Shawn Ryan Show - Peak Points | "I Was Covered in Blood" - Terrifying Moments as a Police Officer

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

We’re revisiting Episode #07 with Ed Calderon, a former police officer in Mexico who dedicated his career to combating cartels and organized crime. This recap highlights Ed's extraordinary insights into survival, security, and the challenges faced on the frontlines of law enforcement in one of the world's most dangerous environments. Shawn Ryan Links: Spotify - Full Episode Apple Podcasts - Full Episode Ed Calderon Links: Website - https://www.edsmanifesto.com Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/edsmanifesto Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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We were being hunted. One of the older guys said the body's a gift. Kind of being recruited by the cartel. That's when I realized that there's no winning here. Not like this. I resigned that day. She said there's no such thing as coming back home. Either you change on your way back to home or the home you left changes when you're gone

and you don't recognize it when you come back. How long into your career, into your law enforcement career in Tijuana did it take for it to become real where you're like, this isn't a fucking game. As soon as I got out, probably the second day on the job, we were. We were kind of spread out in this and in Baja State, and. I got to see

it immediately, the the the no fucks given by the cartels. So I remember me and probably eight other guys moving through downtown Tijuana in full kit driving around in some marked vehicles and getting the order to stop from the lead car that was in front of us. And we parked aside and everybody ran out of the cars and adopted defensive positions. And the convoy probably, I'd say probably somewhere in 15 vehicles just passed right next to us. All of them, a few of them armored. All of them with AK-47s. Some of them had federal police uniforms. Some of them have army uniforms. We didn't

know who they were. We're getting calls from the 911 service they have down there from the municipal police that they were municipal cops, but they clearly weren't municipal cops. So we just got in a you know Mexican standoff with them Didn't nobody shot around, but they just passed by us We called for for support from the local police and nobody showed up So how many of you guys were there probably nine nine? What's that two cars that's two cars? Yeah, and they had 15 fucking vehicles Yeah, so we that's when I realized that

There's no winning here. Not not like this Fuck man. There's no winning not like this and Why do you think there were no shots fired They didn't fell threatened by us. They didn't have any fear So they just passed by and actually went to a local little restaurant there and adapted positions around it, had dinner and then went back to your car and left. No support came on our end. So it's one of those, that's when you realize how fucked you are and how no support and how there's just no backing there.

This was before the Philippe Calderon administration. Slowly but surely things changed. We started getting more support, started getting more vehicles, more people coming in. We started working directly with the military and directly with some federal operational police forces. Eventually getting fear put into the opponent, the enemy, the cartel guys. It took some time.

At the start of it, it was just hopeless. Just hopeless. Yeah. Going through the motions. I think it took about a year into it that a few of my friends were killed. They used to rent out hotels for us to stay in. I think it took about a year into it that a few of my friends were killed. They used to rent out hotels for us to stay in.

And we had this buddy system going on. So if you wanted to go outside, you had to have one of your buddy system, right? But you would have to inform that you were going out. They didn't inform. They went to the store, thought it was easy. So they just crossed the street and went to this convenience store. And they got picked up by some cartel guys dressed as federal agents. They had the blue uniforms and everything, with the patches, everything, like down to

every detail. And they were taken. They were zip-dyed and put into a van. They were found 24 hours later. One of them had his ID screwed to his forehead. They were being hunted. Yeah. You know, that's that's when like paranoia.

Less than a year. That's less than a year. That's less than a year. I came out of there in a generation of 32 people and a lot of them are gone. But those were the first really close ones to me that I saw leave, just leave in a horrible way. They're all young, you know. I knew, I just been to a party with the girl, and I met the girlfriend of one of them.

It was the thing I told them, don't marry, don't get girlfriends, because you don't want to leave widows. Just for perspective, it's a thing to be ashamed of or to hide if your profession is a cop, or at least it was back then. So because we're not the, depending on where you were, cops are despised. Despised yeah, so kind of wrapping up your career You talk about kind of being recruited by the cartel and I kind of wanted to go a little deeper into that and I Would imagine that you're recruited

Several times or had friend you already said that you had friends that have been recruited out of the out of the police or maybe the military and into the cartel. I mean, the offer was it was an offer, you know, they were always, you would always get intermediaries approaching you like, Hey, and like, this is this is much money. It's all that it takes for you to work with us, you know, but it was obvious to anybody, you know, as soon as you take an offer like that, you're you're owned, you're theirs. If you fuck up, if you're not useful, or if somebody finds out you're working for somebody that they're they're not a part of, you'll either get arrested, you get killed by the rival group that you're working against.

Or your career ends. So I got a lot of offers, a lot of them. Never took any of them. A lot of my friends and a lot of the people that I used to work with did, or eventually would put it into a position where there was no choice. Plata or blomo, silver or lead, Colombian term,

but it's popular in Mexico. Another code for it, it was one finger up and one finger down. What do you want? You want to, you want plata? Bloma, you want to be on the ground or you want to stay up here in the world of the living? I wasn't greedy.

There's a lot of people that went into policing in Mexico that wanted to find a million dollars and bury in a wall or something, or just be on the payroll of somebody. I remember going to some of the meetings at the office and seeing some new Hummers outside and some of the guys owned. It was kind of scratching my head at it. A lot of us went through a certification process called CALEA.

It's an American certification process. And with that, a lot of confidence exams, polygraph testing, all this type of stuff, all of us went through it. A lot of people got kicked out or were fired after they went through that process, which to us, to me, I passed, so I stayed on. So I figured that all the people that I passed stayed on. They were on the up and up. But people can be corrupted from one day to another.

So we were careful about everything. But I felt a bit better that everybody was going through it. Administration ends. Somebody comes, another administration comes in and a landmark case declares everybody that was fired based on the polygraph exam or the confidence exams as unconstitutional. And all of a sudden you have six years worth of people that were kicked out of the job coming back into the job, their wages being paid forward. And you had people that were suspected of seeing a lower cartel participation

in the office now back at the office. So it got really bad and basically brought into the office all the work that I was doing ended. I got an offer to work for a single side of it, basically. They told us, hey, remember you're working here? Yeah. Well, we're gonna work against these guys over here only, and we want you to come in and, okay, let me think about it.

Basically, we want us to work against one side, which means you want us to work for this side. Yeah. I resigned that day. There was just no getting out of it or squirming out of it or going somewhere else. I didn't have any. All the people that I knew within high-level government were gone because the administration changed.

All the people that I knew in leadership in the office were moved around and I just had no choice. So I went outside, got my resignation printed out, signed it, handed everything in, the duffel bag, handed in my MP5, my gun, my badge, everything, radio. Got myself into a car, called some of my friends, my American friends. Actually two of them went down there, kind of helped me out to get out of there.

Marines, God bless the United States Marine Corps. And they helped me cross the border. Family in tow by this point, which was probably the hardest part. point, which was, that was probably the hardest part. I know everybody out there has to be just as frustrated as I am when it comes to the BS and the rhetoric that the mainstream media continuously tries to force feed us. And I also know how frustrating it can be to try to find some type of a reliable news source. It's getting really hard to find the truth and what's going on in the country and in the world.

And so one thing we've done here at Sean Ryan show is we are developing our newsletter and the first contributor to the newsletter that we have is a woman, former CIA targetter. Some of you may know her as Sarah Adams, call sign super bad. She's made two different appearances here on the Sean Ryan show. And some of the stuff that she has uncovered and broke on this show is just absolutely mind blowing.

And so I've asked her if she would contribute to the newsletter and give us a weekly intelligence brief. This is going to be all things terrorists, how terrorists are coming up through the southern border, how they're entering the country, how they're traveling, what these different terrorist organizations throughout the world are up to. And here's the best part, the newsletter is actually free. We're not going to spam you. It's about one newsletter a week, maybe two if we release two shows. The only other thing that's going to be in there besides the Intel brief is if we have a new product or something like that. But like I said, it's a free CIA intelligence brief. Sign up. Links

in the description or in the comments. We'll see you in the newsletter. I had choices in the US that I didn't have in Mexico. Yeah, it sounds like China's taken a major interest in the cartels in Mexico. And I've operated around China overseas several times and those motherfuckers are just as ruthless if not more than some of the cartels. Why is China's interest in Mexico so becoming so strong? It's your Achilles heel as a country. It's your number two largest consumer of American products in the

world. It's a very destable consumer of American products in the world. It's a very destable place that's getting destabilized even more. So this whole weird thought process that Americans have that the cartels are getting their fentanyl from China, from some sort of criminal element within China. Let's be clear. Nothing comes out of China. Nothing happens in China without Chinese state being involved or knowing about it. This is a place where Big Brother is the real thing. Everybody's monitored. You saw it during the COVID shutdown. You saw it with

the way they're handling the Uyghur population. So nothing coming out of China is coming out of China without them knowing so. So all that fentanyl being brought out of China into Mexico that's getting being put into heroin or some of these fentanyl fabrication sites that are being found in Mexico now with clear instruction by Chinese laboratory specialists. That's not private entity. That's not the triads or that's not a criminal activity. That's a Chinese state sponsored activity. It's clear state to anybody that kind of looks into this.

One thing is regional destabilization. That usually happens when they want something from that country. One thing happened politically within the US and Mexico relationship, the Trump phenomenon. Trump came into office and said, we're going to take a lot of our business out of Mexico, we're going to bring it back. That was one of the things that he said that was going to happen and did happen. A lot of businesses took their plants, American businesses took their plants and companies out of Mexico. Instead of it affecting Mexico in a negative way, Chinese plants and Chinese companies

are planted them immediately. No shit. So, something happened in that interval where somebody on this side figured out that it's probably a mistake and things started balancing out. Interesting thing to note, we currently have in Mexico a leftist president that is open Chavista, that's open Maduro supporter, but somehow there's an open and like really friendly relationship with the US when it comes to the president and Trump and the president down there.

I think Trump is very much aware of the danger that Mexico was in with the Chinese influence and the foreign influence within the country. Another factor that doesn't get talked a lot about is that Mexico has probably the largest mineable deposits of lithium right on the border. China through a Canadian company actually won the rights to mine that a few years back and their mining rights got canceled. And I'm not going to go into Alex Jones territory, right? I mean the conspiracy part of it. Right where that mining discovery was made, that's where the Mormon massacre happened.

So it's a key place and things happen there. It's a very strange kind of environment for all the influences and all the pushing and pulling that's happening in that area. Some of the people that I've talked to in the security field, some of the people that I've talked to in the security field outside of the friendly neighbors of the US, like in Mexico there's a lot of Cuban intelligence services, service operations going on all over the place, just like places like Venezuela. You can see a clear partnership and influence with China there.

All right. It's in their best interest to gain ownership and control over a place like Mexico, which is going currently going through a lot of bad stuff, a lot of, a lot of crime, a lot of destabilization. There's whole swaths of Mexico that are controlled by cartels. Um, the new generation cartel, I think in a way is a product of that outside influence. It's the only cartel that grew during the COVID epidemic shutdown. That tells me that there's some sort of outside influence from China there. Are you seeing a lot of Chinese coming into Mexico and kind of setting up shop? The largest, one of the largest cash seizures was done on a guy,

Jen Lee Segon, Chinese, Mexican national, somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred million dollars cash found at his house. He was trafficking fentanyl legally and meth precursors into the country. And there's some sort of paperwork legality. So there's some shady stuff going on there. How long has this shit been going on with China? As soon as the US got a taste for meth, I think that's probably the start of it. When was that?

10 years ago? Probably a bit more further back than probably 15 years ago. 15 years? Yeah. And then this has just been exponentially growing. Is it weird? How do I phrase this? Are you seeing more and more Chinese people?

Is it becoming like a common thing to see Chinese? One of the largest communities of Chinese nationals are growing all along the border. Wow. Right? So, I mean, again, this is not something that's not something in the realm of conspiracy. This is clearly happening out in the open in a lot of regards, and people can research this and see it for themselves. To deny that the largest cartel in Mexico has grew during the COVID epidemic because

they clearly had a supply chain from China is to deny what's right in front of your face. To deny that more and more Narinco-made military-grade stuff is popping up in print places in Mexico is also missing something that's in front of your face. And to deny that, so how many people die from fentanyl related issues here in the US? Tons. If you want to confront a military, the. Is a superior military force. Mm-hmm How can you? Corrode that That makes perfect sense generation. I think with China is they're fucking extremely effective. No wait at whatever they do

They have a lifetime president. Yeah one one one being they don't They don't fucking play by rules either. And China will come in and they'll open a whorehouse immediately to start gathering intelligence because people are gonna go to the fucking whorehouse, they're gonna fuck a Chinese hooker, the hooker's gonna milk them for information, the information gets to where it needs to go

and it happens like that. It's the Cuban intelligence services that are operating all over Central America and specifically Venezuela. That's how they act. People are playing checkers with these guys that are playing chess and they play the long game. That's something I think the US doesn't get.

Example, China has a lifetime president. Cuba has a lifetime regime with the Castros. They're playing a really long game against a country that has elections and politics change every four, eight years. And they see the clear line in divide. So I mean, there's blood in the water. I think they can smell that. Everybody's taking advantage of it. Yeah.

And again, foreign eyes. I'm new here. I'm trying to earn my way into becoming an American, but I still have that outside perspective. People getting offended by the whole Chinese virus wording or China isn't the villain, and the country, people kind of coming into the defense of that. People within the MVA not wanting to speak up about China because the Chinese are the best, one of their best clients as far as buying some of the rights to watching some of these NBA games. Disney. I mean, they can't say anything wrong. How surreal is it that you can't speak

What's surreal is it that you can't speak critically about China if you work for the NBA. I mean, that is outside of the realm of what I thought being an American was. Right? So, I don't know. It's a weird time. But I think that's... They're clearly waging some sort of long-term war campaign against the US and Mexico is being utilized as a tool for that.

Yeah. How do you cope with all the shit that you've seen? We talked about some of the stuff you've seen. We've talked about the disposing of bodies and some of the gruesome stuff that you've seen the cartel do down there. We covered the fact that you've gone on 2700 fucking there's no numbers. I'm not that it's just a blur of years of blurs I don't know. I don't know how many of those well, you know nine years that whole experience Well, you know nine years I hold experience Humor yeah part of it. I think

One of the things I always recognize with other people that I meet that have people like you that have an experience base Other people like that it hadn't kind of went through their own thing a certain commonality that I see in people like that Humor is one of them. Usually I can tell a lot about somebody if they don't have a sense of humor. You know, they take themselves too seriously. There's something, there's something amiss there. Yeah. Humor is one of those big things that has helped me out. Kind of, it's a good mask. Yeah. It's a good cloaking device humor. It hopes get through the misery when you're in the middle of it too. I had this one of my closest friends

when I was working, his name was Jaramillo. Very infamous name, I've kind of made him famous. It's my way of keeping him alive. He was one of the older guys that I worked with. He was a mess. I mean, he was a dumpster fire inside of a dumpster fire of a person, but he was very loyal and he was a very good guy. He gave me some of the biggest laughs in my life, usually unintentional, you know. He'd always kind of basically keep me laughing. He would push me into going into weird places and kind of getting out of my comfort zone and just taking every day as if it's the last one.

We went on some weird adventures, including one that included a donkey show, which we won't get into. And we would always get shit-faced drunk every time we would come back from something. There was a word that I discovered or learned about up here in the US called PTSD. It's not a word that we know down there in Mexico. There's no concept of a veteran or a support network for people that go through the experiences that I went through. A lot of the people that go through those experiences,

there's no talk about that. There's a sense of machismo. You just take it. It's fine. Just don't go crazy. So you get a few days off. You get to leave and you would go get drunk and come back. And you would get asked if you were okay and you would lie your ass off and say yes and

just go through with it. Just go through with it. Go through the motions. I'm into history and I like reading about other warrior cultures and people that did things that they had to do. You know, PTSD has always been with us. It's been, this is what you talked about, your experience, what I'm talking about. We're not talking about anything new. This is the history of the world. But I think there's something that happened culturally that separated us from how people used to handle some of these things, or how some people would talk about some of these

things. From spirit quests as they used to kill them, or finding yourself, or going off on these pilgrimages, or whatever form they took. Ceremony is simply performing an act with a symbology just to convince your subconscious mind of something. So from going to mass and eating a cracker that's supposed to be the body of Jesus and drinking wine that's supposed to be the blood of Jesus, there's some biology there to getting handed a silver coin at the start of a leadership position and getting

told that you were going to get another one because you go into it knowing it's going to end. Yeah. Thank you for listening to The Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave The Sean Ryan Show review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show.

I think some of those things are missing and some of our kind of modern way of approaching some of these things. Some of these things have been amputated from us. We're suffering from a phantom limb syndrome when it comes to some of these things, you know, what happens after. Like, I grew up having parties at the comes to some of these things. What happens after? Like, I grew up having parties at the cemetery during David's dead.

I get a weird feeling every time I travel up here and I see empty cemeteries with no people there. It's like they're forgotten. There's no relationship there. I don't know. I think that whole culture of suck it up, be a man, go through it, I get that. It worked. It fucking worked.

You know, it works when you're in. It works when you're in it, you know, and then makes you a factor When you're off the bus when you're out you're fucked. Yeah um Yeah, my mom used to say that told Like i'll quote that i'll give that quote again um I went through a horrible of a few bad situations, but I think one of the first ones, uh

Um, the war that I fought was at home with an enemy that spoke the same language that I did. Every now and then we would share funerary homes with the enemy. The counter guys were being mourned over on that side of the street and we were having our services for our guys over here. So it was different in that way. A very horrible thing happened. Very traumatic. I lost a few people.

And I was covered in blood. And I was covered in blood. My clothing was covered in blood. I had sneakers, my socks, fuel in my toes. And blood has a tendency to kind of dry out and crust a little bit. I remember I wrote the reports that I had to write and talked to the people that I had to talk and I was told to go to the hotel and wash up and come back the second day. I got in the car and drove straight home,

like unconsciously just drove to my parents' house. I drove probably three hours in the night straight there. I showed up sometime in the early morning mornings and my mom opened the door. She saw. She didn't say anything. She sat me down, took my clothing off, put in the washer and made me some coffee. She didn't ask anything. The next morning, I passed out for a bit.

And she asked me, what do you want to do? So I want to go home. She said, there's no such thing as going back home, Ed. Either you change on your way back to home or the home you left changes when you're gone and you don't recognize it when you come back. So she told me going back home is that trains left the station. There's no going back home.

So you have to figure out what that looks like for you next. I was very. Mind altering. Yeah, she was a she lived through a lot herself, so. She was very wise. Sounds like it. She. She was very wise. Sounds like it. She, in her own way, she told me to suck it up.

I stood up and I remember smelling my clothes. They were downy fresh, you know. She bagged me a lunch, got in the car. I saw all the missing missed phone calls on my cell phone. People were angry. I went back and faced the music. Told me, where'd you go? So I just needed, I just needed a moment. I got reprimanded for leaving. Damn. But, you know, it was, I realized that there was no going back home.

So that gave me focus on going straight. Surviving, figuring out what that road would lead me. I was aimless. It fucking changes you. Yeah. How long did it take for you to realize your mom was fucking right on the money? That's a probably probably a few days after she passed away. She she she struggled for a long time with a few issues

and Before she went she told me to leave that job Leave that thankless job and That's not that's no longer the war you should fight. That's not your war anymore She passed away and I did a lot of self-reflection. Again, I got two days off to mourn my mom. She got to meet my kid, which I think was very soothing to my mourning process. process. Everything kind of aligned after that. She passed away and a few things kind of shifted politically down there and I had to leave.

She gave me that push at the end, I think. I remember thinking back to that moment and I kind of wrote it down. I've shared that openly a few times. I remember, every time I smell that morning coffee, I remember that moment. It kind of brings me back to that weird moment where there's no more innocence. You're facing your mom and you're not what you were. Yeah. I know that feeling Sorry to hear that but you know

Sounds like she was looking out for him. Yeah. Yeah, but and Sounds like she still is After she passed she's always here now Yeah, everything I do she's always been a big inspiration It's one of those teachers that you don't recognize as a teacher until they're not there anymore One of the things she used to do and push me to was volunteer work and Yeah, we would go and feed some of the things she used to do and push me to was volunteer work. We would go and feed some of the people at the Tijuana Canal, heroin addicts.

She gave me the eyes to see humanity, even at the lowest levels. I remember one of the first self-defense classes I gave was through a church group that would work with some of the prostitutes in Tijuana. And that was my mom pushing me to do that. You know, all this cool shit. You think you're some expert and stuff like that. Go teach them. They need it. She gave me eyes. Instead of dehumanizing people. I think that's one of the biggest things she gave me was the human factor so I could relate to people and talk to people despite that they were trying to kill me. Only a few moments later I could sit them down, give them a phone, have them phone, maybe

a family member to tell them that okay, give them a cigarette, give them a swig of tequila and talk to people. That's a powerful armor that she gave me with that. And it's something I've been using to try and process that whole life that I left behind. Again, the world has ended for me a few times over. Part of my process to kind of, there is no getting better, there is no healing, there is learning how to live with things, there's learning how to find a new normal, how to find a new center or a new base.

That's what I think I'm kind of looking towards. No matter where you're watching Sean Ryan show from, if you get anything out of this, please like, comment, subscribe, and most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, please leave us a review on Apple and Spotify podcasts.

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