The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - Inside The Fall Of Mexico's Most Powerful Drug Empire: The Truth About El Mayo & The Sinaloa Cartel

Episode Date: March 2, 2025

The Sinaloa Cartel has long been considered Mexico's most dominant criminal empire, but with the recent arrest of its legendary leader, Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, is this truly the end? Or is the cartel simply evolving and expanding beyond borders? In this deep dive, we explore: - The real reason behind El Mayo’s arrest and whether it was staged - How U.S. and Mexican authorities have historically worked with cartels - The cartel's global expansion into Europe, Asia, and beyond - The parallels between today's drug war and past U.S. policies - Why America’s crackdown on fentanyl may actually make things worse Despite government crackdowns and military intervention, drug trafficking is far from over. The Sinaloa Cartel is adapting, decentralizing, and finding new ways to operate. Will the war on drugs ever succeed, or is this just history repeating itself? This Episode Is #Sponsored By The Following: MANDO! Control Body Odor ANYWHERE with @shop.mando and get $5 off your Starter Pack (that’s over 40% off) with promo code MITCHELL  at shopmando.com! #mandopod TRUE CLASSIC! Upgrade your wardrobe and save on @trueclassic at trueclassic.com/CONNECT! #trueclassicpod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fallen drug lord Ismail Miao Zambata is making a deal with federal prosecutors in New York City as we speak. Is this finally the end of the mighty Sinaloa cartel? Mexico's most powerful and longest-lasting drug empire? It seems like the threats from the U.S. to cripple the command of Mexico's criminal organizations is actually working. The Mexican military have swarmed the U.S. Mexico border. Ice raids and deportations are happening all over the country, and U.S. Navy planes are conducting clandestine surveillance missions over. mainland Mexico. Maybe these zero-tolerance, tough-on-crime tactics work after all. Maybe Trump's new

military approach to dealing with cartels will actually curb fentanyl trafficking into the U.S. and once and for all close the book on the era of lawlessness and criminal supremacy in Mexico. I'm here to tell you why not only is that not going to happen, but why things are about to get worse, and how the war on the Sinaloa cartel has not caused them to implode, but actually expand across the globe. And before we get into it, if you wouldn't mind taking a second to like the video, leave a comment, and subscribe to the channel if you have not already, it is greatly, greatly appreciated. All right, vamonos. I know it seems like we're living through this scary, unprecedented era, but just like everything in society, all we're doing is repeating history. Here in America, we're living

through a Republican revolution on the heels of a failed Democratic-led government, just like how Ronald Reagan ushered in a new era of conservatism in 1980, after Jimmy Carter's miserable failure as president the previous four years. And with this new Republicanism came tax cuts, large tariffs, paper tiger imperialist conquests like the invasion of Grenada and the covert CIA wars throughout Central America. And of course, zero tolerance, tough on crime approaches to try and curb drug use in the United States and eliminate drug cartels abroad. Do you see the similarities to today? Trump is just borrowing the Reagan populist playbook. He's threatening tariffs with our enemies and our friends, he's promising to maintain his previous presidency's tax cuts, and he's threatening to

annex Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, even Gaza. And of course, along our southern border, he's promising to not only shut the border down, but invade Mexico to decapitate the command of the Sinaloa cartel and dismantle the fentanyl trafficking networks into the U.S. This is tough talk, but that's what populist politicians do. They browbeat because they know that's what their mob of electoral idiots wants to hear. And by the way, I'm not saying you're an idiot. if you voted for Trump. I'm not even saying that we shouldn't be attempting some of these things like tightening border security and cleaning up the street gangs in some of America's cities.

But the truth is, most of these measures are too little too late. The war on drugs and drug trafficking, just like the American Empire, is in its final phase of existence. I'll explain exactly why all of these things will not work later in the video. But first, let's look at the fall of the Sinaloa cartel as we know it and how it came to be that the once untouchable drug lord, Ismail Zimbada, ended up in American custody cooperating. As you're about to see, that's nothing new either. Putting a label like snitch or rat on a true drug kingpin like Mayo Zimbada is to be ignorant of

history and how the drug game actually works. That no snitching code is uniquely American and is usually perpetuated by trolls and low-level drug dealers who've never had any real money and who cannot fathom how powerful a person like Chappel Guzman or Mayo Zimbabai. actually is. I hate to break it to you, but there's never been any honor amongst thieves. There's a reason that quote goes back to biblical times.

Now, of course, it's fucked up to rat on your friends and other associates within your organization. But at the end of the day, the boss does what he wants, and his only goal is to stay free and save himself and his family, and in doing so, hopefully, the rest of his organization. Don't make me quote Denzel from Training Day on that ass. This shit hears chess.

It ain't checkers. And make no mistake, Old Man Mayo has been playing chess since the 1970s. Even if you go all the way back to the beginning of organized crime in the early 20th century, high-level criminals have been working with the government. In America, Lucky Luciano made a pact with the federal government to patrol the ports that he controlled in New York City and rid the unions of Germans and Nazis in exchange for immunity.

We can't know for sure, but he probably fed them some of his rivals as well to sweeten the deal. Now, of course, he eventually ended up getting extradited back to Sicily. All of these sorts of alliances end at some point, just like how El Mio's usefulness eventually expired, and he was arrested by the same government he was feeding info to all those years. The U.S. government has had similar arrangements and allegiances with terrorist organizations and dictators, vis-à-vis Norega and Panama, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, just to name a very few. Anything in furtherance of American interests, this is what they tell themselves at least.

Now, among drug kingpins, Pablo Escobar himself was working with the American CIA in Nicaragua. This is well known by now. He was giving them information on the whereabouts of the leftist Sandinista guerrillas before and after they took over the country in 1975, in exchange for the protection of his airstrips for his cocaine planes, stopping there to refuel and route to the United States. We don't know for sure if Pablo snitched on his rivals in the drug game, which at that time would have been the collie cartel, but back then the U.S. government, specifically the CIA, was more interested in fighting communist guerrillas in Latin America than they were with toppling drug lords. It wasn't until the 1990s in the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Mexican drug lords

that the CIA and the highest levels of law enforcement in the American Department of Justice made tackling drug kingpins a priority. Of course they did. They needed a new enemy to justify their jobs. So naturally, with that, came the new practice amongst Mexican drug bosses of turning in their rivals in order to stay free and gain advantage for their organizations. Put yourself in the mind of Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, the founder of Mexico's first drug cartel, the Guadalajara cartel. Guys like him don't think like criminals.

They behave more like generals in war. Now, if I'm Miguel and I want to break the Colombian's monopoly on cocaine importation into America, what's one way I can do it? I can't just send hit teams down to Medellin or Collie and start a war. That's too expensive, but back then they had way more. muscle than the Mexicans did. But how about I reach out to the DEA and let them know when a billion-dollar load of

collie cocaine bricks will be arriving in California? Is that snitching or is that strategy? Bosses at this level operate rationally without emotion or the code of the street mentality that so-called gangsters and drug lords in America are supposedly bound by. For instance, check out this clip from a recent interview we did with Owen Hansen, a former USC football star turned drug trafficker who ended up being one of the main cocaine distributors for Choppos' oldest son back in the mid-2010s. See what he says about how the cartel reacted after a valuable asset like himself got arrested by the DEA. So that's how the

cartel works. And for any of you that don't know, I mean, it's it's the facts, you know. You get arrested. And if you're someone high up on the food chain, guess what? They're going to try to help you get out. They know how valuable I was. I was a fucking legend in California, right? They called me the California kid for a reason. Right. So they're like, dude, we want to help this guy. So who were some of these people that they offered for you to tell? They gave me these guys. They had lawyers come in that weren't even related to my lawyers. I'm like, you get that legal call.

And you're like, oh, well, fuck, what's my lawyer here? He was just here two hours ago. And you get in the legal room and it's not your lawyer. And you know who he's there. He's like, hey, you know who I work for. And he's like, hey, the boss sent this guy over. He goes, he does this, this and this. I'm not going to say it.

But he does this, this, this and this in Mexico. He's wanted. Here's his wanted. He goes, you can go in there and give him. them this and you'll probably get some time off. They sent one of their lawyers with a brochure of different guys available for Owen to rat on. Wild, but logical. This guy is incredibly valuable to their organization, and so they want to get him out of prison as soon as possible so he can get back to work. That just makes sense. It's amoral. It's not right or wrong. It's how

any company legal or illegal would behave. So now let's look at the history of the Sinaloa cartel, from its formation in the early 1990s to the beginning of its downfall in the 2010. and then finally how their mythic leader, Mayo Zimbada, met his end last July when he was kidnapped and flown on a private jet to the U.S., where today he is currently cutting a deal that might spare him the rest of his life in prison. More on those details in a minute. Remember, drug trafficking in Mexico traces its roots to the state of Sinaloa. They had the perfect climate for marijuana cultivation back in the 1960s and later on for poppies to feed the explosion of the heroin market in the United States. The Guadalajara cartel itself was comprised of

different drug trafficking clans all originating in Sinaloa. And even after that disintegrated and the different groups fanned out to regions throughout Mexico, Sinaloa remained the heartbeat of Mexican and global drug trafficking, and it remains that way to this day. Now, as many of you already know, the so-called Sinaloa cartel, even at its most powerful and organized, was never one mafia top-down structure, but an association of cooperative drug trafficking clans, each led by a boss. In the late 90s and the early 2000s, what I can pretty confidently call the height of the cartel's power, the three primary bosses were Joaquin Chappo Guzman, Arturo Beltran Leva, who started as the head of Chappo's security team and rose to establish his own drug

routes and become as powerful as Choppel himself, and then of course Ismail Mio Zambata, who was 10 years older than the other two bosses and had been in the game since he was a teenager, in the 1960s. The first splinter among the bosses came after a beef arose between Chapo and the BLO or the Beltran Lavo organization. Nobody knows for sure how it came about.

Some say it was over a murder of one of Choppos' relatives by an associate of the BLO or a disagreement over a drug route they both shared in Chicago. Or perhaps Chappo just felt that the Lavas were becoming too powerful. Memorial Day weekend is almost here

and it's time to kick off Summer right. When I'm getting ready for the first big weekend of summer, Total Wine and More is my go-to, especially when I'm firing up the grill with family. I'll grab refreshing beers, easy drinking wines, and some hard seltzers for the cooler. And with everything that goes into summer, it's nice knowing you're getting the lowest prices. Total Wine and More. Your Memorial Day, Made Easy. Shop Total Wine and More in store or online.

Spirits not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly must be 21. Tensions finally boiled over on January 31st, 2008, when authorities arrested Alfredo Beltran Leva, Arturo's younger brother. Then, the very next day after Alfredo gets arrested, guess who walks free from a Mexican prison? Ivan Archivaldo, Chappo's oldest son. Don't maybe spell it out for you. Chapo handed over Alfredo to save his son, but also very conveniently because the BLO were becoming a nuisance to his organization. So this sparked a war between Choppos' faction and the BLO.

And a year later, Arturo Beltran Leva was ambushed by the Mexican Marines at a safe house in Quirnavaca and shot to death. How did the Marines know where he was holed up? You can probably take a guess. So there's one boss down, two left standing, Chapo and Mayo. And this is where things really start to get crazy. If you'll remember at this time, Chapo is becoming more and more famous. Gaining notoriety is the world's biggest drug lord. He became like the new Pablo Escobar in terms of his infamy and his status as a Robin Hood,

a rags to riches underworld success story. And Mayo hates this. He's the complete opposite. He's quiet and cautious. He's a long-term thinker. Nobody knows for sure how or when he first made contact with the American authorities. It was likely through his entrenched connections and contacts within the Mexican military and the elite political class, who Mayo has been bribing for decades.

I'll bet Mayo had a plan to turn in Chapo all along. His opportunity came in 2009 when his youngest son, Vicente, was captured in. Mexico City by the DEA and extradited to Chicago. Facing life in prison, Vicente was recorded over a tapped MCC line talking directly to his father, Ismael, who, in no uncertain terms, granted his son permission to cooperate with authorities against Chapo, who was their primary target at that time. Years later, after Chappo was finally captured for a third time and extradited to the U.S., It is believed that Vicente served as a star witness for the grand jury in the case against Chapo that sent him to prison for life.

It's not official because it was a sealed indictment designed to protect the identity of the informants, but Vicente is now not only out of prison, he's traveled back to Mexico and might even be running things again within whatever is left of Mayo's organization. It's a literal soap opera. You can't write this stuff. So now at this point, it's 2017, and old man Mayo is the last man, the last of Los Seniors. The problem now is, who's left to tell on?

The drug business is a zero-sum game. It's either you or them. And when you've run out of them, it means you're all out of bargaining chips. And around this time, fentanyl is really starting to tear its way into America. Overdoses are skyrocketing and junkies are turning into zombies. And Sinaloa and fentanyl are making the news every day and they've now become a brand name on the lips of U.S. Congress people.

And Mayo's got to know that's not a good thing. In fact, it's possible that at this time he was already feeding the Mexican and American feds info on the Chapitos, run by Chapo's sons. And this is why the headlines from that era always linked fentanyl production with their group instead of Mayo's. How crazy is that? This is deeper than ratting. This is espionage. At this time, the two remaining cartel factions, the Maito's and the Chapitos, had a shaky agreement in the state of Sinaloa. The Chapitos would get control of all of the internal drug.

trafficking in the city of Kulia Khan, and the Maitos had the countryside, plus both of their respective drug routes to the United States. But there was always tension between the two, obviously. The Guzman kids were pissed that Mayo and his people had helped put their dad away for life. I get it. So finally, in 2023, the Mexican Marines raided and snatched Oviedo Guzman and extradited him right away to the U.S., and now shit is really hitting the fan. It was like the Biden administration was putting extra pressure on the Mexican government to crack down on fentanyl as much as possible before the elections. Then about a year and a half later, on July 25th, 2024, Mayo claims he was going to meet with the mayor of Kulia Khan and another

state official when he was assaulted, blindfolded, and forced on a private plane to El Paso, Texas, where he was met by awaiting DEA agents. But what made this even weirder was that he was accompanied by Joaquin Guzman Lopez, another one of Chappo's sons, who appeared to be turning himself in. He was not kidnapped and forced onto that plane. The next day, after Maya was booked and put on a plane to New York, it leaked that Ovidio Guzman El Raton had been released from the Federal Bureau of Prisons custody on July 23rd, two days before Mayo's arrest. Dude, these families are the Mexican versions of the Montague's and the Capulets. History just repeats itself, tit for tat. Do you see how everyone is just a pawn in a chess match? Some pieces are more important than others,

and these players use what the U.S. government wants to save themselves and their families and gain advantage for their organizations. It's ingenious, really. They operate more like spies than they do drug traffickers. So if you're Mayo and you're the last piece on the board to fall, what do you do? How do you save yourself when you're the government's number one target? Or is he? Remember, it's an open secret that Mexican politicians and military commanders at the highest level have been in bed with the drug cartels since the beginning. It's not an exaggeration to say that they control drug trafficking in Mexico. Check out what our friend and former Tijuana Special Forces officer, Ed Calderon, had to say about the entrenched system of corruption in Mexico

and how the arrest of El Mayo could topple all of that. Where the army themselves talk about, hey, in this part of Mexico, we support these guys. And this other part of Mexico, we support these guys. And we have to put our foot down against this cartel because they haven't paid. Like, that's the level of, like, interference and also compliciency that these guys have. It's a power behind the throne in Mexico. The Mexican army as a whole has always had interest as far as supporting one cartel or the other, depending on the region. It operates in, basically.

All ports into Mexico are military. All the precursors and stuff like that is basically going through military checkpoints, you know, accidentally or purposely. It's almost bipartisan that the U.S. has been trying to figure out how to get Mexico to play ball. And I think having El Mio with a Rolodex of all the people he paid off is probably one of them. There you go. He's suggesting that the arrest of El Mio signals the beginning of the end of this chess match. And all that is left to fall are the corrupt politicians and military elite in Mexico. The dirt Mio has on the Mexican political elite is probably huge.

Remember, he's been paying these guys off for almost half a century. In the eyes of the American Justice Department, it could be to America's benefit to try and extradite some of these characters and try them for corruption here in the U.S. In exchange for granting Mayo Zimbada some kind of deal that will allow him to not die in prison the way the Chapo is going to. Here's Ed again, answering a question about how the cartels feel about their new terrorist designation that Trump gave them the other day. Number one, that designation has threatened the government more than it has threatened any cartel members. That is who is in fear of this designation. Why is that? Well, because a lot of these people that are currently in power have had and have a lot of money behind them and backing behind them of institutions, companies, moneymen, middlemen, who are cartel affiliated and funded.

So they're aware that any sort of funding and support of that nature is going to come back and bite them in the ass. So they're afraid of the past. They're also very much aware that you, as a country, have a walking encyclopedia of who is corrupted, who isn't in the form of El Mayo Sambada. The going rhetoric within government circles is that we've already seen the first covert military operation by the United States in Mexico. And that was the arrest of El Mayo Sambada. As I said, the Mexican political elite are panicking.

Even crazier, it's possible that the move to capture Mayo is a long, play by the Americans to get him to give up these politicians. Shit, it's possible that Mayo arranged this whole thing with the Americans beforehand, and they just staged it to make it look like a kidnapping. We cannot rule anything out, especially not in Mexico, where nothing is what it seems. It's so much deeper than what meets the eye. But hey, there's no question that the Sinaloa cartel, as we once knew it, is over. The war in Kulia Khan has turned into a war of attrition, meaning each side is trying to

inflict the most casualties on the other side as possible. There will be no negotiated settlement, no truce. The side that will win will be the side who can make a deal with the federal government in Mexico City, and then once that's done, the Marines will swoop in and decapitate whoever is left on the losing side. But the damage has been done. This war has shattered the image of the Sinaloa cartel as the Robin Hoods, or the so-called good cartel that maintains a social standing within the community. Ordinary people are sick of it. They're sick of the violence and the disreferrales to daily life. Just like the American Mafia, which in many ways really served a purpose within Italian American communities back in the day and was tolerated and even respected by civilians,

they've now outlived their usefulness. They're a net negative to the community. They've become just like any other criminal group. On a long enough timeline, this will happen all over Mexico. Now, yes, it is true that parts of Mexico right now are engaged in full-on war with the government, especially in the southern region. The Halisco New Generation cartel is doing drone work. and all other kinds of craziness. But this is always how it is during the changing of any economic or political system. It gets worse before it gets better. Mexico is poised to become a very rich country in the coming generations, especially once their new transcontinental port connecting the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico gets built. That will be like the Panama Canal times a hundred. It

could put their GDP on par with the United States. And when that happens, everybody's standard of living will rise. The middle class will grow and they'll have more voting power and little by little the criminals who run Mexico, the real criminals in Mexico City, the politicians and their corporate cronies, will be weeded out. Also, there will be a demand for law and order which will do away with the drug cartels as we know it. Right now, Mexican cartels are experiencing their final days of the Wild West, the way that the Plains Indians in America made their last stand in the 1870s against the encrored. of settlers coming from the east. They're fighting valiantly, but there's no stopping progress.

It's only a matter of time. By the way, I get to comparing Mexican criminals to Native Americans is not a perfect analogy. Relax. The point is, Mexican cartels, like Sinaloa, are antiquated and cannot be a part of modernized, affluent Mexico. But what about right now? Will Trump's war on the Sinaloa cartel make a dent in the drugs flowing into the United States? No, not even close.

And in fact, all this pressure on the Sinaloa organization has just caused them to go global. The Sinaloa cartel is adapting. Check out this clip from Jorge Ventura, a reporter who covers cartel activity. This is a memo now coming from the Canada Border Service Agency. It was first obtained by Radio Canada, but it is reeling a criminal network involving Chinese and Mexican nationals called the Dragon Cartel, specializing in the trafficking of Totoaba fish, in exchange for chemical precursors. needed to produce fentanyl in Mexico. Now, Totoaba is a unique fish that is an endangered species in the Gulf of California. Cartels in Mexico discovered that there is a demand in the black

market in Asia for Toto Ava for its bladder. Now, according to Canadian officials, one kilogram kilogram of Totoabba bladder is worth $80,000 on the black market. It is even nicknamed the cocaine of the sea. Now, Totoaba swim bladders are sold on the Chinese black market and are used for traditional cuisine, medicine, and even cosmetics. And according to the memo, Western ports are a target for the exchange of these illicit goods. It's particularly the port of Vancouver that is the most vulnerable for this type of criminal activity because of its connection to the West Coast ports of Manzanillo and Los Angeles to the Asian and European markets. Experts say that Canadian authorities are currently

facing an uphill battle cracking down on the Totoaba trade because of the huge amount of cargo passing through the ports of Vancouver, combined with the difficulty of a identify illegally traded bladders amid other legal fish products. Totoaba swim bladders are often smuggled alongside frozen flesh and squid. And while often transported in coutes and backpacks, curitable networks are now expanding their methods to include smugging them in gasoline tank, spare tires, or hidden vehicle compartments. Experts say that right now officials just do not have the infrastructure to track down

this Totoaba. What's also alarming is experts also say that the amount of fenced are going through the ports of Vancouver, while some of it will stay in Canada, the majority is still making it to Mexico. You guys smell. I know it and you know it. I can smell you through the camera. I smell too.

I'm funkified. I'm an active man. I go to the gym. I go on runs. I go on dates. I podcast. I do stand up. I reek probably 70% of the time.

That is why I use Mando. You know Mando by now. I love Mando. They're my go-toeodorant. I don't have to pitch you guys anything. They're full-body deodorant. They're full-body deodorant. You know this by now.

It is all the rage. You can put it on the top of your head, on the bottom of your feet, your grundle, your nut sack. That's what I usually use it for. Your armpits, traditionally, if you want to be a square. Mando is a full body deodorant that comes in a bunch of yummy different flavors. It was created by a dude that realized that they were misdiagnosing and mistreating B.O. I actually prefer the cream tube deodorant. It's liquid deodorant that comes in a tube.

You squirt it. and then you apply it. It's very different, but I prefer it over the roll on stuff. But of course, they have plenty of that as well. Mando is clinically proven to prevent odor for up to 72 hours. Plus, it's healthy for you. Unlike all of that crap from the legacy brands that you buy at the grocery store, Mando is aluminum-free, dye-free, paraben-free, baking soda-soda-free, and it's vegan.

So you don't have to worry about putting toxins in your body. That day is done. Choose from a variety of scents like bourbon leather, clover, Mount Fuji or pro sport. Bourbon leather is my favorite. You smell like a glass of whiskey. It's delicious. I love it.

You smell like a man of some means. Like you've got a thing or two going on. The ladies love it. Or so I'm told. I don't really have any in my life right now. But it smells delicious. And check it out. Mando has leveled up since they started sponsoring this show.

They are now in retailers all over the country. Go try America's number one whole body deodorant right now. You can get it at Walmart, Target, and other Mando. major box stores across the country. But for the best deals, you got to go to shopmando.com and check this out. We got the starter pack for you with that discount. Starter pack comes with a solid stick deodorant, cream tube deodorant, two free products of your choice like mini body wash and deodorant wipes, plus free shipping.

As a special offer for listeners, new customers get $5 off a starter pack with our exclusive code. That equates to over 40% off of your starter pack. use code Mitchell, M-I-T-C-H-E-L at shopmando.com. That is, S-H-O-M-A-N-D-O.com. Please support the show and tell them that we sent you. Use that promo code Mitchell and get $5 off, which equates to 40% off, which is really, really cheap.

I don't even know how they're turning a profit off of that. Smell fresher, stay drier, and boost your confidence from head to toe with Mando. True Classic. You've heard me talk about them by now. I'm wearing them. quickly becoming the only kind of clothing I wear. Plain Jane is back in. Nobody is about the brands and the logos anymore. Everybody just wants sleek, minimalistic clothing, right? That is true classic. This is for men only. Thank God, most of you listening and watching are that you're just men. So you need something that's going to fit well, that's affordable, and that looks dope, but that you're not going to have to put

a lot of time into maintaining and thinking about. You're busy out there trying to get money, okay, legally or illegally. Many of you are coming home from prison or you're on your way there. You need to look good when you hit the bricks, right? And you need to do it at an affordable price. I love True Classic because as many of you know, I'm six foot six and I weigh 190 pounds. How do you dress a man that looks like Gumby? Right. How do you dress a man that has the build of George Miroson, right? Who looks like a white minute bull, okay? How do you make his clothing not look like he's wearing a flowery summer dress. You wear True Classic.

See how it hugs my arms? Like I don't even really have good biceps, but it's like accentuating the best parts of my physique. That's what True Classic does. Makes your chest look bigger. Makes your arms look bigger, right? Makes you look like, you know, you got something going on.

You've been going to the gym. That's why I love them. And it's not just T-shirts. I'm wearing a long-sleeve sleeve Henley. They have fleece hoodies, jeans, button-ups, joggers, and more. I wear their clothing to the gym. They have these great, like, dry fit

like shirts that I go to the gym and they're perfect for absorbing sweat and they wash easy it's great you can mix and match online you can pick which fits work the best together comparing your jeans with your shirts vice versa and there's a 100% fit guarantee with easy returns and 200,000 five star reviews online it's clothing for any occasion at the gym casual professional like when I podcast going out with a lady it's clothing that fits snugly and that is not going to break your bank. So, level up your date night or everyday style with clothes that actually fit right.

Just go to my exclusive link at trueclassic.com slash connect to save. That's trueclassic.com slash C-O-N-N-E-C-T. Shop now and elevate your wardrobe today. Let them know we sent you. I love True Classic. How wild is that? The cartel will discover a black market business

for everything. They are illegally fishing this rare, delicate fish out of the Sea of Cortez or the Gulf of California, and they're selling it to Chinese traffickers in Vancouver, Canada. That's just proof that no matter how much pressure you put on these guys, they'll just adjust. They're masters at business and at adapting. And just like the Russian army, they've got numbers. So it doesn't matter how many bodies fall, more groups will pop up. And I already talked in the last video that I did covering the cartels about the fentanyl cooks in Sinaloa in northern Mexico.

They're just all independent groups now. You fucking press one down. You knock one group off. Another kitchen will pop up. Look, they're doing it not even with drugs. Far from it. They're selling rare fish and making as much as they can, moving a kilo of cocaine.

It's bananas. Look, I'm not saying Trump's tactics are not going to have some effect on the cartels. Of course they will. When you send the American military to the border and actually across the border into mainland Mexico, you're going to cause these guys to run for the hills. Everybody is hiding out right now,

but they're not not working. Product has to get moved, and necessity is the mother of all creation or invention. That's what's happening with these guys. They get very creative. They're starting to use Canadian ports, not just to import fish, but to actually move up drugs from South America.

So instead of crossing them mainland over the border into the southern United States, they're just going up, over, and then down, and then they'll bring the drugs from Canada, south into America. I actually always thought that that was probably the move. It's not possible to completely seal off the border. Now, think about the consequences of doing that. You hear a lot in the news right now, even from really smart commentators that I respect, they say, we need to shut the border down.

Well, we live in a globalized world. We have something called NAFTA. hundreds of thousands of trucks a day, literally a day, most of them with goods that are not illegal, come south from Mexico up and into America. So shutting all of that down is just going to create economic chaos for everybody, okay? Now, of course, the Mexican military is making a show to appease Trump. They've sent the Guadilla Nacional to the border. We see all these videos now popping up of the Guadadilla standing around, looking for drug tunnels, supposedly. But again, according to Ed Calderon, it's just to show they're not stopping anything.

This is very typical Mexican. As I always say about Mexico, everything is about appearances. So they're not doing nothing. Illegal migrants are also still getting through. Let's not forget that. It was fentanyl and migrants was the big promise by Trump to stop. Now, of course, as you probably guessed, the price to get across has increased a lot. I've heard that it's up to as much as $12,000 now from Tijuana.

into San Diego. That's what a coyote will charge just one migrant. So that's good money. It's gone up four or five thousand dollars per head in a matter of weeks. That's what these policies do. They actually just put more money into the cartels pocket. So something like that could offset what they lost from having less migrants cross over the border. Let's also not forget what a sealed border is going to do to Mexico. If you've got hundreds of thousands of migrants coming up from Central America through Mexico trying to make it to the U.S. and they can't get into the U.S. anymore, they're not going to turn around and go back home. They're not going to go back to Haiti. They're not going to go back to Venezuela. They're going to stay stuck in Mexico. So that's going to do a couple of things.

One, it's going to create a bigger demand for drugs internally in Mexico. It's a lot of desperate people. A lot of desperation means a lot of new drug addicts. There's a huge, huge market for meth in Mexico. So a lot of the money that the Mexican cartels, will lose by crossing less people into the United States. Those people are just going to turn into drug customers. Number two, this is going to make recruitment for these Mexican cartels much easier. We already know that in the South right now, which is like a civil war zone in the south of Mexico, these organizations are forcibly recruiting Central American migrants into their ranks.

They basically, it's like how in Africa, warlords kidnapped children and make them child soldiers, that's kind of what's going on in parts of Mexico. And trust me, if there's hundreds of thousands of Central American and African migrants stuck along the border, the cartels are going to figure out a way to use that to their advantage. That's the pretty sick part about it. Well, let's not forget decentralization. I always use that word. And what exactly do I mean by that?

I'm talking about the hierarchy that once was the Sinaloa and other major Mexican drug cartels is breaking down. And it's almost completely flattened, completely broken down now with the arrest of the last chess piece, Myosumbata. What's happening? It's making Sinaloa go global, meaning drug traffickers originating in the state of Sinaloa, Kulia Khan, Barayahuato, Latuna, all of these different little regions in Sinaloa, Mexico, whose entire culture, entire economy, is driven by drug trafficking. These guys have fanned out to different markets all over the world. It's wild to think about it. You know what it's like?

It's like how Cuba or the Dominican Republic produces MLB baseball stars. They all start in this one little place. They get really good at their thing. And then they head off to the bigger market. That is how the culture in Sinaloa is. I've been down there. I know a lot of people down there. Drug traffickers.

I've talked with them. They come up as youngsters. looking up to older men that teach them how to cook fentanyl, teach them how to package meth, are talking constantly about where the best price of cocaine is. Hey, we can start sending our bricks down to Australia and make $150,000 for one kilo where we can only get $15 for it in Texas. This is part of the culture. It's generation after generation passed down. So check out what's going on, okay?

Sina Loa has influence basically all over the world now. They've been in Ecuador and Southern Columbia for years now. What they've started to do is these guys go down there and they fund coca leaf grows in the southern part of Colombia. They give Colombian drug traffickers money to grow coca farms or to produce cocaine and then they buy the product from them. Then what they'll do is they'll partner with these Ecuadorian gangs, these furiously violent Ecuadorian gangs like Los Tigres, right? they'll partner with them to traffic drugs out of the port in Yiaquil, which is a super easy port to move product out of. And from there, that will be the launch off point. And they'll send product to Europe, Asia, Australia, whatever.

But it's all backed by the money from Mexico and from Sinaloa. It's pretty fascinating. And they're making methamphetamine this global phenomena. I mean, you're starting to see meth markets open up even in South America, where traditionally, it was just cocaine. Go read Insight Crime. That's the best kind of newsletter when it comes to keeping up with the way that drug cartels and criminal groups are changing their tactics. They're sending tons of meth to Asia, Europe.

I mean, they love meth. They've been cooking it in Sinaloa for a long time. So you hear all about fentanyl. All we hear about in America is fentanyl, but actually the most used drug besides cocaine, and we, if you even count that as a drug, is crystal meth. So they are cooking it like nobody's business down there. There's another huge meth boom going on in America right now, but also all over the world. So what these guys do is they identify different parts of the world. They make contact with somebody there. They figure out somebody else at the port who can, they can pay to move the product through. Boom, there you go. That's the way drug trafficking works. Now,

There is no need to have a hierarchy. It's a bunch of decentralized independent operators that are working together to move product through. They don't need a cartel. Check this out. If you want to really get an idea of the way that modern drug trafficking works in 2025, I read this article on Insight Crime. There was a meth bust in Chile on the port of some coastal city in Chile, South America, pretty far away, wouldn't you say?

They busted like 500 kilos of meth coming from where? You got it. Manzanio Mexico. So it was sent over by either somebody from the Cinaloa organization or the Nuevo Haleisco organization. It was a Brazilian in Chile receiving their meth from Mexico that he was then going to ship off to Australia. It is a completely globalized, decentralized world.

It's fascinating. I've read about fentanyl cooks going on in both. Bogota, Columbia. Some of these guys from Sinaloa realize that it's getting way too hot in Sinaloa and in Sonora. They're like, we are way too close to the fire right now. They probably are rightly worried that Trump will send in some special forces people to start killing off these fentanyl cooks. They're like, fuck it. We're going to go down to Colombia, stay out of everybody's way and cook this shit and then send it north. I mean, it is an absolute culture. And Sinaloa, the brand is everywhere. But it's not a cartel.

They're just drug traffickers. They're guys who know everybody. They know suppliers. They know experts. They know how to bribe people at the port. They know how to use accountants and lawyers to pay off politicians. They don't even need a lot of the violence anymore. It's happening in Mexico because there's so many different criminal groups.

But you don't have to be violent if you're in Colombia buying up kilos from some ex-rebel group, right? They're happy that you're there. They need the money. They need the buyers. Spain is another big one for this Sinaloa diaspora. Spain is the gateway for cocaine into Europe. And guess who they find over there in those big drug busts, huh? Motherfucking Mexicans from Sinaloa.

And a lot of the ex-Mexican disgraced politicians also living over in. Spain. I don't think that's a coincidence. Decentralization, that's where the world is going. That's where the currency is going. That's where the legal economy is going. It's not top down. It's cooperative. It's independent trafficking clans working together in different functions of this invisible economy. It's actually much better. I would argue it's a great time to be a Sina Loa drug trafficker because you can go anywhere in the world and get your business done off an encrypted foam and you don't have to be shooting it out with the Mexican military in the mountains who wants to do that finally what does this mean for America because after all that's what this is about that's what

Trump's declared war on cartels for it's to stop fentanyl and drugs and migrants from coming into America that's what he wants to shut the border down that's what everybody is running around crazy about. So let's observe. Start with migrants. We can barely get Americans to do these jobs. We can barely get Mexicans to do some of these jobs. They've been here long enough to where they're like, yeah, I'm not working for minimum wage. I can make more money on a construction site. We have a declining population. That's part of the reason that we're in such a debt problem. It's such a doomed debt spiral right now is because we can't even keep up and have enough babies to keep up with the amount of people that are dying. We're like Europe. That's why.

in 60 years, we have to have AI and the robots do these jobs or else our economy is going to implode. We don't have the workforce. That's one thing. You get rid of the migrants coming in, shut the border down like people are calling for. Who's going to pick the food? You know, I hate to be that guy, but that's what these migrants are doing. They're growing the food, picking the food, working the shit jobs that we don't want to have, but it's fucking better than, you know, being in a gang warfare. in Port-au-Prince Haiti, right? And that's a huge drain on our GDP. I think I read that, like, new migrants contribute like a trillion dollars to the GDP every year. And all that's going to do is

add to the decline of the U.S. dollar and the American debt crisis. Okay? That's really what this is about. And that's what I meant at the top of this video about how the American Empire is declining. Just like Mexico is in the final phase of this drug cartel-driven, organized crime, controlled society. America is in her final phase of being the global empire of the world. You could argue that's already over. You could argue that it ended after the second invasion of Iraq and the devastation in the Middle East and what happened in Afghanistan, the Taliban is now back controlling it after we bombed Afghanistan for 20 years. It is over. We Trump himself the other day said they have a plan to cut the Pentagon budget in half. Did you hear me? Cut the, that is a

revolutionary act, cutting the budget of this shadowy, unelected bureaucracy by half. What does that mean? That means despite all his posturing, he knows it's over. He is bringing everybody home. So instead of being a global power, America will be back to being a regional power. It will be a power within the Americas, within the Western Hemisphere. And in the Eastern Hemisphere, will be China and Russia. And in the Middle East, I don't know, we'll see. They're fighting it out. But that's my point.

Trump knows himself, even though he's not saying it because he has to appease the mob. The empire's over. Now, what this could mean is that it might get harder to move drugs into America. Because if he's cutting the Pentagon budget and bringing all these troops home and slashing foreign wars like he should, which I agree with, they're going to focus a lot more resources on that southern border, on patrolling the ports, on

interdicting drugs. It could be a lot harder to get drugs into America. Well, how many times have we talked to people on this show who say, yeah, dude, I shipped a fucking shitload of meth through the mail? I mean, look at me. That's what I did for years. I made millions of dollars sending weed through FedEx boxes. And I had like a 98% success rate. We talked to Owen Hansen a few weeks ago. He was Sina Loan Lieutenant in America. He told me that even back in the 2010s, Choppos' son was using DHL to ship multi-hundred kilo loads into Toronto, Vancouver,

and as far away as Australia. It's the mail, dude. It's globalization. It's commerce moving at what seems like the speed of light. It's a numbers game. Drug traffickers know this. How can you police that? Another consequence I think of this crackdown

on cartels, I think it will be harder for Sinaloa in the short term to get precursor chemicals to make fentanyl. And you can argue that's already working. Fentanol deaths are down in the United States. They were since last year. And they say the reason is the fentanyl that's getting shipped from Mexico is a lot weaker. And I talked on the last episode about how fentanyl cooks are testing out their product on bunny rabbits because a lot of these batches are weak. And I think that's probably because they're having some difficulty in getting the precursor chemicals from China. That might make them go back into things like heroin, right? There could be another heroin boom here. The point is, if you cut off the border, if you seal the border off, you are going to create economic devastation

in America that is going to create more drug addicts, more than there already are. There's a whole generation of lost people addicted to opioids, addicted to drugs, some casual drug users, right? But it's that whole nihilism thing. And that's the culture that's in decline. That's a spiritually dead culture. And when you have that kind of demand for drugs, they're going to get in. Ask yourself this. Is there a drought on drugs right now today? 2025, February 16th when we're recording this. Is there a drought on hard drugs? Does anybody you know that uses drugs? drugs say, I can't find any. Trump's policy's working. No, not at all. I bet the prices haven't even gone up. Look, things in America and Mexico are going to get worse before they get better. Trump is

going to do some positive things for this country. I think he already has. I want us to cut the Pentagon budget. I want us to stop the wars abroad. I want us to, yes, have some control at the border so these migrants coming in aren't exploited and kidnapped and have all their money stolen and all of these other horrible things that happens to them because we have such a disorganized system at the border and they fall victim to the cartels. I want people to stop using drugs, but in the short term, it's going to be anarchy.

People don't believe me, but for the world to get better, the United States has to rearrange itself. I don't want to say fall, it's not going to fall, but it's going to give up their dollar as the World Reserve currency. That's what's kind of holding everything back is the U.S. clinging to this kind of declining empire. That has to go away.

We have to become cooperative again. And it's just going to take time. But in the end, America is going to need to really go through a reckoning. Just like Mexico, our entire economies and political systems are going to have to change. The dollar and fiat currency is going to fall. We're going to need to replace that with a sound money system, Bitcoin. And I know I sound like a geek when I talk about Bitcoin. But truly, once that becomes the thing that stabilizes all the currencies of the world and connects all the currencies of the world, society is going to improve.

When society improves and there's more hope for people, you have less people that want to destroy themselves with drugs. And all of these positive things are going to come out of that. And I'll say this. I'm going to make a prediction. By the end of this century, and I might live to see this day, I hope I do, we are going to see an end to the war on drugs. there will be no more drug war. People will come home. We are not going to militarize this thing anymore.

We're going to take care of drug addicts and we're going to cut off crime that comes from the illegal drug trafficking at the source, which is the demand. All right, you guys, things are about to get crazy, weird, but very, very exciting. Let's stay tuned. We'll see what happens.

I'm going to be back very soon with another video. My name is Johnny Mitchell. You have been watching The Connect. see you next time.