The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - Inside The War For Tijuana: How Mexican Cartels Turned Tijuana Into World's Most VIOLENT City

Episode Date: October 27, 2024

Tijuana, Mexico—one of the most dangerous cities in the world. This Episode Is #Sponsored By PDS DEBT! Stop waiting and start saving. Get a free debt analysis right now at PDSDebt.com/theconnect In this eye-opening documentary, we dive into the heart of TJ, where crime and violence are part of daily life. With insights from former law enforcement officer Ed Calderon and ex-dope boy Fernando Puente, we uncover the truth behind Tijuana's notorious drug cartels, the shifting dynamics of power, and the impact of U.S. drug policies on local crime. Support Ed and Fernando! Ed YouTube: @manifestoradionetwork3191 IG: https://www.instagram.com/manifestoradiopodcast/ Fernando YouTube: @ElBordoMx IG: https://www.instagram.com/fernandotjmx/ Grab your OFFICIAL The Connect Merch! Very Limited Run, Orders Are Up For 2 Weeks Only! https://theconnectmerch.com/ Join The Patreon For Bonus Content! https://www.patreon.com/theconnectshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. I hung out in the most dangerous neighborhoods inside of one of the most dangerous cities on earth, Tijuana, Mexico. And what I saw was even wilder than I could have imagined. Most of Tijuana right now is a bunch of people sleeping in Tijuana and traveling to San Diego to basically work. This is the last border city before you cross into the world's largest drug market. I thought I wasn't going to make it past 23, 21. I just wanted to live life fast and whatever happened, happened. You get grabbed by a cartel group, they might not do anything to you.

But the police and the military, they're going to do something. Their culture of torture and physical torture, mental, psychological torture in Mexico, is vast and old. It's a hellhole, and it's a truly a torturous place. Tijuana, or T.J., as the locals call it, is the most crime-ridden city in the Western Hemisphere. It is a true Wild West town, where anything and everything is for the taking, and murder is as easy as negotiating a price. While all of the eyes of the world are fixed on the recent capture of Sinaloan kingpin, Mayo Zambata, and the bloody struggle for power in Kulia Khan, T.J. is quietly resuming its rank as one of the most murderous cities in the world, with as many as 10 homicides taking place every day.

That's a low number. Even cops and prosecutors get hit up in this town. So who are these underworld players fighting for their slice of the billion-dollar Tijuana to San Diego black market? And how was the shifting drug policy in the United States affected the criminal gangs and cartels in Mexico? To answer these questions, we toured Tijuana with former T.J. cop and current knife mogul Ed Calderon and podcaster Fernando Puente, a former dope boy and human smuggler who ran the streets of Tijuana. for decades. What we found was nothing short of incredible. And before we get started, please take a minute to like and leave a comment on this video. It really, really helps us out.

All right, let's get into it. Everyone knows Tijuana is Sin City. It was formed that way. T.J. sprang up as an outlaw border town, a place for American servicemen from San Diego to come down and spend their cash at the bars and whorehouses in the city's infamous red light district, right in the heart of downtown T.J. Yeah, all the military guys came and did their, like, they still do, but that's how it started the economy out here. So the economy basically started with illegal activity. Yeah. And, of course, sharing a border with the world's largest economy and biggest buyer of illicit goods, the United States, has made Tijuana a hotbed of smuggling from the beginning.

It exploded during the Provision era. Yeah. So people can drink in the U.S. or they came down to Tijuana. Al Capone owned a ton of property down here and used the Baja Peninsula as the launching point for his. rum-running rackets into the United States during prohibition. The municipal government building of Vincenada was built and owned by Al Capone. Today, the port of San Jacidro is the busiest land border in the world, with millions of pedestrians and vehicles crossing into California every day.

This city is vast, lawless, and brimming with opportunity. It truly is a criminal's paradise. The first drug cartel in T.J. was established in the 1980s by the Ariano Féle. family, led by brothers Ramon and Benhamine from Senadoa, who were gifted the territory by drug lord Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, after he went to prison and the Guadalajara cartel he founded splintered into four separate cartels in regions throughout Mexico. Tijuana has a phenomenon that it's not like Kuleakan, which is far away from the border. A lot of the cartel elements that are old here in Tijuana have grown up on both sides of the border.

The Ariano Felix are now the legacy cartel in Tijuana, the old guard. And although most of the founding members have long since died or gone to prison, their brand has lived on. What was once the Ariano-Felix cartel is now a Tijuana cartel. The new generation of Tijuana traffickers continue to refer to themselves as the Tijuana cartel or as being part of the Ariano-Felix organization, although most have no actual blood ties to the founding family. Now you're getting people coming in,

allying themselves with this cartel, with what remains of that cartel from Calisco. and they come from old leadership as well. And then you get some of the new kids coming in that are working with both of these cartels that are fighting it out. So leadership at the top is old. However, according to Ed,

there are still elements of the old guard in place who have ascended the day-to-day world of drug trafficking and have assimilated into high society on both sides of the border. The admins are old. The people are in charge of the money, the people in charge of the old connections, The people in charge of the payroll for the cops on both sides of the fence, not just Mexico.

Like border patrol agents get paid, ICE agents get paid. Like, who's in charge of that? Those are the, that's the true leadership. It is their deep, entrenched political and business connections. They've been investing in businesses, families, lawyers, like, since the 80s. That's how big the organization is. They'll have somebody show up with guns. If you get caught up by the cops, lawyers will already be there and also the person that they pay for, that works in the federal...

Probably a judge. A judge or somebody is already... All of the police, military, and emergency services are all in the same place answering all the calls. So if you have somebody there with ears that works for you, you can know what's happening across the city. As well as their relationship with corrupt law enforcement in Mexico and the U.S. that make much of the drug and human smuggling by the newer Tijuana groups possible. We have somebody here that worked on the smuggling side, and I worked on the law enforcement side,

and I would look at actions of border protection and ice and a lot of these institutions that work on that border. And every now and then they would just do this. And just look that way and just money does get into those pockets. It still does. Fernando Puente grew up in the neighborhood of Colonia Los Altos, on the west side of Tijuana. The Ariano Feist had a kind of control over most of this fucking part of Tijuana.

And is that because this is the oldest neighborhood in Tijuana, and they're the oldest family, the oldest organization? Yeah, that too. The borders right here, you know. A stronghold of the Ariano Félix organization. You kind of knew. Like, if you look that way, you can only see one big-ass house with a lot of cameras and shit like that. And then military would show up. So you kind of knew who these houses were.

Like, back in those days, you had fools walking. They're tigers here. Baby tigers, leopards. I found a lion in the house once. And home to some of the most vicious killings that took place during the cartel war years of the mid-2000s. It's not as filtered as it is in the U.S. when they're aware that there's law enforcement and phone taps

and there's a lot of shit going on. You can't fucking get involved in anything because you're getting on a list. There's nobody taking lists here. There's nobody tapping phones. If there are, probably cartel guys or like somebody with a lot of... So it's different here. Like, there's realistic.

There's nobody keeping tabs on shit. Fernando is a typical Tijuana. He speaks English, was raised in T.J. But has a U.S. passport. And he's been crossing back and forth over the border almost daily since he was a kid. When we were young, we were all hustling, like, selling, like, weed and cocaine and shit like that.

You know, you start finding ways to, like, I mean, some of us had to connect to get, like, cheap cocaine. So he was selling that shit. I'm a U.S. citizen, so I would be crossing people over. By the time he was a teenager, he was making a living smuggling illegal immigrants into California. Maybe twice a day, bringing like one in the morning, two in the afternoon, maybe, something like that. I'm a U.S. citizen, so I can cross, like, up to nine times a day, you know what I mean?

And it wouldn't be strange because I've been crossing all my life. Employing a variety of creative methods to fool the U.S. customs agents. The guy used to work for, he'll throw in a, I don't know, like a trailblazer, and then he'll have, like, four or five people on the back seat but on the floor, and then just throw, like, a black blanket on it, and have a driver go to the border, and they made it a bunch of times because even when you lower the window down, if it's dark, you can't really, you know what I mean?

You can't really see nothing unless you really like get a light on and stuff like that. And they usually have scouts looking at each of the agents. Which line is crossing faster because sometimes they'll just take your paper, scan it and give it to you and go. What is the best time to cross? In the morning, when people are like from four,

like six in the morning. Because it's so busy. Yeah, volume. Plus it's just workers going to work. Right. What we would do even, like, dress them up as workers, like as gardeners and shit like that and cross them at that time, and it's like a 90% chance that we're going to make it. Wow. He also had a drug crew in Los Alps that was moving Coke and U.S. grown weed, which had started to become a trend in that area.

High grade, cartel marijuana grown in the U.S., but shipped south across the border for retail distribution in Mexico. One of the most used drugs as well here in Tijuana, weed. Right? Weed. Some of it, shitty weed from Mexico. but most of it, California wheat. Guys like me bringing it back. Yeah.

You don't want any shitty wheat from here, right? Fuck no. I mean, I started bringing wheat just for me to smoke, but then people would start, hey, bring me some, bring me some. So I would start bringing to sell out here. A phenomenon that we'll talk more about in a second. No one wants to think about debt. But the cold hard truth of it is,

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It only takes 30 seconds. That's PDSD-EBT.com slash the connect. Thank you so much for sponsoring the show. Check them out if you need help restructuring your debt. let's get back into the episode. Fernando represents a group of criminals usually not talked about when we think of organized crime in Tijuana,

and those are retail-level drug dealers who service T.J's massive internal demand for narcotics. What you're seeing now is an injection of capital, like cash capital from America's living here, that no longer have to buy their drugs in San Diego or somewhere up there. They buy them here locally.

So now you're seeing this California in the 90s, gangs forming. So you have the street presence of the market where they sell and they control, which is exposed, so that's who you can kill if you're a rival. And then you have segments of the city being like, this is our territory, this is your territory, this is your street corner you can sell off, this is your street corner you can sell off. And if we want to attack each other, the most exposed element there is the dude on the corner selling. You see, Tijuana is filled with junkies. It's actually unbelievable.

Official statistics place the number at 500,000 addicts in a city of about 2.5 million people. That's almost a fourth of the population. And the actual number is probably much higher, especially when you account for all of the junkies from San Diego who venture south across the border every day to get their fix. It's growing because we just got an influx of new drug users from the U.S. who are now living here and they don't have to cross the border to go and to buy their thing. Now they live here. So do you actually have,

junkies that just permanently relocated to Tijuana that live for a couple hundred bucks. No, we have junkies that come cross the border, get high, and then they go back. Yeah, they go back. Yeah. Crystal meth is the biggest winner. What's the most popular street drug in Tijuana right now? It has to be Crystal Meth. In T.J, it's considered a working man's high.

It'll keep you, get your work, you know? It's like coffee. I mean, some of the cigars get paid with that. Yeah. So, it's crystal meth. It's like, it's like a base level, like everybody, that's like, that's like, it's a, moneymaker here still. But there's also spots that serve heroin and crack cocaine, which are no doubt products of the demand from the other side, from the U.S. Most interestingly, though, is the rise in

imported high-grade marijuana from California being sold on the streets of Tijuana. That's another weird aspect that nobody talks about. There's a giant traffic weed market. American weed market. American weed market in Tijuana, going into Mexico. Cray rolls, edibles, all that package stuff that You see all nice and shit? People will load themselves out and just cross and they become a little side hustle. Think about how wild that is. Drugs are supposed to get smuggled north into the United States, not the other way around. But that's what legalization in America did.

There's very little racket left for cartel growers in the U.S. to make profit domestically. All of the legal grows and dispensaries have bottomed out the price. So what have they done? Simply turned south to places like Tijuana, where pot is still. illegal and the black market is thriving. Now there's more money selling weed in Mexico than there is in the U.S. And you can see you're a dope dealer. And you can see lines of that because they're burning and extorting and attacking smoke shops here, which is like the, it's like the public face of that. Groups like Fernando dot each part of the city, dealing out of their respective plazas.

As a criminally kind of freelance until you want to actually like be serious with somebody with like a crew or like the main cartoon shit, that's when you, you know what I mean? But other Other than that, you can be crossing people, you could be selling shit, you can be doing all kinds of shit and not be cartel-related. So you're allowed to hustle independently? If you have the correct friends,

because if you're really like, don't know anybody but you're doing it and then somebody knows, then you might get checked about it, you know what I mean? These micro-traffickers are usually not part of the cartel. Small organizations related with the bigger cartels, independence working here, but being taxed by higher-ups, and often receive their material

real wholesale from them. Fernando explains the benefits of joining the cartel versus remaining independent. What is the difference when you're just between just being a hustler, like a drug dealer and T.J. And then actually joining an organization. Well, you're directly with them. Like you depend on them. They're giving you the stuff you sell. They're giving you the shit you cross. You know, if you get pulled over, they help you out. You know, and it's a job. I mean, it's like, if you fuck up, you get the tablet, you know, I mean, also. It's a job. You get a, you get a, you get a salary. A week? Weekly salary. You get a phone.

You got to answer every time. You get weapons, you know, get delivered to you. You don't carry weapons. You got to turn them back in. As soon as you shoot somebody, you got to go turn them back in. Because they don't want you to get caught with a hot gun. So it's like you're a cell, you're working for them. But all the logistics are separate.

These street-level micro-trafficking gangs could explain some of the rising violence Tijuana has experienced in recent years. in large part fueled by the exploding demand for drugs from Americans crossing into T.J. Right now it's more gang-type violence because now you have like three organizations in Tijuana. So like this whole neighborhood might be run by one, but as soon as you cross that main avenue there, that's all, that's the sombreros. You know what I mean? That's the whole other thing. In the past, it was always very public executions of people. They would just go into the middle of the day with a bunch of armed people and just stray people.

Now it's more targeted. Now it's like a drug dealer on one corner that is working for the rival cartel and you'll see a guy show up with a 45. Or a dude that has a Monday laundering operation for one cartel getting his business and himself burned alive. Fernando took us to one of the busiest traps in the whole city in the infamous Zona Norte neighborhood, just a few hundred yards from the border fence.

So right now we're in an alley here in Sona Norte, one of the few places where you really got to know somebody to just... So this is the trap. This is a trap. This is a whole trap neighborhood. Like, if you, I mean, don't point the camera otherwise, but there's people like watching out like alleys and just pointing. And people know we're here already, you know what I mean?

People know there's some weird white guy recording right now. But since we're with him, nobody's tripping, you know what I mean? Do gringoes from junkies from San Diego know that this is the spot to come to they want to get high? If they win gringos to come, yeah. These men who are operating the trap are old friends. of Fernandos and use various dilapidated buildings on this block to serve crack, crystal meth, heroin, and weed. Although not officially employed by the cartel, this particular trap has been sanctioned for these men by the Ariano Felix organization. You can't freelance here.

Yeah, you can't do this without. You can't freelance here. So there's no freelancing. There was freelancing in your neighborhood. Maybe, yeah, a little bit. A small. This is like, here's a giant market here. Like, this is like, yeah, there's money here. There's no way You can just, I'm just going to set up job here. Either these guys that own here will kill you or somebody just like, I have to cover him. Like, what's the motherfucker making money here? It is prime drug dealing real estate, and they tell us that they must pay royalties

from all of their sales to the cartel. On the menu at this particular trap was weed, the cheaper Mexican-grown strains from Sinaloa, and the high-grade stuff coming in from California. For me that I lived up there, if you want to get good weed, you will come here. I asked one of them if he had ambitions to move up in the organization to become a wholesaler rather than serving retail all day in the trenches. And in typical Mexican fashion, he said, why bother?

Was it worth the risk? And he's right. In Mexico, the drug trade carries real risk. They don't give a fuck about people selling weed. They don't give about a drug sales point. But they get, the business is being burned. The business is being extorted. And that's what flips the citizenship.

So if they find somebody that's sympathetic to that, like, hey, these guys are helping us out. They'll never report these guys to the cops. What's up, you guys? I hope you're enjoying this episode. I just had to take a sec to tell you about our new merch line. That's right. We finally did it. We have exclusive limited run hoodies, shirts, and hats.

Go to the connectmerch.com. As you can see, I'm wearing this chopo hoodie in the style of a Botero for all you art geeks out there. Like I said, this is a limited run. Once we sell out, there's no more. It's only going to be up for about two weeks. So go over to the connectmerch.com and get your hoodie, your shirt, and your hats today. All right, let's get back into the episode. Lately, the biggest risk to the boys in this trap hasn't come from other cartels, but from Cristalleros or Crystal Meth addicts, who have been extorting and robbing the street vendors and small businesses in the neighborhood. I never heard that before. So pretty cool. The fact that people that were hooked on meth before me or cocaine

different than now people are on the... No, no, he had a gun on him, right? Yeah, they got to because they're fighting those guys. Like fighting the med heads that try to like extort the businesses, they do the community watch for them. So they're not worried about getting caught with drugs and a gun, like in the US, that's a double charge, you know what I mean? Nah, right here, nah, here. One of the guys showed us the bullet scars from where he'd had a gunfight with one of these Cristalleros

after he'd confronted him about this extortion that they've been doing. Besides hand-to-hand drug sales, the fellas in this trap are also coyotes for hire. So basically what they do is there'll be somebody checking from one of the streets I showed you earlier that are on a higher plane and just with the phone and they'll guide you just with the phone. Like, yeah, now you're going to jump this fan. Now you've got to run this, turn right, whatever. Human smuggling is arguably more profitable than the drug business now. and low risk, especially the way these guys tell us they do it.

They'll dress them in military clothing. Yeah, with a drone. They'll follow them with a drone. Using drones to monitor the location of the Border Patrol agents on the U.S. side, these guys will, in real time, guide the migrants over a cell phone through the cutout holes in the border fence and into the mainland United States. And it's usually Mexicans? Because if the people are Mexican, they're not

Yeah, the people from other countries, they send them as bait. Contrary to what the media would have us believe, the majority of the migrants they smuggled are not South American or Chinese or African, their fellow Mexicans. What's the success rate of people getting through from this? Out of 10, 7 might get through. That's good.

But it's not out of some patriotic sense of loyalty. it's because Mexican migrants pay the most, up to $10,000 ahead for this kind of guided drone surveillance smuggling. Migrants from these aforementioned places like Haiti and Africa do attempt to cross, but the majority do not have the big money needed for the high-tech smuggling service and therefore end up getting caught. So the immigrants that aren't Mexican, they get stuck in Tijuana. They come from Venezuela, Africa, the Middle East.

They don't get stuck. They don't get stuck. They stay. Some of them stay. Some of them cross, but they don't get the good crossings. Like the ones that have ISIS X rate, you have to pay for. Now, many Haitian migrants have opted to forego the crossing and instead have set down routes in Tijuana,

where they enjoy a relatively high quality of life. So as you can see, the domestic demand for drugs inside of Tijuana is enormous, making trap spots like the one we visited extremely lucrative. And still, at the end of the day, these guys are just nickel baggers. Guppies in a world controlled by whales. The cartels, just like the government, barely seemed to bother with them. After Miguel Gallardo, the original Mexican drug lord, was arrested in 1989, the Guadalajara cartels splintered into four separate organizations, Juarez, Sonora, Sinaloa, and Tijuana.

The turf was divided up. The problem, of course, was that Tijuana had something the Sinaloans never had, the border. But for about 17 years, the two groups managed to get along. Tijuana allowed Sinaloa and other cartels to move product. through their territory in exchange for a fee. And what they offered these other organizations was the safe warehousing of their merchandise and stash houses all over the city,

plus access to their contacts in government and corrupt customs agents to then successfully move that merchandise across the border. It seemed like a fair exchange, and there was a limit to the violence. Until 2006, when Chapo Guzman, the fastest rising star in the Sinaloa cartel, decided he wanted it all.

His army of Sicario's began attacking targets in Juarez and Tijuana at the same goddamn time. Psychotic. Fernando was a young D-boy at the time when the violence really kicked off. I did this back in 2006, these two right here. And you can see the other ones are stung by my friends did the other ones. My friends passed away already, so I think that's why mine is still untouched because I'm still here and I still pull up to the blog.

What happened to all your friends? Well, it's just alive, you know? Most of them got killed, shot, betrayed or stuff like that. His neighborhood of Los Altos was ground zero for incursions by Sinaloa mercenaries who patrolled the streets looking for Ariano Felik's stash houses, which they would then raid and kill everyone inside. They were doing all kinds of tensions right here. You see guys changing, switching cars and just talking about, like, radios and shit.

So we called them, and we told them about it. And he called his contact, and, like, 20 police showed up, and they just started patrolling there because he was paying, he was paying the cartel that day. The Sinaluan, they didn't really have the government backup like them. So they'd left, but like two days later, they got him outside. He was walking out, and they kidnapped him, and he was hung from a bridge. And that was one of the first, like, narco messages when the war really, really started, you know what I mean?

This was also the beginning of the so-called narco-manta era, in which cartels would hang their victims from freeway overpasses next to large banners with warnings to the opposition scribbled on them. I read in Kulia Khan that 99% of the homicides go unsolved. same thing across the country and same thing here. It was common at this time for greater Tijuana to experience up to 20 homicides per day and nearly as many disappearances. When they shot them, they were laying in the street for about an hour before anybody came.

We have friends calling us like, anyway, they shot these fools. They're out here. They're just laying there. We call the cops, but they're not showing up. They showed up to like an hour and 20 minutes later. Nobody's going to investigate that. Nobody's going to look into that. It's just too much.

Even if they tried to, man, it's just so much like the shooting he's talking about. I have a podcast with one of the. the main perpetrators of that stuff, and they were shooting each other from, like, across the street, from right here just a bunch of full shit. And then people started running away, so you'll find bodies like 20 minutes away. You will find people, like, you know, showing up dead.

The violence got so brazen that a special elite police unit was formed to tackle the bloodshed that had gripped Tijuana. The only successful counter-organized crime program ever implemented in Mexico was here. Ed Calderon was only 21 years old at the time that he got recruited to join this elite squad of cartel hunters. When I got put through my first few months of training, physical beatings were part of it. I'm not talking about a drill sergeant screaming in your face. I'm talking about floggings, waterboarding situations being utilized as hazing rituals, beatings. And then when you go out and you see some of the older guys who are there to be instructing.

to you as a new guy, you'll see them pull out a plastic bag and put it out over somebody's face and basically do a spixie it. Um, battery's, live wire being put on people. And it's institutional. It's everywhere. He recalls working in Colonial Los Altos on the same streets where Fernando and his crew were operating at the time. I think it was actually around this neighborhood when I saw this. I was working with the army back then and we stopped a car with the, with four ladies in it. And they had a big tortilla cooler in the back.

See? And you lifted up the tortilla cooler and there's a bunch of AKs and rifles. While we could never get Ed to admit it on camera, it's a well-known fact that his police squad left no witnesses. And did you ever witness, like, your own team torturing a person that left you kind of unsettled? They can't talk about that.

If his crew was coming to see you, they were killing everybody. Torture, which has always been common practice in Mexican law enforcement, was exacerbated during these cartel war years. You would get placed on perimeter duty. You would hear screams coming in from places where they were doing things to people. The orders came from high up, you know. Ed himself was tortured by his fellow cops, who were testing him to see if he had been flipped by a cartel. I was put into a room for a bit.

and there's there's there's there's there's there's there you're hopeless it's a hopeless place to be in you know when the when your shit gets taken

when you get stripped down and you get put into this fucking foldable chair or a wheelchair uh you're your own you don't know if this is real you don't know it's going to end

you get a lot of guns pointing at you uh I got live wire put on me and asphyxiation. And the first thing they tell you when you let you go is like, hey, you just passed a very thorough confidence exam.

The violence was not only out of control on the street. A lot of things have happened around this prison, some horrible things, some pretty interesting things. There's two of the largest prison riots in the state's history happened here. It spilled over into La Mesa Penitentiary, T.J.'s biggest prison in 2008, during one of the most violent riots in Mexico's history. I was resting that day and everybody caught called in. I got here, parked my car somewhere along here, made my way through this thoroughfare and everything smelled like CS gas.

It was just tear gas everywhere and the unit that I was in was pretty well equipped. So all of us had survivor gas masks on. So he got here with gas masks on and we just, All of the responding agents were running that way, and we were running that way. Ed was part of the team that shot their way into the prison to put down the riot, in which 19 inmates were killed. They were worried about them breaking through that metal door and escaping. So any hole that you would see would get rounds shot through it.

People were shooting from the inside out, throwing rocks, doing all that shit. Any hole that would get made in the wall, there was a pretty big hole on the other side of this building. Any hole that would get made, that's where all the rounds would go through. The amount of bodies inside of that prison afterwards, after that riot, a lot of them were internal killings. The family members would riot on the outside while the riot was going on on the inside. So it was, Tijuana was at a boiling point that day.

The days after the riot, there was like piles of bodies popping up around the city. And on the news, they said it was like cartel-related, like cartel wars and stuff. But a lot of them were wearing prison uniform. So. They were basically, that's what the word in the street was. They were dumping the bodies out in the street,

so they wouldn't get blamed for killing innocent. You know what I mean? As brutal as these police tactics were, they seemed to work, at least for a time. It might not seem like it now, but Tijuana, when I was active, was at the number one spot as far as the most dangerous cities on the planet. And the work of Lizaola did, got it off that list.

Shit went dead quiet here for three years. Not only did the murder rate fall dramatically, dramatically in the years between 2008 and 2015, when Ed's unit was active. But by 2009, the last of the Ariano-Felix family members were arrested and exorited to the United States, marking the end of the family's monopoly over Tijuana. It seems like Chappo got his way, as the Sinaloa legacy remains active in Tijuana to this day. But you know things could only remain quiet in Tijuana but for so long. There's too much money to be had.

Since 2016, the presence of the Nuevo-Halisco cartel has made the water boil again in T.J. The war that's going on in Tijuana, they actually caught up two guys in one of the nicest areas in San Diego. And La Jolla was one of them. You killed him? Yeah, they killed him. As of right now, there are three major cartel players active in the city at all times. Like, if you live in a neighborhood, you'll know who's in charge of that neighborhood. You're not going to put a little white sombrero on your fucking car there, you know?

It's like a code for like my Mayo Zambatha's people, like a white hat. Sinaloa, the faction's still loyal to now captured Kingpin Ismail Mayo Zambada, the Nuevo-Halisco cartel, which is possibly on its way to becoming the largest and most sophisticated criminal group in Mexico and the Tijuana cartel, which as far as I can tell are now a loosely associated group of trafficking organizations who identify with the Ariano-Felix family in name only. and the mission of these cartels is simple and unwavering. Move the work to El Otrolado. These people are basically moving around a lot of weight,

so it means that the interest that control that movement is probably either from Sinaloa or from one of the local older guards of the Tijuana Cartel or Halisco. Here's how smuggling and T.J. works these days, in a nutshell. First, the cartel bosses set up and fund the drug shipments getting sent to the United States. The biggest moneymakers right now are crystal meth and fentanyl, but raw heroin seizures are up this year and cocaine is always in demand. They get their buyers lined up in the U.S. Maybe it's some of their own people on the other side receiving the merchandise, or more

likely these days, it's an American group, a biker gang or a Chicano gang, paying for the work cash on delivery. Next, the boss will bring the merchandise to any number of the independent smuggling groups in Tijuana. Who's taking that kind of risk? People that want money. Yeah, People that want money, there's no opportunities here. You either work in a makila, work for the Amazon fucking building that they just built here, and that they're going to earn pennies on the dollar. Or you can fucking put a load across and get like five grand or more. These are the local experts who, for a fee, will move your product across the border.

They have notes on everybody. That's because that's their job, just looking and saying, hey, if you want to cross something, the best bet is going to be through line seven for a minute. These guys know the border crossing by heart. They know the best times of day to try and cross and have intel on the most favorable border guards. The Border Patrol itself is the most corrupt federal police institution in the United States. They might even be paying some of them off.

Give favor or preference to a family member in some weird way or like some of the cases that have been brought upon like Border Patrol agents. Their families get the benefits, not them directly. because that's how you figure your way around some of that shit. It was a loud secret that a lot of those guys were basically that some of those guys were getting money from the U.S. side to look the other way or to let shit cross. They know the best way to package the product to throw off the canines.

You'll have vehicle body shops, basically building heights and constructing ways of concealing drugs to cross the border. And most importantly, they hire the drug mules. It's going to be young people. people that have a visa or people that have a dual citizenship getting utilized to cross. You see, smuggling methods are always shifting depending on the pressure points from law enforcement.

Drones aren't getting utilized to drop off things. Still, they go high. They have dampeners on the border, but they can go across that by sending a drone high with a signal, and that's going to relay any sort of information to the other drone so they can go farther in. RC vehicles loaded in the back through the fence. It seems like drug tunnels, once made famous by Chapo,

have all but been abandoned in TJ. They're expensive and take years to build, and overall just bring down a lot of heat. Catapults in some parts of Mexicali we've seen Tramuchet is being utilized. And just right now, through the ocean, jet skis are a big thing now. Jet skis and speedbows, yeah, right through the ocean, all the way up of the... There's a video of some dudes getting dropped off in La Jolla with backpacks.

Some cartels still do attempt the large multi-hundred-kilo crossings inside of tractor trailers or semi-trucks. Those are the big bus that always make headlines. But these days, the majority of drugs smuggled into the United States from Mexico come over in small quantities hidden inside of passenger vehicles. Why take the risk of trying to smuggle 200 bricks in one truck when you can send 10 bricks inside of 20 small cars? For the ghetto youth of Tijuana, mulling a package across. across the border is as normal as getting a summer job. They will keep you for a period, but in the end, they go back. And as soon as you go back, did you sit your rat, did you stitch, do you snitch,

then you have your job back, and I'll go again. The cartels seem to have little sympathy for the mules who get arrested and might even stick a mule with the bill for the lost work after they're returned from doing their jail time in the U.S. If it's a large load in a vehicle, if it's owned, if it's a lot and you get grabbed with it somewhere across the border and they could figure out or make it like if it's just stupidity on your end, they're not going to forgive that.

It's not like, oh, we just lost it. You're on the hook now. So whatever you owe them is going to be worked off or paid off. Some sophisticated organizations have developed a tactic called blind mulling. You'll get blind mules now, which is like a rare, it's kind of a new thing. it's been done it for a while, but it's kind of new, where they'll wait, they'll spot somebody crossing daily and then just load up his vehicle and put an air tag in there so he can track them.

After that car crosses the border, they'll either steal it and remove the work, or sometimes they don't even do that. They can just remove the work without that person ever knowing that they smuggled drugs for the cartel. People here are really cartel savvy. They know, you know, they know they check their cars before they cross to the U.S. The civilians in Tijuana know about. this practice. Ones who cross every day into San Diego to go to work intentionally don't wash their cars. That way, in the morning, before they get into their car, they can see if handprints

have been on the vehicle, and they'll know to check their car for drugs. You can see some of the, some of the high rises they're right on the border. And some of these apartments have cameras and like high, high magnification lenses on them, basically. So it's basically a live view of the border 24-7, and just like he was saying, like, hey, who's waving people through more? So you'll get at number seven, and everybody will move to number seven, so they can cross and have a bit more of an opportunity to cross. Hour after hour, day after day, the spider web of criminal groups make it their life's work to move drugs across that imaginary line.

This is Naculikana. We have a shit ton of Americans living here. So anything that happens here, aside from the foreign investment, aside from all the Americans living here, the hammer comes down really hard here as far as I can't roll around in a four-car convoy with a technical 50-cow on the back of it because the military will show up. This is Tijuana. This is a Kulia Khan or Guadalajara where the culture and size of those cities make it possible for one organization to monopolize the trade and keep a lid on violence. This is a gigantic border town. There's too much money and too many wolves, and the decentralization of technology has collapsed the hierarchy of traditional Mexican criminal organizations

and made it possible for many smaller groups to get in on the action. Unlike the legacy cartels, Sinaloa and the CJNG, where in order to move up, you have to be related to the boss and then move up within that organization, and T.J., you could take shit over, if you're willing to kill, of course. Fernando told me privately that, Although he never officially joined the Tijuana cartel, a few of his friends from his old crew from Los Altos did.

Every time it's my birthday, even homies, like the few of them that are still there, they're like, hey, bro, that's crazy. We're 33 now, we're 30. You know what I mean? And I mean, this guy, the one I'm talking about, he's the personal, like, secondhand man to one of the bosses right now. So just me having those type of conversations with him, it's like, fuck, man. Wow. So he stayed in the game and he really made it.

He's next to the boss, yeah. He's his set of security. You hear him in his corridos, you hear and everything. And he's my childhood friend. They grew up, and then one of them seized on an opportunity and hijacked a load of kilos from some guys from Sinaloa. And now, bam, just like that, he's a boss. He's next to the boss, so he's enjoying the perks of being with him.

But he asks also, like, if they come and get him, his boss gets to run, and he has to stay there and... And shoot it out, so he does? And he's done it. Wow, with who? With government and shit like that. It's this kind of Wild West criminal landscape that makes Tijuana the murder capital of Mexico.

Does he expect to die or has he have a plan to get out? All those guys have stories, have wild stories. All of them have been shot in because they've been in war. So like, like shit you see on the news recently, like I know those guys. Does he expect your friend? Does he, is he trying to get out of the game eventually or does he expect to get killed? I think he's going to die. And today, in 2024, the murder rate might already be back to what it was during the official

cartel war years of the 2000s. Now where are we at? 2024 compared to... It's getting back up there. It's getting back up there. Only now it's more subtle. There's too many Americans and too much gentrification

for convoys of armed cicadios to be rolling around and getting in firefights in the city center like they did in the old days. So they've made this protective cocoon for the gentrification. They call them zones

like armored zones. Right. But they kill people in these zones. Now the assassinations are more targeted, and much of the killing is confined to the poorest colonias on the east side of the city. But make no mistake, you can and still get it anytime, anywhere, and for any reason in TJ. And there's almost no chance they'll find the killer. Currently, Tijuana has more open homicide cases than any other place in Mexico, which I guess

isn't saying much. The volume of death that happens here versus the substandard training corrupt, low means, zero fucking effort police, the policing that you have here in Mexico. And I know this because I was a part of it. And I'm never going to go back to work for those fuckers again. They don't pay you enough. They don't give you enough. And there's absolutely no sort of support for anybody working in that field to give a fuck, realistically.

There simply isn't the manpower, resources, or the will to prosecute murders, especially not drug-related murders. And besides, it might actually be a cop that's pulling the trigger. It has long been understood that in Tijuana, police officers are guns for hire. A lot of cops were basically utilized as hit squads for organizations. I mean, why hire a bunch of dudes from seeing a law to come kill a guy when you have armed cicarios wearing a badge? During the cartel war years, entire units would be in the pocket of whichever group was paying the most.

Not only are they hired triggermen, Tijuana cops have now formed their own drug trafficking organizations. Last year, a group of cops in T.J., who were supposed to be protecting a load of coke for El Mio's people, decided to turn around and steal it. And they found out who jacked and who distributed the stolen merchandise. And there was a fucking cleansing happening because of it. And the people don't realize that even if you're a cop, there's no protection for you. Sakadios from Sinaloa went on a week-long killing spree of any and all police who might have had something to do with it. This is all too common in TJ. Ed explains why it's so easy for cops to become corrupt.

A lot of the guys that I was working with when the job ended for them, either they were under investigation and they were pushed out, either they got caught with somebody or something outside of the scope of their function. A lot of them would end up going through the legal system and then get help on that side of things. by the people they were working with on the outside. So a lot of them were flipped and started working for one of many criminal organizations operating. But of course, Dirty Cops in Tijuana is nothing compared to the wholesale corruption of the Mexican military and the Mexican political class. They had a thing called the Wakamaya Leaks, which is our version of WikiLeaks,

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. Nothing, and I do mean nothing in Mexico, moves without the blessing from the top. The Mexican army as a whole has always had interest within, as far as supporting one cartel or the other, depending on the region, it operates in, basically.

All ports into Mexico are military. So it means that all the fentanyl, all the precursors, and stuff like that is basically going through military checkpoints, either, you know, accidentally or purposefully. Ultimately, that is the safest way to get away with dealing drugs in Mexico, become part of the government. And now that Mayo Zambaba is in U.S. custody, there's no telling what damning info could leak about how high up this corruption actually goes. 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 Mayo with a Rolodex of all the people he paid off is probably one of them. What's for certain is that the new president-elect, Claudia Shinebaum, is almost guaranteed to be as favorable to cartel interests as her predecessor, Andres Manuel Obrador, who has been accused by high-level drug traffickers, as well as Mexico's former security administrator of taking bribes from the cartel that go back 15 years. One of them had a federal open case in the United States. Osiam Fuego, who was basically the Secretary of Defense in Mexico for a second year.

He gave him life. And the president of Mexico petitioned the federal government in the U.S. to hand him over because he was going to get investigated here in Mexico and they wanted to use them. Petition. Petition. And they did. The U.S. dropped, I don't know if they dropped the charges, but they basically sent over the whole investigation packet to Mexico,

handed them over. And he was driven to his house and let go. And this guy was on the phone with people. And so it goes down in good old Mexico. As they'll tell you on the streets of Tijuana, we're going to eat regardless. As for Ed, he spent years recovering from his time in the police force. You would have a lot of guys basically coked up with guns working in places where they probably shouldn't.

Or people drinking themselves to death every night, trying to process the unprocessable trauma that they just went through. I quit drinking three years ago. And I can't remember a week that I wasn't drunk from 21 to about 38. He's now a successful influencer, private security consultant, and knife mogul. Make sure to check out his podcast, Manifest Radio podcast, as well as his Instagram. He is one of the best follows on the internet. And Fernando, he's out of the game as well

and now spends most of his time on the U.S. side focusing on rap and podcasting. Just having all these guys that died where I grew up and everything, it kind of broke up the unity, you know what I mean? And it started getting ugly and shit like that. So everybody just started looking for other ways. I started looking for other ways a little bit late, you know what I mean? But, I mean, I'm grateful that I'm still here.

Go check out his podcast, El Bordo, at El Bordo MX. And follow him on Instagram, all of the social. media sites. He is the voice of the new generation of Tijuana S. All right, you guys, that's been today's episode. What an incredible story. What an incredible place. Thank you so much for watching. Make sure to like, comment, and subscribe. And we will see you next week. Take care.