The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - Inside The WORST Drug-Infested Slums Of Medellin, Colombia

Episode Date: October 6, 2025

Medellín, Colombia — once the heartbeat of Pablo Escobar’s empire and the most dangerous city on Earth — has transformed in shocking ways. In this episode , Johnny dives deep into the hidden world of Medellín’s modern drug trade. 👉 From basuco “zombie” addicts roaming the hoyas, to the rise of small neighborhood gangs (pandillas) replacing cartels, Medellín tells a story of survival, profit, and transformation. Johnny explores Barrio Pablo Escobar, explains the disturbing chemicals that make up cocaine, reveals why Mexican cartels like Sinaloa now dominate global smuggling, and walks firsthand through a city's 30 year evolution. Topics covered in this episode: -Medellín’s violent past vs. its surprising present -The basuco epidemic and “walking dead” addicts -How guerrilla groups (FARC, ELN) now control cocaine labs -Sinaloa’s alliance with Colombian producers -Gangs, tourism, and why Medellín is safer than ever Medellín is no longer exporting cocaine like it once did, but the drug economy is alive and thriving — just in ways you wouldn’t expect. This Episode Is Sponsored By The Following: Cash App! Download Cash App Today: https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/1ekoiacn #CashAppPod. As a Cash App partner, I may earn a commission when you sign up for a Cash App account. Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App’s bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures. FRE! Get 20% off you first order at https://frepouch.com using code CONNECT at checkout! Surfshark! Go to https://surfshark.com/connectmitchell or use code CONNECTMITCHELL at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN! Join The Patreon For Bonus Content! https://www.patreon.com/theconnectshow 00:00 Inside Medellín's Drug-Infested Neighborhoods 03:00 How the Drug Trade Shifted in Medellín 06:00 Medellín's Rise from the Cartel Era 09:45 This Episode Is Sponsored By CashApp 11:14 Pablo Escobar's Legacy and Tourist Boom 14:00 Transformation of Barrio Pablo Escobar 16:16 This Episode Is Sponsored By FRE and SurfShark 18:00 The End of Medellín Cartels and the New Drug Economy 20:55 The Shocking Chemicals In Cocaine: The Process Explained 26:00 Basuco: The Toxic Byproduct and Its Epidemic 30:00 Gang Control and Neighborhood Drug Markets 34:00 Rise of Urban Gangs and Pacified Violence 37:00 Personal Stories from Medellín's Underbelly 41:00 The New International Drug Trade 44:00 Why Medellín Remains Safe Despite the Drugs 48:00 Final Thoughts and What's Next Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you finally find your thing, you want the whole world to know about that thing. So you use a thing called Canva to make it an even bigger and better thing. Whether you want to create flyers for that thing, make presentations for that thing, or design merch for that thing, you can do anything. So people can see your thing, feel your thing, love your thing. The next thing you know, it's a thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing. I wrote a little song to remind you, choice hotels, get you more of the experiences you value.

The Can Beah Hotels got it all. A rooftop bar, have a ball. Bring a date, your squad, or even your mom. Book direct at choiceotails.com. God damn. This is the tenderloin on Mark McGuire's steroids, Doug. Whoa. Whoa.

Whoa. Whoa. God. Damn. Fool. Whoa, fucking A, dude. Oh boy. That is heavy.

I hung out in the most dangerous, drug-infested neighborhoods inside of what used to be the most dangerous city on planet Earth, Medellin, Colombia. These neighborhoods, which the locals call Oishas, literally meaning a hole or a ditch, make the slums in American cities look like relatively safe places by comparison. I've never seen any other than. anything like it. Thousands and thousands of burnt-out drug addicts openly selling and using

Basuko, which as you're about to learn, is South America's version of crack cocaine, except it's about 100 times dirtier than crack and a thousand times cheaper. Oisges like these are dotted throughout Medellin and are a vital source of income for the urban Pandillas, or the gangs, who have taken over the criminal rackets in Colombian cities ever since the fall of Pablo Escobar and the Kingpin era of the 1990s. This is the evolution of the criminal underworld in Colombia. We're in Medellin, obviously the birthplace of international cocaine trafficking. This is where it all began.

Pablo, the Ochoas, gotcha, all of the biggest drug lords that everybody knows about. They populated these different neighborhoods, and this was where they took the work, they refined it, and then they exported it to the rest of the world. And now, 40 years later, that business, model is completely gone from this city. I'm not exaggerating when I say that in Medellín today, there are no cartels or drug trafficking groups who export cocaine to the rest of the world anymore. They keep it here in the city to sell out locally. There's a huge demand for cocaine and for Basse, Basucco, in the city. And so what they have now, instead of drug cartels, they have

Pandayeros, they call them, different gangs that control different sectors of this gigantic city. And they trap. They buy cocaine wholesale from the cartels that live in the mountains. They bring it to the city. They chop it up. They bag it up. And they sell it to tourists. They sell it to drug addicts. And they sell it to local people who just use cocaine recreationally. And, you know, I think they do pretty well. I mean, we went down to El Centro yesterday. And it looked like a Michael Jackson's thriller video. I mean, drug addicts are everywhere in Latin America. definitely in Medellin, but there are no more drug cartels as we knew them from back in the era of Pablo Escobar. It's remarkable. But despite this anarchy, this junky dystopia, the city of

Medellin overall has managed to transform itself and become one of the safest big cities in Latin America. How is this possible? I had to go down there and find out for myself. And before we get started, as usual, please remember to leave a like and a comment on this video, Share it with a friend and subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. We deeply, deeply appreciate it. Okay, listo, mis parceros. Let's get to medigine is the birthplace of international cocaine trafficking. Once that bassook goes into the city, then the people that are in charge of that are the local gangs.

And since they can't traffic cocaine to the states, they got to settle for trafficking cocaine here in the city, in the neighborhoods. They've pushed all the attics. sellers into small little pockets that created zones for vice. Even though it's very chill and very safe, yeah, people still get disappeared left and right. Medellín, Columbia, my, my, my, truly one of the great cities on earth. Part of me cringes to say it, especially now that it's become such a destination for passport bros, creepy sex tourists, and annoying digital nomads who drive everyone's rent up but still have the nerve to haggle over prices. I was here first, motherfuckers, way back in 2009, before the secret

got out. It's no surprise why everyone loves this place. It's aesthetically gorgeous, the weather is mild and perfect basically all year around, the natives are some of the friendliest most accommodating people I've met in my lifetime of travel, and of course, the tits, and the ass, and the faces. Columbians were recently ranked number one as the world's most beautiful people, and it's always been that way, actually. It's just that this, city went through an era. From the mid-1970s until Pablo Escobar was killed in late 1993, Medellin Colombia was the heartbeat of the international cocaine trade. To be sure, there were cartels in other cities, of course, Barranquia, Santa Marta, and the infamous Kali cartel in the

south of the country, but nobody made an impact quite like Medellin. This is where the business began. The natives of Medellin, known as Paisas, are a distinct ethnic group that descend from Andalusia, Spain, and are a mix of North African, Basque, and Sephardic Jewish people from Eastern Europe. It's been said that back in the 15th century, Spain exiled many of its Pisa criminals to their South American colony of Colombia, to the province of Antioquia, and that is how the culture of criminality was bred into the men of Medellin. I don't know how true that is, but it would sure explain the bandito culture that has been present in Medellin from the beginning. After all, Peru, Bolivia, and Venezuela also grow cocoa leaf, but it was the

Pisces of Medellin who took this leaf and made it a global cocaine phenomenon. On our first day in Medellin, our guide brought us up to the infamous Barrio Pablo Escobar, the hillside neighborhood that Pablo funded and built for poor and working class pisa's back in the mid-1980s. All right, so we're here in Barrio Pablo Escobar. This was the neighborhood that Pablo Escobar built with his drug money back in the day. And it's just one of these things that's way set back. We're super high up right now. I'm looking down onto the city of Medellin. So they told us this barrio was built in 1985. That's when they started work. That's when Pablo was running for governor of Antiochia State, where Medellin is located. And, you know, he probably only invested

$50, $100 million to build this entire hillside out into this working class neighborhood that you have now. It would make that every day, $50 million. And according to our guide, it's not even a dangerous neighborhood anymore. That's gone, literally. Like, I'm in the middle of what used to be one of the most dangerous neighborhoods and one of the most dangerous cities in the world. Our guide told us back in the day, we couldn't just be out here like this, you know? It's incredible the 180 this city is done.

At the height of the Medellijin cartel, neighborhoods like Barrio Escobar were staging areas for cocaine manufacturing, packaging, and preparation before the Coke made its journey to the United States and Europe. Remember, the Medellin cartel was just an affiliation of different drug trafficking gangs, one of the strongest being Escobars. There was also the Ochoa brothers, Carlos Leder, Jose Gacha,

and many other lesser-known but incredibly rich and powerful, groups who controlled different sections of Medellín. Back then, each of these poor neighborhoods dotting the hillsides of the Antioquia Valley was filled with cocaine labs. Labs is just a fancy way of saying kitchens inside of residential houses where the drug gangs completed the process of crystallization, converting the base powder or basse into the finished product of cocaine. Besides these urban labs, the traffickers also had warehouses to stash the freshly packaged cocaine and trucks to transport it out of the city when it was time to load it onto a plane or a ship en route to its final destination. It's wild to think that all of the billions of dollars

generated by the Medellin cartel in those years began in poor neighborhoods like these. And that is why, when things really began to unravel for the cartel in the late 1980s, neighborhoods like Barrio Pablo Escobar became war zones. The paramilitary group Los Pepeps, funded by the Cali Cartel and with the support of the American CIA, pulled daily incursions into these barrios, raiding and burning coke labs and stash houses and driving the homicide rate to one of the highest in the world. Dozens and dozens of people were killed on a daily basis in Medellin back then.

But nowadays, things have completely changed for neighborhoods like Barrio Pablo Escobar. This is like a favela in many ways. It's got its own neighborhood watch. It's got its own people that run the barrio, the tiendas where they sell drugs, They sell a lot of weed. They sell a lot of tussi, which is Coke mixed with MDMA. It's like pink cocaine.

So, yeah, they're still getting money here. But what our guide, Alejandro, was telling us, is that a lot of the gangs that run this neighborhood, they police themselves. So, for example, when the Venezuelan migrants started really coming here about 10 years ago, they were doing a lot of extortion, a lot of killing of innocent people.

And they say, no, no, no, no, no. Al Rio to the river for you. So they basically cut these guys up and they throw them in the river. Today's episode is brought to you by Cash App. We love Cash App. We use Cash App exclusively to send and receive money. We've checked the demographics of this podcast.

We know you love it too. If you didn't know, Cash App is more than just a safe way to send and receive money. With the Cash App card, you get tons of perks without any hidden fees. Think early access to concert pre-sales like Kendrick Lamar and Sabrina Carpenter. Yeah, because that's who I go to see, Sabrina Carpenter. Plus discounts on everyday purchases at brands you're probably already spending money on. It also keeps your money safe by automatically flagging suspicious transactions and letting you lock your card instantly

if it's ever lost or stolen. Spend with confidence with the Cash App card today. For a limited time, new Cash App customers can use our exclusive code to earn some additional cash for real. Just download Cash app, use our exclusive referral code, Cash App 10, that's the number 10, in your profile, send $5 to a friend within 14 days, and you'll get $10 dropped right into your account. Listen, I'm no mathematician, but that is a double up. That is 100% gain on your money. Terms do apply. That's money. That's Cash App. Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App's bank partners. Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC. Discounts provided by Cash app A Block, Inc. brand. Visit cash.com slash legal slash

podcast for full disclosures. Pablo Escobar himself and the bad old days have become a distant memory, and residents of this Barrio have turned him into a tourist attraction. So they've turned this area into like a museum. Like, Colombians used to be ashamed of their past. Used to be ashamed of all the drugs and the violence. It was something you weren't supposed to talk about in polite company. And now it's like a tourist trap. I'm here chilling with. statue of Pablo. Reminds me of Hollywood, what they're doing with like, you know, museums of movies and shit like that.

We're in the age of nostalgia. So right now we're in this little shrine to Pablo with all these pictures. We got letters that he wrote to his lovers, to his family. And this was only 40 years ago that this guy was setting off bombs in El Pobalo. His cicadios were killing literally tens of thousands of people a year.

Many innocent people got killed. This was like a mass murderer. And here we are celebrating him. And it's not just us. There's tourists from all over the world that are popping in here. But Colombians are good business people. Like they're like, yeah, we have a fucked up past, but let's take advantage of it.

Let's make some money off these stupid fucks who come here and like us. Medellin as a whole has become one of the safest big cities in Latin America. Tourists, tech companies, and international investment have flooded into the city over the past 10 years. And the Medelline drug cartel as we knew it, as the world knew it, that's gone too. Now, of course, there are still drug capos who live in Medellin, no doubt.

But none of the cocaine that leaves Colombia for foreign markets is prepared or launched out of this city anymore. It just doesn't happen. These days, most of the cocaine laboratories in Colombia are located in the southern regions of the country, in the departments of Putumayo and the Valle de Kauka. These remote swaths of land are controlled by Colombia's most powerful guerrilla armies, the ELN and the FARC, who at one time were left-wing revolutionary groups fighting the Colombian government, but have since transformed into the country's largest drug cartels. It is in these distant regions, largely impenetrable by the federal government,

where the majority of the coca leaf is grown. I'm going to go into more detail about this in another video, but here's the basic process of how the coca leaf gets harvested and turned into cocaine. Step 1. Coca-leaf is grown on private land owned by small and medium-sized farmers, who hire laborers to pull the mature coca plants during harvest season, which takes place every three months. And check this out.

It takes about 600 pounds of coca leaf to make just one kilo of cocaine, so there's never a shortage of work, and the farmers are constantly planting new coca leaf crops. Step two, now that all the coca leaf has been stripped from the coca plants, it's time to make the cocaine paste, or the basse, the base. Most of the coca leaf farmers are also experts in this process and have cocaine-paste laboratories located on their properties. Now pay attention, because this is where the cocaine economy bifurcates into two distinct worlds.

Listen as our friend Alex, who used to work for a time in one of these base laboratories, describe the process of turning the coca leaf into cocaine paste. It's a dirty, laborious process. Once the raspa chinis, they bring the wade leaves to this area. It's like a big old built, it's like a big old bathtub made. out of wood. They start putting all them leaves in there. And then what you do is you have the weed eater guy.

I went through that process. That was like my favorite one. You're just in there, weed eating. Yeah, just grinding it down. Yeah, just grinding it down to as fine as you can. While you're weed eating, there's another guy in there that's putting all types of chemicals in there. And then he walks around

barefooted just like mixing it. For people that think that when they're sniff good cocaine, like, oh, 100% pure? Explain what you dump in to make cocaine. Yeah, it's 100. You're sniffing 100% of pure crap. After I started going to these co-collabs, I was like, oh, man, I can't believe I'm sniffing them.

Because they gasoline, the asseophysotico, and a lot of chemicals, a lot of chemicals, even cement. What's the purpose of putting cement? The point of all that is because that does something to the leaves or to the plants to be able to prepare it, to take out the merchandise, because once all that's done and once all that, they start putting that in these big old plastic containers,

big sized plastic containers with more chemicals and the gasoline. That's where the real gasoline's in. And they put that in there for days. And then within a few days or, yeah, like within a few days, that starts extracting the real cocaine. That liquid turns into some kind of pasta, some kind of like syrup, like some type of syrup. And then that syrup starts getting harder and harder.

And then they put it into these other special buckets. And then it starts getting really hard. And then they're able to mold them. This ad is for all you pouchers out there. Like me, I'm a poucher now, thanks to these bad boys, free. Look at them. Look at them. Take a good look, you guys.

I do not podcast without one of these bad boys in my mouth. I got it in there. You can see it. free free F-R-E these are the new gold standard in pouches okay they've revolutionized the game I was not able to take nicotine for the longest I couldn't use the competitors like Zinn I definitely couldn't use like the old school chewing tobacco it makes me sick make me want to puke they sent me a package of these and I am now on the wagon free and they're not afraid to give people what they want I take the three milligrams but they got these joints up to 15 okay for

those of you that have a high tolerance. I love free. Okay. These are the grittiest, coolest pouches on the market and a hell of a diuretic. I just took a giant dump upstairs. Probably didn't even need to, but it cleaned me out when I put these things in. Boom. They get a little nicotine rush into my head. It wakes me up, keeps me focused. I can't recommend free enough, you guys. I'm telling you, I'd probably promote this even if they weren't paying me. F-R-E, free. And, boom, You get 33% more pouches in a little canister like this than the leading competitive brands. It's also got Freeze Revolutionary Moisture Technology, more strength options, and a variety of delicious flavors. I use the mint and the winter green.

They've also got, what do they have right here? Just plain normal, lush, lush. Ooh, I don't know what lush is about, but I got to try that. You can buy them in packs if you want, too, okay? Or as a stocking stuffer, Christmas isn't too far away. you get the six pack. Go get them, guys. Free F-R-E. And check this out. They got a deal for you guys. Get 20% off your first order at freepouch.com. That's F-R-E-Pouch.com and use that code connect at checkout. Once again, that's 20% off your first order at freepouch.com. You're going to get 33% more product at a

comparable price point. That kind of value just makes sense for these guys. You've got to use that promo code connect at FREPouch.com with the promo code connect and get on the bandwagon, man, free. Change your life. Yeah, change your life, guys. You guys, whenever I log online, I do so using a virtual private network. If you don't know what a virtual private network or a VPN is, it safeguards your entire online activity. Once your device connects to the internet, all information is encrypted, concealing your online activity from snoopers and trackers. And here at the Connect, the only VPN we trust is Surfshark. Surfshark creates user-friendly privacy and security solutions to protect your data and privacy online. Surfshark enables you to virtually explore the globe,

browse privately by encrypting your internet activity, and blocks ads and malware that may disrupt your experience. Surfshark offers enhanced privacy and security, bypasses geo-restriction to access block content, protects your data on public networks by securing public Wi-Fi connections, and offers a single subscription to secure all your devices simultaneously. I don't really have to explain to you guys why protecting your online activity is so important. It's because we're tracked everywhere, we're monitored everywhere, there's no privacy. Here at the Connect, we use Surfshark all of the time, whether we're booking flights and hotels internationally to get the best rates. We use it to upload content in the United States when we're out of the country. So besides protecting

your privacy, it gives you enormous utility. If you like watching Netflix shows, from Japan or Europe, you can log on to your VPN and tag yourself in Germany or Italy, wherever you want to watch content, and you'll be able to access shows that way. I can't recommend them enough, you guys. Go to surfshark.com slash connect Mitchell or use code connect Mitchell at checkout to get four extra months of Surfshark VPN. Wow, that's a great deal, you guys. You need to be on a virtual private network. Why not use the best on the market? and that is Surfshark. So use that promo code, Connect Mitchell, to get four extra months free when you sign up for Surfshark and check it out. They have a risk-free 30-day money-back

guarantee. You have nothing to lose. This is the offer we have available exclusively for our listeners. Go hit that link, Connect Mitchell, for four extra months on Surfshark. So one more time, go to Connect Mitchell at checkout. That URL and code will be in the description of this episode. Thank you, Surfshark. Depending on the quality of the coca leaf, These cocaine-paste chemists will add a disgusting amalgam of things, including gasoline and cement, to the batches in order to separate the chemicals that get you high from the actual coca leaf. Now, after all the chemicals have been strained and the cocaine paste squeezed out, those leftover chemicals stuck to the bottom of the large cooking pans will be scraped out, packaged, and sold as Basuko,

which is what we saw on the streets of mediter. Spring weekends are all about family, sunshine, and evenings on the patio. Before everyone arrives, I stop by my local Total Wine and More to grab a great bottle to share. With such a wide selection and the lowest prices, it's easy to find something amazing for everyone to enjoy. If you're not sure what to pick, their friendly guides can help. Find what you love and love what you find only at Total Wine and More. Shop total wine and more in store or online. Spirits not sold in Virginia and North Carolina.

Drink responsibly. B-21. The jean. The bassoco is like the garbage that is left over, that you can't turn into cocaine. Okay, and they mix that sometimes even with ladrillo. Ladrillo is like bricks. Explain how the leftovers, when the process of making the Coke, is it the cocaine base? Is it those chemicals that fall off of it to become the bassook or is it the cocaine itself?

Yeah, it's the cocaine base itself that it looks too, it's too nasty and he just can't turn it into crystallizer. You can't turn into a good, pure cocaine brick. Okay, so the stuff that's in that's in that big plastic jug, everything that got poured in that you described earlier, right? From cement to gasoline to ethanol, whatever have you, it's the stuff that isn't. is it white, the white stuff that comes out. Exactly, what's left over. It's what's, yeah, the other stuff. That's what becomes bassook.

It's like when you make rice and a rice cooker, and it gets burned a little, and you just get the good rice out, but there's always that. On the sides. On the sides or on the bottom, there's always that burn part that you have to scrape out.

Yeah. That's bassoco. That would be the bassoco. How do the dealers do it? Do you scrape up kilos of bassook? Yeah, exactly. They scrape that up and start adding it up and adding it up, and then from that,

they make the bassook. or and then the basuko is sent to las ojas where the normal drug addict local drug addicts use it now of course there's a difference right because you can go to la oja and you can buy basuco or you can buy basse base is is is is pure it's like saying pure basuko is white basuco basically but basse is what they is before they break it down to make good basuco because you got garbage bassoco you got good bassoco and then you got la base. So the base, they also smoke that like crack. It's like actually crack. The only difference is that they don't use ammoniaco to separate it or bacon soda to cook it. Amonia. They don't use none of that. They just, they just sell it to it and people use it. Okay, so base, so literally basse, base is just the base cocaine if they didn't sell it to the crystallization labs. Exactly. I got you. Exactly. And when you go to the hood and you want to smoke bassook or that,

You can say, eh, de me bassoco, or you can say de me vassi. Basuko, which literally means garbage, has become an epidemic in cities all over Latin America, especially in cocaine exporting countries like Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. Basuko has become a completely separate but lucrative revenue stream for the drug gangs who have replaced the legacy cartels in these major urban areas. Everybody's got their own way of selling their basuko. Right. And it's like people buy this one here.

because that's the one I like. So everybody's got their own way of personalizing their basucco. Some people even scrape heroin into it to make it more addictive. And its effects, well, just take a look. It makes fentanyl look like macha green tea. On the streets of Medellin, one hit of Basuko retails for about a thousand Colombian pesos. That's like 25 cents U.S. I have never seen real life zombies, but what I witnessed that afternoon in Medellin was literally

the Walking Dead. But I digress. Step number three. Now that the clean cocaine paste has been extracted, dried, and packaged, it's time to sell it to the narcos. The coca farmer will take his kilos of Basse to the local town, controlled either by the FARC or the ELN, and sell them to a broker working for any number of narco-traffickers. Depending on the season and the supply, a kilo of good cocaine base sells for about $500 U.S. And now for the fun part, it's time to make the blow. This process is referred to as la crystallization or the crystallization of the cocaine. This part of the supply chain is operated directly by the narco-traffickers,

who employ specialized cooks working round-the-clock in clandestine labs all over guerrilla-controlled territory, where the cocaine paste is finally converted into powder cocaine. Are most of these cocaine crystallization labs in the same areas as the base cocaine labs? Actually, the majority of these labs are in the urban areas. In places where you wouldn't even, I mean, maybe they have buildings that you go in. It looks like normal people live there. But they got a crystallization lab there. There are some that are in the jungle.

But these are like by really big, big tapos that they crystallize everything there. They export it there. They pack it there. They compress it there. And then they put them in the, in the, in the speedboats and they go. So those would just be like the guerrillas, who we now know.

Berrillas or the narco-terroristas, really big time deals. I'm talking about they're producing thousands of kilos. Right, right. But it sounds like the majority of narcos are now just independent and they're just doing it in like apartments. Like would there be apartment buildings in Kali

just down the road that have labs in them running right now? Exactly, exactly. Seriously. Yeah, yeah. There could be places where you wouldn't, even know. As a matter of fact, you know, sometimes since I worked in cocoa labs and I know that smell that comes from working there and those crystallization labs, that there's a certain smell that you just can, I can't explain it to you. But I've been to some really rough neighborhoods

where I get that smell and I know something is being cooked up there. But for whatever reason, the Narcos just don't have crystallization labs in the city of Medellin anymore. Maybe it's just too hot, too much police and military presence protecting the foreigners who are flocking to that city in droves. If you're a narco, it's safer to operate your kitchens in territory under the protection of the guerrillas, who have the local government paid off and the logistics necessary to move your cocaine bricks from your labs and out of the country. Currently, the main exit points for cocaine leaving Colombia are south into Ecuador and on the Pacific coast out of the city of Buena Ventura. The relationship between the narco-traffickers and the guerrilla groups in Colombia is almost identical to Mexico,

where the major cartels use their political protection and military power to facilitate drug shipments into the U.S. and Canada on behalf of drug traffickers. And speaking of Mexican cartels, guess who's popped up in Colombia and taken over the cocaine trade? Who are the cartels most podorososos, more important, exporting the most of Colombia? this momentico, are the cartel of Sinaloa here in Colombia. What's

the case? The cartel of the can't that's peasanting right now. They're patrociding. So,

that the cartel of Senalo is notocating. The cartel of Sinaloa is doing with the guerrilla,

and we know that the cartel of the Ceyla is a, here in Colombia we have

like, as people just people who don't care, the bigita, the whelita, quartizala, with a chas, with a motorciarra.

So, that's a here in Colombia, cause a damage psychological. Me, that I have worked with a cartel, and I can tell you what authority that I am sure

could be a 90% correct, that yeah, the cartel of the Sinaloa is here. What are the Sinaloa cartel? How are they involved? Yeah, they're involved because they're an alliance. Because because the Sinaloa cartel knows how to get drugs in easily in Mexico.

They know how to get drugs over there very easily, much easier than a Colombian that is not from Mexico. So there's some type of alliance there. There's an alliance there. And the alliance is that they need the cocaine from Colombia and they need to send it to the state. So there has to be an alliance there. You just can't get rid of these cats from Sinaloa, can you?

I'm going to go into that more in a separate video. But back to Medellin. This magical city that gave birth to drug trafficking now boasts and historically low homicide. rate, and cocaine labs and cartels are nowhere to be found. What has replaced them are these pandillas, urban gangs who control the retail drug trade in their given territory. Right now, there's no less than five significant pandas who control turf throughout the city's poorest sections. The amount of drugs and drug trafficking and drug abuse that I've seen in this city is on par with

anything that I've seen in Tijuana, anything I've seen in Guadalajara, but the violence is a of what those places go through. There seems to be an agreement, a cultural agreement, a spoken agreement between the people that run the gangs here who peddle the drugs, that everything is to be respected, violence is to be kept at a minimum, and the tourists who come here are to be catered to professionally. And we've certainly seen that. what this city has managed to do. The city planners, the city government we've learned,

they've pushed all the attics and the sellers into small little pockets of the downtown area, like it's the tenderloid in San Francisco. So all of these different barrios in Medellín are completely pacified and clean. So it's kind of a remarkable forward-thinking thing that they've done here. They've created zones for vice.

They're the ones who are profiting from the Basuko trained. And as you can see here, business is good, very good. Once that Basuko goes into the city, then the people that are in charge of that are the local gangs, the local armed robbers, the ones that handle the old jads. But though majority of those old jads and everything are controlled and really ran by bigger groups that are owned by like maybe workers from the drug dealers.

In other words, like they call them here lava perros, you know? The guys that wash your cars for the drug dealers, the hitman, the cicarios. Those guys are the ones that manage those little areas because they have their connections and since they can't traffic cocaine

to the States or smuggle cocaine over there because then they would be the capos, then they got to settle for trafficking cocaine here in the city, in the Ojas, and that's what they, in the neighborhoods. As we passed through one of these barrios in downtown Medellegene, I recognized it as a neighborhood where I had come to score drugs years ago,

way back in 2009. I talked about it in the third episode of The Connect. While I was in Columbia looking for investment opportunities to launder my drug money, I was introduced to a few guys who ran this neighborhood in Medellin. I went to one of their trap houses in the middle of the night, where a lieutenant for one of these gangs sold me bricks of weed and a half a kilo or so of cocaine. So I walk outside my hotel, and there's a taxi waiting for me,

an old school yellow taxi, but the light is off on top. There's no service light going on. The back door of the car opens up, and I jump in. And in the back seat, there's this huge Colombian dude, built like a brick shit house. He hands me a blindfold. And he's a nice guy. He smiles at me, and he politely asked me.

He says, could you please put this on, sir? Now I'm a little worried. I'm like, dude, it's not that serious. I don't need to smoke weed. badly. So I turned to open up the cab to get out before I can do that it starts driving off. So I'm like, fuck it, I guess I'm in this now. So I put the blindfold on and I really started to get nervous at this point. It was probably only a 10-minute taxi ride, but it felt like three hours. Finally, the cab comes to a stop and the guy sitting next to me tells me I can take the blindfold off.

So I get out of the cab and I look around and I realize, oh, I'm in the barrio, I'm in the ghetto. There's little kids with walkie-talkies strapped to their chest, riding their bicycles around the streets. I glance up at the rooftops of the adjoining buildings, and there's lookouts with guns kind of scanning for any sign of police. So now I realize I'm in a place where I really shouldn't be. I'm in no-go zone. So he takes me into one of these townhouses, and it's real nondescript. So I was taken upstairs at the second level of the house, and I'm introduced to the guy who I was on the phone with. little five foot three dude, introduces himself and he says, hello, my name is your good friends with good people. I said, yeah, very good people. He says, okay, what can I do for you? I said,

well, I'm looking for some weed. And he said, okay. And he takes two gigantic garbage bags, and he drops them at my feet, and they're stuffed with kilos and kilos of weed. And he said, you want the good shit or you want the bad shit? I said, well, give me the good shit. How much is the good shit? And he points to me and he says the peso amount and I do some quick math and it's $50 American.

$50 for a thousand grams of weed. So it was like funny to me. I was like, give me five of them. I don't give a shit. $250 will get me five kilos of weed. Yeah, give it to me. And he goes, well, what about the coca? And I was like, yeah, fucking give me a lot of that too.

How much is that? And he says, hang on. And he leads me into this room, and there's a bunch of guys hanging around. And he opens up a safe underneath his desk, and he takes out a brick of cocaine and places it on the table. And I said, that's good shit. And he goes, that's the best shit. So I said, okay, well, how much will a kilo this be?

And he goes, I'll give it to you for $2,000 American. And now I'm back almost 20 years later, and nothing much has changed. Besides selling Basuko to the dope fiends, many of these gang neighborhoods are also places where independent drug dealers can come to score weed, cocaine, and heroin at wholesale. There were lookouts on every corner keeping an eye out for the cops and the opposition, just like there were in 2009 when I came here for the first time. That was a trip. But now in 2025, despite the drug trade being as active as ever, these gangs don't beef with

each other like they used to. Everyone respects each other's turf. It's like an unspoken agreement. It's one of the huge distinctions between. between a city like Medellin and somewhere in Mexico like Guadalajara is there's no boss. There's no bosses anymore. It's drug trafficking clans that are neighborhood to neighborhood. But where that usually should cause a massive amounts of violence because there's nobody at the top controlling things,

it didn't work out that way in Medellin. Every group, every little gang seems to respect each other's turf. And there's no expansionist motivation. like we see with cartels in Mexico, they're always trying to take each other's territory. Here it's, you know, respect and just getting money. There's plenty of money to go around, especially now with all these gringoes moving to the city. In fact, there's so much foreign money flooding into Medellin now that a market has opened up for high-end American-grown marijuana.

One of the things this guy was telling me is now a lot of American weed is being sold in barrios like this one in Medellin. So they just intercepted a load coming from California at the Rio Negro Airport. It was like 1,500 pounds of Cali high-grade bud. How wild is that? So now America is starting to export our drugs to Colombia. Talk about a change. Columbia was supposed to export their shit to us.

It's wild. Columbia is a country racked with problems. kidnappings, bombings, extreme poverty, and record levels of cocaine being manufactured and shipped to destinations all over the world. But you wouldn't know it if you came to Medellin, where the greatest tragedy are these neighborhoods containing tens of thousands of Basuko addicts, but even these oyshas are hidden from sight, tucked neatly away from the civilian population. And how are these gangs not beefing with each other? Perhaps it's because they're still controlled by the violent right-wing paramilitary groups who are an offshoot of the original Los Pepe's and are the main opposition to the ELN and the FARC and whose home base

happens to be in the mountains outside of Medellin. But that's just my speculation. Maybe it's the collective trauma of such a violent past, not even the gang members want to return to that era. Everyone just get your money and chill the fuck out. That seems to be the modus operandi these days in Medellin. All right, you guys, that's been today's episode. We're going to do some follow-up content from our time in Columbia, so make sure to subscribe to the channel and turn on alerts so you get notified whenever we drop new videos. My name is Johnny Mitchell, and you've been watching The Connect. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th,

the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavah Thethe. Theater.com, only at Yamaava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. Start the spring season off right with a new pair of Toccovas Western boots. Hand-crafted and over 200 steps from genuine leather. They're built to last and feel broken in the moment you put them on. From cowhide to exotic leathers,

Ticovus blends timeless style with all-day comfort. Pair them with premium denim, Western shirts, and accessories for an effortless polished look. Shop quality Western goods in store or online at Decova's.com.