The Joe Rogan Experience - #1253 - Ioan Grillo

Episode Date: February 26, 2019

Ioan Grillo is journalist who has spent the last 18 years reporting on the drug war in Mexico. His books "El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency" and "Gangster Warlords" are available now.

here we go five four three two one first of all how many people get your name wrong when they try to pronounce it well so many people i don't even care anymore i just i just however it comes out because i live in it's a funny name where i come from right from england growing up it's a funny name but in mexico it's even stranger names. So I just normally make it Ian. And my second name, Grillo, which in Spanish is Grillo. Right. So everyone... They mess that up too if they see it spelled.

Yeah. Pull this microphone about a fist from your face. Right there. Here we go. Johan. I don't think I've ever heard that name before. There's an actor called Johan Grufford. What's he in?

He's in Fantastic Four. Oh, really? He's the Fantastic Four. Oh, really? He's the stretchy guy. Oh, no shit. In Fantastic Four. So, yeah, he's made that name a little bit more. A little bit more acceptable. How did you wind up living in Mexico City?

So, I came to Mexico or went to Mexico in the year 2000. And I kind of messed around for a few years in the uk wanted to get into journalism so i found one way to get into it was to start working in a foreign country rather than going to my local newspaper and working go to a foreign country and start working and i had a romantic idea about latin america thinking i'd be like i saw the movie salvador you know oliver stone's movie from the 80ss. I kind of had a romantic idea about running around with grillers, fighting military dictatorships. So I arrived in Mexico in 2000 and got a job at an English-language newspaper.

How old were you? 27 when I first left the UK, yeah. 28 when I messed around for a bit in Mexico as well and then got the job when I was 28. Mexico City is a wild place. Yeah, yeah. It's so packed. It's hard. I've only been there twice for UFC events.

Yeah. But every time I'm there, I'm just shaking my head like I can't believe how this traffic works. It's crazy. Yeah, 18 years and I've spent a lot of time in that traffic. Nobody cares about red lights, green lights. They don't care. It's stressful. Everyone wants to cut you up all the time.

Yeah. People shout at you a lot. You have to get used to people calling you like pendejo, cerdo. I try different tactics. Now I just try and relax and not get angry. Did you know how to speak Spanish before you went there? Yeah, yeah. So I spent one year in Spain, living in Spain before I went there.

I spent a year in the Middle East as well. But yeah, I started off when I arrived, I spoke more to Spanish Spanish, which is like, oye, tio, coño, tio. And then I changed I spoke more to Spanish Spanish, which is like, Oye, tio, coño, tio. And then I changed more to like the Mexican Spanish, which is like, Oye, wey, que paso, wey. Right, right, right. Yeah. So when did you start getting into narco journalism? So like I arrived, say, with a romantic idea about what I might cover in Mexico or Latin America.

And right away, I realized all that idea of guerrillas and military dictatorships that had gone. That was the last century. Che Guevara, all that stuff, that had gone. But right away when I arrived, my very first arrive, first back in the UK, I grew up around a lot of drugs in the UK. So going back to the 80s, I grew up up a lot of people taking drugs i had a few friends who died from heroin overdoses back then four people i knew died of heroin overdoses i had a

sister who went who became uh schizophrenic smoking a lot a lot of well no she became schizophrenic and there'd be a lot of drugs being smoked around that time as well. Was it pot? Yeah. Back then it was Moroccan hashish. There is a connection, you know, and we've been exploring that a lot lately. We went into this marijuana debate between Alex Berenstein and Dr. Mike from canada and we talked about it and i know people that have had that happen to them where they've had schizophrenic or psychotic breaks because of just massive doses of marijuana and especially people that don't do it or people that do it too much for too long

it does happen i heard that debate that's one of the reasons why it came to mind uh i mean i don't know uh a lot of people smoke weed smoke hash a lot of people it's fine uh now when when my sister had a breakdown when she was 18 and i was 16 at the time and when that came out it turned out also my my grandmother had an issue with schizophrenia right and i think i don't know if it's a time bomb waiting to go off yeah or if it was a time bomb waiting to go off. Yeah. Or if it was how much the hash was involved in that. There's other issues as well.

So I don't really know the science of it. But anyway, going back. So I've been around a lot of drugs before. So when I arrived in Mexico, actually, one of the first, first arriving in Mexico, I ended up hanging around with some people. And they were smoking a lot of crack in Mexico. It's up hanging around with some people, and they were smoking a lot of crack in Mexico. It's one of the first people I met. Wow.

I went down to the beach, like backpacking down to the beach, and these people were smoking crack. And I was like, this is kind of strange. I didn't know there's people smoking crack down here. So when I got a job at the local newspaper in English, and I just started looking at the crime thing, one of the first stores I did was on the issue of crack being sold locally and how that linked to cartels and then very soon just very very quickly I just fell in right away like I said all these things happened by accident I just fell into covering the crime beat and this is going back to 2001

so 2001 was the same year that Chapo Guzman escaped from prison. Then I was calling a lot then to a great journalist from Tijuana, Jesus Blanco Nelas, a real legend from Tijuana, who survived a shooting by cartels. And, you know, phoning him up all the time, just getting him to give me information, give me tips. And that was how it really started. Another big story I did back in those days was the court-martial of some generals for drug trafficking. And that was really where it began back then. Generals for drug trafficking. How much of an issue is that?

I mean, corruption must be unbelievably rampant. So, I mean, corruption even isn't a strong enough word for it. Sometimes I call it state capture i mean so this is the real beginning and this has been a whole crazy 18 years of covering this stuff and this is just the very beginning about then i've seen a whole lot of very crazy stuff in that time but like just to get a sense of how bad the corruption is or what it really means on on the ground level there like Like there's policemen. Like you interview policemen,

you get to know the policemen in a certain town, certain city. And it's hard to know, you know, or military guys or politicians. And you want to believe these are good people. You want to believe there's good policemen out there who really want to stop crime. So there was one policeman. His nickname was Tyson, like Mike Tyson.

His nickname was Tyson because he was a well-built bloke, well-built guy. And he was friendly with the press. A guy from Michoacán, friendly with the press. And then it came out that he was actually a drug cartel member, a ranking member in the drug cartel. And he actually confessed they they used to have a thing where the police the federal police when they got him got him to confess on camera and he confessed not only was he turning a blind eye not only was he carrying out murders he was

training the young kids how to decapitate people how to cut people up and he was explaining in graphic detail how he'd like you know how they managed to cut people up and he was explaining in graphic detail how he'd like you know how they managed to cut limbs off how he gets young people to train them to cut limbs off to get them to lose their fear so that's the level of corruption that could be a policeman you're dealing with and that's really who they are um so that's one of the the crazy things about corruption down there did you have any hesitancy in getting involved in narco journalism knowing this? I mean, I would imagine that's one of the most dangerous avenues to pursue in journalism. So this was little by little I got involved in covering this.

So like going back to 2000, this hadn't happened. This war hadn't happened. It was still like a crime issue at that moment. So I began to cover these things. And then around 2004, I got a job for the Houston Chronicle out of Houston, Texas. I was covering, I was a stringer covering Mexico for them. And I flew up to a lot to Nuevo Laredo. And there was a turf war beginning there, which is really the beginning of the drug war,

which has torn Mexico apart, began on the border with Texas in this city called Nuevo Laredo over the bridge from Laredo, Texas, back in 2004. So there was a lot of interest from the Texas newspapers, what was going on. There's a whole bunch of bodies piling up there. But again, going back to these days, and this is kind of innocent looking back, innocent looking at myself then newspapers what was going on there's a whole bunch of bodies piling up there but again this going back to these days and this is kind of innocent looking back innocent looking at myself

then and innocent looking at what mexico was like then they would simply say go to the place i drive up to monterrey rent a car and just drive the car to noble aredo with bus by myself and now people just don't do that there's just too much crazy stuff going on. But back then it was still like, oh, you can just do that. When you say crazy stuff, like what kind of crazy stuff? I mean, now you can get stopped by an armed group driving on those roads. You could just drive along and there could be a group of guys with guns could stop the car, get someone out, take you away.

I mean, there's a whole people a lot more careful about where you – now when you move around the roads, you've got to lot more careful about you know where you now now when i'm when you move around the roads you could be very careful how you move and how you plan this stuff you don't just wander by yourself drive around these places so so back then when this was happening and um there was uh these bodies turning up and i was trying to figure out why and and i uh there was one uh guy interviewed who was the head of chamber of commerce um and i talked to him you know very interesting guy about a couple of weeks later he became the chief of police for the city and they asked him they said are you scared um you know you're scared about being killed he said no i'm not scared it's only the corrupt people who get

killed and he was shot dead six hours after he gave that statement. They shot him dead. And that was one of the real markers of something really strange that's going on in Mexico. Something is, like, going to erupt in Mexico. And then from there, it kind of just escalated and escalated. And I started working for other media, Time Magazine, New York Times, different people. And after a while, I said, I can't just write news news stories about this i've got to write books about this because this stuff

is big and it's complicated it must be immensely complicated for the the people that live there it seems like there's no escape i mean if you you can't turn to the police the police are the cartel there's the cartel the police all the politicians most likely if they're alive have to be compromised yeah i mean there's been some very very desperate people and i mean there's been some very there's been some inspirational people as well fighting this there's been heroes there are heroes um just to get more of a sense of what that means on the ground as well uh you know and some of the things you see uh you know some of the things that stay with me you know for a while it was quite romantic covering this it

was like wow i'm covering i'm going to these places where chapel guzman is from you know i got to the village and meet his mother and meet his family um i'm writing about these these crazy people but then you start seeing the human pain in all of this um one of many stories that stick with me was a mother in monterrey a school teacher you know when you have armed guys moving around they're also like uh really affecting the civil population attacking the civil population and one mother um she was in her home with her two children in Monterrey. And it was like in the night just chilling in their house. And then the door broke down.

And about 15 guys in bulletproof jackets all came in, long arms, just taking stuff from the house. Held the family, pinned them down. And they said to the mother, which of your children is the oldest? And she was like, didn't know how to reply. to the mother which of your children is the oldest and she was like didn't know how to reply i mean which of your children are the oldest how do i how do i reply to that she just couldn't speak and the eldest son she had two sons 118 115 the 18 year old was a philosophy student and he said um i'm i'm the oldest so lucky you're coming with us and took him away the next day she got a phone call saying okay we've got your son give us this amount of money we'll give him back so she went around to like relatives just

got the money she wanted to get the money right away she turned up with the money gave some money and then they just cut off the cause she hadn't heard from him since and I I mean seeing her face the devastation um the pain she said like you know just couldn't couldn't go on with life after that just not knowing not having the closure and i met her when i went to report on one of the worst atrocities which was 49 bodies who'd all been decapitated all had their hands and feet cut off and all been dumped on a road and they were taken to the morgue in Monterrey

and I arrived at the morgue I was inside the morgue just smelling the smell of the dead bodies this kind of weird smell you get from like decaying flesh, kind of like a sweet smell you get from when you're around those places where you can smell the bodies decaying. And I was inside the morgue and I came out and she was outside the morgue.

And she was trying to see if her son might be among those people, among those bodies. Wow. You know, it's so insane that this is right next door to America. And there's so little effort put on doing something about it, including doing something to mitigate the influence of illegal drugs by making drugs legal. I mean, that would be one gigantic step. You're not going to stop people from doing drugs. I mean, this is an illogical, ridiculous approach. I don't think people should do most of those drugs.

But when you make drugs illegal, only criminals are going to sell those drugs. And this is exactly what you have right next door to America. I mean, it's just unbelievably insane that there's this amount of crime a drive away from San Antonio. Yeah. And talking about that issue of the money and the economics of this. Yeah. So, I mean, you look at cocaine.

So you've got the, there was four main drugs. Now you've got fentanyl coming in as well, and the cartels are making fentanyl. They're making it? Making it, yeah. They're making it, bringing in precursors, making it. There was a lab, one lab, I was in Nog uh about a year and a half ago they bust a lab in nogales right on the border they were making had the lab there making the fentanyl and bringing up

here but as well as that you've got the other four main drugs historically uh marijuana uh heroin cocaine and crystal meth and this goes back 100 years like so Sinaloa, which is the cradle of Mexican drug trafficking, Sinaloa is a bit like Sicily is to the mafia, like Sinaloa is to the Mexican drug cartels, where it began. And it began right, so you go back to 1914, you had in the US the Harrison's Narcotics Tax Act, when they restricted opium and cocaine in the United States. when they restricted opium and cocaine in the United States.

And from 1915, they began a cross-border trade from Mexico to the United States. So that's when it started? All the way back then, so over 100 years ago. Some of the very first people doing it were actually Chinese Mexicans. They were Chinese immigrants who arrived in Mexico. They began doing this. They bought opium from China, planted it in Mexico. And some of the first people receiving it were Chinese Americans. Some of these very early cases, a case from 1916, investigated. There's documents about this case where there was Chinese

Mexicans trafficking to Chinese Americans here in California. And at that time, there was a governor of Baja California involved right back then. What is the solution? Is there any solutions to this? Well, I mean, I think a lot of people covering this, you get very weary. You want to see solutions. Yeah. You want to find solutions. And you want to come with that optimism of finding solutions.

And you want to justify why you're doing this, what you're doing this for. Not just to tell the stories, but to look for solutions to this. And it gets worried, but there's three areas, I believe, that are solutions. First, I do agree with you on the idea of drug policy reform. Again, it's tough uphill battle. I mean, going back to 2012,

I wrote editorials about, you know, one of the reasons you should legalize marijuana is because of the marijuana come from Mexico, which goes to cartels, which pays for killers, which pays for corruption. But at the same time, marijuana, a lot of, you know, a lot of is legalized in the United States and the violence actually just got worse in Mexico. So you've also got the issue of heroin, cocaine, crystal meth, fentanyl, and you've got the cartels who have gone into a bunch of other rackets now. They steal crude oil, which is a big deal. They steal billions of dollars' worth of crude oil, criminals down there, from pipelines. Just tap into a pipeline or something?

Yeah, you go into a pipeline. You normally put in two taps. You drill two holes in the pipeline. You drill a hole to take the oil out, and you drill a pipeline. You normally put in two taps. You drill two holes in the pipeline. You drill a hole to take the oil out. You drill a hole to put water in to try and keep the pressure the same. If you saw this crazy video recently in a small town in Mexico where a bunch of – there was a tap open, a really bad tap. The oil was just spraying out. And a bunch of people were lining up just to pick up the oil from the pipeline

and it exploded. And it was just like crazy death toll. Yeah, I did see that. From that out. But anyway, I do believe in drug policy reform. We have to talk about this. It has to be on the table. I mean, Americans, you know,

no one knows really what Americans spend on drugs. But there's this survey which you can find online. If you just, you know, no one knows really what Americans spend on drugs. But there's this survey which you can find online. If you just, you know, tap in, what do Americans spend on illegal drugs? And it is an estimate of $100 billion a year. So, you know, that amount of money, I mean, that's an estimate. I mean, it could be right. You know, it's hard to know. It's a very round number.

But like $100 billion a year. Now, if you think about that pumping into these cartels year after year, I mean, decades, you know, how much of that, you know, if it's $30 billion of that going down to Mexico in over 10 years, $300 billion, over 30 years, close to a trillion dollars. That really creates this monster. But, you know, secondary. So I believe in drug policy reform. I mean, I don't know how. I mean, rehab for everyone who needs it because heroin addicts buy a lot of heroin so everyone you save from that you can uh you know you can stop a lot of heroin and a lot of that money which does money

goes to these people who are doing this stuff but a secondary i believe is social work uh in the neighborhoods like i've talked to i've done a lot of interviews with particularly with the assassins with the killers um in cartels in mexico and also around latin america i've been traveling around jamaica brazil central america colombia talking to a lot of the killers especially and when i sit down with them i try and get their life story like how did they first get into this because you're not born doing this stuff and often I mean in some cases there's different profiles there's some of them uh you know there's one one guy this is down in Honduras which is also a crazy situation there's a guy there I actually met him before I'd met him when i was doing some reporting down there

back in 2015 and he was driving for us and he was also carrying a gun to help protect us with a journalist who had a head had who'd been hit before who'd been actually shot before and uh then i met him again afterwards and got him to tell his story, which is kind of typical of a lot of these guys. And he described how he'd been abandoned as a kid by his parents and had this real hate that he had with the world, like, you know, just fuck the world. And he described the first time that he carried out murders um and it this was actually i mean he carried out later on he he documented all these hits he'd done and decapitations he'd done and this kind of crazy stuff but the first time he carried out a murder was probably the the freakiest when he was i think 14 and they got a a family they went

into a house okay they got a family and they butchered a family and he described when he described that and then described later on you know how he became a hired killer and the thing about him like some of these people you think they're psychopaths they just they really um don't care but some of them really, you think they're psychopaths. They really don't care. But some of them really do have these conflicts inside their heart. I think he was someone, I'll list it back to that interview. And he had, and it's hard to balance that, someone who does evil, but also has been a victim as well, a victim and a victimizer.

And you feel that pain. Since then, he's himself been being murdered um but uh yeah he's uh he was you know one so how you get social work to reach people from a very young age because often they're recruited into organized crime when they're 12 13 years old so he butchered this family when he's 14 was he stealing money from them was he so the story with that was he said that he was hanging around with these basically street kids. And one of the other kids said, I know where there's some money in a house. We can get some money in a house.

So they went in there and killed this family. And it turned out there was no money there. And the reason the other kid had said go there was because he'd actually been living with his family. And he said they'd been abusive to him. reason the other kid had said go there was because he'd actually been living with his family and he said they'd been abusive to him so he wanted to like have revenge on his family but what was so really sick about this to when he was describing it was they had this family and they would to stop them defending themselves they would like take them one by one like pin them in a room and take them one by one like take them out butcher them how the other ones didn't really know what was going on

and think i mean the action itself but how like teenage kids can think about that stuff and then later on when he was talking about the uh decapitations he was talking about they get contracts with decapitation inside the court like they say that we want this killing we want you to decapitate the guy we want this doc we want to see video of the guy being decapitated we want that we want the guy to suffer and when he hacks the heads off there sometimes still be a moment when like when the life goes out of them and when the body is still like twitching like he says they can still see like there's a bit like nerves and it's like a chicken like when the life goes out of them, and when the body is still like twitching, like he says they can still see,

there's a bit like nerves, like a chicken, like a headless chicken, there's a bit, there's a part when they're still like twitching a bit, even after they, you know, they've lost their kind of connections there.

Oof. Now, when you're interviewing these people, how nervous are you? I mean, this seems like if you're interviewing these people, how nervous are you? I mean, this seems like if you're putting all this stuff down, you could implicate them in some crimes, and it seems like it would be very convenient for them to try to get rid of you. So there's a whole bunch of different situations around interviews. Sometimes I've interviewed people in prisons, a lot of time in prisons.

This took me years to get to a lot of these people. First of all, you know, it wasn't like when I first started doing this, I was like, you know, how do I reach them? I started going around to drug rehab places and talking to people in drug rehab. Going into prisons. In Ciudad Juarez, I did a lot of interviews. And in one prison, I got to know a lot of prisoners.

In the prison in Ciudad Ju Juarez in a Christian evangelical wing there. And they were going through this weird Christian, you know, like Christian discovery of God there. And then on the street, often like through contact, I mean, well, all the time through contacts on the street. In Honduras, a lot of great contacts with a friend who's a journalist

who grew up in his neighbors with all these guys he just knows loads of these guys from growing up now there's different different things you know there have been bad situations I think anybody covering this has had some bad situations sometime people get angry people threaten them and so forth but a lot of the time when I when you talk to people and one thing is you have to be very a lot of the time you have to be very stringent about protecting their identity and really serious about that because there's been cases where various cases where other people have interviewed killers and shown their identity either through them showing their face or through like some dumb thing being

shown and they have been themselves murdered you know butchered after these they've given these interviews or like other things that happened they've been threatened or something their family or arrested or so forth so you've really got to protect people's identities in a way in terms of when they talk and stuff and i don't really feel nervous when i interview all these people i probably feel more nervous here talking to you that's just probably because it's like on a big show it's a different a different thing when when you're like talking to first you know you start with easy questions like anything you start talking about how you know how you you know people are human they're human beings and people have got people are complicated

and i haven't just interviewed and i've also got drunk with some of these people and hung around with some of these people um for time trying to get closer like uh you know spent time to try and understand their world a bit more what's the most time you've ever spent with these people? I mean, several days. Several days, yeah. Like, you know, I mean, I'll see them, see them again, hang out with them in different places. Not all the time. Sometimes just, you know, sit down, do interviews, and just leave.

But it's a complicated world. For them, it's their normality. For them, it's a complicated world. For them, it's their normality. For them, it's normal. It's what they've lived, what they've been through, what's happening around them. I mean, this level of murder that's happening in a lot of parts of Latin America now, it's crazy. But in these areas, in this world,

you talk to other people who are just on the edge of this or have family members involved in this, and it's just, they're living this. I mean, these are levels of violence, and it's interesting to compare historically these levels of violence because you look at some of the worst cities like san pedro sula honduras caracas um sierra juarez and these are places which have levels of violence which are like way worse than medieval Europe, a lot of places in medieval Europe. I mean, you look at the figures per 100,000 because some of them have over 100 per 100,000,

150 per 100,000. And medieval Europe, a lot of these cities were like 20 per 100,000. So they're way worse now, way worse in the Wild West than like. Now, there are some places in the United States today, and I've done some research recently in baltimore maryland and i was kind of it's interesting to compare that to latin america and that's a high level that's 40 by 100 000 that's that's not as the same level but it's significant still more than medieval europe yeah wow baltimore is worse

than medieval europe yeah i mean i guess you have to have to some professors they might you know like you get like you know they might be they might say well jerusalem in this time or in a line you know you've got to try and you know it's hard to know get really dig down exactly i don't know if there was outbreaks of violence and killing in certain places but the overall average yeah overall average yeah that's a significant leap 100 leap yeah yeah absolutely balt. What about south side of Chicago? It's not that. I mean, like the level, I think, in Chicago comes out around 20 or something.

So it's not. Now, the whole city. Now, again, one of the things about the violence in the United States compared to Latin America. I mean, Baltimore is significant, but the city of Baltimore is a fairly small place, what they're talking about. So in Mexico, you have entire states that are really violent or entire countries in Latin America.

Whereas in the U.S., it tends to be neighborhoods which are violent. So if you really focus on the south side of Chicago, it's probably similar levels to Baltimore. But if you look at the whole city, you've got neighbors that are pretty safe in Chicago as well now through all of this time that you spent down in Mexico have you seen it you've seen it escalate you've seen it get worse and worse yeah so there was first this really big escalation happened in 2008 was the first big escalation what was the cause of that so you had there was a steady build-up that was happening um and then in 2006 you had

the president felipe calderon declared a military crackdown on drug cartels and after that there was this big response and things started really getting out of hand we'd already seen violence escalating before i think you know my idea my kind of theory behind this is that um you had in mexico back in the 20th century more of a top-down um centralized government controlling everything you You had the PRI in power. And they were, basically, they were controlling it through corruption. So back then, they'd have the drug cartels working for them. An interesting story going back then to the late 1970s,

a story in a book called Drug Lord by Terence Popper, who interviewed a drug trafficker in the 80s. When he got his job as the jefe de plaza, which is the head of a certain territory, when he got the job, he went with the state police at the time and said, I want to become the head of the plaza. And they took him in and tortured him for two days. And, like, you know, beat the crap out of him,

put electric shocks on his nuts, one of the big torches at domesco put water laced with chili in his nose it's not like one of these big so your whole face burns these are like torture techniques they have and after two days of torturing said yeah well done you know you survive well you've got the job so you know what it shows is that the police had the upper hand the police controlled this they were like okay we control this racket and you know we can fuck around and torture and kill drug traffickers when we like uh you know and it all up the presidency i mean there was uh in in that time carlos salinas became president in 94 his brother raul salinas there the swiss

investigated his bank accounts and said he had $500 million in bank accounts, which they, you know, they believed it was drug money. So right up to the presidency, this was being run. When Mexico changed democracy,

so when I arrived in Mexico, it was changing to democracy. It was like, wow, great. Democracy is going to happen. Free market is going to happen. You know, we're in the good days of the 21st century now. But what happened was the political control shifted.

So you had a bunch of different political parties. And they were fighting over the drug trade. And, you know, I was one time in Nuevo Laredo when the federal police had a shootout with the municipal police. They were fighting each other. Probably because they work for different drug cartels so that's what started but then you had the techniques like the technique of beheading wasn't really a big deal it was very very rarely used up until around 2006 and one of the first incidents was in acapulco in 2006, in about June 2006. Now, it might have been after, inspired by the Al-Qaeda,

Sakawi, you know, video, which was shown in full on Mexican TV. I remember when that came out, when they decapitated the guy in Iraq. And they decapitated, first it was two policemen they decapitated. Later that year in september 2006 there was five heads they rolled onto a disco dance floor and then this thing just became just escalating it became this kind of like using this terror public terror so 2006 2008 was a big escalation and then 2011 12 were like crazy and then it subsided a bit in the pub the violence got a bit less public and it was more like hidden like mass grave stuff now the worst mass grave

that's been discovered so far um was in vera cruz now i've been to grave in one place and it was right next to a housing estate and there's families it was so one of the saddest things was you see you see their kiddies bicycles and basketball hoops and stuff right next to this and the field next to that they dug up 250 bodies and the smell was like emanating to this housing estate and it's like a middle class the dream of becoming middle class that was the the kind of something this housing state and right next to it this violence but when i say a lot of these stories and i mean these are crazy stories but a lot of the weird thing is a lot of mexico lives a normality around this it's not what. This is not what you see every day.

This happens, but there's also just a normality that could just be like you're outside here in L.A. and normal people living normal lives around this as well. What is the response in Mexico? After they wanted to have this military action against the cartels, obviously that hasn't really put a dent in it what what what's the the current thought process behind dealing with this so there's been a there's a bunch of like citizen um protest movements various times um during these recent years and one of them was a was a very interesting guy called Javier Cecilia who's a poet and a

writer whose son was murdered. And when it first happened, his son was murdered. And he just came out. The press was like, I can't. This is just Mexico's gone. I can't deal with this. My son's being killed. And then he began talking.

And then he went to the streets and people were coming out publicly crying. And it was one of the first times there was a realization a lot of innocent people are dying with this and people come out and you know i went to some of these things people come out crying family members and actually a sense we're victims here because there was a for a long time since it's simply bad guys killing bad guys and that wasn't the case now the current president andres manuel lopez obador who just won the election last year and just took power on december the first so he's got two mixed things so one of them is this idea of the wars over i'm going to create peace we can have forgiveness reconciliation you know it's hard

to know what that really means and his second thing is we need to have more of a unified state police so like what i described before about you had local police fighting the federal police so we've got to have so he's got this idea now of a national guard which is a kind of hybrid between military and police thing around and that's basically his his these kind of two thrusts he's in now. He's only been in power a couple of months. January was still a bad month in terms of murders, in terms of bodies. Last year was more than 33,000 dead last year, which is the size of Mexico,

so the equivalent of the United States, having close to 100,000. Imagine what that would mean in the United States if you had that many people dying in a year. A month? No, the whole year. Yeah, in the United States if you had that many people dying in a year. A month? The whole year. Yeah, in the year, 100,000. Now, when these people are, when they're being recruited by the cartels, when the police officers are being recruited, the big issue must be, well, there must be two issues, right?

Safety, like if they don't join the cartel, they probably get murdered. well there must be two issues right safety like if they don't join the cartel they probably get murdered and two the amount of money the cartel would give them would be far more than the government would give them to be a legitimate police officer yeah sure that's like uh known famously platinum plumb plateau plateau plumb like silver or lead you want to have the silver of the bribe the lead of the bullet but but even beyond that for a long time a lot of these people who join the police uh like from the beginning there you know i've talked i've got i've got on video uh made a video back in 2010 in sierra juarez of a bunch of uh of rappers just hanging around in the middle of all this and one of their friends was saying and they were talking and these

people were saying you know something had been done for taking drugs over the border, they'd been in gangs and stuff. And one of them was like, I want to be a policeman. And he was like, I want to be a policeman and make some money. You know, basically through corruption. So it is like, that is the mentality of some of these people joining the police from early on. Another guy I opened

the first book with is this guy who became a policeman when he was 18 he was basically a hard tough guy played american football from durango became a policeman when he was 18 and in the police learned to torture and learn to murder he said that's what i learned in the police and i just like 20 after two years just left the police and went full-time into crime it's like 20 after two years just left the place and went full-time into crime it's like so you know you've got a situation where you know it's not you know it's worse even it's beyond bad they're the bad that a lot of people might imagine of corruption god so all of this essentially is escalated from

the time you came to mexico so when you came to mexico it's almost like you got in i mean if it was a story you got in at almost the perfect time yeah yeah horrible way yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean it's i mean like you know you don't do these things on purpose uh you know you don't think um if i'd look back 20 years ago i mean it's 18 years i've been in mexico now i had a whole you know i've grown up in me Mexico in that sense. I'd never look back and think that. Now, in terms of myself seeing this, I mean, I think for anybody, it's painful. I mean, how you process that level of death, that level of murder, that level of suffering.

It's horrible stuff to see and and and it's you can still have a lot of people um separated from that you know families people are bringing up children and you know you want to separate you know kids from that so often like middle class kids in mexico are quite sheltered because families want to shelter them as much as they can from from from that violence and just you know not let them see that side of things how much of that do you have to deal with in mexico city so mexico city you know is about the same murder rate as houston so mexico City is not super violent. Now it's still not super safe but it's not super violent.

So Mexico City is kind of and there are parts of Mexico which are fairly safe. Now the state of Yucatan where Merida is

is the same murder level as Belgium. So you've got oasis within Mexico where you don't have this level of violence so Mexico

City is it is a great city Mexico City is a great city to live in in many ways apart from the traffic and the pollution and various things I mean there's a bunch of things that are and I love all of Mexico and I love all of Latin America I love even even the bad places I still love I enjoy going to these places i enjoy meeting people there in a hangout in these areas there's a lot of good things about them still but dealing with all the horrific tragedies that you report about and experience do you look for an escape route i mean are you are you looking to get the out of dodge, I mean, there's been different times where I've thought,

you know, I want to stop this now and cover other things as a journalist. And there's other journalists doing that as well as a journalist called Jesus Esquivel,

a great Mexican journalist who's just, I just saw him at the trial of El Chapo over in New York who's been covering this for years, one of the really great Mexican

correspondents who's covered the drug stuff and he was like, he just said to me, oh but I've got some stuff maybe I can give you, this is the I'm going to, this is the last thing I'm going to do covering drugs now we'll see if that's true I think a lot of the time you get caught

still doing this stuff especially when you've covered something people want more, people are interested and there's relevance to this I think some of the other struggles beyond like the danger and stuff is simply

with journalism is in a bad way a lot of the media are in a bad way and just simply getting I'm a freelance journalist I love being a bad way um and just simply getting you know trying to you know i'm a freelance journalist i love being a freelance journalist i love the independence i love being a write books and travel and write magazine stories and make documentaries and do these things but like just you know having the economic base for that you know it's just degenerated a lot in the time that i've been doing it have you personally been targeted at all? So there's a couple of situations I had.

I mean, first, I have to give some respect and condolences to so many colleagues, Mexican colleagues who have been murdered and been murdered, threatened, had to leave the country and various things and they've had it bad um including a friend a good friend a great colleague called who was shot dead in 2017 may 2017 in kulikan a guy i'd known since 2008 um great guy got drunk with him in the cantina very generous guy wrote eight books a charismatic i mean you know really lovely guy who was shot dead and many other stories so so i kind of don't want to give my own compare my own words to a lot of them in many ways but yeah sure there's been times there's one time in uh it was in a state called michoacan um and this was 2014 and there was a thing that happened there when a lot of regular people rose up with guns against

the cartels they were known as outer defense as or like self-defense squads and they rose up to fight the cartels and uh they they you know a bunch of guys with guns it was kind of crazy situation where there was this like almost like a trench warfare happened between cartels and these self-defense groups and then what happened was a lot of regular gangsters started saying oh we're self-defense groups as well you know just coming up saying oh yeah we're self-defense groups you know those guys are out in the street with guns you know we're just going to go out with our guns and so anyway i went down i drove down at the end of this i've been i've been covering this right through and it had been fairly okay to do

the self-defense squads the outer defenses were pretty easy going to work with but i drove down there to to michoacan um and i wanted to do some stuff on it and i was going to meet a friend a journalist she just backed out at the last minute. I just went down there anyway and arrived there. And there was about 50 guys arrived in this place near the city called Apatzingan. And there was about 50 guys who were supposedly a self-defense squad

in a parking lot, getting ready to go on a mission to try and take down this drug trafficker called la tuta and they were like they were sitting there was a guy like signing them up for this kind of mission and there was a bunch of guys they were and they had very heavy weaponry they had ak-47s they had ar-15s they had grenade launchers um on their on their on the top of their guns and beneath their guns. They had like the grenades strapped to them, like actually grenades on belts around them,

ammunition belts around them. I mean like crazy, like you see the old revolutionary stuff. I mean like real crazy, like desperado stuff. And then I was talking to them and I realized quickly these were not self-defense guys.

These were narco. These were gangsters. They came out, they were like, how long have you been in the self-defense movement? Oh, a couple of days. And then they had guns with diamonds and jefe. What does jefe stand for? The boss. What does jefe stand for?

The boss. And I was getting on okay with that. I was kind of like, you know, joking with these guys and taking some photographs of them. So they were posing for photographs. So they were sitting there with, like, posing with their guns and stuff. And they said they have a word, huero is like, it's not really white boy, it's like blondie. You know, it could mean like, you know, if you're white in Mexico, you often get called a huero is like, it's not really white boy, it's like blondie. You know, it could mean like, you know, if you're white in Mexico,

you often get called a güero. So like, güero, how much do prostitutes cost in your country? That was like a good question. I was like, I don't know, you'd have to go there and see. And they're like, güero, do you like taking meth? Do you like taking meth? You know, I'm okay. And they were still like do you know you know you like taking meth uh you know i'm okay and they were still like you know you're kind of joking and this guy turned came up among them and

he said uh the other guys now first there's a big guy and he said uh he was carrying a big gun he's got a really massive head and he said to me a bit aggressively just don't take my photo i was like yeah no problem i won't take your photo and then a guy came up and said to the other guy say what are you doing it's a da guy here it's a da agent among you taking your photographs um you know what are you doing and i was like i'm not i'm not even american i'm british and he said no no you know this is a da guy my my my brother was arrested in Texas and the DA guy pretended to be a journalist.

That's some bullshit story. And I said, look, I can show you my website. So they got the cell phone out and looked through the cell phone and found my website. And the guy calmed down a bit and he said, if I see you, I i'm gonna put a bullet in your head i'm gonna throw a grenade at you he added so i left you know i kind of tried to talk a bit i left and uh yeah and then they went and then i didn't publish the photographs still got

you know a bunch of photographs and one of the guys sent me an email saying what happened to the photographs. My email's on my website. So I just ignored it. And I think a lot of them got killed in a big fight they had with the federal police afterwards. So that was one. And there's been a few more. So it's a lot of touch and go when you're in these situations. Yeah.

So it's a lot of touch and go in these situations. Yeah. The federal police, do they have a plan to try to eradicate these mobs, or is it a lot of lip service? Is it really possible to eradicate these gangs, or is it just one of those things where they say they're going to do something, but they have to kind of protect themselves? You know, there's been different different times i mean sometimes there's been

the federal police have done well going after a particular guy or sometimes with the americans you know there's been uh um you know arrests of very many significant kingpins the problem is as well is that one of the deeper questions is that like uh when you take down some of these kingpins you've always got other people who will fight over their same territory so for example you know you take out chapo guzman and then you get a fight among his sons and some one of his lieutenants over over the empire now what's happened and one of the reasons the violence has increased in Mexico, is because they've had this onslaught attacking cartels over the years. Then you end up with the lieutenants then taking over,

and then their lieutenants taking over, and then their lieutenants taking over. That's what happened in Chicago as well. I spoke to a police officer in Chicago, and he said the violence escalated after some big gang arrests and once they had gotten some leaders of some gangs and other people tried to fill the void yeah exactly exactly so so then you get some of the people who are in power now are like very young very violent people and people who are not as smart not as mature not calculated yeah so so

and also you end up these they fragment the territory so you have people controlling rather than having big cartels some leader who controls it you know half the country you end up with these cartelito like these gangs controlling a part of a state now there's one state called guerrero which you've seen this really like cartel fragmentation and you've got maybe 12 different groups in this one state and you get like a place where they you know one controls it up along a road and then another group controls it passing a certain point so there were some some friends went up there um seven journalists went up there and got held up on this road up there 2017 as well and they got they were in a car going up there two vehicles and about 200

guys blocked the road and the leader of this group was a guy i believe called el huero palaya um like again his name blondie palaya and he's like maybe 23 years old like 200 guys there they said some of the kids i talked to one of the friends who was there and they said some of these kids who was young is like 10 years old among this mob of people and they they held them up they took away the one of the vehicles they took away all their laptops cameras all that equipment stuck them in the car to go do you have to be careful when you're traveling that you don't have like an obviously expensive laptop or camera something along those lines i think from the point of view of is you know they can they can take it

away i mean it's happened a lot of a lot of cases recently colleagues just being robbed um i mean you get like an armed group and they'll take away their basically they'll hold them down take all their stuff. So you don't, so I've got, you know, I know various colleagues, photographers, and if you're a freelance photographer and you lose a good camera, then, you know, like, you know, some of the TV people, they have less expensive cameras than they used to.

I remember a few years ago, a TV group interviewed some gang members up in Hond, and they stole their camera. And at that time, it was like an $80,000 camera. And the TV network, I don't want to say who it was, but the TV network apparently was more pissed about losing the camera than it was about these guys, you know, getting held down and having guns pointed to them. disappointed to them what is the attitude in mexico especially amongst people who are studying the narco wars with all this uh build that wall stuff all this uh what's going on in america there's this this is very strange right versus left polarization over here about whether or not there should be a wall between the united states and Mexico. Sure. I mean, well, I mean, the thing where Mexicans are obviously very anti-Trump in Mexico is, you know, Trump is very unpopular from the very beginning, you know, when he said, you know, they are rapists.

And murderers, yeah. Someone's doing the raping, yeah. Yeah. I mean, he's kind of, you know, if you look at surveys, the level's very low. Does anybody like Trump in Mexico? There's always contrarians somewhere. I've seen numbers. People say like 80% or something think he's terrible.

So it means there must be a 20% somewhere who don't. I haven't met a Mexican who's been pro-Trump. I never have. I met a Salvadoran who was pro-Trump one time, and he had a guy who'd been deported. And he was like, this guy Trump's going to turn out to be a great president. So I see that.

But no, Mexico is very, very anti-Trump. In terms of the wall, I mean, in terms of what, in terms of the smugglers, I was talking to a smuggler in Nogales about this, and he was describing, he was from Nogales, from a neighborhood called Buenos Aires,

which is right on the border with the United States. It's Nogales, Sonora, Nogales, Arizona. Sorry, Nogales, Sonora, Nogales, Arizona. And he was from the neighborhood right on the border there and he described that he first took people over the border of the United States back in the 1980s

when he was at school he was at high school and the reason was that time it was just an old fence and there was a hole in the fence they used to go through into the United States and go back into Mexico just an old wire fence and the first time he took people through people would arrive from southern mexico and say you know how do we get into the u.s and he'd say oh you know this way

and they give him a tip he said the first time he got the equivalent of about 50 cents was what he made to take people into the united states 50 cents nowadays the cost of going into the u.s is five thousand dollars that's what you paid to go illegally to the united states five thousand bucks so you're saying wow look at that increase every time that the u.s puts more security it means it's more expensive when it's more expensive that means more money going to criminals which means there's no an industry doing it so now the cartels make a big percentage of that money of human smuggling into the US.

But like in terms of the wall, I mean, when Trump first came in, he had the line that Mexico is going to pay for it. And then there was this kind of line, right at the beginning, he threatened Mexican president saying, if you don't agree to pay for the wall, then why are you going to come and meet me? And then it was like, wow, he's really going to try and shake down Mexico for like billions of dollars. He's really going to try and do that.

And that was kind of scary moment then. Think from the point of view of mexico when he first got to power he's like he's going to do that and then he's going to deport three million and he's going to you know he's going to um kill nafta actually those things haven't really come to pass actually if you look over the last couple of years of crime hasn't really hit mexico very hard so the concern was that he was going to take money that should be allocated to other ways that's going to help mexico and he was going to try to take that and use to other ways that's going to help mexico and he was going to try to take that and use it to build the wall i i mean no one really knew when he first came in he's like mexico's going to pay for this wall right the wall just got 10 foot higher

remember that yeah it was like it was like you know how you're going to do that you're going to start threatening mexico militarily and say give us money i mean it was kind of like a like is it a shakedown you could just shake them it's kind of it was kind of a crazy diplomatic thing when he first got in so that was kind of scary for a moment from the point of view of mexico but i think after you look at the last couple of years he hasn't really hit mexico with that now if he wants to build the wall now obviously there's a big fuss in terms of the spending here but if he wants to build it uh or, because there is walled in sections of the border already, if he wants to extend it, it won't stop a lot of the hard drugs. I mean, if you look at heroin, cocaine, crystal meth, high-value drugs,

they normally go through the ports of entry. Right. Shipping. Yeah. Boats. Or through the ports of entry through like i mean you have uh through in cars right cars trucks i mean you you go through if you look at um the laredos laredo no laredo one of the reasons that was a big fight and the war started there in mexico is because

that's a very valuable territory there's something like 8 000 trucks go over that border every day now if you have 8 000 trucks how many of those can you search in a day and also the way they can hide this stuff in trucks they can hide drugs in like a metal they can put them in in some kind of metal container seal it up solder it up put a bunch of stuff so it doesn't smell so somebody has to say I'm going to open that with a blowtorch. I'm not just searching. I have to rip that vehicle apart to find the drugs. They were putting them inside wheels.

Yeah, yeah. And that's like inside tires and stuff. That's like one of the older tricks from the 70s. There's a song. It was one of the first narco corridos, the drug ballads. It was called Contra and and uh treason from the 1970s and that was about hiring uh hiding marijuana back in you know in tires back then but yeah i mean now the the trap cars now are like super sophisticated they have some weird trap cars where you have to do like a bunch of stuff like open the door move some stuff to actually to

actually open and find the drugs oh there's like some trick sort of door that has to be active yeah i would imagine if there's a will there's a way and there's that much i mean i remember hearing that from i mean it's not a reliable source but from the sopranos they were talking about only 20 of all the shipping containers that get brought into America get searched. Yeah. Well, that's crazy. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So the hard drugs are going a lot of time through the ports of entry.

And another classic trick they have is they allow some to get busted. So you allow one guy to get busted. They set somebody up. So they're taking some drugs through. They get busted. All the F energy is on them on them and then meanwhile more drugs are going through and is this the united states border that's test that's catching this guy yeah yeah so they're not getting they're not getting tested in mexico as they cross over right it's only the united states border yeah some sometimes they might catch them in mexico, but the majority is going to be the United States.

Are the United States Border Patrol guys, are they ever caught being corrupt? Yeah, absolutely, yeah. There's been cases of U.S. Border Patrol and customs entry people who have been caught taking a bunch of money, taking bribes, allowing certain cars through. Of course.

Certain vehicles through, so yeah. How does one fix this? I mean, if you had a magic wand, you were going to wave it over Mexico and fix this problem. Like if somebody said, Johan, you're a smart guy. You've been in the business for a long time.

We're going to let you dictate how this takes place. So I'd say, yeah, three things. So like drug policy reform. So we've got to talk about how we dictate how this takes place. So I'd say, yeah, three things. So like drug policy reform. So we've got to talk about how we deal with this drug situation. So, I mean, some of that is here, isn't it? And you've probably got a better idea than me about how do – why do Americans take so many drugs? I mean, I come from a drug-taking community myself in the UK, I guess, so maybe it's not that different. Well, I think there's a lot of answers to that.

The biggest one is entirely that most people don't enjoy what they do and they want an escape. I think that's probably the biggest one. There's some ridiculous number that was just – who was discussing the number on the podcast of how many people actually actually was it it was uh johan harry wasn't it yeah he was talking about the number of people that actually enjoy their job 67 people of in this country don't like what they do or you know or just just sleepwalking through their life. There's another significant percent that hate what they do. And then there's a few left over that love what they do.

I mean, it's a very small number of people, maybe like myself or maybe like yourself, that actually enjoy what they do for a living and feel like they're following their passion. Most people are just working a job and they fucking hate it. And then when they get off work, they want to get fucked up. And a lot of these people, you know, they have psychological issues, they're suffering from abuse, childhood abuse. They're trying to, I mean, there's been some significant statistics

about childhood abuse and how many people from childhood abuse wind up using and abusing drugs and becoming addicted and even overdosing on drugs and it's ridiculously high it's about pain pain and suffering and trying to remove that pain and suffering from your life and um you know people that don't know how to make healthy choices and don't have friends that are making healthy choices and don't know what to do with their life that's a big big part of it there's another part of it that's because it's illegal there's something about things that are illegal that are intoxicating and enticing you know when you um look at the statistics in holland in particular where marijuana has been you know you could buy it in coffee shops

forever not that many people smoke marijuana in holland it's a lot of uh marijuana tourism especially back in the day uh now that america has legal marijuana almost everywhere not a lot of people are going to holland specifically to get fucked up but that was always the thing man when we were younger it was always like yeah he's gonna go to holland go get high like i went there i used to go there when i was a teenager i went over there for some of that when i on a boat and arrived in amsterdam uh back in those days yeah the uh i mean it made me made me smile what you're saying just there about enjoying the job. And it's true. I mean, when you said that, I do love what I do and enjoy what I do.

So that's one of the sides to that thing. But, yeah, so, I mean, in terms of, you know, the issue of drugs, we have to talk about this. How can we stop, Americans stop spending that money or allow that money if it's going to be spent not to be going to a black market and destabilizing these countries? But also a lot of issues in Mexico as well. Like, again, that social work. How do you change the reality? And again, so, you know, people who are abused and suffer taking drugs, but people who are abused and suffer in Latin America becoming assassins. Because one of the weird things on a moral level, on a level of morality, you know, I

knew a lot of kids growing up who sold drugs. And it wasn't really an amazing and moral thing to think about. You know, I sell drugs. It was an easy step to take. I'm going to sell some weed and then I'm going to sell some speed and sell some ecstasy and then later on, you heroin or whatever but for somebody to commit a murder that seems like a bigger you know a lot bigger deal how do you get into how do you cross that line to becoming a murderer how do they cross that line so easily well i think it goes back to that young boy that you were talking about

that butcher that family he was abandoned and angry and hurt and just so much pain that he's suffering that's often the case they want other people to suffer when when you see people that are doing terrible things to people they're almost always suffering they're almost almost always wanting other people to feel what they feel they're lashing out that's uh that that social work aspect that you're discussing so critical and something that we've discussed about this country, that how few people are putting, I mean, very few politicians, very few people that are running this country are putting efforts into trying to heal these communities that have suffered from just years and years of systemic racism, years and years of just embedded poverty that's almost impossible to escape years and years of crime and drugs and just growing up in this community of despair this is what we were talking about with baltimore this is what we're talking about with south side of chicago and various cities all over this country it just they don't get better man

they stay fucked up you know um i had michael wood who is a police officer from baltimore and he was discussing what it was like being in baltimore as a police officer and then looking at some documents from the 1970s that detailed the crime in the very same areas that he was patrolling in and this the same crime in the same areas and this sense of just overwhelming futility like there was nothing that he was going to be able to do that's going to put a dent in this because this was a lot of it was a product of these areas in baltimore where there was law that you were not allowed to sell homes to black people in these certain areas. So they kept these people in these poor areas. And even though they had this desire to escape into the more affluent or safer communities, they weren't allowed to for a long time.

I mean, there's so much of that in this country that the people that are in control, everybody just wants to get elected. Everybody just wants to, you know, and then once they get elected, then they're looking to get reelected. So they spend a gigantic percentage of their time campaigning. There's no universal effort on the part of all the citizens of the country to try to look at all these areas and say, hey, this is us. You know, just because you don't live in the south side of Chicago, those are human beings. Those are just like you and I. You could have been them. They could have been you.

If they were you and you were them, wouldn't you hope that you would help? Wouldn't you hope that someone would come in and try to fix this area? Someone would try to pour money? We pour so much money into foreign countries. We pour so much money into subsidizing various industries that a lot of people disagree with. I mean, I'm not an economist. I don't know what economic sense any of that stuff makes, but I do know that money is allocated in a lot of different ways,

and the idea is that it's going to be better for all of us. Well, it's not better for all of us to keep these communities as fucked up as they are right now. And there's no effort, nothing, very little done, no movement, no change, no gigantic step no no 10-year plan to eradicate gang violence no 10-year plan to eradicate illegal drug sales and murder so there's great social work there are some great social workers down there and so there are some heroes in these places and there's somebody i talked to a lot based in sierraarez, my uncle Sandra, who grew up in this neighborhood.

She was one of the first people to introduce me to young gang members in this area. She used to work in a factory there, got into social work. Now she's a psychologist. And, yes, she's somebody who really will do the work and reach people and will, like, save lives. And, you know, some of these, you know, basic stuff you really get in the community and try and reach. And you have to reach the kids When they're often 12 11 12 and you can often see in these areas Who are the kids are going to get into this who are going to be recruited by the cartels? Right who are gonna get the gangs because there's certain profiles in these people. They haven't got their families

I was talking to some guys in in also in Sierra Juarez from the barrio Azteca Which is the one of the big gangs there started in the u.s actually among prisoners and spread into mexico and became almost like a paramilitary group in mexico about how they recruit people and this guy was saying like you know we will see you know i can see from these young kids who's going to be able to kill and you know who's going to be a real fighter and who's not and if these people have gotten you know parents who love them and so forth, these guys aren't going to work for me.

I need someone who's got hate, who's got anger in them, and I can do something with one of those. So it's kind of the perverse opposite of this stuff, really. But so if people don't have that family, and this makes me, I guess, think a bit more sympathized, I guess, as well, the idea of how important family is, how important loving parents is. Whether you're together or separate, loving parents, having that. But if you don't have that, you need social work

and you need people who can offer something and try and… There was an interesting mayor of Medellín called Andres Guajardo, and he had these ideas of trying to change the reality of the city and he said i'm going to build the most he's a mathematician so i'm going to see this as a mathematical problem this issue and i'm going to build the most beautiful building in the ugliest part of the city in the worst part of the city to make and force people who want to see we made a conservatory and put it in the in the poorest neighborhood so that people who want to be in this conservatory have to travel to the poorest

neighborhood and go there and try and change the reality because if you see around you a horrible neighborhood a dirt street no light nothing working you know what do you turn into and if you see a nice environment around you can you change people that way wow how did it work you know it worked for a while it's hard to know exactly because also there was a a truce between some of the gangsters there as well for a while um was it related to the construction of the conservatory i think it might have been if the government was involved in the truce on truce or not but there was for a time the murder rate did drop quite dramatically in Medellin. I don't know if people have carried on, but Medellin has improved.

I mean, Medellin, Colombia, was the worst, the most violent city in the world back in the 1990s, and people do like their city now in Medellin. Wow. So it had some impact. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. And the social workers, I'm sure they have some impact on individual people. But I would imagine that the overwhelming volume of children that are being recruited, that's very hard to put a real dent in it. But I think in Ciudad Juarez it had an effect because when that was the most violent city in the world around 2010, 2011. And there was this turf war there between the Sinaloa cartel, which is Chapo Guzman, against a local Juarez cartel. And there was 9,000 killed in that city over four years of that war.

It was crazy. I was covering it then and just driving around from scene to scene. It'd be like a massacre here, a massacre there, just driving around. Bang, bang, this thing's happening. And afterwards, there was a lot of social work put into the city. And Sandra described right then, she said, there's like a waterfall of aid money coming in. There was like USAID and stuff would start putting money into this

and other different groups. And the murder rate did really drop. And it hasn't gone back up to that level since so i think it does have a real effect when it's put as a policy um you know it does have an effect on these things um but also when you talked a little while ago about a magic wand on this i mean in making a police force that actually protects the community or making a police force that has some kind of effect i mean i grew up in england which is you know pretty safe place relatively and i used to

not like police and you know hate that you know be anti-police or whatever growing up um and now i appreciate wow you know you have police who actually protect the community in some way and the same in the united states i mean the united states the police do protect people to a large extent compared to these countries and you know obviously there's issues here there's an issue with racism and killing and violence and so forth but still i think a lot of the people who who believe that they're you know a lot of people believe they have guns for self-defense and i respect the right to have guns for self-defense, and I respect the right to have guns for self-defense. But really, in America, you're generally safe because the police are pretty hard on clamping down.

But how do you create a police force which really has the will to protect people? How do you have that with the will and the passion and the commitment to help people in Mexico? That would be a dream. The people that have dealt with police officers that are corrupt have a very difficult time hearing what you're saying, right? Those people would be angry at what you're saying, saying,

no, no, no, the police officers here are corrupt, they are bad, there is racism, there are real problems. Yeah. And there is, but I think there's also a real problem being a police officer, period. I think police officers have an insanely difficult job and I think most of them are dealing with PTSD. I think there's a giant percentage of them like all over the world and in

America too, that are constantly dealing with violence and the threat of violence and arresting criminals and being shot at and people lying to them. I just don't think, I think most people are very ill-equipped to handle something like that i mean i agree there's there are definitely problems with the police and there are problems i mean the police shootings are very real problems uh please killing innocent people here is very real uh and you've always got to look for improvement and you know there's people families again suffering from that from that violence i don't want to belittle this no

no you're not i know you're not i just have to sort of clarify because i know so many people be hearing this and going yeah mexico's terrible the united states there's i mean there's a ton of videos the real issue though is we're also dealing with the the sheer number yeah of interactions that police have with people yeah the vast majority of them are fine yeah but i was gonna say on the other thing like say the crime of kidnapping kidnapping is a horrific uh anti-social crime i'm a horrific crime it destroys lives um there's one video uh really video which really made me sick um which was given to a family of a kid like a 14 year old kid who was taken and they were they sent this video to his family in mexico and they were beating this kid and saying to this kid you know this is this and the guy was saying to the camera this is

your fault you bitch to the mom this is your fault look how your kid's getting beaten now you're going to give me the money it's asking for like was it three hundred thousand dollars for the time and those kind of crimes now kidnapping doesn't happen in the united states on a very big level because you've got effective law enforcement so some i mean i mean i was at one conference and there was you know a real nice real nice guy but there's people calling for the abolition of the police and there shouldn't be a police force saying you really want to live like with no police, saying there shouldn't be a police force. So you really want to live, like, with no police? You really want to live with a dysfunctional police where they can just kidnap your kid and, like, send a video to you like that?

And you've got no protection from that kind of thing? Right. I mean, there's definitely problems here, but also you've got to see the other side of having a completely dysfunctional police force and what that means. have a completely dysfunctional police force and what that means there's just such a staggering difference between the united states and mexico in that regard in regard to gang violence drug violence just overall murders and the stories that we hear from over it's so different the fact that you could just draw a little line in the dirt you cross that line you're in hell and then you cross this line you're in houston i mean that's fucking crazy yeah yeah i i mean again i mean i get criticized sometimes from i met you know sometimes mexican government sources or mexican tourism sources you know like i'm covering this stuff so i'm showing the worst

um and it can give a distorted picture sometimes because you know when i tell a story of 49 decapitated bodies with their hands and feet cut off, people think, wow, you know, as soon as you say this stuff and some guy describing decapitating people, this kind of does, you know, knock people out. So, you know, I don't want to say as well as that, it still is a great country. Yeah. I still, you know, I love the United States, but I probably love Mexico more. And what do you love more about mexico besides the food uh i mean i would say generally the atmosphere is good i just feel uh feel people are nice generally i mean despite all of this horrific violence do you think it's

because they don't have the same sort of uh ruthless ambition that people in the united states have i think there is a sense we were talking before about why people are into drugs don't have the same sort of ruthless ambition that people in the United States have? I think there is a sense. We were talking before about why people are into drugs. And one thing that occurred to me is this kind of hyper-competitiveness of society. And people can feel like failures. Like if you feel like a failure, if you feel like, I guess maybe social media has affected this as well, because you see what people have and you expect you to have more right and you feel you haven't lived up to it i think in mexico people you know if you're broke in the united states you can you can often

maybe feel like a personal failure how come you're living in america and you're broke right um whereas in mexico lots of people are broke so you're like you know it's like you don't feel that same kind of personal failure with that i when i'm there one thing that always strikes me is how happy people seem and that i think there's a certain stress level that a lot of americans put themselves into where they're constantly pursuing material possessions material wealth and success and that oftentimes this leads to really exacerbated stress levels and it's not it doesn't make you happy like the whole idea of having things in our mind is uh someday if i buy this car i'll be happy if i live in this neighborhood i'll be happy and then so they work

12 hours a day to try to achieve that dream and they're never happy and they're always stressed out and even though the vast majority of the united states i mean there's some insane number like 34 if you make more than 35 000 a year you are in the top one percent of the world so there's a giant percentage of this country that's in the top one percent of the world yet the overall happiness level at least from what've read, is quite a bit below the people in Mexico. Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, a lot of these things. I mean, how do you see your own happiness or measure your own happiness or sense of success or failure?

So, yeah, so that's part of it. I mean, yeah, and the food is great. The food is amazing. I'm a giant fan of Mexican food. I love it. There's a place down here that I take the guys here that. The food is amazing. I'm a giant fan of Mexican food. I love it. There's a place down here that I take the guys here that work here all the time. It is as Mexican as you get. No one speaks English there.

They have Mexican soap operas playing on the television. And the food is just sensational. It's so good. Yeah, yeah. So some of these things as well as that. But before you talk about this border between Mexico and the U.S., yeah, it's a huge, it's that vast difference between countries and cultures. And the interaction, another issue, I guess, is the issue of guns going south.

And we talked about all the drugs coming up. You've also got a lot of firearms, a lot of firearms. Like that Fast and Furious deal. Yeah. The Eric Hold holder thing that went down years ago where they sold it was some sort of a sting yeah they sold guns and those guns wound up being used to kill americans and even american police officers yeah yeah so that was so the atf um are going after this and there's i mean the number of guns no one's really sure how

many guns are going down but there was one one study that came to the conclusion that over 200,000 guns every year go from the United States into Mexico. Wow. That's an insane number. 200,000 guns. And I interviewed a guy in prison in Ciudad Juarez for gun trafficking. guns and i interviewed a guy in prison in sierra juarez for gun trafficking and he would drive every weekend from mexico up the united states um by like 10 to 15 um mostly ar-15s some other guns as well and drive them down into into mexico and it's pretty easy to get into mexico so you drive them in it's like it's it's it's uh a piece of piss it's very easy to get into Mexico so you drive them in it's like it's

it's a piece of piss it's very easy you basically most of the time you've got no control now he would actually hide them

in fridges and in stoves and would pay an import tax for the fridges and stoves but but he was buying them and he said

he said to himself how did you buy the guns he said I would no idea so what idea did you show to buy your and he said to himself, how did you buy the guns? He said, I had no idea. He said, what idea did you show to buy your guns? He said, nothing at all. He said, no idea whatsoever. He said, no, nothing at all.

So did he buy them from gun shows? So he'd buy them from gun shows, but then what he would do was he would use the private sale loophole, which they're trying to close now. Yes. So he would go in there, and then I went to a gun show in Mesquite in the greater Dallas area, known as the Gun Show Captain of America. And went to a gun show there and asked people, can you sell me guns?

I don't live here. Can you sell me guns? And first they said, oh, no, you need to be a tax resident. And someone said, oh, yeah, sure, I can sell you these guns. And the reason they get out is they say it's a private sale right however some of them and i know some of the the the pro gun people get angry talking about this but i saw this in my own eyes they've got a whole bunch of boxed up ar-15 rifles and they're selling them as being private sellers so yeah private sale now so he was just just simply buying these guns and taking them down i saw right in front of me as

well somebody who who who said to the person i can't i can't buy he's looking for a different gun and said no i can't buy it i don't have i can't use id to buy the gun um and the person you know still happy like even the private cell loophole if you in theory if you suspect the person is a criminal or we're using for purposes, you shouldn't sell them a gun. But they don't care. And so one thing, I mean, you really want, do people really want people who, they could be MS-13 undocumented, they can still walk in and buy guns in some of these places. But then, yeah. So that's a big issue as well

Yeah, those gun shows are pretty bizarre You're walking around with a bunch of people Just itching to shoot somebody They're just hoping somebody breaks in their house I know a guy who keeps a gun On his ankle at all times He keeps one in his back He's got a holster that he carries with him sometimes

He carries a knife as well He's literally begging forster that he carries with him sometimes. He carries a knife as well. He's literally begging for someone to fuck with him. I've got no problem with the people who like – I talked to a guy from the Alaska Machine Gun Association. He has about 200 guns in his basement, 200 guns. Wow. And I don't have a problem with with uh with people with doing that but then there's still like how do you stop the guns going to criminals the same

the gun the criminals in in baltimore right um i also interviewed in baltimore a gun trafficker who's taking guns into the city of baltimore the yeah the gun show loophole is very strange it's very strange that that's allowed and this this is coming from someone, me personally, who owns guns. And I believe in the Second Amendment. I don't think that the way to stop people from doing illegal activities is to make those activities illegal for people who don't do anything illegal. I think the real issue is the psychology behind people that are willing to shoot people in the first place. And to deal with the overall mentality of these human beings and try to figure out what's wrong with our society. Curate at a base level, at a human level. That's what's really wrong. It's not the inanimate

object of a gun that's the problem. It's the human beings that are willing to use these guns to commit horrific acts. That's what I think. But when you have something like drug cartels which exists or gangs which exists and then you have this thing called a gun show and then you have this gun show loophole well boy you got a fucking giant hole in your dam you know you got water pouring right through right there like how do you not fix that up if you are a person who believes in second amendment you believe in legal and responsible gun use you should be angry at that because that is that represents a gigantic problem and that also represents a threat to legal gun ownership because if this keeps happening and people keep getting outraged and more mass shootings happen

with illegally acquired guns after a while you know there's there's it's going to come to some sort of a real conflict with people yeah i'm actually doing a new book about gun trafficking. So I'm really interested to hear about his issues and what the actual room for compromise is. Or like someone like yourself who believes in the Second Amendment, how much room for compromise do you think there is on these issues? I mean, like closing the gun show loophole. The other thing, like, for example, the issue of 50 cals.

Yeah. Now, 50 cals in Mexicoels the cartels use 50 cows they use them to set up ambushes they'll use them to hit uh military vehicles police vehicles so they'll sit on the side of a mountain and there are 50 cows and go bang bang and like go right through they're like baseball size bullets yeah crazy now imagine if you crazy not quite that big but they're big ass bullets I understand a lot of these Mets can police and military

are corrupt as well but you know if you are an honest one or whatever you're going in a car and you're stuck getting hit by one of those

going into your vehicle then they open up on you so is there any room there do you think for like clamming down on 50 cals I've never heard

that discussion that much I have a friend when I was one Anthony Cumier he's got a 50 caliber it's ridiculous clamber down on 50 cals. I've never heard that discussion that much. I have a friend who has one. Anthony Cumia. He's got a 50 caliber. It's ridiculous. I mean, the idea that you're using that for self-defense,

unless you're going to war with Russia or fighting against some gang, cartel gang that's invading your city, that seems, that's a military weapon. I mean, it's the same argument, I think, for having a fighter jet with hellfire missiles do i think you should be able to own a cessna and fly a little plane around sure okay do i think you should be able to own a jet well i mean there are a lot of rich folks with private jets okay do i think you should be able to own a fighter jet that goes the speed of sound? Oh, I mean, it's just a faster jet, right?

Yeah, okay, okay. Do you think you should be able to own a fighter jet with.50 caliber guns strapped to it? Oh, well, what the fuck is that? Are you starting a war? Like, what are you doing? There's like these levels that things get to, you know? That's the argument against automatic weapons. Like you can't use automatic, like certain states have regulations in terms of what you can.

In California, you can't even have a silencer. I don't know why because it's very bad to have that loud bang of a gun. It's terrible for your ears. And if you're a hunter or someone who likes to shoot target practice or something, that's terrible thing for your ears and there's a suppressor that could put on the end of the barrel and it'll mitigate that but for whatever reason i think mostly because of films and public perception people think that those silencers are only used by assassins or something like that you're using to kill people so they convert the the semi-automatics from the states in mexico they convert them to fully automatic. Yes.

They do that here, too. And then, of course, you know about bump stocks. Yeah. Yeah, which makes it much more free with the trigger, much easier to fire rapidly, rather. So how do you feel about the issue? You know, one of the issues is of having a database. Like the ATF, or they're not allowed to have a searchable database on on guns in the united states so they have like they have like paper files and stuff they go through still they can't have like a digital database on guns that seems ridiculous doesn't it yeah i mean yeah you

think they think i mean i guess these are the gun lobby see the idea of a gun registry as being a step to taking away their guns because um like you start registering, then you can go then afterwards and say, well, we know where the guns are or whatever. But how do you feel? Do you think there's flexibility on that issue of like the gun, of like having searchable databases? I mean, like with a car, like you have a license plate, and if there's a hit and run, you just type it in,

and you know whose car it is within seconds. With gun tracing, you can't, you know whose car it is within seconds with gun tracing you can't you know you find a gun at a crime scene whatever you can't just trade you know put a button you're gonna bang that's who it is they have to go through paper they have to go through a whole formal trace and go through this kind of search so you think there's flexibility on that issue as well or how do you feel about that yourself well i myself feel there should be a traceable database i mean if there it's just like a car and i'm glad you brought up that analogy because when you when you get a car

you have to know how to drive a car you have to in order to have a license to drive a car you have to take a test you have to take a written test and you have to take a physical driving test with an instructor they have to see and think about how many more people drive cars than own guns. So it's possible to do this with guns, yet it's not done. When I bought my first gun, they're like, here you go. I was like, what? Like, that's it? Like, yeah, you're not a criminal.

Look, we did a check on you. You're not a criminal. Here's a gun. I bought a pistol. I bought a 38 revolver. That was my first gun. And I went to the gun range and practiced with the gun. And I a pistol. I bought a 38 revolver. That was my first gun. And I went to the gun range and practice with the gun. And I read about how to do it. And I talked to an

instructor about safety and put goggles on and ear muffs and make sure you're protected and how to properly hold the gun while you shoot it and all these different things. But it's stunning to me that you don't have to do that. I mean, you can own 150 guns and know how to operate zero of them, and they're all yours. You don't even have to prove you know what the fucking safety is. You don't have to prove you know anything. That's crazy. I mean, I admit it's fun to shoot guns.

And since I've been doing research for this new book, I've been shooting a few guns in places. I went over to Serbia, and I arrived in serbia on a hangover i'd seen my friends in the uk and got drunk with them and arrived in a hangover and i'd met the contact there and said i wanted to go to a gun club and he took me into a nuclear bunker and fired an ak-47 just came off the plane wow and it was like wow they had a crazy they said whatever you want to fight at a crazy amount of guns there. So I can see it's fun to fire these things.

Do you think they actually are good in self-defense? I mean, do you actually think, I mean, I don't, in Mexico, I don't have guns. I wouldn't, when I travel in the field, I won't go with security. Generally, security is going to be more of a hindrance um because they attract attention yeah attract attention um yeah and they've got to go basically with my hands up and say look this is this is me so i'm doing uh most of the situations there you're going to have a lot of people with heavy guns you're not going to outgun these guys yes in central america is a bit different in honduras there was with guys with guns they're not out of choice uh of choosing

security because the the journalist himself was carrying a gun and had friends carrying guns. And he was carrying a mini Uzi. He was driving with this journalist friend of mine, Orlin Castro, his name is, great, great journalist. He was driving around and he had a mini Uzi on his lap as he was driving around to crime scenes and running around doing stuff. But do you think guns are actually effective for self-defense i mean do you have guns for

self-defense and believe in that or simply just enjoy the sport of shooting guns well i hunt and uh one of the things i have used although i archery hunt now most of the most of the hunts i go on when i when i go to these places to uh to bow hunt specifically but i have rifles for hunting um i have handguns for self-defense and it depends entirely on the situation that's like saying do you think cars are effective to get you where you want to go well they are effective if you drive carefully and you use the blinkers and look when you change lanes and make sure you observe the speed limit and all the different laws and are aware and don't crash into anybody. But if you're an asshole, no, they're not effective. You're going to wind up dying in a car accident.

You're going to flip your car over on the side of the road. If you're in a terrible situation, it is better to have a gun than to not have a gun if you know how to use it. If someone's breaking into your house, there has been countless stories of people protecting their families from bad guys when they have guns. These are real stories. They do exist. There are people that I've talked to. You can find them. There's countless stories.

There's also countless stories of people leaving their guns unlocked and a child gets a hold of it and kills himself accidentally there's there's stories of children accidentally killing their mothers there's all those stories too so can a gun be effective in self-defense for sure that's why the military used them that's why police officers used them that's why people train and they go to the range and they take tactical courses to learn how to use a gun for self-defense absolutely a gun can be used for self-defense it's the best thing for the best tool for self-defense other than you know obviously living in a good neighborhood having a security alarm all these different steps, a dog, dogs are good, especially a dog that's a trained dog.

But yeah, guns absolutely can protect you. If you're in a situation and someone breaks in your house and you shoot that person dead, you're safer than that person killing you. That has happened. But this is a gross generalization that's entirely dependent upon the situation that you find yourself in. But if you're not protected by – if you don't understand how to use it, if you're not trained, if you don't have training to keep your shit together when things go south, because when you're in a situation and your life is in danger if you've never been in a high

pressure situation before how do you know you can keep it together and even hit something you're aiming at people have wild trigger panic and they they have a really hard time dealing with life or death situations if they haven't served in the military or been in some very very high stress situations where you have to learn how to control yourself under extreme pressure conditions there's a lot there's a lot of factors there but i would say the same thing is like you you would also say that with martial arts like can you defend yourself if you know martial arts well depends on what you know i mean some martial arts are fucking horse shit you you there's a lot of people out there practicing nonsense, and if someone who actually knew how to fight just punched them in the face,

they would be doomed. And then there's other people out there that are experts that would be very calm if someone tried to fight them, and they would know what to do and what not to do, and if the person wasn't armed, they would be able to easily dispatch them. It really is dependent upon the situation, how much effort you've put into it, how much thought you've put into it, how much thought you've put into it. But there's a lot of people out there that if you broke into their house, you're making a huge mistake because they're trained and prepared and ready because

they don't want to be a victim. And it doesn't mean they're bad people. And I think we have a problem in this country where we look at things, they very binary they're one or zero they're good or bad guns are bad guns are always bad i don't want a gun bad guys take your gun sometimes sure sometimes sometimes you kill the bad guy and you protect your family though too that's real too yeah no i have respect for people having having guns for self-defense when we're talking about about shooting i've been around a few shootouts in in latin america and uh and over in haiti and one thing about that from from a journalist point of view and being around and i've been around a few shootouts in in latin america and uh and over in haiti and one thing about that from from a journalist point of view and being around and i've been seeing a lot of violence as well like people fighting um even going back to england people having physical fights um or with knives and that kind of thing so one of the differences i think with guns

is and it's funny you can't see bullets. It's not like a small thing, but like you can't see the thing that's hurting you. When you see a guy with a knife, it's like the guy is scary. You can see, you can imagine that knife sticking into you. But the gun is like you're seeing,

you know, the object. You can't see really the bullet going in. So one of the times, one of the times I was in haiti and uh i went there to cover the earthquake in 2010 um which was you know real sad you know like crazy amount of dead there and we were covering the looting um afterwards and the police came and started firing right into where people were looting and i was with a cameraman and the police

were firing bang bang and then and during the same situation not not right in that scene there but in another scene they shot and killed somebody the police just firing at the looters and all the looters started running when the police were firing they were firing again how high were they firing but they were firing you know bang firing this place down and the cameraman i was with was just sat there and he was like filming this and i think this is one of the problems that why a lot of cameramen get shot in these places you start feeling like you're watching on tv oh wow because you feel like you know you're seeing the lesing wow this is amazing look at what look at what i'm watching yeah know you're seeing the lens and wow this is amazing look at what I'm watching yeah

and you're seeing this and it's like and I was saying run we gotta go like they're firing it's like we gotta go he wants to get the shot

yeah we gotta go there's another sad sad thing of a guy filming an American journalist

called Bradley Rowland Will, you know, rest in peace, who was killed in Mexico back in 2006. And he was filming a shooting in the state of Oaxaca.

And he filmed this guy shooting and he fell and was hit and it carried on filming. Oh, wow. So he literally filmed his own death.

I mean, you can literally see there. Yeah, Sadler's working for a news agency that day when he was killed. Yeah, there's a lot of courageous camera people, and they get locked into that job, and it becomes normalized, almost like you were saying, the people that live in these war-torn areas. It becomes a normal way of life to them, and although there are a lot of murders,

if you're there on a daily basis, it seems like almost like a regular life. A lot of these cameramen, I mean, they're courageous people. You see these guys who go over to war zones and film what's going on in Afghanistan, and I've met some of these guys. It's just, it's a crazy way of life

to just accept the fact that you're an observer that might be a victim. And you're capturing all this so people like me can get some semblance of a perception to what's going on in that part of the world. I went over to the Philippines, southern Philippines, and saw the fight against the Islamic State there in end of 2017. And it was interesting seeing that compared to the violence I cover normally in Mexico. So that was ISIS. They took over the city called Marawi. And it was an area they called it. It was interesting.

It was more self-contained. They had an area called the main battle area, the NBA, the main battle area. So in that area was ISIS and the Philippine army just going at it all the time just like a constant bang bang bang bang bang and planes going over and bombing but actually even when you're outside that main area even if you're you know we were just outside it and even if you're like 600 meters or 600 meters from it but it's you're not in the fight and the fighting is over

there whereas in something like mexico south amer, a lot of times this fighting is kind of happening everywhere. There's no real control over where the main battle area is. But they didn't really let any journalists inside, like deep into the main battle area. They didn't really let any journalists in. We're sitting outside and hearing this constant ricochet of gunfire. But sometimes bullets will come out of the area so there was an australian guy and i think he bent over to pick up some cookies and a bullet hit him in the neck

um i saw the x-ray actually of the bullet embedded in the side of his neck and actually it was taken out so it must have been at the end of its terminal velocity. Yeah. Yeah, so it must have been a far, far, far shot. Yeah, yeah. Or it went through something else before it hit him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he maybe didn't go in too fast. That's crazy.

Yeah, exactly. So it was kind of a... And he's okay? Yeah, I think he was okay. He was okay with it. Boy, that guy's lucky. Yeah. It's shot in the neck and you're okay.

Yeah. So, but yeah, in terms of, you know, some of the people have really been in, they had one of the guys, one of the police special force guys had a camera on his helmet. And he went, he showed me that footage. And he was right there, right inside there, going there going there like really really close buildings fighting with the islamic isis people and it was the same techniques i talked with general and he had a big chart showing how the techniques of guerrilla warfare had evolved from like faluja aleppo mosul and how this kind of weird new form of guerrilla warfare they have of like fighting

and how this kind of weird new form of guerrilla warfare they have of like fighting house to house. So basically it's suicidal kind of guerrilla war. They rise up and they'll be like, you know, super close, fighting really close. And then when they're born, they hide in like basements and stuff. And they drill holes in the walls so they can fire through and fire through. And the footage he had, he showed me the footage he had

from being like right inside close up, like running literally in the room, bang, taking these people out. And it was like, wow, this is just crazy. I was trying to persuade the guy to let me put that footage out there. You know, it looked like a kind of crazy video game, kind of Call of Warfare. Sorry, Call of Warfare, is that what it's called? Call of Duty. Call of Duty, cool um call of call of judy

yeah um yeah i mean mexico right now is almost like a war i mean you can call it a drug war but because there's no it's not like an army versus army war we don't think about it that way but from in terms of the amount of violence that goes on over there and the amount of casualties it rivals anything that's going on in the world right now yeah so i'll be talking a lot about this over the years and with some like experts there's a good writer called robert bunker who's an external researcher for the pentagon and he investigates this stuff there's a guy called john sullivan from here in california was a police officer who also did a bunch of research and you know got like a doctorate in in starting a lot of this stuff as well talk to them about their ideas about what this means you

know what is the uh um how can you define this in terms of warfare you know how does it fit in and they directed me to one book by an israeli historian called the transformation of war and this was written back in the early 1990s and he basically predicted then you're going to see a transformation in war an armed conflict around the world and you know we have like nuclear weapons but they're useless in these situations you know nuclear weapons you can't use a nuclear weapon to solve the problem in mexico you can't use a nuclear weapon to solve the problem in Mexico. You can't use a nuclear weapon to deal with the Islamic State. These are internal insurgencies in countries.

So if you look at Mexico, it's a kind of weird hybrid. So between crime and war. So I use the word crime wars in some of these places say mexico el salvador guatemala honduras where you have i mean there are some situations in mexico where you know the you know there was a group who called the jalisco new generation cartel somebody a guy shot down a military helicopter using an rpg7 wow um they killed eight soldiers and a federal policeman in that helicopter there was one shootout which involved 2 000 federal police and 500 sicadios like 500 cartel hitmen had this crazy battle in michoacan so sometimes you actually

get actually starts to look more like a kind of regular conflict, but generally it's all, you know, way more kind of hybrid. So it's kind of weird mix. And so I was trying to get my head around this for a long time. For some years I was trying to think,

you know, is this a civil war? Right. Should we look at this? And then it becomes, okay, this, and then it was,

you know, Robert Bunker when he, when I talked to him one time and he said, you know, like, this doesn't fit into these theories. You know,

it's not quite war it's more than crime it's a weird hybrid in between um to kind of crime war and that's the way you got to understand these these things but a lot of the the conflicts around the world today these are spreading i mean you look at somalia you look at libya you look at a lot of these places the kind of weird mix instability yeah and then this is what a lot of refugees are fleeing from. And I was down in Tijuana at Christmas. I followed the migrant caravan that came through Mexico of Central Americans, which caused a big storm here that Trump kind of hit before the election.

What was that like? Was that overblown? I think it was a big deal. Was it a publicity event? Like, is that why they were doing it and making it such a big deal and everybody's walking towards the border? It's a bit more than that.

I think there was... These caravans had started a few years ago and they started off in Mexico for security. There was an issue back a few years ago where the cartels in mexico for security um there was an issue back a few years ago where the cartels would kidnap migrants en masse they would just get loads of migrants now you think these people are poor how can they make money from them but they'd get them put them in camps and they know they have family in the united states so they say okay we've got 50 people in a camp we want five thousand dollars off each one of you off your family like give us a number we're going to call your family okay send us the money down

and then sometimes they'd agree on okay two thousand you know like but so it sounds like you know you're making money out of poor people right but you do it en masse you do it ten thousand people and you get a couple of thousand dollars each that's like you know twenty thousand dollars two hundred two hundred million dollars so they started doing caravans for strength to avoid these mass kidnappings what was different about the latest caravan they actually became became a caravan crossing borders they used to be going through parts of mexico together then they started crossing borders now the caravan began in oct, around October 12th. And there was a call for them to meet.

And my friend Orlean, again, the journalist down in Honduras, he was down there filming with his TV crew, putting it on TV. They're down here, they're going on this caravan. And suddenly it went boom. And loads of people saw it on TV. And they're like, I'm going. I'm leaving. I'm leaving.

Now, the desperation was so heavy. Now, Honduras is in a real meltdown kind of stage honduras is bad venezuela is worse but honduras might be like number two for you know real meltdown cases in latin america right now so people were like you know talking to some of these people they would say like i saw it on tv and i was that's it i'm going just decided Just decided right away, I'm going to get my bag and I'm going to go. So they arrived at the, when they went through Guatemala, into Guatemala, you know, they became big, like 7,000 people. Arrived at the border with Mexico. And, you know, first of all, they tried to, there was a push and shove on the border and tear gas was fired.

And they went down and crossed the river. Some of them walking across with a rope. Some of them going across on tires. It was a kind of crazy scene. They were squatted half the bridge and then they came down. So it was kind of a big deal. The idea of calling them an invading army and so forth was obviously overblown. But I think it was significant scenes, quite historic scenes that were happening down there and what was the overall goal

to make it through to the united states yeah i mean you know different people had different ideas it was kind of on these weird things you know like it was go to the united states now some people had no idea where they were going had no real plan some people some people had very clear um cases of being like i'm a refugee um you know understanding a bit about refugee legislation and and like fleeing very specific cases where they've been targeted by gangs working with corrupt police who want to kill them who have like attacked them and they've run and like i want to seek refuge in the united states or in mexico someone was seeking refuge in mexico run and like, I want to seek refuge in the United States or in Mexico. Someone was seeking refuge in Mexico, which is not the safest place to seek refuge.

I mean, like there's been cases of people with one cameraman I know who fed Honduras and then was killed in Mexico. Has there ever been any discussion of the United States military intervening and trying to do something about the cartels? the United States military intervening and trying to do something about the cartels? So there's been like a U.S., you know, some U.S. forces, like U.S. marshals, sometimes, like Mexico is very proud of its constitution

and very proud of its sovereignty and doesn't want U.S. force acting in Mexico. And I think the kind of idea really of U.S. military is pretty out there. It's pretty, you know, like it wouldn't help if he'd be bogged down into more problems, and there'd be no appetite in Mexico for that. But there have been some cases of U.S. doing some kind of activity in Mexico. Like, for example, when they went after Chapo Guzman,

when they got him and there's a big shootout. They got him the first time, actually, without shots fired. And then he went to prison and escaped. That one escape from prison? He's escaped more than once, right? Yeah, escaped twice, yeah. Did he get helicoptered out once? No, no.

There have been, prisoners have been helicoptered out, which is crazy. He had the one tunnel escape with the electric bike, right? Which is crazy. Yeah, yeah. When he went to the,

John, and went to the bathroom and just stepped behind the door and he's gone. That was insane. It was really weird when I went to New York right now,

seeing him in the court in New York. Like, seeing him in the flesh after all these years covering this stuff and i saw him and it was like i've been to his village before i talked to his mother i'd stayed the night with his cousin in in his village wow up in the mountains uh you know seeing what's it like up there it's um you know quite quite rugged mountains. Sierra Madre is like you go in a car up on like,

we were in a 4x4, serious off-road, up and down. And there's people, you know, wandering around there, fully armed, guys with like ski mask. One guy, like camouflage gear, camo gear, ski mask, AK-47 just like on like quad bikes just driving around the area wow and we went up there with a colleague and a photographer uh story for time magazine and we went up there and drove into the village and i bought a bottle of whiskey thinking to kind of offer to the to the family members say oh you know here bought a bottle of whiskey, thinking to kind of offer to the family member to say, oh, you know, here's a bottle of whiskey.

And when we arrived there, and he said we could stay at his house, and I bought out a bottle of whiskey. And he said, we don't drink in this house. We're Christians. Wow. We don't drink. And there's this nice guy, and he was like evangelical Christian. Wow.

Cousin. And we'd sit there talking, and he'd be like quoting the Bible. Whoa. And coming stuff. And, you know, it's like. Does he not understand that? And there's a church. It's an evangelical church right there, which is supposedly built by Chapo.

Wow. Which his mother goes to right in front of her house. And we sat through a three-hour evangelical service um sitting there with you know chapo's mom there and all these family members were sitting there and the cousin even said oh we've got some friends here because he was basically he said like you stay with me you know you're my responsibility if something happens you know i'm gonna have to pay for this right so we're like yeah we're gonna behave ourselves and you know in the village and and he said during the church and then we want to also have we have somebody from

england here and somebody from the us and come out in this in this church ceremony so yeah yeah really really bizarre scenes up there and there was so bizarre did you talk to them about the contradiction of being a evangelical christian being involved in essentially a mass murder and drug running operation so so the cousin is supposedly you know he was like a cattle rancher now i don't exactly you know obviously he's he calls um you know he i don't know how much he might have been involved in the past but his his his he says, but he says he's a farmer there. And the mother, Chapo's mother, who's 88, was 88 then, now is like 89, 90 now.

You know, she talks about her son with kind of pride. I didn't push too hard. There was a bunch of gumming around and stuff. I didn't push too hard. But yeah, I mean, this is their way of life i mean these are so seeing him in the court um was kind of bizarre seeing you know seeing him right there and in new york was like in brooklyn you know right there in brooklyn yeah and they brought in all of these crazy characters as uh cooperating witnesses they brought in 14 cooperating witnesses um and a bunch of other gangsters. How did they protect those people?

Yeah, I mean, heavily, heavily protected. I mean, I think it was ethically very questionable why they brought a lot of those people in. They brought in one guy whose nickname is Chupeta who confessed himself to as many as 150 killings and maybe did

a lot more and he makes a deal likely makes a deal to cooperate against Del Chapo

so you get into a kind of weird intrigue there about what the government was doing with this whole case

there's a history that in this country with prosecuting the mob, John Gotti and Sammy the Bull Gravano, who was an admitted murderer and talked about the murders that he committed, and still they allowed him to get free. Yeah, John Gotti's lawyer was one of the lawyers for El Chapo. Of course.

Yeah, and then they had another. So they got some of these lawyers there. It was a crazy kind of show. Yeah. It was weird. It was like, you know, New York and the show they were putting on there. Yeah.

I felt kind of disconnected with the things I've been seeing over the last few years and it didn't really... Why was it in New York? You know, they indicted him in a bunch of places and I think they chose New York for the reason they wanted more of a show. Wow.

I think they brought in more than 50 witnesses, three months of trial. What was his defense? So they originally tried a bit of a defense of – they wanted to get a bit of a defense of how there's a kind of government conspiracy um of like showing things like fast and furious you mentioned like saying oh how come the government's trafficking guns to cartels and one of the witnesses had before one of the witnesses against him before used this weird defense called public authority saying he had permission from the United States government to traffic drugs. So basically saying there's a kind of conspiracy involving the Mexican government

is totally corrupt and working with cartels. The U.S. government is corrupt and working with cartels and having various suspicious agencies. And El Chapo is kind of a fool guy that they're putting this blame on. Now that didn't really, the U.S. prosecutors shut that down and the judge. They just said, that didn't really, the US prosecutors shut that down, and the judge, they just said, you can't talk about this stuff. You can't say that.

So when Fast and Furious came up, they said, no, you can't talk about it. You can't talk about it. You couldn't talk about it in the court. Well, that's ethically ambiguous, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Because that's a real thing that happened. Yeah.

So we can't talk about that. And then the defense tried a bit, well, they had audios of El Chapo, and they said, well, how do you know it's him? And is he really the main guy in the Sinaloa cartel? Now there is as well, very possibly he's not the top guy in the Sinaloa cartel. There might well be another guy called Miles Ambada who's really the number one, and he might be more of an emblematic figure. But for some reason, El Chapo became the most famous in the world.

And so this other guy, is he still free? Yeah, he's still free. What is his name again? Mayo Zambada. And where is he at? Somewhere in the mountains. They're always in the mountains? Often.

I mean, one of these weird things you think like, if you're a drug lord and you've got all of the money you know you've got millions billions they say let's say hundreds of millions i think they exaggerate how much money some of these guys have individually but then you could go around the world you think you could go somewhere out but these guys tend to be in their places they they're they're people like some of these people are people who are very uneducated i mean chapa who's as a kid he was carrying sacks full of oranges to sell almost no education and they start handling hundreds billions of dollars they're dealing with a billion dollar international business and they've got the capacity to understand and deal

with that but at the same time they're still really hyper local in some ways they're still like people who they understand their world they understand it from their environment to control and become masters of their environment um to become kind of powerful in in that place lords in that place but you know they couldn't you know the idea of them going to like sitting in Italy in a cafe and kind of running it from there, it's kind of beyond them. They would have to be there near the business because otherwise someone would just take it over, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You probably have to run that thing with an iron fist. Yeah, I mean, you could think though, or maybe like, yeah, I guess so. Maybe get your Christian cousin, he won't rip you off. Yeah. But also, how much money do you need to make? Right, right. What can you get out? Maybe, again, with corruption.

I mean, there's the issue of like a lot of police in Mexico are poor. So that's why they take deals. But there's an ex-governor called Thomas Yaddington, who I met a few years ago when he was governor of Tamaulipas State. who I met a few years ago when he was governor of Tamaulipas State. And again, he was not only taking money from drug traffickers, after he left being governor, he got into drug trafficking himself. And it's like, you think, well, once you've made a couple of million, do you need to make another 10 million?

But then again, the same with, I don't understand that. With business. With businesses. What's that incentive? Why do they think they always want to make more money? I don't know. I mean, we were talking about that recently with Jeff Bezos when we found out he has $150 billion. Like, when do you just say, we're good?

We're good? Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I think it becomes, it's a game more than it is anything else. Like, they might as well be playing Parcheesi or Monopoly or whatever. They're trying to win. You know, they're trying to constantly win and also you have an obligation because you're a ceo of this company so you you're running this enormous business that's earning money for all

these other people as well it's all very complicated though that has to do with a lot of psychological factors where people can't put things into perspective and they get caught up in the race. Yeah, I guess, yeah. Drug traffickers are thinking that same thing. Yeah. I mean, also, like people have explained to me, involved in this world,

they make a lot of money, but they spend a lot of money. Oh, yeah. Which is why these numbers are wrong. Like with Chapo, they said he's worth $14 billion. That's what the US government said in that case he's worth 14 billion but then he's you know people explain to me you know 14 billion is when you take the value of drugs you're saying he he trafficked and you're adding that up and saying it's 14 billion dollars worth but really all the time you're paying back suppliers

you're paying people off you're owing money and you know and you know you're buying back suppliers, you're paying people off, you're owing money, and you know, and you know. And you're buying hippos, and jets, and gold-covered Rolls Royces. Yeah. And there's some of that, I think,

you know, some of that was, might have been exaggerated with him. He had a lot of kind of more like middle-class houses. Oh yeah. I went to one of the last, the last hideout he was caught in, it was more like a middle-class.

It's a normal house. Kind of house, but he'd have a lot of those. What the fuck happened with Sean Penn? Yeah. Why was Sean Penn up there talking to him? That was so strange. Yeah.

That photograph of Sean Penn shaking hands with him. And then Conor McGregor wore that same T-shirt and he took that same pose on when he was going to fight Eddie Alvarez, I believe it was. Yeah. What was that about? Why was Sean Penn visiting him? Yeah, bizarre moment.

I mean, you have an actor who's played gangsters. There he is, right there. Yeah. There it is. So strange. An actor who's played gangsters with a gangster who they're having movies made about him. And there was a woman that Sean Penn knew that hooked this all up, right? Kate Castillo.

She's a famous Mexican actress. Yeah, yeah. So the whole story started there. She is, yeah. Look at them all palling around. Hey, here's me with a murderer. Hi. I used to be married to Madonna.

So the story started. So Kate Castillo, who you see there she was an actress in a tv series about drug traffickers which have now become a huge deal in latin america um they called uh like telenovelas means like soap operas kind of thing series tv series and the whole bunch of them made about drug traffickers which are really popular and she was in one called La Reina del Sur, the Queen of the South. And in that, she played this drug trafficker. And afterwards, in some kind of weird moment afterwards, I think she was like really into her role and stuff. She came out with this message she wrote saying, you know mexico is in such this is such tragic

situation in mexico um you know why don't they come you know drug traffickers come and like um traffic with love i trust you more than i do the government um which these are kind of sentiments that some people have but you know it was kind of a strange thing kind of bit of an out there thing for a for a tv star to say and then chapo el chapo apparently became kind of enamored with her seeing her on tv and they started this kind of communication now sean penn then got involved in this and was like uh you know i'm going to go there as well and we can talk about the idea you know the pretence of the meeting was as well talking about making a movie or tv series of his story and el chapo giving the rights to kate de castillo and sean Penn was kind of involved in this somehow.

Now, Sean Penn, there's a bit of discussion now that Sean Penn and Kate de Castillo fell out over this. They have different versions of what happened there. But Sean Penn decided to go and write this story for Rolling Stone about the whole experience. So they went then, and this meeting was arranged. And they went up to the mountains. And when that photo was taken now they at that point he didn't actually give an interview to Sean Penn but they had a dinner and had a meeting up in the mountains and and then left and then they were meant to afterwards there was then a big attempt to hit Chapo, but he escaped.

So that's when some people say that the Mexican government had followed them and used their trace to try and get to Chapo. But he did escape. He almost got caught close to there quite soon afterwards, but escaped. It makes sense. I mean, how else would Sean Penn be able to slide through? He's a famous actor. I bet he doesn't even speak Spanish.

Yeah. Does he? I think he does. I mean, I don't know. If so, if he was followed, I'm not saying that he was in any way deliberately leading them there. But it's something that I think about all the time. I think about, okay, if I'm going to meet criminals, am i being followed right um and am i going to lead you know what's my connection with law enforcement conviction with criminals it's a very difficult thing that

i've been balancing and thinking about for a lot of years so anyway the chapo escapes um and then said he couldn't meet up again for the interview because he was it was too hot for him so they made this video interview where he was sent some questions and he videoed himself answering the questions which is kind of interesting it was the first kind of statement he made and he said i know various things i've been doing this since i was 15 he didn't really give much away and then he was caught and when he was caught were like, we've got to move the stories. And then the story came out like bang after he was caught in early 2016. So it had to have some sort of an impact in them catching him. It must have.

I mean, it's possible. It all makes sense. Yeah, yeah. It's possible. I mean, Chapa, I think, was pretty, you know, he'd already been caught before. He was caught in 2014, was in prison escaped in 2015 through that tunnel and then was caught again in 2016 so yeah i mean maybe it had an impact you know i don't know but they were looking for him yeah they were looking for him and he seemed

to have lost a lot of his protection you know he before you know going back a few years you know he had enormous protection you know and those mountains i mean in the village you see there's a house above like there's kind of a main clearing where his mother's compound is you know it's a pretty basic still that village then up from there you see a um a house on a hill and apparently that's where for a long time he's going to stay in that house um you know when he was on the run in the past he had so much protection anytime the military will come close up the mountain you've got hundreds of people you know radio saying the military coming up get clear man what a crazy world you study really it's uh it's amazing i really appreciate you coming here and talking to me about this and this book is

El Narco do you have more books that are available yeah sure so my first book is El Narco my second book is Gangster Warlords

which also has stuff on the MS-13 on the gangs in Brazil the gangs in Jamaica as well as Mexico and I'm working

on my third book now and the third book is about about gun trafficking hmm well listen man I really appreciate your time and you you've lived a very very fascinating life stay safe out there man great to be here thank you brother appreciate it thank you thank you very much