The Jordan Harbinger Show - 500: Ed Calderon | Survival Secrets of a Drug War Veteran Part One

Episode Date: April 27, 2021

Ed Calderon (@eds_manifesto) is a non-permissive environment specialist and combatives instructor with over 10 years of experience in counter-narcotics, organized crime investigation, and public safety in the northern border region of Mexico. [This is part one of a two-part episode. Stick around for part two later this week!] What We Discuss with Ed Calderon: How drug cartels infiltrate and take over towns, cities, and entire regions without fearing local law enforcement or even the military. How US taxpayers fund limitless government corruption south of the border without any real accountability. 2020 has been the most deadly year in Mexico for cartel-related violence, and it's getting worse. Not all mass graves found in Mexico are the result of cartel atrocities. The reality could be even more sinister. Why cracking down on cartel crime is such a difficult (and life-threatening) proposition for would-be crusaders. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/500 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. When you actually see the video, the GoPro video that was released later on of El Chapo's son's arrest, you can clearly see that they're dumbfounded and just they realize what they just stepped into. When the El Chapo's son basically walks out with his hands up, they get orders from the higher-ups to detain him as they wait for a helicopter to extract him. The thing is that Sinaloa cartel owns the sky over Kulia Khan. So there's no way you can land a helicopter there without getting blown up. So they basically did a call out for every single gun attached to the Sinaloa cartel to surround the city.

And they came from everywhere. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game, astronauts and entrepreneurs, psychologists and spies, even the occasional former jihadi, rocket scientist, or extreme athlete, and each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to this show or looking for a handy way to tell your friends about it, we now have

episode starter packs. These are collections of your favorite episodes organized by popular topics to help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show because it is so varied. So just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start. That'll get you started or that can help someone else get started here with us. And of course, I always appreciate it when you refer others to the show and have them dive in. Today, a guest I've been chatting with my phone for a while. We've got a lot in common, which is kind of surprising because he's a former Mexican police officer. And now he's a non-permissive environment specialist. So essentially, he teaches travelers modern evasion and escape tactics. Be safe from kidnapping. Probably could have used those lessons a couple

decades ago, be safe from home invasions, how to arm yourself in a place where you're not allowed to arm yourself. This is a great, super interesting guy. I'm excited to be talking with him here today. Today, though, we're going to focus on cartels, drug cartels, cartel culture, corruption in Mexico, even how the cartels and law enforcement use the occult and occult symbols. You've seen this if you've seen Breaking Bad, right, Santamorte, and things like that. It's just a fascinating and super interesting conversation that delves into some of the details on this that I guarantee you've never heard anywhere else, even if you've heard other interviews with our guest today, Mr. Ed Calderon. He's a fascinating cat. I can't wait to get this going. Of course, he's got to come back on

I'll tell you right now, the guy's got to come back on the show. This is a two-part episode. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing folks, the authors, thinkers, creators, every single week, it's because of my network, and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. It's about business, it's about personal, this stuff will not disappoint you. And by the way, most of the guests on the show, They contribute to the course or they're in the course in one way or another. So come join us. You'll be in smart company.

Now here we go with Part 1 with Ed Calderon. Other people were like, this guy in Rogan, you've got to get him on. And people have been telling me this for years, but they said you're like a safety instructor. So the sales job was really bad, right? And I was like, look, man, I don't need to learn how to purify water in a tent during an avalanche or whatever. You know, like I don't, I'm good. I'm all set. Yeah, I'm not one of those guys just going to tell you, this is make a fire with a stick or stuff like that.

I remember there's a friend of mine, a Navy SEAL guy that does auxiliary training for the SEALs, and he does survival training. So they're all out there, you know, making fires with sticks, and they turn around like, hey, Ed, how do you start a fire? And I just, you know, well, I mean, it's an old Mexican way of, you know, carrying a lighter, you know. Yeah. Just carry a lot of lighters. That's about it, you know.

No, I'm not one of those guys. It has been such a weird and hard thing for me to try and explain to people what I do, because there's not a lot of people doing what I do and not a lot of people from where I'm from, basically. Yeah. So I've had everything from internet celebrity man to influencer to a non-permissive environment specialist to... Which is good, but doesn't mean anything

to like 99% of the population. Influencer, by far the worst title you can get out of the thing. Yeah, yeah. I think, and finally, you know, a former member of Mexican law enforcement. That's about it. Which sort of makes it as boring as it comes, right? So, yeah, it was tough.

And I started hearing from our mutual friend, and she's like, you got to get this guy on, here's what he does. And I was like, this is really cool. But she's essentially what, reporting on drug cartel activity on the border, which seems like a really dangerous job, actually. Oh, yeah. She has not only an eye for it, but she has a very clear understanding of the why is that some of these things down there.

It's pretty easy to just, well, this happened and all these bodies are there, but it's kind of hard to put in some observations as far as who was responsible. A lot of people like to say the cartel was responsible. Well, which one? There's a lot of them down there. And it's very important to state specifically who claimed responsibility. And the messages that were left behind were threatening who. It's a quagmire of conflict right now in Mexico.

And I think there's not a lot of information coming out of Mexico from news sources that are independent per se, you know. This is such a huge topic. I think already just from my research, my prep, there's more than one show in terms of the amount of information and the stories that we have. So I definitely want to thank you for your time coming on as well. And it's so hard to even know where to start with cartel stuff because I lived in Mexico for a while, obviously just, you know, like under a year. So it's my understanding is fairly limited.

And it was like 20 years ago. I lived in Guadalajara, so they didn't even have Nueva, new generation, right? Generation cartel, yeah. Yeah, like they didn't, if they existed, nobody had heard of them at all. Yeah, I mean, the Guadalajara's always had cartel presence. And I'm going to say always, I mean, since the inception of what we call the modern, you know, the modern narco-type conflicts down in Mexico. It's a key state. It's close to other key states.

It's basically on the Pacific side of the country. So it's access and its proximity to nautical ports, like the Port of Manzanillo, is pretty important. These are some of the places that even during COVID and the shutdown that COVID kind of provided, these are some of the places that still had shipments coming in regular. from China with meth precursors and fentanyl and stuff like that. So it's a very important key part of the country. It's interesting that it's now kind of the cradle for one of the biggest drug cartels on the planet. Right now, it's looking like it's going to overtake Sina Loa in the next few years.

It's sad to see because I lived in Guadalajara. I think I mentioned that, or you guessed it from the name of the cartel. I can't remember now. And it was relatively safe feeling. And I remember people saying, hey, this area, this neighborhood is not the safest, wherever I was, you know, at the particular time. And I remember walking down the street and someone would be like, hey, give me your watch. And I'd be like, no. And they were like, all right, I'll just go get somebody else. And then we'd go to clubs. I was friends with some wealthy Mexicans that were actually like

blonde-haired, blue-eyed, which shocked me, but makes sense if you think about the Spanish coming in and then just maybe not intermixing as much, some of these super wealthy old money types. We would go to clubs and the guys would get in fights with other guys. And then after 20 minutes, they're drinking with each other. And now you look at things in cartel news and you see like somebody was hanging out a swimming pool and then dot, dot, dot, 15 people died because somebody drank too much tequila and gotten a beef. And I'm like, this place has changed a lot in the last couple decades. It's something that happens all over the country. You start not respecting the small rules and the bigger rules start going to start disappearing. So the way cartels usually kind of start growing and operating in a region as far as

or influence goes, they go into a place, they set up shop, they arm themselves, usually they arm themselves in a superior fashion than the police. By this I mean, most police officers in Mexico at a state, a federal, and even at a local level will have some sort of AR-15 in a semi-auto configuration, a handgun that is issued to them, and two magazines for rifle and or two magazines for pistol. They are poorly trained, underfunded. Sometimes they're going to have, they're going to get 20 bullets, so they have to put 10 bullets in each magazine. They have to buy their own things. So that's who's defending the security of the citizenship in that area. Against people with like rocket launchers and mounted 50 caliber machine guns on technicals or whatever

they call those trucks. Against people that can take down helicopters and then have actual dominance over the airspace above the places they control. Right? So Guala Hala Haleesco cartel has a, one of the distinctions for being the first cartels to take down government helicopters with RPGs. And they're known to have things called Mampads, which are basically, you know, radio guided rockets, RPGs of the Russian manufacturing and 50 cows. So imagine a local cop with just a revolver and or a pistol on his side and a rifle. That he's shot 40 times in his life, right? If that, you know. But now imagine a few trucks rolling in of a bunch of 17, 16-year-old guys wearing body armor, AK-47s with a bunch of magazines. Cops are going to look the other way and or, you know, it's just, it's not a fair fight, basically.

In some of these regions, they basically become the de facto police forces, which is another thing that is kind of an interesting phenomenon over the cartels. They took a page out of the U.S. military's book, when the invaded Iraq, you know, hearts and minds. That's exactly what they do in the regions where they, uh, operate. They built schools. They police their areas. They punish criminals, very much like ISIS, except without the religious connotation. They basically set up a shop in such a way where they start injecting themselves at all levels of the society, from banking political campaigns

for people they want to see in power, to assassinating rival political appointees, to killing reporters and journalists that are talking negatively about whatever they do, to paying for immigration lawyers to do favors for people that are from the region. And then, okay, so you got your green card? Hey, so you have your citizenship? Well, it's thanked to us. So now you're going to work for us in the States, you know? Yeah. They start expanding their influence. We get a comparison to the collie cartel and what Escobar did. You get comparisons to the mob in the U.S. These guys are on, they're a different at the, it's a whole different level. It seems like this ramped up a lot in the era of Felipe Calderon and Enrique Pena Nye Nia.

though, right? Like these presidents of Mexico that were super corrupt, modern Mexico, super, super corrupt. So there's this almost, I don't want to be too hard on Mexico because I love the place, but it's almost like this failed state and everyone goes, okay, if we got this a hole in office, I can't count on him for anything, I can't count on the police for anything, I have to look to the cartel. So, because it's easy for us in America to go, well, how dare they, you know, they're building that school with dirty drug money, how dare they do that? But they have no other option. It's not like the government has one school being built and the cartel says, hey, we're going to have one with gold toilets. It's either there's nothing happening and you have no upward mobility and you

can't even feed your kids or you deal with criminals that are going to kill you if you don't cooperate and if you do cooperate your life upgrades significantly. And no one else is going to help you. Am I close? Yeah. I mean, interesting, you mentioned the Philippi Calderon and so Philippi Calderon for people that don't know, he's the one that officially kicked off the modern drug war that's going on in Mexico, right? And it's, he basically said at the start of his administration made it a point to go after cartels. I mean, enough is enough, basically, he said. For this, he created the federal police force. He put the military on the streets to basically try and use them as a policing force in some places. He created confidence examination centers across the country for cops to go in and get polygraphs done on them, drug testing, psychological evaluations.

He partnered with the U.S. and started doing FBI background checks for people. I went through a bunch of these filters myself. He inherited certain elements of his cabinet from other previous presidencies and governments, including his head of public safety, Garcia Luna, who was, who was. the head of the, basically the head of the federal police and, and the head of national policing in Mexico. And later on, the president that followed him had a general, who was basically our head of the national defense. Do you have all these guys that are part of these cabinets that are turned out to be completely in bed with cartels, right? So even if maybe a president was not specifically involved in anything, that provable. All the people around him were in some way,

shape, or form being influenced by cartel people. And you can see this clearly by how some of the cartel groups grow and wane during certain presidencies. It's clear as day to anybody who wants to kind of see. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Ed Calderon. We'll be right back. Now, back to Ed Calderon on the Jordan Harbinger Show. So you have president's certain administration's favoring one cartel over the other. And I think the latest one was favoring Sinaloa, right? It wasn't like the drugs are. I don't even know if you still calling that, but the sort of head honcho turned out to be like the right-hand man of the cartel leader. And it was like a military general. Who am I thinking of? Do you know, am I talking about the right thing? Do I have this

right? The past administration had a general who was our version of the secretary of defense, basically. That was our version of Secretary of Defense. It turned out he was arrested coming out off of a plane somewhere in California by the DEA. And apparently he was, he had been aiding and abetting the Beltran-Laba cartel in Mexico during his tenure as, you know, in power. But when he was arrested, you know, he was living, retired, and he was with his family in the U.S., which is interesting because a lot of these high-level arrests, a former very corrupt politicians in Mexico have been happening as they live a life of comfort in the U.S. Yeah, they're like, I don't want to live in this. place that I screwed up, I'm going to go live in La Jolla instead. Yeah, or whatever. And it's interesting

seeing how basically some of these guys get rewarded by the U.S. government for the work they did in Mexico. The thing that a lot of people have to realize is that the U.S. and the U.S. taxpayers, which I now include myself in that group, we all pay for police vehicles in Mexico, for the rifles they carry, for the rounds they carry, for the guns they carry, for the training they get. We, all of us, pay for that. The U.S. has been basically outsourcing the drug war to Mexico for years. So all of us paid for that. So when you get somebody like a high level ranking government official that was obviously very corrupt and or on the payroll of a senior law cartel, and now retiring in the U.S. and having a green card as a part of his reward for working for

U.S. interest in Mexico, we have a hand in it as taxpayers as well. We have some responsibility there as well. And it kind of leads me into asking people out there, specifically when they tell me like, Ed, what can the U.S. do? We can audit what we're sending over as far as money, number one. We've been paying for the drug war and the drug war has been happening and going about in the same way, in the same manner for more than 20 years. I was part of 12 years of that drug war.

Nothing has changed. In fact, things are getting worse. We are exiting the most deadly year in our modern history, in Mexico as far as body count. So is 2020 more deadly than 2019? Yes. Yes. Wow.

These are government numbers, so they're always skewed. And also the government numbers don't take into account the people that are just plain missing, right? Really? Which is another part of the, this is almost science fiction writer. I couldn't make this up. But the industrial level of people getting disappeared in Mexico, basically, is insane. I mean, how many people are just gone and how many mass graves are found?

and how many mass graves are just reported the news every week. Yeah, I was going to say, I feel like every time I look at Mexican news, or I look at some of the Instagram accounts like yours or our mutual friends that I will link in the show notes, it's like, new mass grave found 50 clicks outside of Guadalajara with 15 people thought to be like, and it's never like thought to be a bunch of cartel assassins. It's always like thought to be student group.

Yeah. Thought to be a group of missing tourists from like Nuevo Laredo or whatever, like just random people. Mexican government has a tendency to find dead people and say, oh, it's cartel-related. They probably had something to do with it. That's an easy way out for most Mexican authorities to kind of clean their hands off when they find something like that. Reality, it's not the case, you know? What do you think it is?

It could be a lot of things. I'll give you two examples of how it could not just be cartel-related. The killing feels in Juarez, for a time, hundreds of women were found raped and murdered and severely tortured in the deserts of Juarez. And the government, when the killings started happening, they were saying it was cartel-related because there was a major cartel war going on in the region, so it's cartel-related. People have to realize that some of these places where these hot spots of violence usually attract people that want to hide the fact that they're partaking in whatever demented acts they want to partake in.

They want to hide that by going into a conflict zone where carnage is normal. Right. So if I'm a crazy psychopath and I like killing people because I have a mental illness, I'm not going to do it in San Jose, California. I'm going to do it in Juarez and then people are going to go, I mean, look, man, there's all this cartel stuff going on. It's probably that 15 bodies. What else is new?

It's a Tuesday. If you find five bodies in San Jose, there's going to be a statewide manhunt, nationwide manhunt for your ass with DNA evidence and everything. They're going to dig up, be brushing off everybody's teeth. and jawbones in those graves, they're going to be looking for you for years. And people can do the research for themselves, research of missing women and forced appearances of women and feminicides in places like Tijuana, places like Mexico City. You know, some of them could be related to cartel activity or people trafficking,

but some of them do have the clear sign of just people partaking in whatever sickness that they have and kind of making, intermingling or mixing some of this violence into whatever's happening in the region. That's a factor as well. It's just a cycle. It's a cycle of violence. And, you know, it's interesting. Six, seven years ago when I was active, I was seeing some of the things usually go in ups and downs in Mexico.

You see a violent upsurge, and then you see people that have it enough basically tell the government do something. People with money usually are the ones that really convince them to do something. And you get good results in some places. And you get the figures like Lieutenant Colonel Lizaola coming into places like DiHuana and cleaning it up. That guy's a badass. Did you work for him? I worked for him a few times.

Well, I think he's a badass. I assume there's a lot of people that want to see him flayed alive. Oh, yeah. There's people that call him a torture or people that call him a human rights violator or they call him all sorts of things. But, I mean, the numbers are undeniable. Any place where he has been directly involved in public safety direction, everything goes down. From violent crimes to murder rates, everything goes down. Tijuana was one of the clearest examples of a successful counter narcotics operation all around in Mexico's history. Politics aside, because this is a politically charged statement, but is he kind of like the Rudy Giuliani to Tijuana, as Rudy Giuliani was to New York?

You know how he was like arrest people if they're spray painting anything, arrest people who break shit on the ground? In a lot of ways he was. But again, you have to really know where he came from and what he's about. He's a career officer, came out of the war college in Mexico, a lot of training, basically treated the problem as a guerrilla, a counterinsurgency problem, more so than a cartel problem. But when he was active, he had the support of the state government, the local government, and the federal government. So he had everything aligned to do his best work. You know, he had 11,

or the last time I counted, he had 11 assassination attempts on his life and the last one took the use of his, well, not the last one, because he got, had a few more assassination attempts after that. But he basically got his, he lost the use of his legs the last time he was almost killed. So he went into politics, but it's undeniable that he is and has been a banner for anybody that thinks that there is no hope as far as people trying to change things in Mexico. And he's being vilified completely by the left side of the political spectrum in Mexico right now because of who he represents as far as the success story. He represents the right side of the political spectrum, so they don't like him.

So he's like a law and order guy instead of a like more of a leftist, whatever that means in Central and South America? I mean, politically, when I saw him work, and again, he's, I was both trained by him and also, I got to work as a bodyguard for him when he first started. And then I got to see him directly working for him as him being one of the directors for the groups that I worked with. He was a, he was one of those guys that led from the front, you know. I never saw anything related to him trying to politicize anything. He was just, those are the bad guys. Let's go get them.

This is a citizenship. These are the people that you work for. and you better come up to that standard. Wow. If he can do it, he wouldn't ask us to do it. So he's one of those guys that led by example. Now he's getting into politics. He's ran for the office of mayor of Tijuana two times

and has been consistently blocked. I've been supporting him in those efforts for the last two times. Blocked by what? Just political establishment people? Political establishment people that are clearly have some sort of fear of him coming back into a power. Bad for business. It is bad for business.

Yeah. Specifically, if you are attached and or related to any of the people that they might be, you know, working for, you know, I don't know. I want to jump back a little bit because people are like, okay, this is interesting, but wait, who is this guy? What's going on? Because you went to med school, which, look, for spoiler, you're not a doctor, right? No, I'm not, I'm not a doctor.

Then what, you joined this experimental police unit, which is like, what, anti-mafia, anti-human trafficking. I looked at the ad, or I looked at an interview. You talked about the advertisement that got your attention, where it's vaguely worded, but they wanted young, unmarried men who had stagnated a little bit. And I'm thinking, for a guy who teaches awareness, that one kind of went over your head.

There's like six red flags in there, man. Well, I mean, so people know that I did two years in med school. You know, it didn't work out. Economy went in the toilet after 9-11, down in Mexico, specifically on the border region. Before the government job, I worked at a blockbuster video for a bit and I was really aimless and desperate. I think people don't truly know what desperation is as far as trying to look for a job

as a Mexican on the border and getting all these offers from the other side and all of a sudden finding yourself looking at an ad in the paper seeing that, ah, maybe I could be used as an analyst and or as a translator because I knew how to speak a pretty good English. But yeah, I remember vaguely seeing the whole and then going through the interview process and them asking specifically, I was married and had any kids, which should have been a red flag. It was, in a way. But you're like, it's either this or Blockbuster and Blockbuster, no thanks.

Where's the drug cartel? There's not a lot of choices. I really didn't know what it was going into. All of a sudden, I was standing on a big field with a flag in front of Mexican flag in front of me and a bunch of former members of the Gaffi units. The Gaffi units are where the Zetas came from. basically Army SF guys. The people around us, basically drill instructors, those were all Gaffi guys.

Oh, wow. From no military experience at all and living basically a middle class, lower middle class life in Mexico, to being in a field, getting my hair shaved off with a razor. And then being yelled at and being marching around in the sun for a bit, trying to get us to quit and leave. Yeah, life changing, altering. Yeah. And then, you know, all of a sudden, after six, seven months of training, then getting into the whole policing side of it as far as training goes, and then getting handed a gun, a badge, and some body armor and send told, go off and do good work, basically. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Ed Calderon.

We'll be right back. Thanks so much for listening to and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers, those who sponsor the show, that is why they renew. That's why we can keep the lights on around here and have all these amazing conversations for you without me hocking a bunch of, I don't know, random courses on getting rich on the internet. So please do support them or at least consider supporting them. Go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals if you want to find the codes and the sponsors all in one place. Again, that's easy to find.

The codes do help support the show. I know you think, ah, Jordan's got plenty of people doing this. No, plenty of people never do it. They just Google the sponsor and go buy the stuff. Use our code, please. It really does all add up. And of course, we've got worksheets for today's episode. If you want to check out some of the drills and exercises talked about during the show,

we put those all in one easy place. And that's linked in the show notes as well. The show notes are at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. All right, enough of that. Let's keep it going here with Ed Calderon. The Zetas, a lot of people don't know that the Zeta, well, first of all, it's a cartel, and it was made up of Mexican special forces trained by the United States, I assume. Yeah, the School of the Americas, some of them for Bragg trained.

I used to work with a few of the guys that were of the generation where the Zetas came out of. It was basically a group of SF guys that just deserted. The Gulf Cartel had Ozel, Gardena's Guillaigian, wanted bodyguards, wanted an elite bodyguard unit. So he said, well, how much do they pay you there, the Mexican Special Forces? Yeah, I'll pay you more. Yeah, like 10 times more. So they deserted. They went to work as a bodyguarding group for him and then as an enforcement arm for them.

and then they realized, hey, we can do this for ourselves. Why are we working for somebody else? So they kind of splintered off. They're not what they used to be now anymore. They're really more of a shadow of what they used to be, but they used to be a very scary, highly efficient, highly militarized, hyperviolent group of people. I mean, the special forces part of it,

these guys were special. A lot of them, bilingual, trilingual. Some of them had engineering backgrounds, law backgrounds. So, I mean, they're highly educated people. Jeez. How much do you think they got paid in special forces and how much you think they got paid by the cartel? As far as the cartel payment side of it, I've heard everything from 25,000 bonus to sign up in 5,000 a week or something like that. Plus whatever you found out there, you could keep that type of stuff.

So I don't know. Back then, I have no idea what a base pay was, but it's probably somewhere in the vicinity of what I used to earn when I got out first. So it was probably, I don't know, $1,500 a month maybe at the most. So that's probably somewhere in the vicinity of that, I would think. So you make more in a couple weeks working for a cartel than you do in an entire year working for a police unit and you're, I don't know, maybe not less likely to die, but possibly at least you're better armed. You stand a better chance of fighting back, I guess.

I don't know. And also it's also culturally. The police are not the good guys in Mexico. That's just the truth. In some towns and places in Mexico, they're the bad guys or the villains. Because of corruption? Because of corruption. because of certain very public cases of the Army or the Mexican Marines doing some horrible, horrible genocidal type of stuff to certain ethnic communities in Mexico to massacres in our history where the Army has participated.

They get a bad rap, basically, or they just get burned. There was a case in Sinaloa of a Mexican Marine SF unit. This was probably four years ago, maybe five. They go into a party in Sinaloa, a big kinsaniera probably or a wedding. That's not too clear by the video, but there's video out there of it. They instruct all the military-aged individuals and the group to gather in the middle of the room. They ask them who has guns. Nobody had guns.

And the women in the crowd who are cowering behind tables and stuff like that start recording them with their phones. And the video makes it online. It was clear and apparent that they didn't have anything, but all of the guys were lined up outside and executed by the Marines. Were they cartel guys? Were they not cartel guys? According to most of the people there, they were not involved, but they were executed. Stuff like that happens, and obviously in that region, they are no longer recognized as anything but a predatory influence coming into where they live, killing their men. And I think, again, this problem in Mexico has been treated as a law enforcement police. policing problem, it's an insurgency. This is a counterinsurgency problem that has a lot of insurgency groups basically fighting against one another. And there are places that this insurgency has

clearly won, like Sina Loa. The Sina Loa cartel two years ago beat the Mexican army in a one-on-one fight. Is that when they went after El Chapo's kid and then they were like, oh, crap, we're surrounded by trucks and gangsters? Can you tell us the story? Because people probably read that in the news or didn't. When I heard the story, I was like, I was watching it live as much as I could. And I was like trying to, you know, listen to the Spanish with my rusty-ass Spanish because it was just straight out of Narcos season five or whatever, season seven, whatever we're not up to yet. It was just, I've never seen anything like this in my life. Basically, according to the government, and this is again, according to the government and according to what I know, there's two different stories there. A Mexican special police unit went there and supposedly had clear indications that El Chapo's,

son was there at a party and they were going to go to arrest him. That is the official story. But when you actually see the video, the GoPro video that was released later on of El Chapo's son's arrest, you can clearly see that they're dumbfounded and just they realize what they just stepped into when he, when the El Chapo's son basically walks out with his hands up, takes out his gun and hands it over to somebody else as he walks out. I mean, if I'm back where when I was active, you know, 28-year-old Ed, wearing a ski mask with my MP5, and I have somebody grabbing onto some gun, I would shoot them, right? That would be my reaction.

But you can clearly see that they identify who's there. They're told who's there. And they start kind of stepping back because they realize how much of a cluster fuck they just walked into. They get orders from the higher-ups to detain him, and they move him to a federal building in Sina Hala, to hold him as a war. wait for a helicopter from the military, probably the Mexican Marines, to extract him and take them to a secure location outside of the state. The thing is that Sinaloa cartel

owns the sky over Kulay Khan. So there's no way you can land a helicopter there without getting blown up, specifically if it involves a high-ranking member of the cartel that runs that area. So they basically did a call-out for every single gun attached to the Sinaloa cartel to surround the city. And they came from everywhere, from all over, from Sonora, from outside of the state, from in the state, people that had no involvement with the enforcement side of it, like people that were just guarding fields and or people that were tending fields were armed and all of them were bust in. The army was trying to do the same, the Mexican army, the Mexican military, feral forces were trying to do the same. So the senior law

Cartel basically sent people to take hostage of all the military family housing barracks in the state, and they took him hostage. And they just outnumbered and outgunned and outnumbered the military there. The president of Mexico, the current president of Mexico, says that he gave the order to let him go. When in actuality from all the people that I've talked to related, they were there, that were a part of it, they said that the guy's holding El Chapo's kid basically just let him go when they saw that there's no. hope, basically. Mm-hmm. They blocked off all the roads, bridges, not the military, the cartel. And you could see them, like, burning cars on bridges so that nobody could get through.

And there'd be, like, a pickup truck with metal welded to the sides of it, kind of, like, makeshift armored turret with a 50-cal machine gun. And there were everywhere. Yeah. It looked like Afghanistan or something. It was a very clear expression to show a force from the cartels, and as far as how much they can muster as far as armed people and how they own a state. I mean, they own that state. The army retreated. There's no ifs, ands about it. The army retreated from that situation.

And I posted a bunch of videos on my Instagram feed. Interestingly enough, a few of them were kind of like shadow banned because... How do you know if your shadow band? What is that? First of all, a lot of people don't know what that is. Instagram blocks certain content off people's search bars. So if people were following me, those didn't show up in their feed if they were searching. Or they would click on it and they would click on my feed and that specific thing would seem like I archived it and it wasn't showing up. Odd thing happened during that whole thing. It made it a point not to show specific violence. I just wanted to show videos of the army going in and out of the city and some of the 50-Cal technicals moving around the city and stuff like that.

But if people want to look for them, I managed to repost some of them, so they're still there. But you can clearly see a video of the Mexican Army leadership, shaking hands with the cartel guys, basically coming to a gentlemanly agreement to not engage. Right. There's a few of those that I posted up that people are like, I have the advantage of having a few generations of federal police and state police and local police that have trained when I was still active and I still worked for the government and I still did training for the government. So my DMs and my WhatsApp get lit up when something like that happens.

And I always get all of the videos get sent my way. That's how I get all the information mostly. To somebody like me that was in it, it was shocking to see such a display of force. By a group that is clearly completely detached from many sort of government leadership as far as what they're doing. imagine a criminal group like that taking over L.A. And having the U.S. military send in people and then retreat. Just imagine that, you know? That would be mind-blowing to people.

Even for the police to retreat is mind-blowing. The army would never even and should never even be there in the first place. But the police, at that point, the LAPD has already been defeated. And then the military comes in and they go, you know what, these guys have too many guns. We're out of here. We're going back. I think it's posse cummatitis or something like that. It's called when, you know,

there's, the military shouldn't be involved until there's a policy cummatis and, and then the military can intervene. But in Mexico, I think that's, there's people screaming for the military not to be involved. And I think it's a national security type of issue now. It's a civil war from the sound of it, man. Yeah. It's a civil war where the leadership on the military side has been clearly found to be compromised by the people that they're fighting. So the reason why the raid for old Chappo was done by the Mexican Marines and not by the Mexican Army special forces is because, the Mexican Army Special Forces are no longer to be trusted by U.S. law enforcement and government. They don't trust them anymore because they are clearly aware of how corrupted that organization is.

So they decided to bet everything on the Mexican Marines. And now we live in a day and age when some of these Mexican Marine units have been clearly found to be indulging in abduction for ransom. There were a few of them found guarding a high-level Senaloa cartel operative in Sena. you know, with all their equipment. So, you know, who can you trust, you know, and who's in the middle, the citizenship? The citizenship that doesn't have a second amendment, a citizenship that doesn't have a clear voice or any sort of trusted political establishment that they can influence or move with any sort of a power or influence. And a bordering superpower to the north that seems to not want to really audit what the money that they are sending down to Mexico

is doing. So it's a hopeless place to be in. I assume you got asked to work for the cartel when you were working the police unit. I mean, does everyone get asked kind of early on? Like, hey, what are you going to do? There's always people inside will tell you, hey, Ed, you want to, you know, there's a side job. Do you want to do that? It's like, no, I'm good, you know. Or you can indirectly be working for a cartel by having the director of whatever unit you're working for basically say, well, we're going to go after these guys over here, but not these guys over here. You don't know why he's doing that because that's above your pay grade, but clearly, I never took anything that was in mine.

I never indulge in any of that. Yeah, people around me were corrupted. People around me were compromised. I was drug tested sporadically during the year. I had FBI background checks done on me constantly when I went through my certification process. I was certified by a U.S.-based police certification company called Kalea. My organization that I worked with was one of the first ones in the country, if not the only one that it was actually certified by a U.S.-based certification process. To make sure you guys weren't corrupt.

Yeah, because we had access to liaisons that would share information with us, so they wanted to verify we were trustworthy. Even with all that, every now and then you would then find out that the guy that you worked with like two years was on the take, and he was arrested and you saw him on the news, and all of us had to change phones, that type of stuff. Eventually, it got to a point in my career where politics changed. Like they always do, Mexico goes through six-year president comes in, then he goes out, and then another party comes in. Mexico is in a two-party system place like the U.S. We actually have some sort of a multi-party system going on where different parties have actually been taking power in Mexico.

But every six years, basically everything gets tossed into the garbage as far as whatever was successful doesn't matter if it's attached. of the past political system. It's... They just burn the manual, huh? Just start over. So that's what happened to the group that I work with in a way. I got basically called into an office told that all the people that were in charge were no longer in charge and the new people that were in charge were clearly working for an organization. Clearly because they're driving cars that are worth more than three years of their salary?

Or like, how do you know? People just know, you know? People just know that some of the people that came in were seen in Lawo Cartel guys or New Generation Cartel guys. It's like a spoken secret, you know. And it got to a point where I was told, basically, you want to work or you want to leave. I left. Here's a trailer with Charles Rue here on the Jordan Harbinger show. When I was 14, I got my first opportunity to escape North Korea and go to China.

Police camp to our house. We are getting deported to North Korea. I got transported to a detention center. They are brainwashing us for nine months. I started working in a coal mine while I was paid only in rice. So one morning, instead of entering the mine, I walked up the path and began running. And in the distance, I saw a train come to stop. This is my chance. I need to get on that train.

I finally made it to the border town. I'm already determined the next day, right? I walked into the river that divides North Korea and China, which is Yellow River. And then I slowly walked into the water. I slipped on a rock and I lit out a screen. A floodlight was on my back. and I heard a soldier screaming at me. Oh, man.

Yeah, this sattie, an dorova. Stop, stop, stop. But I would shoot. The guard was kept screaming in me, but he never filled the trigger. And then I went into the cornfield. I'm in China now. So I embarked another long journey to South East Asia. I got to Thailand.

That was the best day of my life, going to Thai prison. And then I was trying to apply for South Korea, but they didn't recognize me as refugee. And they're like, we would have to send you back to China. Chinese government sent me back to North Korea, but you guys don't want to help me. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. He escaped the police. He had to run with secret police in China. I mean, this guy just has an absolutely amazing sense of survival and story.

And that's episode 84 with Charles Rue, Confessions of a North Korean escape artist, part one and part two. Episode 84 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Make sure you check it out. All right, we're going to wrap part one here. Part two comes out in a few days, or depending on when you're listening, is already out. go check that out. Links to everything Ed does will be in our show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. If you buy anything from any of our guests, please do use the links in our show notes. Worksheets for this episode are in the show notes. Transcripts for this episode are in the show notes.

And there's a video of this interview going up on our YouTube channel at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram or hit me on LinkedIn. I love hearing from you there. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and man. relationships, using systems, using tiny habits over at our six-minute networking course. The course is free. It's all the same stuff I use to grow my business, to grow my personal life, to make sure I don't lose touch with my friends and family. That's all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Dig the well before you get thirsty. And all the guests you hear on the show, they contribute to the course in some way. So come join us. You'll be in smart company.

This show is created in association with Podcast 1. My amazing team is Jen Harbinger. Yes, that's my wife, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Ian Baird, Millie Ocampo, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know someone interested in drug cartels, the occult, law enforcement, Mexico, corruption,

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