The Underworld Podcast - She Hunted Down the Zetas Cartel Members Who Killed Her Daughter

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

When members of the fearsome and brutal Zetas cartel kidnapped her daughter, Miriam Rodriguez did what they asked and paid the ransom. But it wasn't enough, and she never saw her daughter again. Fed up with a lack of help from the police, she went on a one-woman crusade for justice, tracking down the men responsible for killing her daughter by any means possible. New York Times reporter Azam Ahmed joins us to talk about his new book, Fear is Just a Word, about Miriam Rodriguez and the quest for hard to find justice again Mexico's cartels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Especially since the Gulf Cartel fractured a few years earlier when their enforcement winged, the incredibly brutal, even by cartel standards Zetas, turned on them. them and formed their own cartel. That led to, I guess, what you could call a civil war. See, in the border cities of Mexico, it's basically whack-a-mole. One city gets hot because the cartel who controls it gets put on its back footing, and then all hell breaks loose. But someone else eventually takes control, and things can calm down considerably. I mean, just Google Juarez, Rebirth, Juarez, most dangerous city, Juarez, all that stuff, and you'll see what I mean. Still, the border towns and border towns in general, there were desperate people do desperate things.

Miriam Rodriguez is one of those people, and she feels as if she's got nothing to lose as she tucks a pistol into her pants, a 38, and goes looking for a Zeta's killer known as the florist. See, Miriam is on the hunt, and she's hunting the most dangerous prey of all, not just men, but cartelmen, soldiers, killers, specifically the men who killed her daughter, disappeared her, as has happened to so many others in Mexico in the last few decades at the hands of sociopathic cartel members. She tried the legal way, tried with the police, the appropriate channels, tried to get them to do something, anything,

to get some semblance of justice for her daughter. But she's a nobody, no power, no money. So she decided to take matters into her own hands, and she went looking for the men who did this to her daughter and took away everything she had. Little by little, she pieced together who they were. Then she pieced together where they were. Who would suspect a middle-aged woman in costume as a census worker or just being a middle-aged woman, walking around, asking questions, sussing things out?

She didn't shy away from the electronic stuff either, right? Even though she's middle-aged, scrolling social media feeds, tracking girlfriends, maybe finding out where they worked so she could wait around and see when their cartel boyfriend showed up and then get a beat on them. They had kidnapped her daughter only two years earlier, demanded a ransom, and even when she paid it, they didn't release her and she never saw her again. And she wanted retribution, and she set out to get it. Some of the men, they ended up in prison.

Others killed. Miriam wasn't some Reddit detective trying to solve some serial killer case based on online clues. She was out there in this. streets, taking on the Zetas under plentiful death threats and not stopping. The florist was still out there, though. Miriam had even known him as a little kid. But then he went the way of too many teenagers and young men of Mexico.

He got involved in the life, and then he was different. Now, she was different, and she was finally closing in on him. This is the Underworld Podcast. Welcome back to another episode of the Underworld Podcast, the audio experience where two journalists who have reported all over the world, myself Danny Gold, and my illustrious co-host, Sean Williams, take you the listener on a journey through global organized crime. As always, bonus episodes on patreon.com slash genderworld podcast,

where you can sign up on iTunes or even Spotify if you check the banner on our page. Today is a bit of a special situation for the podcast. I actually had a pretty big interview with a pretty big dude that fell through. that I think was going to be something pretty special. We're going to do an episode on it, but yeah, just didn't work out. So instead, we have a special episode with Azam Ahmed about the story you heard in the cold open because he is the one who quite literally wrote the book on it. It just came out.

We're going to talk about it a lot in this episode. This was supposed to be for the Patreon. It's typically the sort of thing you'll hear on there. If you sign up, there's plenty of injuries we have going back. But we're going to run it as a full episode because, you know, that's what we got. and it's a fantastic story. His mic was not great, so the sound is a little off, but we'll be back next week with our normal episodes.

And who knows, maybe I'll tell the story of what exactly went wrong and who I was supposed to meet for that episode. Also, if you want more on the Zetas, if you go back maybe 10 or so episodes, we have a whole episode on their entire story from beginning to kind of the ends. But anyway, enjoy this episode.

So we are joined today by a very special guest. He is the international investigative correspondent from the New York Times. He was based in Afghanistan, based in Mexico. Azam Ahmed, say hello to everyone. Hi, thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks so much for joining us. You have this incredible new book out, and it's one of these things where I think people know bits and pieces of the story, and I've seen it, you know, pop up on like,

Reels and on TikToks that, like, don't do it justice at all, but you've kind of written the definitive. in-depth investigation of this. And I think you broke the story as well in international media. So can you just kind of tell us a little bit about the book and just, you know, a brief summary of the story itself? Sure. The book focuses on the story of a woman named Miriam Rodriguez,

mother of three, who was selling hats and cattle, a merchant in a small border town near Texas. And in 2014, her daughter is kidnapped by one of Mexico's most violent cartels. And, you know, as any parent would do, She pays ransom to the kidnappers. She does everything they say. And when she doesn't get her daughter back, she goes to the authorities looking for help. But of course, it's Mexico, and so the authorities do nothing.

And she slowly kind of just transforms from this, you know, average mom and merchant into this angel of vengeance. And she starts to track down members of this cartel one by one to figure out what they did with her daughter and how it happened. So, literally, several of them have wind up dead and several wind up in. prison as she goes on this quest. Yeah, and I think it's just this, this remarkable story of one woman that just like doesn't listen to, you know, common sense. She's going after it's the, you know, we've talked about the Gulf cartel. We've talked about the Zetas. You know, people, people I think, that listen to this podcast are aware of just how dangerous it is in Mexico to stick your head out when it comes to doing anything with the cartels. And this is a mother who just isn't going to listen to

it. And yeah, we'll get to, we'll get to the consequences that play out with all that. But how did you, how did you come across the story and what made you decide to write a book on it? So I, I was actually working on a totally different project in 2017. I was looking into the illicit use of spy, which everybody now knows, Pegasus in Mexico by the government. And I saw a blur about an activist who had tracked down her daughter's killers. It was just a small blurb, and I looked everywhere for more detailed information than it just wasn't any. Nobody had really done a proper story identifying what she'd done or saying exactly how she had done it. I remember thinking, that's extraordinary. It was in a small local newspaper. So it was kind of an

asterisk, extraordinary of true. And in the following year, I actually went up to her hometown and started to meet with some of her family members to try and figure out what exactly had happened and whether it was valid information. Turned out it was. So I spent the next several, months going back and forth. This town is called San Fernando's, very close to the Texas border, in the state of Tamolipas. It's about an hour away, out and a half away from the U.S. And what's the history, you know, when it comes to cartel-wise and drug war-wise, in that region where she is and where she was kind of doing these investigations? Yeah, it's a great question. When I started to do this book, so you would ask me before

I didn't answer why did I want to do this book? So I wrote this article that was very, very kind of like, it was a very action-packed story about this woman's quest to find the people who kidnapped and then ultimately killed her daughter. In the way when she kind of took justice into her own hands, because there was a broken law, nobody was willing to help her. And I remember at the time when I decided to write the book, what I wanted to do was answer the question, you know, spoiler alert, ultimately Miriam Rodriguez is killed by the very same cartel that she essentially dismantles in her hometown. She pushes them so far and so hard

that they wind up killing her on Mother's Day as a statement, which of course sets in motion, a whole other chain of events that the book culminates in, but I remember thinking, how is it possible that a mother, for the simple act of looking and seeking justice for her kidnapped and murdered daughter, can be killed herself?

How does a place come to be so broken? And I've written about Mexico for six years at the bureau chief of the New York Times of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. I found like it only gotten at that glancing blows. We all sort of assume that impunity and corruption of these forebond conclusions, these like endemic qualities to Mexico. But that's not true. You know, Mexicans are as wonderful and brilliant and honorable as anybody else. But when you have systems that create that, that's when you get this toxic environment where something like this can happen. So I wanted to trace that back to its origins as much as I could.

And I was fortunate in that Tamolipas, the site where this incident happened, and the Seta cartel, the cartel that actually kidnapped and killed Miriam Rodriguez's daughter, came from this place. And you can trace the origins of the Siphas back all the way to the early 1900s in post-revolutionary Mexico. When a cartel knew as the Gulf Cartel would subsequently be known as the Gulf Cartel, but when this cartel began forming post-revolution and smuggling alcohol in the United States during the great prohibition era.

So there's an inherent irony already. This cartel forms because of an American prohibition. Just as this cartel flourishes because of different American prohibition today. So the Gulf Cartel becomes this juggernaut of smuggling things into the United States. Tobacco, alcohol, car parts, electronics, anything you want,

they were getting it across the border into the United States and back. Come the 60s and the 70s, there's a handover at the cartel, and all of this is kind of chronicle in the book through the three kind of pioneering leaders of this particular cartel. And the second leader of this cartel decides, what are we doing with all these small-time products?

Why aren't we smuggling cocaine? It coincided with other routes for cocaine in the United States being shut down. So this goes from being a multi-million dollar business to a multi-billion dollar business. Because suddenly, you have these incredibly rich smuggling networks. You have incredibly rich political protections, essentially like a marriage between the state and organized crime that's happening in Tamilitas. And that means that you now have a cartel infrastructure that is financed to the teeth. Finally, you have this third individual who takes that infrastructure and then adds one element to it.

And that is, there's an inversion that happens. Post-revolution, the government was the most important entity in the entire country. They were basically an autocracy in all but name. So organized crimes sort of worked for them and were on their payroll in some ways. It was smuggling and whatnot. It happened with the nod and smile of the government itself. But as the 2000s started to approach, there was an inversion. Democracy started coming into Mexico. This party lost for the first time, which then suddenly these cartels didn't have bosses anymore. They were kind of in charge of what was going on

themselves, and they were financed to the teeth. And there was no law enforcement structure really capable of stopping them. And that particular cartel formed the group known as the SIPAs, which was basically the leader of the Gulf cartel saying, you know what, the new currency of power is violence. It's no longer your connection with the government. It's no longer how much product you can move. It's how much violence you can inflict because there's no one here to stop us. So we hired a bunch of Mexican special forces soldiers

to sort of initially be his Praetorian Guard, and they were known as to Sissetas. That group grew and expanded until they became the armed wing of the Gulf cartel. And then ultimately, around the time the book starts in 2010, the Gulf Cartel and the set to split and that redefines violence in Mexico forever because you suddenly have militarized violence on the streets and these guys are fighting and the government has no choice to militarize their response to that violence and combat in the surface. Sorry, it was long-winded. No, that was great. And we've talked a lot and, you know, we did a full episode on the Zetas

a couple months ago and just sort of it wasn't just that they were these well-trained, some of them by the American forces, you know, special forces guys, but they also brought the brutality, it seems like, to a whole different level when it comes to just the way that they killed people, the people they were willing to kill. You know, how present was that in this area when Miriam's daughter is killed? The jurors sat in a dark room, hands resting on a Ouija board. They weren't guessing. They were asking the victim who killed them.

Sounds unbelievable, right? But it happened. And that's just one of thousands of stories waiting for you on Morning Cup of Murder. Hi, I'm Karina B. B. Dürfer. And every single day on Morning Cup of Murder, I bring you a real, chilling true crime story connected to that exact day in history. From Killer Cannibal Brothers to the Boy Scout who was obsessed with the occult and the strange story of the bloody hammer in the frozen cabin. These aren't the cases you've heard a hundred times. They're the ones that make you stop and think, how have I never heard this before? With over 2,500 episodes and a brand new story each and every single day, Morning Cup of Murder becomes part of your routine fast.

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What these guys would do would dehumanize, deface people, do these grisly, horrific things to terror flying. You know, they were terrorists in that respect, because it would completely, like, just terrorize the local population so they wouldn't stand up. But it would also essentially freeze in fear any of their enemies because they would, you know, they would turn people into human scarecrows. You know, they would disembowel, they would make their captives fight to the death. They were doing medieval things. in some ways because they realized if you were the scariest, you can avoid a lot of the consequences of violence

because people would just not want to fight you. So that was, I'll put it like this, the two instances that really put the sentence on the map in Mexico and made them public enemy number one for the Mexican state were 2010 the mass murder of 72 migrants that occurred when they were basically kidnapped off of buses, taken to a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, and executed one by one.

One of the individuals managed to escape and alert the Mexican Marines who then discovered these bodies, and obviously that was how this was discovered. That just kind of changed all the rules. Nobody had seen that level of atrocity in Mexico for quite a long time. And then the following year, in the same sort of way, people began being taken off of buses heading north towards the United States and buried in mass graves all along the periphery of San Fernando.

up to at least 200 people before they stopped counting that were uncovered from these mass graves. So one year after the next, you were sort of, you know, besting your own atrocities. And that was the context in which Mary and Rodriguez was struggling to find her daughter. What is the situation there now? Have you kept up with a bit? I know you're based in Portugal now, but is there? And, you know, these border towns, like these border cities unfortunately changed so quickly in terms of who's in charge or what the violence level is, you know, is it still?

Zeta does have pretty much faded, you know, their power, right? Yeah, the Siphas are a shadow of their former self. I mean, one data point that I put in the book is that a source with an high-ranking intelligence official in Mexico told me, they killed something like 2,000 seconds from 2011 until 2015. I mean, the Mexican military just went on a rampage. If you look like Azeda, talk like Azeta, you might as well have been a Zeta because you were getting smoked. And they kept a tally, and it was 2000 because they just, they couldn't allow that to happen again in their mind. They're not exactly been on the rule of law themselves.

So they eradicated a lot of what was the power behind the SEPTAs. Now, these groups, they're like corporate entities, right? They change names, they rebrand, and suddenly they're someone else. So there's like the SETA's SETA's SEPA's Svilla. There's other, you know, SETA's groups, spin-offs that still exist in TAMOLITAS. But the dominant group that you and I are talking about, the one that was operational in almost every state in Mexico, and like threatened to be the predominant group in the entire country,

they no longer exist. I actually realized we've gone this far. We happen to the title of the book, which is fear is just a word. So I think it just came out. You guys can get that almost anywhere. Definitely look it up if you're interested in the story. Kyrkus, I think, called it a harrowing expose

years in the making of the tyranny of the drug cartels in Mexico. And one of the things that you go into as well is, you know, how the cartels are basically military forces that are just like, for lack of a better term, almost the governments of these areas that they, they're in charge of. Can you kind of speak on that a little bit? Sure. I mean, I think of them more than governments almost as businesses. They are crude businesses that regulate their market with violence, right? They're sort of in

the black market. And so contract enforcement, you know, supply, et cetera. All of that is enforced through violence. They end up taking over these areas in lieu of local government. And so they do end up becoming a de facto government force, but they're not providing citizen services, right? I mean, they're essentially just they're like legions. They're sort of a parasite that preys off in the host body. And they pray off of it so much, they almost kill it, but they don't want to kill it. They don't want a completely lawless place where nobody lives because they still need these places in order to survive. It used to be that a lot of these cartels were just smuggling things. These were routes and passages.

What was unique about the citizens, which I'm sure your listeners know, is that, They decided to actually prey on those localities. And that really changed the dynamic, which meant that they were in charge of security, which meant that they knew what was going on black by block, who was operating where. They picked out who they were going to target and who they were going to kidnap for ransom,

which businesses they were going to extort, which highways they were going to place tolls on. And so it's almost like if a government did nothing but evil stuff, that's their role in governance. It's kind of figuring out every facet of a society that they can squeeze to remorate themselves. Yeah, they weren't big on the whole, you know, hearts and minds. That was not a Zeta's sort of objective.

Those are you guys who can learn something from the Taliban. How does, and you weren't, well, we'll talk about Afghanistan a little bit later on. I don't want to switch subjects too quickly. How does Miriam's daughter, Karen, how does she sort of get wrapped up in a situation where she gets preyed on by the cartels? I think one of the things that was important to me in this book is not just to do some book that's just a parade of horrors, you know, just one terrible thing after the next, which doesn't get into the human context of this, because the scariest part is these are all functional normal human beings placed in an extraordinary context in which they changed themselves. So Karen was a young girl who was struggling with the prospect of her parents' divorce, and she'd grown up in this world of utter privation, where violence had afflicted. her town or going out was no longer allowed with a simple, like, fun, you know, let's go out

to a movie, let's go get dinner and ice cream or whatever, things that kids do, they couldn't even do it because there were curfews. You know, the Zetas basically said everybody, by sundown is, you know, goes home. Someone, you know, it's like a zombie movie or something where the shutters are being drawn and doors are being closed and lock as soon as the sun starts to set, because people are that terrified. So she grew up in this madness, this sort of anger. And like any kid, kind of got rebellious, coupled with her parents impending divorce and separation, she just started to act out. That meant going out. That meant socialized. That meant, you know, going to parties and drinking because there was still some social life left in San Fernando. And of course, it's a

small town. You're talking 20,000 and 30,000 people. You know, everybody is hanging out together. You know, people know the people that are kidnapping. People know who's in the gangs, who's not in the gangs, whether they know them personally or not because you just see them every day. And so she ran into these people. She didn't necessarily make friends with them, but she knew who they were. And more importantly, they knew who she was. And just that, that brush, you know, that simple brush with those personalities and that population had the wrong time kind of spelled disaster for her. And I often think about our childhoods, right? I'm sure there are people you probably shouldn't have hung out with that you did for a while, and then you grow up. You grow out of it. You think better

of it. You go to college, whatever it is you do. She had a few months of that before it was already too late. Yeah, there's, um, you know, it's not the only place where it is, but there's very little room for the kind of typical mistakes that teenagers make and bounce back from when you're in a place like that. And, uh, there's just no room for error. Ever anywhere, anywhere, not anywhere, but a lot of places in the States, you know, you can make those errors.

You can bounce back. It's not going to end up with you disappearing. Exactly. And, um, obviously it does here and there. But there, it just seems like there's no room for error in. Yeah, the price is high. Price is time. So Miriam, as you discussed, sets out to sort of track down the people that were involved with her murder, that did it.

What does she do? What sort of tactics does she using? Because this just sounds, you know, it's an unbelievable story of a middle-aged woman going after what at that point was the, you know, deadliest, scariest, most brutal cartel. Whatever superlive you want to use. And she just gets right on it. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, it's interesting. thing. So why she did it, I think there's a sacred compact that parents have with their kids,

right? Like, we're supposed to die first. And that was broken. And I think there was guilt, there was uploading. There was just this deep reservoir of pain. And I think, unlike most people who in that context, and again, there were 100,000 disappearing people in Mexico, she just kind of, you know, she told her daughter once, you know, I died the day that they took Karen. And, you know, I'm just going to play the rest of my life out, kind of expecting, if not courting death. And so she was like, fuck it, I'm going for these guys. And she began using shoe leather research, you know, just like almost like an investigative journalist or an investigator for, you know, a law enforcement agency.

She started with what she knew. Like, what are these guys nicknames? And she began looking online, wherever she could find the nicknames of the people who she had already encountered, the people who asked her for the bribe, a young man named. Sama S-A-M-A. She spent months doing this, doing nothing but just trawling online, entering her daughter's Facebook account, looking to see if she could find it. And then suddenly, one day, she sees this guy's name pop up. And she sees a picture of him with a woman who's clearly his girlfriend wearing a uniform with, you know, that belongs to an ice cream chain that operated in the state of Tamalipas.

And she starts going, location by location, surveilling every one of those ice cream chains until she finds this girl. And when she finds a girl, She just keeps going back expecting one day this kid Sam is going to show up to pick up his girlfriend. Sure enough, he does. Follows him home, gets the address, goes home that night, basically dyes her hair, puts on a uniform as a health care worker, returns to that neighborhood, by the way, which is an hour away from where she lives, and conducts a mock poll of the entire neighborhood, pretending to be a health care worker just so she can get this kid's real government name, just so that she can put that into the government's file because they're not going to do it.

It's the kind of thing that you would expect an enterprising investigator who was trained and sophisticated to do, but she did it herself. That was just how it started. I mean, from there on, disguises, subterfuge, making friends under false pretenses so you can gather intel, all of that was that were the kind of tactics she was using to make this happen. And she does end up getting some, well, yeah, she ends up getting some measure of justice, yeah? She does.

She does. I mean, there's a big moment in the book where she basically helps lead. a raid by the Marines on the camp where the Settas are operating and where they had had Karen at one point. And then she is involved in the arrest of nine others through the course of the next three years. So she gets justice to a degree. I mean, Mexico being Mexico, the nature in which those arrests are made and the ability to build a case against people once you've arrested them is a whole other question. And unfortunately, she passed away and was no longer able to kind of stage manage this thing

but for sure she did more than just about anybody else has been able to do in that respect and you mentioned the the Mexican Marines and you know from the stuff I've seen and I think you talk about this as well like they're they're actually a pretty effective

force and you know all things considered in Mexico they do seem to well just get things done yeah I mean they get things done to a fault almost there's there's as a shoot first asked question those later kind of approach. And look, in the context in which they are operating, they will tell

you, if you talk to them, like, what are we going to do? We're going to arrest somebody, and then he's going to go to court, and he's going to get out in two days, and then we're going to end up, he's going to end up shooting one of us. So the decision is like, once we know who they are, we just take them out. I mean, I think if we can say anything about the war on drugs in Mexico is that violence meeting violence has not worked, because that has been the approach when Trump and other candidates talk about, you know, militarizing this conflicts. I had to break it to him. It's been militarized.

It's been militarized since 2006 in Mexico. The Mexican Marines are respected because they basically adopt the same ethos of the cartels, but they're operating on the side of the government. When Miriam is sort of launching these investigations, you know, I guess before that local story came out, are people eventually aware of what she's doing? Like, how does Mexican society react to, to, uh, to, permission to what she's done. Very few people are aware outside of her town,

and maybe outside of Tamalipas. She's growing as an activist, and people, you know, she begins to form what's called as collective. These are groups of individual citizens who have had children, loved ones, disappear, who have come together to form sort of a unit. Because in a place like Mexico, nobody hears you if you don't speak with volume.

So the more people you have, the more people who are shared, have a shared sense of purpose, the better it is. So she establishes the first ever collective in San Fernando. And again, just based off of what I'm saying about what happened in 2010 and 2011, that was the central conflict point between the Gulf Cartel and the Senta. So extraordinary violence was inflicted on that town.

By the time she started counting, there were hundreds of people who had been disappeared just in Saffernanda. And those were only the people who she got and agreed to talk to, who agreed to talk to her. So she is well known in San Fernando. She has made connections in and around her state of Tamil Nicos, but she's still not really known nationally by any means. When your story came out, you know, was it after, like your initial story, was it after she had been killed? And, you know, her story of up to that point, was she well known? And then what happens when your story comes out, does she become this national figure? Is it something that politicians speak about, pop culture, anything along those lines?

I think before my story came out, people in time when they could have written things about her. Nobody had, I guess, gotten the level of confirmation or detail or the evolution of what she had done and how she had done it. But people had hit bits and pieces. Whatever your thing, it could be anything. Canva helps you make that thing a thing. Canva is a simple online tool thing. It's a way to design with our magic AI tool things. You can social media your thing, generate images or videos of your thing, make decks for presentations to show your thing.

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But I think broadly, people still only knew the broad strokes of what she had done. People had tons of opinions without having a lot of factual details about what was going on. What do we know about what happens with her murder and the subsequent sort of consequences? Yeah, so basically in 2017 on Mother's Day, the set-las sent a group of hitmen, many of whom, or at least one of them, has came from prison not very long before, to kill her outside of her own home. So they gunned her down in cold blood, just outside of where she lived on the front lawn, basically. And that ignited a crisis within the state of Tamilipas,

because the government was like, okay, they just killed a mother for searching for her disappeared daughter on Mother's Day, who was also an activist in our state, who was also an activist in our state, who was also under the auspices of state protection because she had asked for state protection. So it became this utterly humiliating moment for the state. And they sort of did this big song and dance in this show about how they hadn't done anything wrong, that they were going to go after and pursue the people who are responsible. And, you know, they did kind of the job that they usually do enough to delay sort of the negative press coverage, but not enough to really get to the bottom of it.

Is it possible to get justice in Mexico right now? waited in such a way where the system can be bent to your will. If not, you're really not in a place where you can, to be honest. I mean, you have to do something like what Miriam did. And Miriam just forced this calcified system for the gears to start working and start working in her favor. And she did it through sheer force of will. She did it by cultivating sources within law enforcement,

who she knew wanted to help. She did it by finding intel that they themselves couldn't have because that helped them. She did it by building their cases for them in some ways. And by creating such a big persona that suddenly the system began to help her. And then she created this collective to start to use those skills on behalf of others. But the vast majority of people don't have that. The vast majority of people show up at a government office and are ignored. Or just their names are added to a long pile of people who are suffering some sort of inhuman trauma.

and, you know, the government's kind of helped us to do anything about it. It just sort of did more than anything chronicle their own dysfunction. Prior to coming over to Mexico, you were based in Afghanistan. And, you know, is there, I know it's a very word question to ask. Obviously, the cartels don't have any sort of ideology behind them that you can really point a finger at. But did you see similarities between what was going on in Afghanistan? I mean, you know, they are paramilitary groups. They do, like we said, they operate like a state within a state.

do you see any similarities between what was going on in Mexico and what you saw in Afghanistan and then in terms of reporting on both like how how did you attack each one? I think, yeah, you're right. I mean, the ideology thing is a big difference. The other big difference is the cartels don't want to govern. Taliban always wanted to govern. And that gives them a different set of responsibilities. If they want to govern, they have to show they can govern.

They have to show that they have some value proposition where it's cartels. They just they want to hear. and they want to be able to apply their trade. They have a lot of money with which to do it. I think similarities are organization. They're both extraordinarily organized groups. I think the Taliban, one of the reasons they have been successful in Afghanistan is because of how united they are.

And I think the most successful cartels are the ones to have very clean command and control, where they are extraordinarily organized and the lines of command are really clear. I think they are very clear-eyed about territory and what they can hold and what they cannot. I think for the Taliban and the cartels, there's a similar dynamic wherein they can kind of have control over an area without presenting themselves as in control, if that makes sense. You know when you're in a place with the Taliban or in neutral, not because there's no government or no police officers, but because the government and police officers have this sort of slightly cowed look to them, because they just are, wearing a uniform so that everybody can pretend like it's there doing their jobs. That same kind of thing happened in Mexico, where, you know, the influence was felt more than

seen. That makes sense. Yeah, it is interesting, though, when you think about it, because a lot of paramilitary organizations want to at least try to win some good will, you know, set up social services, do something to sort of prove their worth to the citizens that are essentially under their control. And I guess, you know, with some cartels, we've seen them crack down on, like, extortion attempts of small businesses or, you know, pretend that they're not going to hurt civilians deliberately. But you really don't see that, at least I haven't seen that.

Maybe you have in Mexico where they try to create this sort of, we're better than the government. We're going to take care of this for you. We're going to get the infrastructure up and running. We're going to get you clean water and things like that. Were there examples of that that maybe I've just missed? Not really. No. You're like that. Not at all.

No, I mean, you know what they'll do? And they're pretty, they're pretty actually, for all the horrors that the set that's committed, what they sort of did to the people, a lot of these cartels are pretty deliberate about who they kill, for instance. They don't like to kill innocence, not just because they're nice guys, because they aren't. But like, it's not good for business. You know, they will, if someone is in the neighborhood robbing people, no, they'll warn them. You better, you better knock it off. And if they keep doing it, they'll kill them. And so there's actually not a lot of theft in some of these more organized,

cartel-controlled areas because they don't want to, they call it Calentadentano la Plaza, right? They don't want to heat up the block. They don't want the cops showing up and, like, investigating robberies when they're trying to do something that's far more lucrative, i.e. smuggling items, goods, people, drugs. But no, they haven't done the hearts in mind. I mean, again, you do have instances where anarcho show up and buy everybody a meal. or like, you know, they'll throw a big fiestas and things like that.

But I think so much of that has been driven so underground that there's just not that much interaction with the public populace, at least at the very high levels. Yeah, you think, you know, maybe hand out some turkeys on Christmas or something along those lines, but we're not seeing that. When you came over to Mexico from Afghanistan, obviously you weren't, you weren't someone who was naive or new to violence, right? you had been working in Afghanistan, and I think the region as well, what were you, you know, was it shocking? Like, were you worried at all? Were there things that surprised you? I mean, when I got there, I actually didn't write about violence for a long time.

I didn't, I feel like writing about violence and loss or writing about the disappeared. Because to me, like writing about poverty, it is something that's so important and so vital to move the rear to effectuate some sort of change to stimulate emotional response that bad or lazy writing about it is worse than not writing about it. So I determined not to write about it until I understood a bit more and could situate it, not just kind of due to the sports coverage equivalent of like the Narco Wars. And so what I, what was surprising and shocking to me was the level of corruption and purity, the way that the state operated within the context of Mexico. It was staggering. You go to a new country, and for me, at least, what I try to do is just understand

it on its own terms of what's actually happening here. What is it that, you know, the rest of the world should know about this place and doesn't know about this place, or maybe what is it that we think we know about this place that on reflection, maybe we don't know that well? And I think I've read so much about violence and dysfunction that I just sort of thought it was simply a narco state. And I realized it was actually kind of a klepto state. It was a place where, like, governance and the rule of law were broken, but we're in the ruling class and the political class had no real interest in fixing it. And we're in many ways the cause of it. And so my first several series for the paper out of Mexico were about that corruption. As I was saying in 2017, I did a series

on Pegasus in Mexico. It was all about how the government had purchased the spyware and how there was all this illegal targeting of journalists, human rights lawyers. you know, activists, even myself, who were being targeted illegally with Pegasus, because they didn't want that kind of pushback from external sources, right? They didn't want to be embarrassed publicly and internationally. And when I saw that it was like, holy shit, this is what's actually happening here. It's not just like it's some narcos running wild. And so it took me a while through prison of that to kind of get to where I felt I had something to say about violence. Yeah, I mean, it's unfortunate, you know, like that is essentially what our podcast covers. And Sean and I have talked about this a lot. You know, sometimes you just want to talk about like the fun cultural stuff of a place that you go to, but when you're there specifically to report on something along these lines, like you were not the cartel correspondent. You're not a narco correspondent. You were the Mexico correspondent and I guess Central America as well. But, you know, that's the topic that we that we focus on. Obviously, you know, Mexico is fantastic. And I've spent a fair amount of time.

there. But yeah, I guess that that sort of covers it. I mean, is there anything else about the book you want to add that maybe I didn't ask about? I think, I mean, I just thought I would go into some of the, you know, I, what I hoped set this book apart from your typical cartel narrative is it's trying to do, it's trying to world build in some ways. It's like, here's this cartel and here's this horrible thing that happened. But it's also tracing back through history using national archives and stories about how we sort of got to that place, but also in reconstructing the story itself. I mean, I was leaked a 20,000-page case file,

which allowed me because, obviously, I couldn't interview Marion. She had passed before I ever got a chance to start writing the book. But in that 20,000 pages, it was almost like communing with her. I could get these granular details about moments and things that were happening, and by speusing that with the interviews of over 100 people

involved with her, with the situation, with a broader kind of story, I was able to do something I felt was like a bit more novelistic and a bit more, at least of an attempt to draw down not just the heroin violence, but also personalize it and make a

story about real people in a real place. Well, yeah, definitely people pick that up if you can. Fear is just a word. Where can people find you? Where can they see more of your work? I mean, New York Times. I'm also on X, I hardly ever tweet.

And yeah, the book is available at Random House or any bookseller, Amazon, etc. Thank you so much again for your time and for joining us. And yeah, it is a crazy one. I think it's a story that people, you know, people have started to pick up on. Like I said, I've seen it going across social media here and there, but this is the sort of in-depth, Expo's Day is the wrong term, but it really is just like of what really happened from start to finish. So definitely pick that off.

Thanks so much,