The Underworld Podcast - The Cartel Del Noreste's Kingdom of Terror w/ Andrew Glazer

Episode Date: May 19, 2026

Nuevo Laredo is one of the most feared cartel cities in Mexico, a place where disappearances, gun battles, and corruption became part of daily life as the Cartel del Noreste, or CDN, tightened its grip on the border. Born from the remnants of the brutal Zetas organization, CDN turned the city into a battlefield, fighting for control of smuggling routes into Texas while allegedly terrorizing civilians, journalists, and anyone seen as a threat. The city became so cartel-corrupted that it dismantled its own police force entirely. The documentary film Spring of the Vanishing adds another layer to the story, documenting how U.S.-trained Mexican marines deployed to fight the Zetas instead carried out their own wave of kidnappings and killings of civilians. Director Andrew Glazer pulls back the curtain on a city where families still search for missing loved ones, and where the line between organized crime and the state itself often seems impossible to separate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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January 22nd, 2021, and Tommy Olipas, Mexico. A convoy of six police vehicles rolls out of a station, in Camargo just on the border with Texas, somewhere between 8.30 and 9 in the morning. They stopped to fuel up their gas tanks, and then they head south on dirt roads towards the Rio Grande. They get lost in the dust, and a convoy splits up. Then, over the radio, an urgent call, coded numbers, armed personnel nearby. Not exactly out of the ordinary, because the northeast cartel and factions of the Gulf cartel still operate all along this border. Still, it's not what you want to hear when you're in a police convoy.

The lead vehicle accelerates. The others follow. Then gunshots. One of the officers will later tell investigators he couldn't make out what anyone was shooting at. He heard a commander bark at a gunner, what are you waiting for? Shoot. The gunner said, but I can't see anything. The commander said, just shoot.

There's 19 people in the van that they fire on. 17 migrants, most from a small mountain town in southern Guatemala, and two Mexicans. against smugglers. Investigators would later count 107 bullet holes in the truck. Somehow, some of the migrants are still alive when the shooting stops. An officer walks over to the truck and looks in it. He sees women, some already dead, others wounded. A boy face down on the ground. One of the women reaches out and says, please help me. The officer tells her they're going to call for support. He means it at the time. What happens next, he watches from a few meters away. A colleague walks past carrying a gasoline canister.

There are more gunshots, about 10. The canister is emptied over the truck. A lighter sparks. A piece of burning paper sails into the truck bed, and the whole thing goes up in flames. One line of thinking says that they might have been chasing down the van because the smugglers didn't pay the tax to the Gulf cartel, who the officers were in bed with. Another says that it was CDN smugglers trying to move people through contested territory, and that's why they got lit up.

understand how something like this happens, you have to understand Tamio Lepas. It's a long, flat Mexican state that runs along the southern bank of the Rio Grande, from the scrubbed ends of the west all the way to the Gulf Coast. On the other side of the river, Texas, the busiest drug and human smuggling corridor on Earth. The Northeast cartel, or CDN, controls the prize crossing of Nueva Loretto and its arteries, but various factions of the Gulf Cartel lay claim to Matamoros and Reynosa, two bigger border cities. In these borderlands, the line between cartel and authorities stopped being a line a long time ago, which brings us back to those 24 officers on that dirt road, because they weren't some rogue element, some bad apples. They were the special operations

group of the Tommy Olipa State Police, an elite unit reporting up a chain of command that went all the way to the governor's office, a unit that, by the DEA's own internal memos, was functioning less like law enforcement and more like muscle. Detaining people, handing them over to the cartels, making them disappear. This is the story of a city, a cartel, and a government so tangled together, you can't tell where one ends and the other begins. This is the underworld podcast. Welcome back, everyone, to the B. Welcome back, everyone, to the Best International Organized Crime Podcast in the entire world, the Underworld podcast, hosted by two journalists who have reported on this sort of stuff all over the globe

and now bring you new stories every single week, even when we don't want to. I'm one of your host, Danny Gold. Usually I'm joined by Sean Williams, but he caught a case of what we like to call the Berlin Fever, even though he's in Buenos Aires, Argentina. So he's out this week. I do have a special guest this week. We'll get to that in one second. As always, bonus episodes are available on patreon.com.

as an oral podcast. You can also sign up on Spotify right here in the app or even on iTunes for the low price of $5 a month. Tips and advertising inquiries at the underworldpodcast. At gmail.com. We got a few really good ones in the last few weeks, and I owe some emails, I will get to that. So if you emailed us and you're waiting for one,

getting back to you soon, merch at underworldpod.com and click that merch title to get T-shirts and everything else. Now, my special guest is a journalist, documentary filmmaker, and Matt Sine. scientist Andrew Glazer, whose new documentary film, Spring of the Vanishing, is out now on iTunes? Where else?

On Prime Video. And Fandango, if you knew that was still a thing. Yeah, pretty wild stuff. And I think it's worth pointing out that Andrew here is so old that he used to actually advise me. He was my mentor in a way. He taught me how to do video and doc stuff. When I just started doing video, I had no idea.

He was not very nice about it, but he made me into a champion. But that's how old he is. So, yeah, Andrew, thank you. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having us. I mean, long ago, I did see some promise in you. You were raw and unpolished and energetic and supremely confident, as you still are with those sunglasses, clearly.

But if I had known that you were going to throw away all my training and become a podcaster, I wouldn't have wasted my time. But I'm glad you are because I'm flogging a film right now that I really hope people learn about and see, Spring of the Vanishing. So thanks for having me on. Yeah, I mean, look, you either become a podcaster, or you become a person who has to go on podcast.

That's just what it is right now. You know, I just sort of cut out the middleman and rent right to podcasting. But so I could help out my people that I wanted to. Thank you for doing that. Thank you. So, yeah, tell me, I mean, this documentary takes place in Nueva Laredo, which, you know,

we're going to talk about cartel stuff. We're going to talk about CDM. We've done an episode on them. But just kind of tell me about starting to work there. You've traveled all over the world. You've worked all over the world in conflict zones. What's it like when you start working in, you know, a cartel stronghold like that? Well, I should mention that I shot my last two films in Novo Laredo, and after the first of the two,

which was a film called Bad Ombres for Showtime, I was so glad when I was crossing the bridge for the final time that I would never have to go back anytime soon. And then a few years later, here I was crossing the same bridge. When you cross that bridge, it's really as dramatic as you can get, you're going from a super sleepy, low-crime town Laredo, Texas, in about a quarter of a mile or maybe even less, you're in a cartel stronghold in Nuevo Laredo. So I first started working there in 2018 for Bad Ombres, and have since made, I would say, close to 50 to 80 crossings. And I still get butterflies every time I cross, even when I have a name to drop, which is important because there are various gatekeepers official and unofficial every step along the way

when you get into Norville-Lerado. On my last documentary shoot, the name that I was told to drop was Reimundo Ramos, and I learned quite quickly that his name was an effective name to drop. Tays and Point, our first day on this latest shoot, my cameraman, our former colleague, shout out to Eric Fernandez, and I were crossing the bridge. And immediately after we crossed the bridge, we were sitting on the curb, just a few feet from the Mexican side of the bridge. And the thing that you don't want to happen,

happened. A big, brand new SUV black with tinted windows rolled right up to the curb, uncomfortably close to us. The windows rolled down. And there were two mean-looking guys with shaved heads who asked immediately, where we were from.

And my response was to be as vague and naive as possible. And I just said, I'm from New York. And they just stared back at me for a really long time, making it clear that that was not the full extent of the information they requested. So I did mention after that that I was working with Ramundo Ramos, and they waved, smiled, and said, have a great day, and we're on their way.

So it was clear that that was a good name to drop. Yeah, even like the watchdog, guys. seem to, seem to know him. So I do want to talk a little bit about what the ongoings are in Nueva Laredo or have been the past decade or so, but in general, so, you know, a lot of Mexican border towns, you have a lot of Americans going over there for fun, for doctors, whatever. Is that not the case in Nueva Laredo? It was until early 2000s, 2006, 2007. Until then, it was definitely a place where people would pop over and hang out at the bars. There's actually an interesting place called the Sona de Tolerencia, which is a big red-like district that's surrounded

by walls and is now run by the cartel. I think our usual Kohoshana Williams is intimately familiar with that, and every other red-like district in Mexico, basically. Yeah, it was founded during the, when the military, when there were military bases nearby and it was safe for off-duty GIs to pop over and have some drinks, enjoy the company of some women, and, party. It's still there, but it's getting less traffic from the U.S. these days. But the main strip, which is really one of the main strips is right when you cross the bridge, there are some pharmacies there for people who want to pick up cheap and unprescribed Xanax and other medications. By some people, do you mean yourself?

No, but I have to say that I did work with a camera person who was not Eric Fernandez, who, when we were rolling some B-roll on the street, this was in the first film I did, just left the camera on the tripod went and bought some Xanax and other products and then came out without interrupting his shot. Sounds like a professional to me. Yeah, he was true pro. So yeah, let's do a brief intro into the ongoing Zinaueva Loretto right now. Let me give some background on it and the whole cartel thing.

Basically right now, the Northeast cartel, otherwise known as the CDN is in charge, like really in charge. We're talking basically they run the city. We did an episode on them last year, but a quick refresher. They're basically the aftermath of Los Zetas, who I'm sure all of our listeners recognized by now. The Mexican Special Forces soldiers turned Cartel Sicarios, I think first for the Gulf Cartel, and then they became their own thing and were sort of very well known for their levels of proficiency in military tactics and their levels of brutality. Here's a short clip from Andrew's film that kind of goes into the history a bit.

The speaker here is Guadalupe Correa. Am I saying that right? Yes. Who literally wrote the book on the Zetas called Las Zetas Inc. Then Osir Karenaz Guillen became the leader of the Gulf Cartel. He met some members of the federal police that were doing anti-narcotics operations. They were former members of the Mexican army that were trained in counterinsurgency operations because of the conflict that had taken place in southern part of Mexico, the Zapatista movement.

And this is how the SETA started. First, working for Osiel Karna Zillen as the guard of the drug lord and then were sent to protect Nueval Aredo by the Gulf Cartel. And Los Zetas changed the phase of organized crime in Mexico. The SETAs were so violent. They were performing extortion, kidnapping, beheadings and all sorts of violent acts that were unprecedented in the life of Mexico. So Los Zetas, they broke away in the 2000 and formed their own cartel, which became known for their sheer love of violence and paramilitary tactics, basically changing the game in Cartel lands.

The CDN forms around 2014, 2015, when the Zetas, who have been undergoing a period of fracturing when, you know, the usual cartel growing pains break up into multiple factions. The CDN is the bigger faction that kind of wins the territory, I guess you could say. and they follow the Zetas path of just brutal violence, torture, acid dissolving, fun stuff like that, along with developing these sort of paramilitary shock troop wings. They're real go-getters, I think you could say. And the crazy thing is, when they break off from them, they represent the more violent insane wing of the Zetas, which is saying a whole lot. They break away essentially because another faction of the Zetas takes issue with the fact that they've gone

just completely psychotic and out of control. And that's psychotic for, like I said, a Mexican drug cartel. And not just any Mexican drug cartel, the one that was known for being hyperbient. I feel like I'm stressing this a lot, but it's because it's reality. If I could just interject for a sec, there's suspicion that because their Zeta's roots were in counter-narcotics operations for the Mexican military, that some of them may have actually been trained in the United States. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we talked about that. Yeah, yeah. I think they, I think some of them were, I mean, when the U.S. went over, over there, didn't they train with some of the guys who eventually made up? Is that, is that a known thing or is that only, that's only suspicious? Guadalupe, who I consider the foremost expert on the Zetas, doesn't say it with full, complete confidence, but it's very, there's a lot of suspicion

that there were Zetas trained, pro pro-pre Zetas. Yeah, yeah, when they were with the Mexican Infestrian. They were trained in Fort Benning in the United States. So I always assumed that was, maybe it was assumed that they were trained in Mexico, but I always assumed that was like a known thing. I had no idea that.

it was debatable. Yeah, I think at least maybe the Ford Benning training. But yeah. Okay. So they basically, when they first formed this faction, the CDN, they're led by Z40, who you guys know Los Zetas, their original guy, Z1, I think, through Z something, but they all received numbers, I think, based on hierarchy or something along those lines. This guy's name is Miguel Trevino, Trevino, right, with the end with the little thing, Morales,

who was an early Zetas member and leader. who was captured around that time they first broke away, right? His brother, known as Z-42, takes over. And the Trevino Morales family, they basically run the show and still run the show, I think, in the CDN. You've got brothers, cousins, uncles, I think an aunt's involved. It's a real family affair. And there was almost like a cult-like following amongst people

who were a part of CDN with that family. And 2014, 2015, that's when they give themselves this name, the Cartel de Noresta, the Northeast Cartel, and we have the birth of this new notorious cartel on our hands. Z-42 is captured soon after and that a different Trevino Morales, his nephew, Juan Francisco El Quico, Trevino Chavez, takes over along with help from an aunt and his dad,

and sort of goes, I think, he gets captured relatively soon, but there's a cousin or uncle always stepping in. I think, what do we just do an episode on 3-3? Oh, El Mancho and CJ and G, these sort of like big, and the cartel before them, the Valencia clan, it's like these big, a lot of the cartels are these sort of big family clans that you really don't think of them as these affairs, but, you know, 40, 50, 60 members. And, you know, you'll have 15 or 20 people in the same family that are in the higher ups of these

cartels. It's really wild. So, Nueva Loretto, when the Northeast Cartel official declaration comes, they make the city their base of operation, their stronghold. And they really take it over, right? They're basically a quasi-government of sorts. They expand outward into other areas in the northeast of Mexico and establish contact in Colombia and parts of Central America,

but they're really a localized cartel. And whoever Loretto, the city, in the state of Tamio Lipas, it's the reason the CDN can exist and fight off bigger, more well-known cartels. It's the busiest crossing from the U.S. to Mexico, the most valuable piece of real estate along the border. Although I feel like that kind of goes, doesn't it change the most busiest?

It is still the busiest as far as commercial traffic, which makes it super easy to smoke. Everyone, you know, talks about the drug smugglers somehow carrying it across the border on their bodies. Yeah. Much more volume of narcotics is coming through on the trucks, which they think they, I can't remember what the figure is, but they check like less than 1% of every truck that's passing through. If they did otherwise, it would just slow down commercial traffic to a standstill. And you also told me before we started filming that they also don't check camera equipment. Yeah, well, sort of yes and no, actually.

So we, one of my greatest, you know, I talked about the butterflies I have crossing the bridge into Mexico. Part of that is because I'm going into a place that's kind of scary. And part of it is the arbitrariness of the customs officials that are meeting you when you get across into Mexico. And so we are carrying across, sometimes wheeling on a cart, $200,000 worth of camera equipment, which if we got the proper declarations and documents would mean nothing. So we didn't bother doing it, and we just hoped for the goodwill of the customs agent. And it worked probably dozens and dozens of times. And one time a guy just stared at us and said, wear your papers with the clear intent of either shaking us down for a bribe or taking away our equipment.

And suddenly my Spanish got really bad, and I just stared at them like an idiot for a really long time until he got bored and just waved us through. So they don't always check camera equipment, but this one guy did. and that kind of reinforced a lot of concerns we had of losing our cameras to the supposed good guys. Still probably safer than taking camera equipment into Oakland. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, they don't like reporters there.

But they do like reporters because they give them- CREETT cameras, yeah. Yeah, there's like no one, we should do an episode on that. It was a thing for a while, I mean, even when I was out there, years ago, they're stealing all the cameras guys, yeah. Yeah, they'd follow them and just take everything. Okay, so CDN basically has total near-control. of Nueva Laredo.

It's so pervasive that in 2019, gasoline stations in the city are forced to refuse service to police and military vehicles under threat, forcing authorities to ship and fuel from outside the city. Unlike, say, CJ&G or Cinelloa cartel when they have operations in other areas,

the CDN directly controls the city rather than just allying with local gangs to operate. Quote, the Northeast cartel decides what's permitted and what isn't, said one government official. This includes a total ban on robberies carjackings and assaults, as well as consumption and sales of synthetic drugs like methamphetamine, and I think fentanyl, too. Member settled disputes as small as local neighborhood disagreements and hand-down punishments.

So that's when I'm actually forgetting who I quoted there, but we should give them credit at some point. But yeah, that's how when you're talking about settling local disputes, that's very different from other massive cartels who usually don't bother with that sort of stuff. That means that, like, you know, it's quasi-government. So paramilitary government, basically, and they're still kind of. fighting with the remnants of the Gulf cartel and another faction of the Zetas known as the old

school Zetas. Famously in 2022, the CDN attacks the entire city after their leader is grabbed, like we saw in Puerto Vallarta when Mention was killed. But yeah, it's still not a really well-known cartel. It's not nearly as big as the remnants of Sinola or Halisco New Generation, but in Nueva Laredo, where you were filming,

they are in complete control. Can you talk a little bit more about the city itself kind of set the scene for us? Yeah, I mean, in your last episode about the CDN, which I thought was great. You talked about their sort of overt wars that they fight and extreme violence that they carried out, both as CDN and Zetas. Right now, it is not always like that. There are flare-ups, but since the really bad old days of 2006, 2007, when Novo Laredo was one of the most dangerous places on Earth, and that was during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, things have

feel calmer day to day. There used to be raging wars in the streets between rival cartels, between the cartels and the police, between the cartels, police, and military. And there was horrible violence against civilians to kidnappings, as you said, beheadings, car bombs. Today, there is a sense of relative calm.

People are going about their business. Oftentimes, you'll see people out in the streets in restaurants and stores. When you don't, it's a pretty clear sign that the local community knows something's going on and that we should follow suit and be a little less overt with our filming. But it's important to note the impact of the bad years of extreme violence, which lasted until maybe 2012, 2013, is that the city is in many places just pretty dead, as we talked about.

Also, it's important to note that there's no more local police. The police were disbanded back in the early days and haven't recovered. So the authorities are the state police who come in once in a while, and you see them with big pickup trucks and 50 cows mounted in the balaclavas. The military, which includes now the National Guard,

and occasionally the Marines, which was the focus of our film. And also the CDN themselves. And sometimes they're indistinguishable. You'll see the CDN, Tropa del Inferno, the shock troops, kind of the patrols, going about in the same vehicles that the military and the state police go in. The only way you can really tell the difference is the stamp on the side of the truck, which is the CDN logo, which is always pretty off-putting when you see that. You kind of assume that there's some degree of authority. And then you realize that that authority, the guy's holding the power and keeping things as they are the bad guys.

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Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention, and then your mind lets you drift off. find it wherever you get your podcasts that's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster you hear about the again there are occasional and sometimes not occasional outright warfare in the streets with bullets flying

the local people call them balaceras which just means shootout and you learn about those almost the way you learn about traffic jams in some cities you know through the informal network, or it's almost like microstorms, people will, there's WhatsApp groups, various WhatsApp groups, and they'll say, don't drive down Avenida Guerrero because there's

Balacera going on right now. Or avoid X Street because there's what they call a Poncha yantas, which is these chains with spikes that the cartels and sometimes the military will lay down to slow or prohibit traffic from passing. Or watch out because the Thropodilis El Enfiorno is passing down this street. So it is very off-putting. And also, it's interesting to note that the way you can sometimes tell, aside from the stamp, if you don't see the stamp on the truck, the way you can tell the bad guys, the cartel from the military,

because they wear the same uniforms often, is their shoes. The cartel guys, maybe because of the availability of combat boots, but they don't wear those. They wear sneakers. And so the local slang, one of the local slangs for the cartel guys, because they don't want to say cartel or narco in the streets, is contenis, which means with sneakers.

That's kind of the little slang that people use. It's a great, great nickname. What kind of sneakers are we talking about? Like, no, new balance, are we? Good question. I didn't get close enough to- Get close enough to focus. Nike Cortez was the El Salvador thing.

But, I mean, yeah, look, I remember watching, like some crime podcaster like a year or two ago being like, I would never go to Mexico. It's too day. And I'm like, that's ridiculously silly. Like a great, there's plenty of nice places to go in Mexico where you're not going to have any issues, especially if you don't go looking for them. Amazing places to vacation. This does not sound like one of those places.

And this is right across the border too, huh? Like, you know, usually I think tales of this stuff, unless you're in really, really hot spots, is exaggerated. For the most part, people want to scare you not to go to Mexico, but you can go to, you know, Portos Candido. you can go to Cancun, you'll be fine, Plyde-Del-Karm, all that stuff. But this is right on the border, and they have the logo sent. They're not even trying to hide it.

No, they're not trying to hide it. And I guess it is a place that once you kind of learn how to navigate, it mitigates a lot of the risk. But there is a huge fear, even among journalists who are very experienced in working in cartelie areas, including a mutual friend of ours who helped out on my last film. And in Sino-Loa, for example, you can, with proper notice and connections, you can sort of embed with a cartel.

The Sinaloa is, I say, with reservations and with million asterix, they're relatively press-friendly. They want to give you insight into their way of life. There's like one fixer that everyone uses that goes and sets them up. They get the same footage of a guy wearing a bottle clock. Yes, I have them in my phone. Yeah, yeah.

But then that same very experienced and seasoned journalist said there was no way he was going to try to do that in Norvalorado because of the unpredictability and extreme violence. Does his name start with an M? Yes. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. When I was going to do the crazy cartel thing and I've talked about it on the podcast years ago when I was supposed to get this like sleepover with a cartel.

What was his name? El Durango. He was a guy that I sought advice from on that stuff. And that was a crazy situation. and then he, of course, got arrested two days before we were supposed to fly out, ruined all my dreams of, uh... You would have been swept up as well, wound up in Guantanavus.

That's the optimistic way of looking at it. I mean, I was just like, I can't believe I missed this opportunity. We had this lined up for so long. The Fed's completely ruined my, my story and all that. But the optimistic way is being like, if I would have been there when this happened, somebody would have probably shot us. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's, uh, you're probably lucky.

Yeah. But these days, again, as I said, Norville-Lerato is relatively calm, and I stress relative, because it doesn't mean that Cartel Noreste is gone. It's just very entrenched, as you said. It's really part of the civil society. They're the law enforcement. They're the politicians. And they're the, even the main employer, not the main employer, I shouldn't say, but they're a significant employer. And, and, you know, to, as an example, on payday for the Alcones, the lookouts, there is often a parking lot or someplace where there are lines and lines of these local people who are waiting for their paycheck or cash from the cartel guys, and that's just out in the open. So it's very systematic. It's very ossified. One guy... Do they pay in cash, or they use like a ramp or some sort of like payment system, do you think? I think they pay in cash, or at least this. makes sense.

And one guy that we talked to from Unam, which is the biggest university in Mexico, he described the hold that the CDN has on Novelaereto as a Pax cartel, using the same jargon that foreign policy people use to describe the period of stability during American unilateral superpower status, Pax Americana, or the British Empire, Pax Britannica. So he describes it as that, meaning that they've got hegemonic control over pretty much all aspects of society. And they've asserted that they collect taxes from local businesses, they run protection rackets, they've got an extremely elaborate surveillance operation.

Alcones that I talked about on pretty much every street corner. Quick anecdote, when I was filming my last film, it was about a baseball team, professional baseball team that was based in Nova Laredo. And, you know, a huge fan base. One day, the umpires didn't show up to the game, and so the game was delayed. No one could figure out what was going on. A local hot dog guy called around

who knew some of the Contenis guys, and he found out that these umpires were from Sinolaoa, and when they checked into their hotel, and I don't remember what hotel it was, but mainstream American hotel in Nova Laredo, probably someone at the front desk was a lookout for the cartel and said, hey, we heard some Sinaloa lowen accents here, you better check it out, and these poor umpires got kidnapped. They were released

without harm, but that's how pervasive it is that these guys who had an accent were sniffed out and kidnapped right away before they could even leave their hotel room. Yeah, that's like, it reminds me of El Salvador when I used to go down there during the like heyday of MS-13 and 18th Street. They had the same thing. They had the got Los Alcones, were usually kids. If you filmed in an area too long, even if you had permission, they didn't want you there, they'd be like, it's time. You got 12-year-old coming up to being like, it's time to go. But they knew everything, you know, they allegedly had people at the airports.

They would just know anyone in every area. There were WhatsApp groups that, you know, anytime you go into a neighborhood that they control, you're getting that WhatsApp notice. And it was just complete and total control. That's the way it is. And it works almost in some ways like a security force as well. An example that I would give is you would think that

in a place that's overrun by organized crime, you wouldn't want to leave an expensive camera in your car. That's just bad practice. We never do that. But there was one day, we have a local fixer, a guy who helps us navigate things and make sure we don't get in trouble. And we were stopping for breakfast in downtown

and wanted to bring our camera in to the restaurant. And he said, no, you don't want to do that because some of your content, Chinese might be there and they're not going to like that you just ran up with a camera on them. So just leave it in the car. What does that mean? It means that there's no petty crime, no kind of robberies or muggings or the kinds of things you find in other places because the cartel doesn't want to stir up problems in their place of business. It is so valuable their plaza, their place, their territory that they control because it is the main, the biggest entry.

point into the U.S. and the U.S. is drug market, which is enormous. So they do control that aspect of society as well, which is interesting. Yeah, I mean, there's a story like that when I was in Puerto Oskandido in O'Wahaka. Shortly after I left, there was a group, I think, that

like 14 people got killed. And at first it was a report that they were students. Then it turned out that they were a group of just like thieves, and they had gone into a touristy area. I think more popular with Mexican tourists than than Western tourists and just kind of robbed a bunch of people,

and they did it without getting permission to do so because they probably would have been denied. And the cartel obviously doesn't want that. They don't want the attention. They're making money up retail sales and all that. So they all just got wiped out. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that's the kind of thing. These guys just know not. And we had heard that the person who picked up the umpires, I don't know what his punishment was, but that he got in big trouble because he had freelance. He thought he was doing something that his bosses at the cartel were going to like.

And he... Don't show initiative, folks. Do not show initiative when you're in the cartel. No, no, don't. Just listen to orders. Yeah. You know, also kind of aside from the all, everything I described in, in Norville Laredo,

one thing that's very different is that the narcos used to drive around in big, jacked up, really, you know, big rimmed. SUVs brand new and they realized that that called too much attention to themselves so now they ride what everyone affectionately calls mommy cars little or

minivans that you would see in suburban America to take carrying kids around except often the guys in the back are not cute little kids, they're guys with guns. That was me and my friends in high school with a Mazda MPV. Yeah, that's what you see. Yeah, exactly. Just go under the radar. You probably had water guns and stuff.

But yeah, I mean El Salvador was a very slim thing. After a while, they were like no more face tattoos. Don't dress like Cholos in the U.S. We want you guys to wear like khakis and collar shirts and just kind of go into the radar because they were attracting way too much attention. Yeah. I mean, a lot of times you will see large individuals that you can assume are because of where they are and who they're with, they work for the cartel, but there's, as you said, not big scary face tattoos and sleeves even. They're just kind of pretty toned down. inconspicuous. But, you know, all around town, as I mentioned, there's these alcones, literally every corner. And it's usually, as you said, in El Salvador, it could be little kids. It can be someone who is paid drugs, a strong-out woman on a bike. They all have walkie-talkies. That's how you can pick them out. They're often sitting kind of in front of the newsstand. So it looks like a normal place for them to loiter, but they're everywhere. And that's somewhat off-putting to the point where we want to,

time got a text from a local journalist that we had were friendly with and he said oh i see you're over in this neighborhood he said what do you mean did you drive by when you say hi he said no he was on a what's app group with the um narcos and they were reporting our whereabouts uh so actually in a in a way that helped us so no little freelance kid would pick us up and kidnap us and take our gear um they were keeping an eye on us, but it's very off-putting to know that every step you take is being watched by these really violent bad guys. Yeah, but it's like, it's an interesting point. It's almost counterintuitive, right?

You don't want to go in under the radar. You want them to know, with that level of control, you want them to know exactly who you are and where you are, because it's almost like a built-in safety mechanism. Yeah, and every, any time they would approach us, I mean, I described the first time it happened, but it happened probably half a dozen times where someone who didn't immediately know who we were and frankly we stand out tall white guys with with cameras but if someone rolled up on us and asked who we were with we would say we were working with remundo ramos and we can go into who he is in a little bit and they would send us on our way after what they did there's a command center so

they would radio it in to a warehouse where there's a whole communication center where they're taking all this information from the alcones and feel you. feeding it up to the big guys and making sure they're apprised of anything noteworthy, and then they send back their approval or disapproval. And luckily, we always got the approval, the thumbs up. You mentioned the big guys, and I feel like that's, I don't know if it's them specifically, but you also mentioned tropos in the infirno, which we've talked about in the previous episode, basically the hell troops, right?

They're like the most intensive paramilitary tip of the spear, most violent. I think you mentioned that you would seem like a public mural with them in it. Yeah, not a mural. It was actually, so when I was filming my last film about Ombres, we had driven by on the main highway on the way to Monterey, which is called the Death Highway. Just outside of Norville Laredo, there was a giant, I would say, two to three story statue of Santa Morte,

and I don't know if you've talked about that on your podcast before, but it's kind of the patron saint of the underworld, and it's a scary skeleton dressed in a robe, female skeleton with a scythe. And when you see it, it means generally, when you see a large statue, it generally means that there are bad guys that are feeling pretty emboldened.

So we were advised to not look too closely at that, but I was always curious. And on a down day when we were filming this Spring of the Vanishing, I asked our fixer if we could swing by and have a look. And he radioed one of his friends, a kid he grew up, with who was probably in the cartel. And he said, fine, just don't film. So we got there, looked at it,

and then behind it, off the road was something that I'd never seen. It was probably three times or four times. The size of that, it was almost like a massive diorama. You know, I would say in height about two stories, and then it was long, like a whole city block, like half a city block long. And inside that diorama was a tribute to the shrine to the Trobas del inferno. It said that in giant writing and had pictures of devils and devils doing the see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil sign. And it was really creepy.

So there's an old lady who's the caretaker of this shrine, this area. and I asked my fixer if we could ask her despite what his friend said, if we could ask her if we could film. And he said, go ahead, but if she says, no, we're out of here. And I went to her and said, hey, do you mind if we film? These are really interesting and nice. And she said, for 100 bucks. And my fixer said that means get the fuck out of here.

So we got in the car and we said, well, we'll be right back. We have to go to an ATM and we bolted. And interestingly enough, and everything is on the internet these days and Instagram, and I've looked for images of that shrine many times since then, and I don't see anything, and it's huge. So it's really remarkable that this is like this sacred shrine to these scary bad guys that somehow have avoided any kind of publicity. So if our listeners are near there, if you go and film it, Andrew will pay you $100 for the foot. Do not go and film it. Do not. Do not. No TikTok challenge for filming the giant

Mexican shock troop cartel mural. No, don't do that Scientology thing where you run across and film it. That would be bad news. Yeah, no, they don't. You don't make it very far. Yeah. Get us some attention, but probably the wrong kind of attention. Yeah. But yeah, so, I mean, you mentioned that there's no local police.

You've got the state police there and the military there, and they're just all kind of interacting with it. Like, are they in the pocket of these guys? Are they interacting with each other? Are they kind of just like, you know, is it like an old school, I don't know, Western thing where they cross each other and look and then like, you know, everyone's fingers on the trigger, but they don't do anything most of the time?

I don't see that to be the case. And the notion originally in 2006 and seven, when Calderon sort of declared as we're on drugs in the US, gave lots and lots of money for military support. The idea was that the military was less corruptible or incorruptible, that it was more disciplined than the local police, and they were going to be able to handle this. They're not disciplined as far as human rights,

and that's the focus of our film, Spring of the Vanishing, is we investigate a case where the military was called in to take on the CDN, a special unit, actually, of the military, the Marines, they're called under the kind of the special operators of the Navy. They were called in to pacify the CDN and wound up killing a lot of innocent people, and we can go on to that a little bit. But the suspicion is, and I don't know or believe necessarily

that the military is in cahoots with the cartel, but the guys in charge of the military may be, and that is the politicians that decide where they will operate. And this is all an allegation, but the former governor of Tamolipas, a guy named Francisco Cabesa de Vaca, he has been charged with having ties to the Gulf cartel, and it was under his governorship that a unit of the Marines that was the focus of our film came into Nuevo Laredo and outside of Novalo Laredo and killed a lot of people in the effort of destabilizing and decapitating. the cartel. And the suspicion, there is suspicion that Cabesa de Vaca, because he was working for the alleged associate of the Gulf cartel, that he was doing their bidding by calling in these Marines to clear out the CDN, not to make life better for the community, but to clear out a

clear a path for the Gulf to move in. That is all unsubstantiated, but that's what people on the ground are saying. So who is then, you guy you keep mentioning, Ramundo Ramos, you mentioned him a couple times and he seems to be a central focus of your film. So he is a longstanding president of the Committee for Human Rights of Novo Laredo, and he's a former journalist. And he, his investigations and his documentation of human rights abuses by the government and by the military and by state police have been foundational in prosecuting and investigating lots of cases by credible international bodies. So he is an established and respected human rights activist and defender. But the U.S. is alleging and other people on the ground allege that he is also an associate of the Cartel

Noreste. It's something that he vehemently denies. And interestingly, on the day that my film was released on April 14th, when it was released on Apple TV and Amazon Prime, Treasury, the U.S. Treasury Department issued sanctions against Raymond de Ramos for those alleged ties, and also claiming that a lot of his activism against the military and his investigations were disinformation campaigns to discredit the guys that were going after the CDN, and that the victims that he was representing were paid crisis actors and that they weren't really people who had lost loved ones. Would be a pretty incredible tactic to pull that off.

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You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home. It would be, and I think it's also a bit specious, the allegations, at least in the case that we investigated, which was, I believe, the biggest case of the military committing grave human rights violations in Mexico,

in Nova Laredo. We looked again at a case where the military came in, the special forces of the Marines, the same guys, by the way, that caught El Chapo and that are trained, these guys are, I can say, with authority, are trained in the U.S., receive intelligence from the U.S., and often work closely with the DEA. And they came in and made at least 49 innocent people disappear,

including an American teenager, who's the focus of our film, and two 12-year-olds. These were not cartel people that they killed and may disappear. And Reimundo's investigation and the brave activism of the mothers and wives of the missing was credible enough for Amnesty International, the United Nations, and my colleague, Weston Phippen and I, to rely on his investigation to report on it credibly to the point where the military, for the military, for the first of his investigation, to rely on his investigation to report on, to report on it credibly, to the point where the military, first time, the head of Mexico's Navy, came to Norville Laredo and apologized to the mothers and wives

and survivors of the missing. That's unprecedented. So if he was making that up, it would be a conspiracy that reached all the way to the top of the military, which is not true. I mean, working in that area, though, would you, like, is he, according to the Treasury report, is he actually associated with the cartel, would you say? I mean, he says no. And, His human rights organization, again, is trusted by international human rights groups and journalists across the world. And he's been meticulous in documenting many of the cases, the abuses that happened in Norville-Lerato by the government. But when it comes to serious abuses committed by the cartel, there is a blind spot. And I actually, if you want to play a clip from my film, there's a former investigator from Amnesty International who talks about Remando.

and the allegations against him, and she can put it in some context. Reimondo is a human rights defender that has been informing Amnesty International and many human rights organizations of cases for about three decades. And we've always been aware of the allegations against him, the allegations of his links to, I mean, I can't even keep up with the amount of allegations of different supposed networks or criminal networks that Reimondo could be part of. You know, unfortunately, these states such as, Tamalipas, anybody that is going to try and bring evidence to light in those contexts is going to be the subject of a lot of attacks.

So, again, it's important to note that when it comes to serious abuse is committed by the cartel, Remmondo Ramos and his organization are pretty quiet. And to be fair, the local press is quiet on that as well. And I would argue with good reason. Yeah, it seems like a self-preservation thing. Self-preservation, they call it autosensora, self-censorship, because there was a deadly consequences when they were reporting on the Zetas cartel in the early days in 2006,

on to 2012, there's still bullet holes in the local newspaper in the wall from an attack in the early days. And a few months later, after that, Narcos rolled a grenade into that news, It was the first but not last grenade attack on a local newsroom. And then in 2012, they came in with big guns and shot up the newsroom, and no one was luckily killed. And during that time, they're also targeted assassinations of individual reporters. One was stabbed 29 times outside of his home to death, and a female editor from another newspaper was decapitated in 2011, with the Zetas leaving a warning note beside our body saying, stop covering us.

So it would be arrogant of us to say, why aren't they covering it? It worked. The warnings and the killings and the shootings silenced the local press and probably the local human rights community as well. El Manana, which is that local newspaper, in 2012, publicly declared it wasn't going to cover any drug cartel-related news at all anymore. And again, they wouldn't be around if they did. So I do not blame them, nor would I blame Jermundo if that is the reason for his blind spot.

He's doing really important work that he wouldn't be able to do if he was dead. So is there any other evidence that sort of cast suspicion on Ramos in the Treasury's eyes? Well, the alleged smoking gun comes in the form of a recorded phone call. Do you remember the whole thing about Pegasus software? It made international news.

It was Israeli made phone tapping software that was used by Mexico's military to listen in on phone calls by NGOs, human rights workers, and the press. Illegally, I should mention. And the New York Times at the time reported that Drimundo Ramos's phone had been tapped. Shortly after that, there was a strange moment in one of Amlo, the Mexican president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. He used to have these daily morning press conferences. And there was this really strange moment where a reporter who, in the framing of his question,

I would suggest that he's probably a plant. He played a long excerpt of a tapped phone call between Ramundo and the second in charge of the Cartel Noreste, a guy nicknamed El Borrado, which means the erasure. And let's not think too hard about why he has that name. Definitely not an artist. Just like the gardener.

I don't know the garner was a gardener. No. But the phone call, to be fair, sounds like El Borrado was complaining that Reimundo hadn't done a better job of tipping him off to a federal raid that he narrowly escaped. And in the call, they sound very friendly. They sound like they know each other pretty well. So that's kind of damning. I mean, if the call is, like, is the assumption that it's real?

I'm assuming it's real. But the fact that the guy is even communicating with a second in command of this car and, you know, friendly with him. Not like a local guy that he's just like trying to, but like, oh, we've got to, you know, sort of communicate so I can avoid, we can avoid trouble. But like the second in command, that seems pretty serious. It does.

And I don't think anyone has said the call was not real, that it was the two of them talking, I think, is fairly certain. And so it's fair to say that Raimundo is in communication with some of the cartel leaders. And frankly, I think that's why it was his name that we would drop when we were confronted by one of the Alcones, one of the lookouts, because he had told them to lay off us. So that's not unusual that he works in a place that's overrun by the cartel that is run by the cartel as we established, that he is in communication with them. And I would say that part of his job actually requires him to speak to all of these people. And as an example, you know, us journalists have to talk to a lot of unsavory characters.

That's part of the job. I mean, that's what I'm doing right now. Yes, exactly. Likewise. But, you know, we do that all the time. But, you know, we do that all the time. I recall you and I in the field in the West Bank, I think back in 2014, spent a day with a Hamas guy.

Oh, yeah, that was awful. It was awful. And if you had listened to me, my last name is Glazer, your last name is gold, trying to warm him up and get him to agree to allow us to film with him, it probably wouldn't sound great. It would sound like that I'm pretty friendly with a Hamas guy, which wouldn't go over so well with my family and extended family.

But really, that is what we do to work. in these places and to get people to open up to us. So I think it's a leap to say that Reimundo is, to draw the conclusion that Reimundo is in the pocket of the cartel based on that phone conversation. But I also think it's important to note that there is this cliche that we've heard, you've probably mentioned in a number of other episodes, and it's a choice given in a lot of cartel places.

It's called Plateau Plomo. That means silver or silver. lead. That means you can either take money and work with a cartel, or you can get led, which is obviously a bullet. And so I have no information about Remundo's relationship and whether he was given this choice, but it is a choice that's consistently given to people across the, across areas that are ridden by cartels. And I think it's safe to say that, you know, he may have been given that choice. Yeah, I mean, that's the, he's in an impossible situation, essentially, if he wants to do the work that he was doing. I will say, though, it's one thing to, like, kiss him ass so you can talk to someone.

It's another to tip somebody off about police action or... Yeah, and we don't know that he, I mean, the complaint is that he didn't in that case, so I don't know if it's just positive proof. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because the El Barado was saying, why didn't you? And he sounds, Romundo sounds shaken in the call. So, you know, it could be, uh, I don't know that that's a perfect, a perfect. smoking gun. So what do the sanctions mean for him? It's unclear. I would say he's definitely shaken. He's been doing rounds of press, both in Mexico and international. I've communicated with him. He actually believes that the sanctions were timed with the release of my film, which I'd like to believe that that many people have seen my film and that it would have that impact. But it has had a

chilling effect on him. They don't really impact. him day to day right now because he can't come into the states already. He was blocked a few years ago from getting a visa to travel in the U.S. He used to go to Washington regularly and testify to House committees about these disappearances and about other human rights issues. He can't do that anymore. There's concern now that the Trump administration is cracking down on what it says is corruption of Mexican politicians, and that culminated recently in indictments of a bunch of politicians, including the governor of Sinaloa. There is concern that, I guess, Raimundo could be, you know, on that list of put future indictments. But it's unclear what impact that would have as well because the Scheinbaum government, the new president of Mexico, has not turned these figures over to the U.S. government for extradition. and so it's unclear what this will do other than pressure her to do more security cooperation with the United States.

Yeah, sounds very, very intense. The film, again, is Spring of the Vanishing. You can see it on iTunes, on Amazon Prime, and on Fandango. Don't forget about Fandango. Yeah, please, guys, definitely go buy it or rent it if you can. Andrew can't afford haircuts, and we really want to help him out here. He has to wear his mom's glasses. It's just, he's going through a tough time.

I just couldn't pull off those narco glasses you have on. The independent documentary filmmakers really do struggle. And we want to, we want to help them out as much as we can. Thank you again to my guest, Andrew Glazer, for joining us. It was fun. And for taking us through, um, Nueva Laredo in the Cartelands situation there. As always, guys, patreon.com, session, an oral podcast. Onoralpod.com, the unoralpodcast at gm.com.

all right guys thank you till next week Sean will be back we'll have some fun