The Underworld Podcast - The Sinaloa Cartel Civil War Raging in Mexico: Los Chapitos vs El Mayo w/Nathan Jones

Episode Date: November 26, 2024

Sinaloa’s capital Culiacan is roiling with violence in the wake of El Mayo’s capture, and his alleged betrayal at the hands of the Chapitos. But the bloodshed is just part of an ever-changing drug landscape, that’s increasingly dominated by the Sinaloa factions and the CJNG. How do these two organizations work? How can they work together? And what on earth can Mexico’s new president do to stop the bullets from flying? Sean spoke to expert Nathan P. Jones to find out. MERCH: https://underworldpodcast.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and all birds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into...

Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash special offer. 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. Meas Durfer. 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. If you like your coffee hot but your bones chilled, then sit back and start your day with a Morning Cup of Murder. Go listen to Morning Cup of Murder wherever you get your podcasts. And remember, stay safe. safe. It's Friday, November 22nd, 2024 in Kulia Khan, Sinolawa. A city is synonymous with the global narcotics trade as Faberjaya is to big, weird decorative eggs. With its namesake Sinolawa cartel, one of, if not the, largest criminal enterprises on earth. But since July 25th,

when U.S. authorities arrested Kingpin Ismail El Mayo Zambarra, Kulia Khan has been, been plunged into ever more outlandish levels of violence. On that day, it's alleged, Mayo had been headed to a meeting with Joaquin Husman Lopez, son of his one-time colleague El Chapo Husman, and a leader of the cartel's so-called Chapitos faction alongside several of his brothers. But the meeting was a trap. As soon as El Mayo had stepped foot inside the meeting room, he was ambushed. A group of men knocked him to the ground. They placed the hood over his head and they handcuffed him, forcing him onto the bed of a pickup truck and speeding him away to a rural Sinaloa airstrip,

surrounded by cornfields. After a short flight, they had arrived in El Paso, Texas. El Mayo, a man nonful untouchable, was finally in US custody. And he claimed it was all down to the Chapitos. In Sinaloa, betrayal doesn't sit easy. But it takes until September for war to arrive when a leader of the Almayo faction tells his groups to quote, send Los Chapitos straight to hell. Since then, Culliacan has roiled in narco violence.

Dozens have been kidnapped and killed. Their bodies dumped in the streets at dawn. Some are wearing sombreros, a nickname for the Mayos. One severed head is left in a box of half-eaten pizza, a reference to the Chapitos sometime known. name the Chapizas. Faced with such Bordavillian bloodshed, Mexico's government sends in federal police and soldiers, 3,000 all told, to stem the flow. But at a time when the Mayos and Chapitos are battling it out for control of Sinaloa,

and the Senaloans themselves are fighting with the Cartel Alisco Nueva Generation or CJNG for control of Mexico, nobody is safe from the squeeze of a Sicario's trigger. On October 25th, two police officers are ambushed and shot dead in Kulia Kand. Then, on November 18, a local cop is dragged from his home in the nearby village of Kila, his body found two days later near the Pacific coast. Then comes the 22nd. At around 12.50pm, former police director Benjamin Bia Real is dining with two associates at an upscale restaurant when gunmen opened fire from the street.

All three men die on the spot. A clean officer who'd won awards for locking up narcos. It's not tough to see why somebody would use the fog of war to dispose of Bia Rial. Nonetheless, it's a slaying that sends shockwaves through Sinaloa and Mexico. We have to act as a whole, as a team, says Sinaloa's security chief of ending the war. That means citizens, population and public security forces. But this is more evidence of the brutality of that war and the rapidly shifting alliances of a narco market

that's growing and metastasizing seemingly by the day. Welcome to the underworld podcast. Hello everyone and welcome to the show that exposes crime, airs out malfeasance and lets you soak in the absolute pits of the human condition. I am Sean Williams, a reporter. photographer and Miss Amthrop in Wellington, New Zealand, and ordinarily I'd be joined by Danny Gold in New York City, only he's not in New York City, he's spaffing our money down the horse racing track in Tokyo. So, this week, I'm speaking to Nathan P. Jones, an academic and

expert in Mexico, drug policy and security at Sam Houston State University in Southern Texas. Nate has written for years about illicit networks and the bigger picture of alliances and the tectonic plates that shift and warp in the Mexican night. Marco World. And he's the author of 2016 book, Mexico's illicit drug networks and the state reaction. I wanted to catch up with Nate about that bigger picture stuff happening in the midst of Elmayo's capture and the war enveloping the state of Sinaloa and Kuliacam. First though, a bit of housekeeping. If you subscribe to the Patreon, thank you so much. We've got tons coming there. And since everywhere is America right now, happy Thanksgiving and we're going to do a

Black Friday sale of Underworld Pod T's, hoodies, caps, stickers and mugs, you just go to underworldpod.com and click on merch for some top-top deals. So there's my salesman, stick out the way, back to the Narco War and Kulia Khan. Thanks for joining me, Ney.

I went into some of the growing violence in that cold open. I guess a good place for us to start, though, is when you started tracking the cartels. And some of those major shifts in power and allegiances you've seen since you published your book in 2016. Well, thanks for having me.

Yeah, I've been interested in Mexican drug trafficking, going back at least to whom I did an internship in National Defense University at Port McNair. I was just a lowly intern there, but it was in 2007 and the Medida initiative was being discussed. And so I got sent around all the congressional hearings and I got to listen in on all the congressional hearings on the Medina initiative. and that was essentially a partnership between the United States and Mexico and you couldn't call it an aid package even though it was a lot of money, $1.4 billion going toward

Mexican military equipment and things like that. But you had to call it a partnership because the United States had responsibilities to stop the flow of guns, stop the flow of methamphetamine chemical precursors. That's what they were talking about back then. It was an interesting moment of hope because the Colorado administration was coming in

and it seemed like relations were going to get better. They were asking for this. They realized, they had an organized crime problem that was beginning. You already started to see the surges and the homicides going up because Mexico had been at a historic low at that point. And so it was this moment of hope like, hey, is this going to be them getting control of this problem?

And generally no. That is not how it is played out. And I've become a lot more cynical over the subsequent years. And so bringing up to reasonably, you've written recently about how the Mexican cartel world, essentially in the last few years, sort of bifurcated into the CJNG and the Sinaloa cartels. Can you tell us a bit more about how that happened

and where we are now in terms of that split? Yeah, and this isn't the first time that the Mexican cartel underworld has entered a bipolar structure. If we went back to, say, the year of 2020, it would have been, say, the set us, and the gold cartel versus the Sianloa cartel. Eventually, there was a split between the gold cartel within the gold cartel in the Settas, and there was a bipolar structure there.

The government came down very hard on the Settas. And then some interesting things happened related to the kingpin strategy. And very important Sinaloa cartel lieutenant named Natchel Coynelloa cartel was killed by the Mexican government. And he was known as the king of Kirstal in the Guantalajara area. And he oversaw a group of traffickers. Many of them had been old school millennial cartel who had become kind of a subsidiary, a piece of the Cinole cartel. And they had that old school knowledge from the millennial cartel of they've been in the

avocado industry. They've been in the methamphetamine chemical precursor industry. And when Natcha Kuala goes down, there's this internal struggle. And what emerges from that fragmentation is what we now know of is the C-Change. And initially they're allied with the Sinaloa Cartel. We hear about them as the Mata Seta's going over to Reda Cruz, 35-sever supposed set the heads on a highway in Veracruz. But in historical hindsight and what I wish I'd written more about in my book back in 2016 is this was this beast that was arising. And Hector de Malione, he's this amazing reporter then calling this out of the El Universal.

He wrote a nexus article in the la Sombra that nobody is. the shadow that no one saw. And by 2015, the CJNG was big. It was powerful. It was downing Mexican helicopters. And it was spreading rapidly across Mexican territory. What we kind of started to realize was they were taken over the porons. And they were very strategic about how they did it.

It couldn't have been looking back on it. Maybe it was a coincidence. They were in better groups. They were going for the ports there. They went from Port of Manzanillo in Cordima. You saw a violent spying there. You see them go after Lazido Kahn and say Mitya Kahn. They're taking the port.

Why? Chemical precursors. Fentanyl becomes big, but they already had experience with Beth and Fetabine and bringing in the chemical precursorses for men. And so you start to see, and at some point there's a split between the Sinaloa cartel and the C.J and G. And if anybody ever wants to watch, I actually got to interview and moderate a panel of law enforcement, D.A. and California Department of Justice for the National Law Enforces. with the Warfare Fund. It's called Operation Shadow Game and it's available on YouTube.

And you can actually hear them talk about it, get a street, and the horse and bound. The CJ&G and the Ceynoloa cartel entered the Pippana Plaza together when they, when they helped take that over. They were working together. And at some point, there was a split. That's what we're seeing a lot of violence in Pippana, but we're also seeing a lot of massive geographic spread over the 2010s of the CJ&G. And so when this split occurs then, how do they deviant the industry, how, I guess, deliberate is that, or was that the result of fighting? Yeah, so the thing is, there was an alliance, but it wasn't like they were part of the same order. So it's not like a marriage of like, well, how to we divide these unified assets.

No, I think in historical hindsight, as we dig into it more, we're going to find out more. Mencho was El Mentiono, the leader of the C.J. NG was always his own piece. And there's great reporting on him by Eels out of the Rolling Stone did the brutal rise of El Mentiono in 2017. Great article. Everybody should read that on him. El Mancho was a Halisco State Police officer who ends up in the millennial cartel and he's married to a Valencia. The Valencia family was the heart of the millennial cartel. So she's bringing in the capabilities of money laundering and all of those family connections and capabilities. And he is this very shrewd, ruthless drug cartel operator.

It's this, how do we say, evil match made in heaven in the sense of, this is a match made of heaven for leadership of a drug cartel that's going to expand very rapidly across the 2010s. And B&B, the dominant calendar weight to the previously dominant acetaloa cartel. There's always a debate of who's bigger. Is it the CJ and G is a CETA. And so where are we today in terms of the flow of various drugs? Who's commanding what, how much of it is CJ&G and Cinello respectively? Yeah, and that's a great question.

And the truth is that I can't give you a clear answer. And if anybody can give you a clean answer, they're probably making numbers up on the fly. And we don't have the receipts on this industry. It's difficult. But what we do know is that fentanyl has become ubiquitous. It has become highly decentralized. So I'm very skeptical of the idea of, say, surgical strikes to deal with the fentanyl industry. That's probably not going to work.

We're dealing with clandescent labs from all over the play, all over rural areas. They're not really labs per se in many cases. And we've got a highly decentralized market. What I'm looking at, and I'm writing a butcher right now, is looking at the state of Guadetto and how it was impacted. Because that was where the Amapola, the opium was grown. That was one of the traditional areas. It was a, you know, a very important subsistence crop. And increasingly, that's getting displaced by fentanyl and there's less demand.

There's still, there's still demand, but there's less demand. We're seeing more and more fentanyl. If you look at the drug overdose numbers, you see cocaine. Good little fashion cocaine. It's like a very stable number of people overdosing for a year. And then all of a sudden it's skyrockets. And the number that skyrocketing is cocaine plus mental only. And that's where we're seeing these skyrocketing overdoses.

We've seen some traction on overdose coming down a little bit here in the United States. That may be due to like a public health approach by the Biden administration. We'll see what the Trump administration decides to go on and do on that. But both the Sena Loa Cartel and the CJNG and multiple other smaller organization, there's about 400 organized tribe groups operating in Mexico. Based on the 2021 Atlantea intelligence data, about 395, if you include the various subgroups and things like that, there's so many different groups.

they're all going to be moving fentanyl. They may specialize in some drugs versus others. But the other key thing is they move beyond drugs. And they are diversifying into the avocado industry, Wachikol, which is an old school term for like moonshiners. That's what they're calling the oil theft mafias. And then there's Awatikul, Agua, so water theft mafias. So they're diversifying into all of these very complex,

what the economy is called criminal conglomerates, with diversified portfolios. And now the migration, they're taking advantage of the migration flows and effectively taxing the migration flows coming through their territories. So they were massive and they're highly diversified. They're going to be highly resilient.

And they're in many ways decentralized. We're talking about these big groups. But in many ways, if you're dig into them, as you guys have mentioned on this podcast, I think it's great that you've done this on this podcast before. the same of lower cartel is not in monolith, right? We've always thought of it as a federation. Sometimes we talk about it that way just because it's easier,

but as we're seeing with the internal struggles now within the senior lower cartel, it's never really good in long. How many discounts does USA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount, safe driver discount, new vehicle discount, storage discount, legacy. How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usaa.com slash auto discounts.

Restrictions apply. Yeah, and we'll put some of your writing on the show notes so that people can sort of do some of their own research as well. But there was a really interesting piece that you published around this time last year on the kind of different webs, networks and shapes of these two cartels. And they're very differently shaped, right? And they expand in different ways. So could you go into some of the differences with the two? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

So the underlying data comes from Lancia Intelligence, which is a private Mexican security consulting firm. It is a very expensive data set to get a hold of. But I am unfortunately a non-resident scholar, Rice University of Baker Institute. And they were getting a license for a year. And they said, hey, this gives us three licenses. Would you like one of them? And I was like, yes. And I saw that they had social network analysis relational data of the alliances.

And I was like, I want that. And they gave it to me. And so this is based on Lanier, Intelliatorialial. It's a great data set. And what we found was when you break down the alliances, the two big actors that become very obvious based on their centrality in the alliance structures are the Cinaloa Cartel and the CJMG. But what was interesting is if we zoomed into the ego note, just looked at who the Cinaloa

cartel is connected to and who the CJMG is connected to. And then we put those together. what we found was you can just tell by visually looking at it, the Cino-Lowardtel is part of a network that is more densely connected. And the CJ&G is a little hierarchical, less densely connected. Everybody's connected to the CJ&G, but the altars, the people who connect the CJNG are not connected to each other. And that's fascinating because that suggests a much more hierarchical structure.

The CJ&G is like a jealous lover. You do business with me, you don't do business with nobody else, right? The Ceynolola-Gartel, you can determine, this one of two ways. One, they're weak and they're balancing against the CJN or two, they're old school. This, they've always done. There's always been networks and relationship building. And that's just part of the old school structure. And I think that I lean toward that, but in the paper, we argue it's a one probably a little bit above are happening at the same time. So those are the key differences in those two structures. And so, I guess bringing us on to some of the more

recent developments. I mean, the arrest of Elmayo, all the kind of implications of who shipped him in and who has which interest and the fallout and the Chapitas as well. What is going on between these groups? Could you just kind of explain to us what is happening in the fallout of this gigantic arrest? So the nature of how the arrest went down is important for this because this is part of the story. The dominant narrative now, and there are many narratives, but the dominant narrative at this time coming out of Miles Zamada's lawyer and Charlie

is that Zambollah was effectively cheaped that put on this plane and then turned over by Joaquin Jr. the shopping. From the Chapin's perspective or from

Joaquin's perspective as he's turning himself in, this makes a lot of sentence. Let's say he's got to give up all his money in cutting a deal with the U.S. government. But he doesn't have to give up the $15 million war money for Maya Zabon. That's a sweetener. Plus, you want to get a good deal with the United States, bringing in one of the most wanted

traffickers. I call him the Kaiser Soze of Mexican drug trafficking. This is the ultimate dealmaker who never, you know, spent a day in jail going back, you know, 40, 50 years. He's a major player. That's a heck of a sweetener. And I can't imagine that that tapito is not getting out really, good deal.

Well, the implication of that is a Chapito betrayed Mayo Zamada himself. And on principle, the Mayo Zamana faction of the Ceylon cartel essentially has to engage in some kind of retribution and to, at a minimum, send a message.

Now, the question is, how far are they going to go? Is it that they have to send a message and they have to reestablish deterrence and cause enough pain to do that, or are they willing to stop at some point and come to some form of an agreement? And then the other thing that has happened, and this is still preliminary,

but let's discuss it as if it's a strong possibility, is the Chapitos, there's rumor, there's word reporting, suggesting that they formed an alliance with the Hartthel de Hadisco. Against the Maya's a matter of attack. That's just some interesting thing. The miles of manufacture might be really, really strong.

They might be really scared if they're willing to do that. And if you look at the geographic dispersion of the miles of manufacture, they're more widespread oftentimes than the Chapitos, if you look at it along. Which suggests, Milo had always said in his old interview, I think he was interviewed by Horneuxed Ed in Processional Magazine, way back when. And he said something to the effect of like,

yeah, if they take me, nothing changes. There's people in place. which is just a very resilient organization that is going to be able to weather this fairly well and may also have significant built in government on tax. Right, yeah. So reading the tea leaves then,

what do you expect to be, you know, when the guns fall silent on this war, whenever that may be, and enough bodies have piled in order to satisfy, you know, the retribution or the bloodlust that is the fallout, of this. Do you think that there is a significant alliance forming then? A significant alliance forming between the Chapitos and the CJ and G or they put away? Yeah. See, that isn't that is a really good question and I don't have I'm still waiting to see how

whether or not this alliance turns out to be true and real and operational and what are the implication of it. So I'm still waiting to see that play out. Whether or not the Mayoes could essentially lay down arms

or lay down arms against the Chapitos or at least say, hey, we've satisfied our rage or reestablished deterrence and when that would happen is a really good question.

I don't know the answer to that. The war of the conflict goal goes on though, it seems the less likely that is to be, that they could go back to being the Ceno Loa Federation, the Ceynoloa Cartel as we knew it. It looks like

that there's going to be some kind of, it looks increasingly like a more permanent split. Now, how lunch the Chapitos are going to ally with the CJ and G is another question because the CJ&G remind me

of the set this before them. And what I was doing to work in Pijuana back in 2010, 2011, And I had this really interesting interview. And we asked about Set the Presence because there had been some rumors that Benhamina Adiano Felix was cutting a deal behind bars. And the Sethas, we're going to form an alliance with the Tijuana Cartel. And there was like rumors of a short-lived alliance or something like that. And a local businessman said, think gum.

The Senthis, because they're like locusts, they leave. No. And the C. and G is viewed in many ways similarly. Maybe not quite as aggressive in the set those in terms of leaving nothing in touch, but certainly more aggressive than the Ceno Loa cartel. And then to fill back around has done some amazing research on this and talked about, yeah, they're both engaging in widespread extortion,

but they're doing it in different ways. And the C2OO cartel has more of a business-oriented approach to it, whereas the CJ&G tends to be a lot more aggressive. in which case there may be some natural fault lines between the Chappanethos and the CJG. Even if this alliance is real, it may not be Durham.

And I would suggest that it's probably not going to be particularly during unless they just see the Mayo's as a continuing threat. You mentioned or reading from your 2023 piece

that the Sinaloa cartel operates very much like a corporation, really, a kind of sort of a federation or something that we would associate more with kind of the business or the licit world, whereas the CGM is about

territory taking and attacking and going to war and more like a street gang almost in the way that they gather their power, right? Well, I think they've got this hybrid model in the sense that they can capitalize massive expansion through the control of the ports.

and the synthetic, the profits from the synthetic precursors. And then they're really good at sending out emissaries and finding local groups that have really strong control of their local plazas, their trafficking or territories, and then flipping, and they're really good at them.

And I think that that's been a key to their rapid expansion and a key to their kind of durability. The difficulty with that is each of those local, who control their cells, control their territories, they have their own interests as well. So whether or not they stay in your fold

or they will flip out to another group or the Ceyloa cartel or Chapitos or Mayos can sponsor factions to essentially break validates to your rule, that limits expansion. So we've seen this massive geographic expansion of the CJNG, but the question is, the Cine of lower cartel has a boy been able to kind of like forwarded at different strategic places

with different groups like coming out against them. I hope I've answered your question. Yeah, yeah, that was really interesting. I was going to ask as well about, I guess, fentanyl, to stick with the fentanyl issue, how have both of the cartels kind of cemented their positions in fentanyl? I mean, not just precursors,

but the production of it as well. I guess is coming in-house, right? Increasingly, I haven't really focused so much my research on the exact mechanics of fentanyl production in the various cartels or things like that. But what we've seen from recent indictments and court documents like the Chapitos indictments of 2023, that were three fentanyl-based indictments,

we've got a social network analysis. One of my students has done a great job, writing when we need to hurry up and get it published. But what we found is that the Chapitos were really adopters, but the CJ&G may have been even earlier adopters of that. And so at this point, they essentially embedded this so much into their business model that it's very decentralized. And there are a smaller group also engaging in fentanyl trafficking.

So the idea that this is in some way vulnerable to say surgical strikes or something like that strikes me as kind of naive and polyanish at this point is so well-destrient. and built into their business models, that it's going to be very difficult. And I don't think they can really be deterred. It's so much part of their business model. On the demand or the OD side, the number of deaths from fentanyl have kind of plateaued recently.

Is that a U.S. thing or is that a Mexico thing? That's a really good question. And I'm going to speculate, but I want to be very honest and say I'm not really about spending a lot of time on the drug overdose side and how that, some of the public health measures that may have been helping and reduce that. You know, you've got public service announcements, the DEA thing of one pill can kill. That is true. There are documented cases of people not realize what they're taking or having something mixed in that they didn't realize was there that was adulterated.

And that leads to, and these are very small amounts because it's essentially. So a microdose can potentially be lethal for a person who hasn't been using it on a regular basis. And the difficulty of getting the dose is right. There are a bunch of things going on. If Narcan becomes more ubiquitous and more available, we can reduce overdoses in that fashion. Better public awareness may also be happening and things along those lines. And then there's another question of if enough people die and the user base gets reduced. Is there a limit to how many people could potentially be in this pool of users?

That is also another question. So I've only got speculation on that. We are going through presidential administration. So what concerns me is if there was progress being made and it's directly attributable to previous administration, will that be continued or will that be discontinued? Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll. with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for citizens back.

Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavatheater.com. Only a Yama Vah Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You win? Must be 21 to enter.

When you finally find your thing, you want the whole world to know about that thing. So you use a thing called Canva to make it an even bigger and better thing. Whether you want to create flyers for that thing, make presentations for that thing, or design merch for that thing, you can do anything. So people can see your thing, feel your thing, love your thing. The next thing you know, it's a thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing. I guess to bring it on to the political side a little bit, I mean, there's changes in administration on both sides of the border.

Amlo, well, I guess the narrative in US circles is widely that he's been ridiculed for some of his policies towards the cartels and treating him with kid gloves. I mean, his official, who is the former public security chief, He was jailed for 38 years. That was Calderon's. He was Calderon's. Okay. Okay. Okay. But what does that say about the state of the or the Amlo administration perhaps in terms of its, well,

it's kind of softer approach to the cartels perhaps than in previous years? And then what can we expect from Claudia Shinebaum as well? Yeah. So this is a really good question. And I question you this myself. Okay, so first, we got the Abrazos, no Velasso's policy. And the general principle was hugs, not bullets. Abrazzo means hug, but Abrazo means bullets. And the idea was dealing with the social loop causes of why people join drug cartels and all of this.

And then you'll deal with that. Rather than engaging in a confrontational strategy, remember, two previous presidents had engaged in a confrontational strategy, violence only got worse. Calibbean administration engaged in the Kingpin strategy. Things got more violent. It plateaued in 2011. Seen to be getting a little bit better. Pena Nietoeyito takes over, says, hey, we're the Aztec tiger, we're a great economy. We're doing really well. We've got great economic growth numbers, but really they were recovering from the swive flu and the global financial crisis and they had a 6% economic contraction. So I would expect that they'd have a few

good years of economic growth bouncing back. The security got sideline. We're not going to talk about it. About midway through the Penaetto administration, you got the IOTINAPA incident, and the missing 43, who were, you know, found by police turn over to a drug cartel and disappear. That was a score in the Mexican site. Terrible. And then you had violence in over nationwide just starting to take back up. And it became very obvious in the second half the Pena Nieto administration that was not something they could ignore. And so they went back to more aggressive policies. They started talking to the United States again a little bit. it was a little bit in the first part it was don't call us we'll call you and then it was like okay

we're going to call you now then amlowe comes in and he said well we tried this confrontational approach across two administrations and it didn't work so he comes in and basically says we're not going to do a confrontational approach that didn't mean that there weren't individual narcos who got arrested some of them being very high level but it almost became like they were patrolling between the spaces between cartels not actually trying to necessarily confront them and crack down on them. But what that allowed them to do was essentially to reify them so. And they entered more diverse aspects of the Mexican economy. And by being allowed to sit there and entrench themselves, they started entering every sector of the economy. And so you start hearing about the tortellia,

you know, the little tortilla shop is getting extorted. And that's common. And the chicken is getting extorted. And the avocados are getting extorted. And they're, It's just entering into every sector of what we consider a legal economy. It's got to be having a massive effect on overall GDP growth. I've seen some numbers of economists saying up to 15% of Mexican GDP is stifled in some way or taxed in some way. That's massive. There was a study that you put out and co-authored with had the late Alejandro Hope on it. Amazing Mexican security analyst.

We lost him a few years back to a health issue. and they talked about cartels. They talked about partels of the fifth largest employer in Mexico. So they diversified and that diversification means they have to have more employees, which means they have more cicadios, more hit men, more people running their logistics, all of those things. So now they're a massive, they've reified themselves under the ML administration. And now we've got Claudia Ashengbaum.

She's from the same orina party. And she's basically saying the same thing as AMLO. There's been some initial indications that maybe they're going to be. be a little more confrontational, the National Guard, which was completely revamped under Amelho administration, has been a little more aggressive. But it looks like they're going to continue the same policies of non-confrontation because it's politically convenient in the sense of if you do the confrontations and then there's more violence, you're going to have more violence in the newspaper. That's going to hurt people. There's more media coverage of it. And that's

going to hurt the Morena Party political. Unfortunately, that leaves it in a bad equilibrium where it's just the organized crime to see infiltrates more aspects of the economy. She has talked about now let me give the positive view

let's see the positive view of what might be given. She was the head of Mexico City. Mexico City had a pretty significant crime drop in terms of overall security but it almost feels like kind of like the floor is lava because you know the head of Mexico

City intelligence goes to Estabily Mexico City which right outside Mexico City and he gets assassinated in his like in a day. It's all like, oh, we're not going to get you in Mexico City but we're going to wait for you the moment you come out of there. But Harfich was the head of her security there. He was nearly killed in an assassination attempt in 2020.

It looked like it was the CJ and Gene behind it. It involved like Colombian mercenaries, high caliber weapons. He was shot multiple times. But he got a reputation. is, I mean, I think he was like tweeting against these cartels from his hospital bed. I mean, he gives this reputation as, you know, somebody who really wants to fight these groups. And they have resided over a drop in violence. Now, where did that drop in violence come from?

Here's what I think. The National Guard was just constituted a whole clump, primarily out of the military. But it absorbed the federal police. The federal police had a lot of corruption problems, but they were good investigative. And when they get pulled into the... this military organization, the military people have all the lines in command and they don't trust the federal police guys. So a lot of them

quit. Well, where do they get hired? They get hired by Mexico City Police. So all of a sudden, Mexico City Police has confidential and a bunch of them. So maybe that helps explain some of the crime draw of in Mexico City. The question is, can that strategy

be scaled up nationwide? And I'm extremely skeptical that that's the case. No, they're saying some good thing. We're going to focus on investigation. That's great. Absolutely. Mexico should have been focusing on investigation the last 20, 30 years. We're going to focus on intelligence.

Okay. That's great. What makes me really cynical is Mexico only takes in 16% of GDP in taxation, in taxable. The OECD average is 34%. So they're taking half of what a normal country takes in a tax revenue to run a country. So that means you don't have money for

house, you don't have money for lawyers, you don't have money for the courts, money for the penal system. Yeah, how do you get control of a situation like this? And how much can Claudia Shinebaum do what she's walking into not the best economic situation? And she's going to be very limited in what she can do. So I've become very cynical. I look back on what I thought of the Medita initiative in 2007 in my hope for a better future. And I look back at myself, it's kind of naive.

Well, we don't need the optimistic end note to finish on with any of these stories. We want to be journalistic and true about it. And I guess, interestingly, it's sort of a microcosm of what's happening in tons of countries, right? You've got decreasing tax bases, slowing growth, got a bigger, bigger pension, smaller pension parts, government's trying to figure out how they're going to get money from nowhere, really. And, you know, in the UK or the US's case, it might be welfare or other concerns. But in Mexico's case, you've got corruption and police and major organized crime to think about. So it's just a different problem, but the same essential economic foundation for how you deal with it.

Yeah, and some of this goes back to, we went on this, like, the Soviet Union Falls, you've got the end of history, Fukuyama. and liberal democracy is one out. And we do this globalization. And it's almost anti-status. It's like the government needs to be smaller and we'll privatize everything. And we did a lot of that. And there was some backlash. And I think in many ways Trump is a reaction to that.

A lot of this right-wing populism that we're seeing globally is a reaction to that version of globalization, that version of capitalism. And we're seeing kind of like a retrenchment. and what we saw in the pandemic was, is the United States going to be dependent for PPE protective equipment, medical protective equipment on China because we were chasing pennies?

Or should we near shore or friend shore and go to Mexico where it's closer? And that's a trend toward regionalism and backing off of globalization, but that also means that the United States and Mexico may become closer together. And you're seeing Mexico surpass China and Canada as the major trading partner with the United States. And so I think that maybe there's like a global economic kind of retrenchment back to a little more regionalism, a little more protectionist.

I hear Trump talk about tariffs and things along those lines. And that could be a, that could also say, lay the seeds for a reassertion of the state's ability to bring in more tax revenue. and that made me one possibility. There's money there. We just have to tax and be willing to bring in those taxes. To do that, you do have to make hard political decisions about spending. We also have to make hard political decisions about who you're going to tax. I guess we've spoken to several law enforcement officials, you know,

former cops, FBI agents, CIA, people like this. And a lot of them have expressed some, I guess, with a fair degree of trepidation, optimism, and maybe the situation on the border will change under a different administration. Like you said, a lot of the migration routes are now being taxed by cartels along the way, whether it's the Trinde Agua in Venezuela, which is becoming a far larger falls, or the cartels in Mexico. How might this play out in terms of Mexico? Mexico's, you know, in terms of the CJNG of the Sinaloa cartel, can anything change once we hit January?

Oh, I think a lot of things could change. I mean, Trump is a very unpredictable figure. That unpredictability may, in and of itself, by reputation, have the impact to a migratory flow. You know, we've seen interviews of migrants and their view may put. fundamentally change over, well, if I'm not going to be successful, maybe I should just stop. We may see some of that. There's been talk of the use of emergency powers or whether it be deportation, whether it be border enforcement, things like that. All of those things could change.

We could see emergency by executive action, emergency action in the immigration system. We don't know. And this is very difficult to predict what is actually going to happen. So, yeah, when I could see some very significant changes in overall migratory flows. What I will say is we did see this surge of migration. And then the Biden administration kind of slowly was surely through good policy, kind of got it a little more under control. Whether or not the Trump administration with more, we'll just call it hard for policies,

will be able to staunch the flow more. and then that would reduce organized crime revenues, that could be one implication. Another implication is people get stuck for a longer, and then they become subject to forced recruitment. And then you have these burgeoning employee roles of these organized crime groups, and they become more powerful, more pervasive,

and they start looking for more things to extort and pray. And I guess looking at the other side of that supply chain across into Latin America, how of those alliances changed over time in terms of who is feeding the cartels, who the cartels are working with? We've done a bunch of stuff on Venezuela because it's a hot topic issue at the moment, but the FARC has sort of turned Coke plenty of times in the last few years as well. How is that flow of, say, Koka and people and other things that the cartels make money from?

How is that changing? Well, we saw a mass and academics are still debating. how this happened. Like, we saw it just collapsed cocaine prices for a while. And that was attributed to multiple factors. I think some of the things that make the most sense or anything, anytime we get back to supply and demand analysis, you're probably on the right track.

And there was a massive glut of coca production. And more and more, for a harvest level, well, this is the best crop I can do to make money. The problem was, if everybody does that at the same time, you get an overall glut and then it becomes practically worthless. And then you have like genuine hunger and people who thought they were better off rather than doing some subsistence farming turned out not to be. So that's one aspect.

What we've also seen is we've also seen more of Mexican cartels sending their own representatives and establishing relationships with different groups further south in the Andean region. So broadly, Mexican cartels have become, I would say, more dominant. They have more direct local presence, but they're really working with partner groups, but they are getting themselves more involved and they're competing internationally. So the CNAO cartel and the CJNG are sending their representatives out internationally, and they're competing for those at work, it's internationally. I long ago predicted that Venezuelan organized crime was going to become

more and more important in the system. That hasn't played out in the way that I thought it was. And the reason why I thought that was because the Venezuelan government was sponsoring organization. And we saw this with Cartel de los Soles. And the souls, the sons, were what the Venezuelan general wore on their lapels instead of a star. they were the signs.

And we saw American entitlements just lay out direct connections to Maduro, the president, and various representatives of the Venezuelan government, and just lay out this cocaine network in court documents. And I thought to myself, if any organized crime that has direct backing from government is going to get all those tactics, say, and he said procedures, is going to get that intelligence, is going to get that training. and they're going to expand. What was interesting is that it was more the prison street gang

like to the Tren de Aragua is what we're seeing now and less the larger Cartel de los Soles or those higher level were sophisticated Argo. But that's what we're seeing now. It's really interesting to see how that plays out in the next year or two because it does look like I mean I'm hearing things from sources about and increasingly being dispatched to sell gold

on the black market, you know, things, anything that would make the Maduro government a few extra quid here and there, it seems like they really use in the TDA to do that, and that would only make them far more powerful. So, I guess looking to the future then, as much as you're able to look into a crystal ball, are there any, as this conflict rages in Kuliakhan and the wider Sinai-a-Loa region, are there any news stories maybe that listeners could look out for that would signal something maybe that would be a decisive change. You know, something that you would look out for and be like, ah, okay, I was kind of expecting or not expecting that,

or that means something in the wider context. Broadly speaking, and this is a little bit tangential to your question. The key thing I'm looking for is Mexico actually has more leverage in a U.S. relationship, their bilateral relationship with the United States. It would be really real, right? because Mexico is doing so much immigration and that's a critical issue.

So in some ways, is it that, you know, there's this famous quote. Being Mexico, living next to the United States is like being a mound's living next to an L. No matter how gentle the bees,

you can't have a hell of a worry, it will grow. Forget who said it, but it's a great. And that's how we think of the U.S. Mexico relationship. But migration is such a critical issue to the United States that Mexico doing all that domestic and porphy internally and helping the United States with that flow and reducing it gives the Mexican government a tremendous amount of leverage on other key point. And so I think that that is something to watch for.

There may be a lot of bombast, these symbolic gestures that go over to Turkey by the court. fairly quickly, but could be consequential short-term. But overall, I'm thinking that there may be more stability in the relationship, in part because Mexico is playing such a critical role, and diverting so many want-for-per resources to this migration issue for the United States. So Mexico can play their hand a little more freely than maybe we are being told. I think that they have more a stronger hand than everybody realize. Okay.

And where can we look out for your work, Nate? Where are you going to be publishing some stuff in the near future? Well, thank you so much. There's a lot of outlets. I'm a senior fellow with the Small Wars Journal, El Centro. So shout out to John P. Seldon, Robert Bunker, the other senior fellows there, and all this fellows at the Small War's Journal. Small War's a great website.

It just went through a massive revam. So we're kind of like getting all our whole stuff migrated over there. But the website has gone through this amazing revamp. It looks really good now. It's a website that got started by Dave DeLegee, who unfortunately passed, but he, all those old school Marine Corps guys who would always be interested in small wars for counterinsurgency. And in the post-Iraq, in Afghanistan, Worset got really popular. And so it's a really important website if you're interested in a regular warfare. And we got the El Centro section, which are a Latin American division.

So a lot of my stuff comes out there. A lot of good social network analysis comes out of there. I'm the book review editor for the journal of Strategic Security. I publish a lot of my son there. These are great open access. These are fluid. You can go read them. These are not pay walled academic journal articles.

I'm so sick in there. And I'm also the book review editor for the International Journal of Police Science. So I've got some really good stuff over there. People are interested in reading it. So those are the three main elements plan. Also, you always got to go back to Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy. They carry a bunch of my stuff there. and that's the more thinking to think tanky stuff.

It's like easy policy kind of many ways as well more interesting than the academic stuff. But over at IJPS, you know, we do network analysis of, you know, say, San Diego Task Force networks. And, you know, but that's when I realized, hey, HSI is as coming on strong as an agency now. And they were key to that Mayo arrest. Yeah. Yeah, huge. They started popping really high.

between a centrality in the networks. And I was like, huh. I mean, you're used to seeing the high centrality organization, the DEA, the FBI and things like, and those,

but I, like I started to see early on about six years ago from data from about six years ago, HSI was popping up. And now we're seeing HSI doing these major, really complex investigation. And 15 years ago, you weren't seeing that.

Now you're seeing it like that agency has come into its own and it's going to play a major role in future drug, drug trafficking. So those are the three big places, Rice University Baker Institute. I'm a senior fellow with the Small Wars Journal, Free Stuff, Journal of Strategic Security, and then I guess the fourth one, international journal in police science, which is a new free open access peer-reviewed journal that we're getting off the ground. Cool, man. Tons to look at and read.

And thanks ever so much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure.