Alex Berenstein is a journalist and writer based in Mexico City, Mexico. He has worked in the UK, Spain, the Middle East and Latin America, and now in Mexico. In this episode, Alex talks about how he got to where he is now, how he ended up in Mexico, and what it's like to be a journalist in a foreign country. He also talks about what it was like growing up around drugs in the 80s and 90s, and why he thinks there's a connection between hashish and schizophrenia. Alex also discusses how he came to be interested in journalism and drugs, and how he became interested in the drug trade in general. Alex is a good friend of mine, and I really enjoyed this episode. I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts and we'll get back to you with more episodes in the future. 5 stars is much appreciated and really helps spread the word about this podcast. Thank you so much to Alex and Mike Hart for being kind enough to take the time to share his story and share it with the world. We really appreciate it and hope you do too! XOXO, Alex and Dr. Mike xoxo Music: "Hollywood" by Mr. Mike Hart and "Goodbye" by Dr. Steve "The Good Doctor" - "The Bad Guy" by Alex Berensteins (Music: "Thank You" by by Alex ( ) and "Bad Girl" by Mike Hart ( ) is a song written and produced by Mike ( ) is by . and is produced by The Good Guy by , & "Good Girl by "Good Morning by The Good Life by David ( ) . ( , "Good Life" by Sarah ( and in the Bad Girl ( ) by ) by James ( ) & // ( ) - "Good Workday by Ms. ( ) ( ) and , and "Good Day" is a tribute song written by ( . & ( ), on . . is an amazing song written & produced and produced & produced & edited by ? & is by Michael ( ) in tribute to the late Mr. Soto ( ) on . , , & , , ) is .
00:00:53.000How did you wind up living in Mexico City?
00:00:56.000So, I came to Mexico, or went to Mexico in the year 2000, and I kind of messed around for a few years in the UK. I wanted to get into journalism, so I found one way to get into it was to start working in a foreign country.
00:03:26.000Yeah, back then it was Moroccan hashish.
00:03:29.000There is a connection, you know, and we've been exploring that a lot lately.
00:03:34.000We went into this marijuana debate between Alex Berenstein and Dr. Mike Hart from Canada, and we talked about it, and I know people that have had that happen to them.
00:03:48.000Where they've had schizophrenic or psychotic breaks because of just massive doses of marijuana, especially people that don't do it, or people that do it too much for too long.
00:04:10.000Now, when my sister had a breakdown when she was 18 and I was 16 at the time, and when that came out, it turned out also my grandmother had an issue with schizophrenia.
00:04:31.000So I don't really know the science of it, but...
00:04:34.000Anyway, going back, so I've been around a lot of drugs before.
00:04:37.000So when I arrived in Mexico, actually, one of the first arriving in Mexico, I ended up hanging around with some people, and they were smoking a lot of crack in Mexico.
00:04:50.000I went down to the beach, like backpacking down to the beach, and these people were smoking crack, and I was like, this is kind of strange.
00:04:56.000I didn't know there were people smoking crack down here.
00:04:59.000So when I got a job at the local newspaper in English, And I just started looking at the crime thing.
00:05:05.000One of the first tools I did was on the issue of crack being sold locally and how that linked to cartels.
00:05:11.000And then very soon, just very, very quickly, I just fell in right away.
00:05:15.000Like I said, all these things happened by accident.
00:05:16.000I just fell into covering the crime beat.
00:05:19.000And this is going back to 2001. So 2001, that was the same year that Chapo's man escaped from prison.
00:05:27.000Then I was calling a lot then to a great journalist from Tijuana, a real legend from Tijuana, who survived the shooting by cartels.
00:05:38.000And phoning him up all the time, just getting him to give me information, give me tips.
00:06:25.000You interview policemen and you get to know the policemen in a certain town, certain city.
00:06:31.000And it's hard to know, or military guys or politicians.
00:06:34.000And you want to believe these are good people.
00:06:36.000You want to believe there's good policemen out there who really want to stop crime.
00:06:40.000So there was one policeman, his nickname was Tyson, like Mike Tyson, his nickname was Tyson because he was a well-built bloke, well-built guy.
00:06:50.000And he was friendly with the press, a guy from Michoacan, friendly with the press.
00:06:55.000And then it came out that he was actually a drug cartel member, a ranking member in the drug cartel.
00:07:07.000They used to have a thing where the police, the federal police when they got him, got him to confess on camera.
00:07:11.000And he confessed not only was he turning a blind eye, not only was he carrying out murders, he was training the young kids how to decapitate people, how to cut people up.
00:07:22.000And he was explaining in graphic detail how he'd like...
00:07:26.000You know, how they manage to cut limbs off, how it gets young people to train them to cut limbs off, to get them to lose their fear.
00:08:02.000It was still like a crime issue at that moment.
00:08:05.000So I began to cover these things and then around 2004 I got a job for the Houston Chronicle out of Houston, Texas.
00:08:12.000I was a stringer covering Mexico for them.
00:08:16.000And I flew up to a lot to Nuevo Laredo.
00:08:20.000And there was a turf war beginning there, which is really the beginning of the drug war, which has torn Mexico apart.
00:08:28.000Began on the border with Texas in this city called Nuevo Laredo, over the bridge from Laredo, Texas, back in 2004. So there was a lot of interest from the Texas newspapers, what was going on.
00:08:41.000There was a whole bunch of bodies piling up there.
00:08:44.000But again, going back to these days, and this is kind of innocent looking back, innocent looking at myself then, and innocent looking at what Mexico was like then.
00:08:51.000They would simply say, go to the place, I'd drive up to Monterrey, rent a car, and just drive the car to Nuevo Laredo, just by myself.
00:09:21.000People are a lot more careful about where you...
00:09:24.000Now when you move around the roads, you can be very careful how you move and how you plan this stuff.
00:09:28.000You don't just wander by yourself, drive around these places.
00:09:33.000So back then when this was happening and there was these bodies turning up and I was trying to figure out why and there was one guy interviewed who was the head of Chamber of Commerce.
00:09:46.000And I talked to him, you know, very interesting guy.
00:09:49.000About a couple of weeks later he became the chief of police for the city.
00:09:53.000And they asked him, they said, are you scared?
00:09:56.000You know, are you scared about being killed?
00:10:07.000And that was one of the real markers of something really strange is going on in Mexico.
00:10:10.000Something is, like, going to erupt in Mexico.
00:10:14.000And then from there, it kind of just escalated and escalated.
00:10:17.000And I started working for other media, Time Magazine, New York Times.
00:10:22.000Different people, and after a while I've said, I can't do this, I can't just write news stories about this, I've got to write books about this, because this stuff is big and it's complicated.
00:10:33.000For the people that live there, it seems like there's no escape.
00:10:37.000I mean, if you can't turn to the police, the police are the cartel, there's the cartel, the police, all of the politicians, most likely, if they're alive, have to be compromised.
00:10:49.000Yeah, I mean, there's been some very, very desperate people.
00:10:52.000I mean, there's been some inspirational people as well fighting this.
00:10:59.000Just to get more of a sense of what that means on the ground as well, you know, and some of the things you see, you know, some of the things that stay with me.
00:11:07.000You know, for a while it was quite romantic covering this.
00:11:09.000It was like, wow, I'm covering, I'm going to these places where Chapo Guzman is from.
00:11:14.000You know, I'll go up to the village and meet his mother and meet his family.
00:11:20.000But then you start seeing the human pain in all of this.
00:11:25.000One of many stories that stick with me was a mother in Monterrey, a school teacher.
00:11:30.000When you have armed guys moving around, they're also really affecting the civil population, attacking the civil population.
00:11:38.000And one mother, she was in her home with her two children in Monterrey.
00:11:45.000And a It was like in the night just chilling in their house and then the door broke down and about 15 guys in bulletproof jackets all came in, long arms, just taking stuff from the house.
00:11:59.000Held the family, you know, pinned them down and they said to their mother, Which of your children is the oldest?
00:12:06.000And she was like, didn't know how to reply.
00:12:08.000I mean, which of your children are the oldest?
00:12:43.000And I've been seeing her face, the devastation.
00:12:47.000The pain, she said, I just couldn't get on with life after that, just not knowing, not having the closure.
00:12:53.000And I met her when I went to report on one of the worst atrocities, which was 49 bodies, who'd all been decapitated, all had their hands and feet cut off, and all been dumped on a road.
00:13:10.000And they were taken to the morgue in Monterrey, and I arrived at the morgue.
00:13:13.000I was inside the morgue, just smelling the smell of Of the dead bodies, this kind of weird smell you get from like decaying flesh, kind of like a sweet smell you get from when you're around those places where you can smell that the body's decaying.
00:13:26.000And I was inside the morgue and I came out and she was outside the morgue.
00:13:29.000And she was trying to see if her son might be among those people, among those bodies.
00:13:40.000It's so insane that this is right next door to America, and there's so little effort put on doing something about it, including doing something to mitigate the influence of illegal drugs by making drugs legal.
00:15:41.000They bought opium from China and planted it in Mexico.
00:15:47.000And some of the first people receiving it were Chinese Americans.
00:15:49.000Some of these very early cases, a case from 1916 investigated, there's documents about this case where there was Chinese Mexicans trafficking to Chinese Americans here in California.
00:15:58.000And at that time there was a governor of Baja California involved right back then.
00:16:38.000I mean, going back to 2012, I wrote editorials about, you know, one of the reasons you should legalise marijuana is because of the marijuana coming from Mexico, which goes to cartels, which pays for killers, which pays for corruption.
00:16:51.000But at the same time, marijuana, a lot of, you know, a lot is legalised in the United States, and the violence actually just got worse in Mexico.
00:17:00.000So you've also got the issue of heroin poisoning, Cocaine, crystal meth, fentanyl, and you've got the cartels who got into a bunch of other rackets now.
00:17:11.000They steal crude oil, which is a big deal.
00:17:13.000They steal billions of dollars worth of crude oil, criminals down there, from pipelines.
00:17:18.000Just tap into a pipeline or something?
00:18:15.000So, you know, that amount of money, I mean, that's an estimate.
00:18:18.000I mean, it could be right, you know, it's hard to know.
00:18:20.000It's a very round number, but like $100 billion a year.
00:18:23.000Now, if you think about that pumping into these cartels year after year, I mean, decades, you know, how much of that, you know, if it's $30 billion of that going down to Mexico, then over 10 years, $300 billion, over 30 years, close to a trillion dollars.
00:18:40.000But a second area, so I believe in drug policy reform.
00:18:43.000I mean, I don't know how, I mean, rehab for everyone who needs it, because heroin addicts buy a lot of heroin.
00:18:48.000So everyone you save from that, you can, you know, you can stop a lot of heroin and a lot of that money, which does money goes to these people who are doing this stuff.
00:18:58.000But a second area, I believe, is social work in the neighbourhoods.
00:19:04.000I've done a lot of interviews with, particularly with the assassins, with the killers in cartels in Mexico and also around Latin America.
00:19:13.000I've been traveling around Jamaica, Brazil, Central America, Colombia, talking to a lot of the killers especially.
00:19:21.000And when I sit down with them, I try and get their life story.
00:19:23.000Like, how did they first get into this?
00:19:25.000Because you're not born doing this stuff.
00:19:28.000And often, I mean, in some cases, there's different profiles.
00:21:05.000But some of them really do have these conflicts inside their heart.
00:21:09.000I think he was someone, or at least back to that interview, and he had, and it's hard to balance that, someone who does evil, But also has been a victim as well, a victim and a victimizer.
00:21:22.000Since then, he's himself been murdered.
00:21:27.000So how you get social work to reach people from a very young age, because often they're recruited into organized crime when they're 12, 13 years old.
00:21:37.000So he butchered this family when he was 14. Was he stealing money from them?
00:21:41.000So the story with that was he said that he was hanging around with these basically street kids.
00:21:46.000And one of the other kids said, I know where there's some money in a house.
00:21:52.000So they went in there and killed this family.
00:21:56.000And it turned out there was no money there.
00:21:59.000And the reason the other kid had said go there was because he'd actually been living with this family.
00:22:05.000And he said they'd been abusive to him.
00:22:07.000So he wanted to have revenge on his family.
00:22:10.000But what was so really sick about this, when he was describing it, was they had this family and they would, to stop them defending themselves, they would take them one by one, pin them in a room and take them one by one, take them out, butcher them,
00:22:26.000how the other ones didn't really know what was going on.
00:22:29.000And think, I mean, the action itself, but how teenage kids can think about that stuff.
00:22:35.000And then later on, when he was talking about the decapitations, he was talking about...
00:22:40.000They get contracts with decapitation inside the...
00:22:54.000And when he hacks the heads off, there'll sometimes still be a moment when the life goes out of them.
00:23:02.000And when the body is still like twitching.
00:23:05.000Like he says, they can still see, like, there's a bit like nerves, like a chicken, like a headless chicken.
00:23:10.000There's a bit, there's a part when they're still like twitching a bit, even after they, you know, they've lost their kind of connections there.
00:23:22.000Now, when you're interviewing these people, how nervous are you?
00:23:26.000I mean, this seems like if you're putting all this stuff down, you could implicate them in some crimes and It seems like it would be very convenient for them to try to get rid of you.
00:23:36.000So there's a whole bunch of different situations around interviews.
00:23:39.000Sometimes I've interviewed people in prisons, a lot of time in prisons.
00:23:43.000This took me years to get to a lot of these people.
00:23:46.000First of all, when I first started doing this, I was like, how do I reach them?
00:23:52.000I started going around to drug rehab places and talking to people in drug rehab.
00:23:56.000I'm going into prisons in Ciudad Juarez.
00:23:59.000I did a lot of interviews in one prison.
00:24:01.000I got to know a lot of prisoners in the prison in Ciudad Juarez in a Christian evangelical wing there.
00:24:08.000And they were going through this weird Christian discovery of God there.
00:24:14.000And then on the street, often like through contact, I mean, well, all the time through contacts on the street.
00:24:21.000In Honduras, a lot of great contacts with a friend who's a journalist who grew up in his neighbourhoods with all these guys.
00:24:26.000He just knows loads of these guys from growing up.
00:24:34.000I think anybody covering this has had some bad situations.
00:24:37.000Sometimes people get angry, people threaten them and so forth.
00:24:41.000But a lot of the time when you talk to people, A lot of the time you have to be very stringent about protecting their identity and really serious about that because there's been various cases where other people have interviewed killers and shown their identity either through showing their face or through some dumb thing being shown.
00:25:08.000And they have been themselves murdered, butchered after they've given these interviews.
00:25:13.000Or like other things that happened, they've been threatened or something, their family or arrested or so forth.
00:25:18.000So you've really got to protect people's identities.
00:25:22.000In a way, in terms of when they talk and stuff, and I don't really feel nervous when I interview a lot of these people.
00:25:30.000I probably feel more nervous here talking to you.
00:25:34.000That's just probably because it's on a big show.
00:25:36.000It's a different thing when you're talking to...
00:25:43.000Like anything, you start talking about how you...
00:25:47.000People are human beings, and people are complicated.
00:25:50.000And I haven't just interviewed, and I've also got drunk with some of these people and hung around with some of these people for time, trying to get closer, like, you know, spend time to try and understand their world a bit more.
00:26:02.000What's the most time you've ever spent with these people?
00:26:44.000I mean, these are levels of violence and it's interesting to compare historically these levels of violence because you look at some of the worst cities like San Pedro Sula, Honduras, Caracas, Ciudad Juarez.
00:26:56.000And these are places which have levels of violence which are like way worse than medieval Europe.
00:27:15.000And medieval Europe, a lot of these cities were like 20 per 100,000.
00:27:18.000So they're way worse now, way worse in the Wild West than like, now there are some places in the United States today, like I've done some research recently in Baltimore, Maryland, and I was kind of, it's interesting to compare that to Latin America.
00:27:31.000And that's a high level, that's 40 per 100,000.
00:27:34.000That's not the same level, but it's significant.
00:27:40.000Baltimore is worse than medieval Europe.
00:27:42.000Yeah, I mean, I guess you have to, some professors, they might say, well, Jerusalem in this time, or you've got to try and, it's hard to really dig down exactly, I don't know if there was outbreaks of violence and killing in certain places.
00:29:08.000There was a steady build-up that was happening.
00:29:12.000And then in 2006, you had the president, Felipe Calderón, declared a military crackdown on drug cartels.
00:29:22.000And after that, there was this big response and things started really getting out of hand.
00:29:26.000We'd already seen violence escalating before.
00:29:31.000And my idea, my kind of theory behind this is that You had in Mexico back in the 20th century more of a top-down, centralized government controlling everything.
00:29:46.000And they were, basically they were controlling it through corruption.
00:29:50.000So back then they'd have the drug cartels working for them.
00:29:54.000An interesting story going back then to the late 1970s, a story in a book called Drug Lord by Terence Popper who interviewed a drug trafficker in the 80s.
00:30:04.000When he got his job as the hefe de plaza, which is the head of a certain territory.
00:30:09.000When he got the job, he went with the state police at the time and said, I want to become the head of the plaza.
00:30:17.000And they took him in and tortured him for two days and beat the crap out of him, put electric shocks on his nuts, one of the big torches they do in Mexico, put water laced with chili in his nose.
00:30:30.000It's not like one of these big, so your whole face burns.
00:30:32.000These are like torture techniques they have.
00:30:35.000And after two days of torturing, they said, yeah, well done.
00:30:47.000They were like, okay, we control this racket.
00:30:48.000And, you know, we can fuck around and torture and kill drug traffickers when we like.
00:30:54.000You know, and all up to the presidency.
00:30:56.000I mean, there was, in that time, Carlos Salinas became president in 94. His brother Raul Salinas, the Swiss, investigated his bank accounts and said he had $500 million in bank accounts, which they, you know, they believed it was drug money.
00:31:11.000So right up to the presidency, this was being run.
00:31:48.000But then you had the techniques, like the technique of beheading wasn't really a big deal.
00:31:54.000It was very, very rarely used up until around 2006. And one of the first incidents was in Acapulco in 2006. In about June 2006. Now it might have been after, inspired by the Al-Qaeda Saqawi video,
00:32:14.000which was shown in full on Mexican TV. I remember when that came out, when they decapitated the guy in Iraq.
00:32:19.000And they decapitated, first it was two policemen they decapitated.
00:32:23.000Later that year, in September 2006, there was five heads they rolled onto a disco dance floor.
00:32:31.000And then this thing just became just escalating.
00:32:34.000It just became this kind of like using this terror, public terror.
00:33:45.000This happens, but there's also just a normality that could just be like you're outside here in LA and normal people living normal lives around this as well.
00:33:58.000After they wanted to have this military action against the cartels, obviously that hasn't really put a dent in it.
00:34:07.000What's the current thought process behind dealing with this?
00:34:11.000So there's a bunch of like citizen protest movements various times.
00:34:18.000During these recent years, and one of them was a very interesting guy called Javier Cecilia, who's a poet and a writer whose son was murdered.
00:34:26.000And he, when it first happened, his son was murdered and he just came out.
00:34:29.000The press was like, you know, I can't.
00:34:31.000This is just like, this is just, you know, Mexico's gone.
00:35:42.000These kind of two thrusts he's in now.
00:35:44.000He's only been in power a couple of months.
00:35:46.000January was still a bad month in terms of murders, in terms of bodies.
00:35:51.000Last year was more than 33,000 dead last year, which is the size of Mexico, so the equivalent of the United States, having close to 100,000.
00:36:00.000Imagine what that would mean in the United States if you had that many people dying in a year.
00:36:09.000Now, when these people are being recruited by the cartels, when the police officers are being recruited, The big issue must be, well, there must be two issues, right?
00:36:21.000Safety, like if they don't join the cartel, they'd probably get murdered.
00:36:25.000And two, the amount of money the cartel would give them would be far more than the government would give them to be a legitimate police officer.
00:36:33.000And that's like known famously, plateau plumber, like silver or lead.
00:36:38.000You want to have the silver of the bribe, the lead of the bullet.
00:36:42.000But even beyond that, for a long time, a lot of these people who join the police are like from the beginning there, you know, I've got a video, made a video back in 2010 in Sierra Juarez of a bunch of rappers just hanging around in the middle of all this.
00:36:58.000And one of their friends was saying, and they were talking and these people were saying, you know, some of them have been done for taking drugs over the border, they've been in gangs and stuff.
00:37:06.000And one of them was like, I want to be a policeman.
00:37:09.000And he was like, I want to be a policeman and make some money, basically through corruption.
00:37:14.000So that is the mentality of some of these people joining the police from early on.
00:37:19.000Another guy I opened the first book with is a guy who became a policeman when he was 18. He was basically a hard, tough guy.
00:37:29.000Played American football from Durango.
00:37:31.000Became a policeman when he was 18. And in the police, learned to torture and learned to murder.
00:37:37.000He said, that's what I learned in the police.
00:37:39.000And just at 20, after two years, just left the police and went full-time into crime.
00:37:44.000So, you know, you've got a situation where, you know, it's not, you know, it's worse even, it's beyond the bad that a lot of people might imagine of corruption.
00:37:55.000God, so all of this essentially has escalated from the time you came to Mexico.
00:38:00.000So when you came to Mexico, it's almost like you got in, I mean, if it was a story, you got in at almost the perfect time.
00:40:03.000I enjoy meeting people there and hanging out in these areas.
00:40:08.000There's a lot of good things about them still.
00:40:09.000But dealing with all the horrific tragedies that you report about and experience, do you look for an escape route?
00:40:18.000I mean, are you looking to get the fuck out of Dodge?
00:40:22.000Yeah, I mean, there's been different times where I... I've thought, you know, I want to stop this now and cover other things as a journalist.
00:40:33.000And he's the other journalist doing that as well as a journalist called Jesus Esquivel, a great Mexican journalist who's just, I just saw him at the Trial of El Chapo over in New York, who's been covering this for years, one of the really great Mexican correspondents who's covered the drug stuff.
00:40:48.000And he was like, he just said to me, oh, but I've got some stuff, maybe I can give you this.
00:41:29.000I love being able to write books and travel and write magazine stories and make documentaries and do these things.
00:41:35.000But having the economic base for that has degenerated a lot in the time that I've been doing it.
00:41:40.000Have you personally been targeted at all?
00:41:45.000There's a couple of situations I've had.
00:41:48.000First, I'm going to have to give some Come respect and condolences to so many colleagues, Mexican colleagues, who have been murdered, threatened, had to leave the country and various things,
00:43:06.000There was this kind of crazy situation where there was this almost like a trench warfare happened between cartels and these self-defense groups.
00:43:13.000And then what happened was a lot of regular gangsters started saying, oh, we're self-defense groups as well.
00:43:19.000You know, just coming up saying, oh, yeah, we're self-defense groups.
00:43:21.000You know, those guys are out on the street with guns.
00:43:22.000You know, we're just going to go out with our guns.
00:43:25.000So anyway, I went down, I drove down at the end of this.
00:43:28.000I've been covering this right through and it had been fairly okay to do.
00:43:32.000The self-defense squads, the outer defenses were pretty easy going to work with.
00:43:37.000But I drove down there to Michoacan and I wanted to do some stuff on it.
00:43:42.000And I was going to meet a friend on a journey.
00:43:44.000She just backed out at the last minute.
00:43:48.000And arrived there, and there was about 50 guys, arrived in this place near the city called Apatzingan.
00:43:53.000And there was about 50 guys, who were supposedly a self-defense squad, in a parking lot, getting ready to go on a mission to try and take down this drug trafficker called La Tutta.
00:47:24.000The federal police, do they have a plan to try to eradicate these mobs or is it a lot of lip service?
00:47:31.000Is it really possible to eradicate these gangs or is it just one of those things where they say they're going to do something but they have to kind of protect themselves?
00:47:41.000You know, there's been different times.
00:47:45.000I mean, sometimes there's been the federal police have done well going after a particular guy or sometimes with the Americans.
00:47:54.000You know, arrests of very many significant kingpins.
00:47:58.000The problem is as well, or one of the deeper questions, is that, like, when you take down some of these kingpins, you've always got other people who will fight over their same territory.
00:48:11.000So, for example, you know, you take out Chapo Guzman, and then you get a fight among his sons and one of his lieutenants over the empire.
00:48:23.000Now what's happened and one of the reasons the violence has increased in Mexico is because they've had this onslaught attacking cartels.
00:49:06.000And also you end up, they're fragmented territories.
00:49:09.000So you have people controlling, rather than having big cartels, some leader who controls half the country, you end up with these cartelitos, like these gangs controlling a part of a state.
00:49:19.000Now there's one state called Guerrero, which you've seen this really like cartel fragmentation.
00:49:24.000And you've got maybe 12 different groups in this one state.
00:49:28.000And you get like a place where they, you know, one controls it up along a road and then another group controls it passing a certain point.
00:49:37.000So there were some friends went up there.
00:49:42.000Seven journalists went up there and got held up on this road up there.
00:50:24.000Do you have to be careful when you're traveling that you don't have an obviously expensive laptop or camera or something along those lines?
00:50:31.000I think from the point of view of it, they can take it away.
00:50:34.000It's happened a lot of cases recently of colleagues just being robbed.
00:50:39.000I mean, you get like an armed group and they'll take away their...
00:50:42.000Basically, they'll hold them down, take all their stuff.
00:50:45.000So I've got, you know, I know various colleagues, photographers.
00:50:48.000If you're a freelance photographer and you lose a good camera, then, you know, like...
00:50:55.000You know, some of the TV people, they have less expensive cameras than they used to.
00:50:58.000I remember a few years ago, a TV group interviewed some gang members in Honduras and they stole their camera.
00:51:05.000And at that time, it was like an $80,000 camera.
00:51:08.000And the TV network, I don't want to say who it was, the TV network apparently was more pissed about losing the camera than it was about these guys getting held down and having guns pointed to them.
00:51:21.000What is the attitude in Mexico, especially amongst people who are studying the narco wars, with all this build that wall stuff?
00:51:32.000All this, what's going on in America, there's this very strange right versus left polarization over here about whether or not there should be a wall between the United States and Mexico.
00:51:44.000I mean, well, I mean, the thing where Mexicans are obviously very anti-Trump in Mexico is, you know, Trump is very unpopular from the very beginning, you know, when he said, you know, they are rapists.
00:53:16.000And the reason was that time it was just an old fence.
00:53:19.000And there was a hole in the fence that used to go through into the United States and go back into Mexico, just an old wire fence.
00:53:25.000And the first time he took people through, people would arrive from southern Mexico and say, you know, how do we get into the US? And he'd say, oh, you know, this way.
00:53:41.000Nowadays, the cost of going into the U.S. is $5,000.
00:53:45.000That's what you pay to go illegally into the United States, $5,000.
00:53:49.000So we're saying, wow, look at that increase.
00:53:51.000Every time that the U.S. puts more security, it means it's more expensive.
00:53:56.000When it's more expensive, that means more money going to criminals, which means there's an industry doing it.
00:54:02.000So now, The cartels make a big percentage of that money of human smuggling into the US. But in terms of the wall, when Trump first came in, he had the line that Mexico's going to pay for it.
00:54:19.000And then there was this kind of line, right at the beginning, he threatened the Mexican president saying, if you don't agree to pay for the wall, then why are you going to come and meet me?
00:54:30.000And then it was like, wow, he's really going to try and shake down Mexico for, like, billions of dollars.
00:54:38.000And that was a kind of scary moment then, I think from the point of view of Mexico.
00:54:42.000When he first got to power, it was like, he's going to do that, and then he's going to deport three million, and he's going to kill NAFTA. Actually, those things haven't really come to pass.
00:54:53.000Actually, if you look over the last couple of years of Trump, it hasn't really hit Mexico very hard.
00:54:58.000So the concern was that he was going to take money that should be allocated to other ways that's going to help Mexico, and he was going to try to take that and use it to build the wall?
00:56:07.000I mean, you go through, if you look at the Laredos, Laredo or Noble Laredo, One of the reasons that was a big fight and the war started there in Mexico is because that's a very valuable territory.
00:56:18.000There's something like 8,000 trucks go over that border every day.
00:56:23.000Now, if you have 8,000 trucks, how many of those can you search in a day?
00:56:28.000And also the way they can hide this stuff in trucks, they can hide drugs in like a metal, they can put them in some kind of metal container, seal it up, solder it up, put a bunch of stuff so it doesn't smell.
00:56:43.000So somebody has to say, I'm going to open that with a blowtorch, I'm not just searching, I have to rip that vehicle apart to find the drugs.
00:56:54.000Inside tires and stuff, that's one of the older tricks from the 70s.
00:57:01.000There's a song, one of the first Narco Corridos, the drug ballads.
00:57:05.000It was called Contraband and Treason from the 1970s, and that was about hiding marijuana back in tires back then.
00:57:15.000But yeah, the trap cars now are super sophisticated.
00:57:18.000They have some weird trap cars where you have to do a bunch of stuff Like open the door, move some stuff to actually open and find the drugs.
00:57:27.000Oh, there's like some trick sort of door that has to be activated.
00:57:32.000Yeah, I would imagine if there's a will, there's a way.
00:57:35.000I mean, I remember hearing that from, I mean, it's not a reliable source, but from the Sopranos.
00:57:40.000They were talking about only 20% of all the shipping containers that get brought into America get searched.
00:58:32.000There's been cases of US Border Patrol and customs entry people who have been caught taking a bunch of money, taking bribes, allowing certain cars through.
00:59:49.000He was talking about the number of people that actually enjoy their job.
00:59:52.00067% of people in this country don't like what they do.
00:59:57.000Or just sleepwalking through their life.
01:00:02.000There's another significant percent that hate what they do.
01:00:06.000And then there's a few left over that love what they do.
01:00:10.000I mean, it's a very small number of people, maybe like myself or maybe like yourself, that actually enjoy what they do for a living and feel like they're following their passion.
01:00:19.000Most people are just working a job and they fucking hate it.
01:00:22.000And then when they get off work, they want to get fucked up.
01:00:24.000And a lot of these people, you know, they have psychological issues, they're suffering from abuse, childhood abuse.
01:00:32.000I mean, there's been some significant statistics about childhood abuse and how many people from childhood abuse wind up using drugs and becoming addicted and even overdosing on drugs, and it's ridiculously high.
01:00:44.000It's about pain, pain and suffering, and trying to remove that pain and suffering from your life.
01:00:50.000And, you know, people that don't know how to make healthy choices and don't have friends that are making healthy choices and don't know what to do with their life.
01:01:00.000There's another part of it because it's illegal.
01:01:02.000There's something about things that are illegal that are intoxicating and enticing.
01:01:06.000You know, when you look at the statistics in Holland in particular where marijuana has been, you know, you could buy it in coffee shops forever.
01:01:13.000Not that many people smoke marijuana in Holland.
01:01:15.000It's a lot of marijuana tourism, especially back in the day.
01:01:21.000Now that America has legal marijuana almost everywhere, not a lot of people are going to Holland specifically to get fucked up.
01:01:56.000In terms of the issue of drugs, we have to talk about this.
01:02:00.000How can Americans stop spending that money or allow that money, if it's going to be spent, not to be going to a black market and destabilizing these countries?
01:02:09.000But also a lot of issues in Mexico as well.
01:03:19.000That social work aspect that you're discussing is so critical and something that we've discussed about this country, that how few people are putting, I mean, very few politicians, very few people that are running this country are putting efforts into trying to heal these communities that have suffered from Just years and years of systemic racism,
01:03:44.000years and years of just embedded poverty that's almost impossible to escape, years and years of crime and drugs and just growing up in this community of despair.
01:03:53.000This is what you were talking about with Baltimore.
01:03:56.000This is what we're talking about with South Side of Chicago and various cities all over this country.
01:04:05.000I had Michael Wood, who is a police officer from Baltimore, and he was discussing what it was like being in Baltimore as a police officer and then looking at some documents from the 1970s that detailed the crime in the very same areas that he was patrolling in.
01:04:29.000There was nothing that he was going to be able to do that was going to put a dent in this.
01:04:33.000A lot of it was a product of these areas in Baltimore where there was law that you were not allowed to sell homes to black people in these certain areas.
01:04:43.000So they kept these people in these poor areas.
01:04:46.000And even though they had this desire to escape into the more affluent or safer communities, they weren't allowed to for a long time.
01:04:54.000I mean, there's so much of that in this country that, you know, the people that are in control, everybody just wants to get elected.
01:05:01.000Everybody just wants to, you know, and then once they get elected, then they're looking to get reelected.
01:05:05.000So they spend a gigantic percentage of their time campaigning.
01:05:09.000There's no universal effort on the part of all the citizens of the country to try to look at all these areas and say, hey, this is us.
01:05:18.000Just because you don't live in the south side of Chicago, those are human beings.
01:05:22.000Those are just like you and I. You could have been them.
01:05:45.000I don't know what economic sense any of that stuff makes, but I do know that money is allocated in a lot of different ways, and the idea is that it's going to be better for all of us.
01:05:54.000Well, it's not better for all of us to keep these communities as fucked up as they are right now.
01:06:45.000When they're often 12, 11, 12. And you can often see in these areas who are the kids who are going to get into this, who are going to be recruited by the cartels, who are going to get to gangs, because there's certain profiles in these people.
01:07:12.000And this guy was saying, like, you know, we'll see, you know, I can see from these young kids who's going to be able to kill and, you know, who's going to be a real fighter and who's not.
01:07:22.000And if these people have got, you know, parents who love them and so forth, these guys aren't going to, they're not going to work for me.
01:07:28.000I need someone who's, like, got hate, who's got anger in them, and I can do something with one of those.
01:07:35.000Opposite of this stuff really, but so if people don't have that families and and this makes my guest think a bit more Sympathize I guess as well to you know the art the idea of how how important family is Yeah, how important loving parents is you know whether you're together or separately and loving parents,
01:07:51.000you know having that and But if you don't have that, you know you need social work and new people who can offer something and try and now there was an interesting mayor of Medellin We're good to go.
01:08:24.000And put it in the poorest neighbourhood.
01:08:26.000So that people who want to be in this conservatory have to travel to the poorest neighbourhood and go there and try and change the reality.
01:08:33.000Because if you see around you a horrible neighbourhood, a dirt street, no light, nothing working, what do you turn into?
01:08:39.000And if you see a nice environment around you, can you change people that way?
01:08:47.000It's hard to know exactly because also there was a truce between some of the gangsters there as well for a while.
01:08:53.000Was it related to the construction of the conservatory?
01:08:56.000I don't know if the government was involved in the truce or not, but there was for a time the murder rate did drop quite dramatically in Medellin.
01:09:05.000I don't know if people have carried on, but Medellin has improved.
01:09:08.000I mean, Medellin, Colombia was the worst, the most violent city in the world back in the 1990s, and it's not, you know, people do like their city now in Medellin.
01:09:22.000And the social workers, I'm sure they have some impact on individual people, but I would imagine that the overwhelming volume of children that are being recruited, that it's very hard to put a real dent in it.
01:09:33.000But I think in Ciudad Juarez it had an effect because when that was the most violent city in the world, around 2010-2011, and there was this turf war there between the Sinaloa cartel, which was Chapo Guzman, against a local Juarez cartel.
01:09:48.000And there was 9,000 killed in that city over four years of that war.
01:10:24.000So, and it hasn't gone back up to that level since.
01:10:27.000So I think it does have a real effect when it's put as a policy.
01:10:33.000You know, it does have an effect on these things.
01:10:35.000But also, when you talked a little while ago about a magic wand on this, I mean, in making a police force that actually protects the community, or making a police force that has some kind of effect.
01:10:45.000I mean, I grew up in England, which is, you know, a pretty safe place, relatively, and I used to not like police and, you know, hate being anti-police or whatever growing up.
01:10:56.000And now I appreciate, wow, you know, you have police who actually protect the community in some way.
01:11:44.000The people that have dealt with police officers that are corrupt have a very difficult time hearing what you're saying, right?
01:11:50.000Those people would be angry at what you're saying, saying, no, no, no, the police officers here are corrupt, they are bad, there is racism, there are real problems.
01:11:59.000And there is but I think there's also a real problem being a police officer period I think police officers have an insanely difficult job and I think most of them are dealing with PTSD I think there's a giant percentage of them like all over the world and in America too that are constantly dealing with violence and the threat of violence and arresting criminals and being shot at and People lying to them.
01:12:23.000I just don't think I think most people are very ill-equipped to handle something like that.
01:12:30.000I mean, I agree there are definitely problems with the police, and there are problems.
01:12:35.000I mean, the police shootings are very real problems.
01:12:38.000Police killing innocent people here is very real.
01:12:41.000And you've always got to look for improvement.
01:12:43.000And you know there's people, families again, suffering from that violence.
01:12:50.000I just have to sort of clarify because I know so many people will be hearing this and going, yeah, Mexico's terrible, but the United States, there's a ton of videos.
01:12:58.000The real issue though is we're also dealing with the sheer number of interactions that police have with people.
01:13:07.000Yeah, but I was going to say on the other thing, like, say the crime of kidnapping.
01:13:11.000Kidnapping is a horrific antisocial crime.
01:13:14.000I mean, a horrific crime that destroys lives.
01:13:16.000There's one video, a video which really made me sick, which was given to a family of a kid, like a 14-year-old kid, who was taken and they sent this video to his family in Mexico.
01:13:31.000And they were beating this kid and saying to this kid, you know, this is...
01:13:35.000And the guy was saying to the camera, this is your fault, you bitch, to the mum.
01:13:41.000Now you're going to give me the money.
01:13:42.000So I was asking for like, what was it, $300,000.
01:13:48.000And those kind of crimes and kidnapping doesn't happen in the United States on a very big level because you've got effective law enforcement.
01:13:57.000I was at one conference and there was a real nice guy, but there was people calling for the abolition of the police and there shouldn't be a police force.
01:14:05.000So you really want to live like with no police.
01:14:08.000You really want to live with a dysfunctional police where they can just kidnap your kid and like send a video to you like that and you've got no protection from that kind of thing.
01:14:16.000I mean there's definitely problems here but also you've got to see the other side of having a completely dysfunctional police.
01:14:23.000There's just such a staggering difference between the United States and Mexico in that regard, in regard to gang violence, drug violence, just overall murders and the stories that we hear from over there.
01:14:49.000I get criticized sometimes from, you know, sometimes Mexican government sources or Mexican tourism sources, you know, like I'm covering this stuff, so I'm showing the worst.
01:14:59.000And it can give a distorted picture sometimes because, you know, when I tell a story of 49 decapitated bodies with their hands and feet cut off, people think, wow, you know, as soon as you say this stuff and some guy describing decapitating people, this kind of does...
01:15:59.000Like if you feel like a failure, if you feel like, I guess maybe social media has affected this as well because you see what people have and you expect you to have more.
01:16:18.000Whereas in Mexico, lots of people are broke.
01:16:20.000So you don't feel that same kind of personal failure with that.
01:16:25.000When I'm there, one thing that always strikes me is how happy people seem.
01:16:29.000And that I think there's a certain stress level that a lot of Americans put themselves into where they're constantly pursuing material possessions, material wealth and success.
01:17:05.000The vast majority of the United States, I mean, there's some insane number, like 34, if you make more than $35,000 a year, you are in the top 1% of the world.
01:17:14.000So, there's a giant percentage of this country that's in the top 1% of the world, yet the overall happiness level, at least from what I've read, is quite a bit below the people in Mexico.
01:17:28.000I mean, yeah, a lot of these things, I mean, how do you see your own happiness or measure your own happiness or sense of success or failure?
01:18:24.000The Eric Holder thing that went down years ago where they sold, it was some sort of a sting, and they sold guns, and those guns wound up being used to kill Americans and even American police officers.
01:18:37.000So that was, so the ATF, I'm going after this, and there's, I mean, the number of guns, no one's really sure how many guns are going down, but there was one study.
01:18:46.000That came to the conclusion that over 200,000 guns every year go from the United States into Mexico.
01:19:00.000And I interviewed a guy in prison in Ciudad Juarez for gun trafficking.
01:19:04.000And he would drive every weekend from Mexico up to the United States by like 10 to 15, mostly AR-15s, some other guns as well, and drive them down into Mexico.
01:19:21.000And it's pretty easy to get into Mexico.
01:19:23.000So you drive them in, it's like a piece of piss.
01:20:40.000Now, so he was just simply buying these guns and taking them down.
01:20:44.000I saw right in front of me as well, somebody who said to the person, I can't buy, was looking for a different gun and said, no, I can't buy it.
01:20:57.000And the person, you know, is still happy.
01:21:00.000Like, even the private sale loophole, if you, in theory, if you suspect the person is a criminal, or we use them for criminal purposes, you shouldn't sell them a gun.
01:21:10.000And so one thing, I mean, you really want, do people really want people who, they could be MS-13, undocumented, they can still walk in and buy guns in some of these places.
01:22:15.000I also interviewed in Baltimore a gun trafficker who was taking guns into the city of Baltimore.
01:22:20.000Yeah, the gun show loophole is very strange.
01:22:23.000It's very strange that that's allowed.
01:22:24.000And this is coming from someone, me personally, who owns guns.
01:22:27.000And I believe in the Second Amendment.
01:22:30.000I don't think that the way to stop people from doing illegal activities is to make those activities illegal for people who don't do anything illegal.
01:22:38.000I think the real issue is the psychology behind people that are willing to shoot people in the first place and to deal with the overall mentality of these human beings and try to figure out what's wrong with our society.
01:22:50.000Cure it at a base level, at a human level.
01:23:17.000If you are a person who believes in the Second Amendment and you believe in legal and responsible gun use, you should be angry at that.
01:23:25.000Because that represents a gigantic problem.
01:23:28.000And that also represents a threat to legal gun ownership.
01:23:31.000Because if this keeps happening and people keep getting outraged and more mass shootings happen with illegally acquired guns, after a while, it's going to come to some sort of a real conflict with people.
01:23:42.000Yeah, I'm actually doing a new book about gun trafficking.
01:23:46.000So I'm really interested to hear about these issues and what the actual room for compromise is.
01:23:50.000Or like someone like yourself who believes in the Second Amendment, how much room for compromise do you think there is on these issues?
01:23:59.000I mean, like closing the gun show loophole.
01:24:01.000The other thing, like for example, the issue of 50 cals.
01:24:23.000Not quite that big, but they're big-ass bullets.
01:24:26.000Now, I understand a lot of these Mets, police and military are corrupt as well, but you know, if you are an honest one or whatever, you're going in a car and you start getting hit by one of those going into your vehicle, then they open up on you.
01:24:37.000So is there any room there, do you think, for like, clamping down on 50 cows?
01:24:42.000I've never heard that discussion that much.
01:24:43.000I have a friend who has one, Anthony Cumier.
01:24:49.000I mean, the idea that you're using that for self-defense, unless you're going to war with Russia or fighting against some gang, cartel gang that's invading your city, that seems, that's a military weapon.
01:25:02.000I mean, it's the same argument, I think, for having a fighter jet with Hellfire missiles.
01:25:07.000Do I think you should be able to own a Cessna and fly a little plane around?
01:25:38.000There's like these levels that things get to, you know?
01:25:42.000That's the argument against automatic weapons.
01:25:46.000Like, you can't use automatic – like, certain states have regulations in terms of what you can – in California, you can't even have a silencer.
01:25:54.000I don't know why, because it's very bad to have that loud bang of a gun.
01:26:00.000And if you're a hunter or someone who likes to shoot target practice or something, that's a terrible thing for your ears.
01:26:06.000And there's a suppressor that they could put on the end of the barrel and it'll mitigate that.
01:26:09.000But for whatever reason, I think mostly because of films and public perception, people think that those silencers are only used by assassins or something like that.
01:26:57.000I mean, I guess the gun lobby see the idea of a gun registry as being a step to taking away their guns because like once you start registering, then you can go then afterwards and say, well, we know where the guns are or whatever.
01:27:11.000But how do you think there's flexibility on that issue of like the gun...
01:27:17.000I mean, like with a car, like you have a license plate, and if there's a hit and run, you just type it in and you know whose car it is within seconds.
01:27:24.000With gun tracing, you can't, you know, you find a gun at a crime scene, whatever, you can't just put a button and go, bang, that's whose it is.
01:27:31.000They have to go through a whole formal trace and go through this kind of search.
01:27:37.000So you think there's flexibility on that issue as well, or how do you feel about that yourself?
01:27:40.000Well, I myself feel there should be a traceable database.
01:27:43.000I mean, it's just like a car, and I'm glad you brought up that analogy, because when you get a car, you have to know how to drive a car.
01:27:55.000In order to have a license to drive a car, you have to take a test.
01:30:15.000He was driving around and he had a mini Uzi.
01:30:19.000On his lap as he was driving around to crime scenes and running around doing stuff.
01:30:26.000But do you think guns are actually effective for self-defense?
01:30:29.000I mean, do you have guns for self-defense and believe in that or simply just enjoy the sport of shooting guns?
01:30:33.000Well, I hunt and one of the things I have used, although I archery hunt now, most of the hunts I go on when I go to these places to bow hunt Specifically.
01:30:53.000And it depends entirely on the situation.
01:30:56.000That's like saying, do you think cars are effective to get you where you want to go?
01:31:00.000Well, they are effective if you drive carefully and you use the blinkers and look when you change lanes and make sure you observe the speed limit and all the different laws and Are aware and don't crash into anybody.
01:31:13.000But if you're an asshole, no, they're not effective.
01:31:15.000You're going to wind up dying in a car accident.
01:31:17.000You're going to flip your car over on the side of the road.
01:31:19.000If you're in a terrible situation, it is better to have a gun than to not have a gun if you know how to use it.
01:31:25.000If someone's breaking into your house, there is countless stories of people protecting their families from bad guys when they have guns.
01:32:50.000If you don't understand how to use it, if you're not trained, if you don't have training to keep your shit together when things go south, because when you're in a situation and your life is in danger, if you've never been in a high pressure situation before,
01:33:08.000How do you know you can keep it together and even hit something you're aiming at?
01:33:15.000And they have a really hard time dealing with life or death situations if they haven't served in the military or been in some very, very high-stress situations where you have to learn how to control yourself under extreme pressure conditions.
01:33:40.000I mean, some martial arts are fucking horse shit.
01:33:43.000There's a lot of people out there practicing nonsense, and if someone who actually knew how to fight just punched them in the face, they would be doomed.
01:33:50.000And then there's other people out there that are experts, that would be very calm if someone tried to fight them, and they would know what to do and what not to do, and if the person wasn't armed, they would be able to easily dispatch them.
01:34:01.000It really is dependent upon the situation, how much effort you've put into it, how much thought you've put into it.
01:34:06.000But there's a lot of people out there that if you broke into their house, you're making a huge mistake because they're trained and prepared and ready because they don't want to be a victim.
01:34:16.000And it doesn't mean they're bad people.
01:34:18.000And I think we have a problem in this country where we look at things.
01:36:35.000There's another sad thing of a guy filming, an American journalist called Bradley Rowland Will, rest in peace, who was killed in Mexico back in 2006. And he was filming a shooting in the state of Oaxaca.
01:36:56.000And he filmed these guys shooting, and he fell and was hit, and it carried on filming.
01:37:07.000Yeah, I was working for a news agency that day when he was killed then.
01:37:12.000Yeah, there's a lot of courageous camera people, and they get locked into that job, and it becomes normalized, almost like you were saying, the people that live in these war-torn areas, it becomes a normal way of life to them.
01:37:24.000And although there are a lot of murders, if you're there on a daily basis, it seems almost like a regular life.
01:37:30.000A lot of these cameramen, I mean, they're courageous people.
01:37:33.000You see these guys who go over to war zones and film what's going on in Afghanistan, and I've met some of these guys.
01:37:40.000It's a crazy way of life to just accept the fact that you're an observer that might be a victim and you're capturing all this so people like me can get some semblance of a perception to what's going on in that part of the world.
01:37:54.000I went over to the Philippines, Southern Philippines, and saw the fight against the Islamic State there in the end of 2017. And it was interesting seeing that compared to the violence I cover normally in Mexico.
01:38:07.000So that was ISIS. They took over a city called Marawi.
01:38:11.000And it was an area, they called it, it was interesting, it was more self-contained.
01:38:16.000They had an area called the Main Battle Area, the NBA, the Main Battle Area.
01:38:21.000So in that area was ISIS and the Philippine Army just gung at it all the time, just like a constant bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
01:38:30.000But actually, even when you're outside that main area, even if you're, you know, we were just outside it, and even if you're like 600 metres or 600 metres from it, but you're not in the fight, and the fighting is over there.
01:38:41.000Whereas in something like Mexico, South America, a lot of times this fighting is kind of happening everywhere.
01:38:46.000There's no real control over where the main battle area is.
01:38:51.000But they didn't really let any journalists inside, like deep into the main battle area.
01:38:56.000They didn't really let any journalists in.
01:38:58.000We're sitting outside and hearing this constant ricochet of gunfire.
01:39:02.000But sometimes bullets will come out of the area.
01:39:05.000So there was an Australian guy and I think he bent over to pick up some cookies and a bullet hit him in the neck.
01:39:14.000I saw the x-ray, actually, of the bullet embedded in the side of his neck.
01:40:09.000I talked to the general and he had a big chart showing how the techniques of guerrilla warfare had evolved from like Fallujah, Aleppo, Mosul, and how this kind of weird new form of guerrilla warfare they have of like fighting house to house.
01:40:27.000So basically it's suicidal kind of guerrilla war.
01:40:31.000And they'll be like, you know, super close, fighting really close.
01:40:34.000And then when they're born, they hide in like, you know, basements and stuff.
01:40:38.000And they drill holes in the walls so they can fire through and fire through.
01:40:43.000And the footage he had, he showed me the footage he had from being like right inside, close up, like running literally in the room, bang, taking these people out.
01:40:51.000And it was like, wow, this is just crazy.
01:40:54.000I was trying to persuade the guy to let me...
01:41:08.000I mean, Mexico right now is almost like a war.
01:41:14.000I mean, you can call it a drug war, but because it's not like an army versus army war, we don't think about it that way, but In terms of the amount of violence that goes on over there and the amount of casualties, it rivals anything that's going on in the world right now.
01:41:31.000Yeah, so I've been talking a lot about this over the years and with some experts.
01:41:35.000There's a good writer called Robert Bunker who's an external researcher for the Pentagon and he investigates this stuff.
01:41:42.000There's a guy called John Sullivan from here in California who's a police officer who also did a bunch of research and got a doctorate in studying a lot of this stuff as well.
01:41:51.000Talk to them about their ideas about what this means.
01:41:56.000How can you define this in terms of warfare?
01:43:21.000So sometimes you actually get, it actually starts to look more like a kind of regular conflict, but generally it's all, you know, way more kind of hybrid.
01:43:49.000It's a kind of crime-war, and that's the way you've got to understand these things.
01:43:53.000But a lot of the conflicts around the world today, these are spreading.
01:43:56.000I mean, you look at Somalia, you look at Libya, you look at a lot of these places, the kind of weird mix, instability.
01:44:03.000And then this is what a lot of refugees are fleeing from.
01:44:07.000And I was down in Tijuana at Christmas.
01:44:12.000I followed the migrant caravan that came through Mexico of Central Americans, you know, which caused a big storm here that Trump kind of hit before the election.
01:45:39.000Now the caravan began in October, around October 12th.
01:45:45.000And there was a call for them to meet.
01:45:48.000And my friend Orlean, again, the journalist down in Honduras, he was down there filming with his TV crew, putting it on TV. Now they're down here, they're going on this caravan, and suddenly it went boom, and loads of people saw it on TV, and they're like, I'm going, I'm leaving, I'm leaving.
01:46:03.000Now the desperation was so heavy, now Honduras is in a real meltdown kind of stage.
01:46:10.000Venezuela's worse, but Honduras might be like number two for our real meltdown cases in Latin America right now.
01:46:17.000So people were like, and I was talking to some of these people, they would say like, I saw it on TV and I was, that's it, I'm going.
01:46:22.000Just decided right away, I'm going to get my bag and I'm going to go.
01:46:26.000So they arrived, when they went through Guatemala into Guatemala, you know, they became big, like 7,000 people.
01:46:32.000We arrived at the border with Mexico and, you know, first of all, there was a push and shove on the border and tear gas was fired and they went down and crossed the river, some of them walking across with a rope,
01:46:52.000It was a kind of crazy scene, you know, the scene down there was squatted half the bridge and then they came down, so it was kind of a big deal.
01:46:59.000The idea of calling them an invading army and so forth was obviously overblown, but like, I think it was significant scenes, quite historic scenes that were happening down there.
01:47:08.000And what was the overall goal to make it through to the United States?
01:47:13.000Yeah, I mean, you know, different people had different ideas.
01:47:15.000It was kind of one of these weird things, you know, like it was go to the United States.
01:47:18.000Now, some people had no idea where they were going, had no real plan.
01:47:22.000Some people had very clear cases of being like, I'm a refugee, you know, understanding a bit about refugee legislation.
01:47:31.000And, like, fleeing very specific cases where they've been targeted by gangs working with corrupt police who want to kill them, who have, like, attacked them, and they've run, and, like, I want to seek refuge in the United States, or in Mexico.
01:47:45.000Someone was seeking refuge in Mexico, which is not the safest place to seek refuge.
01:47:50.000I mean, like, there's been cases of people who have, one cameraman I know who fed Honduras and then was killed in Mexico.
01:47:57.000Has there ever been any discussion of the United States military intervening and trying to do something about the cartels?
01:48:04.000So there's been like a U.S. you know some U.S. forces like U.S. marshals sometimes Mexico is very proud of its constitution and very proud of its sovereignty and doesn't want U.S. force acting in Mexico.
01:48:22.000And I think the kind of idea really of U.S. military is pretty out there.
01:48:28.000It wouldn't help if it would be bogged down into more problems and there'd be no appetite in Mexico for that.
01:48:35.000But there have been some cases of U.S. Doing some kind of activity in Mexico, like for example, when they went after Chapo Guzman, When they got him and there was a big shootout.
01:48:49.000They got him the first time, actually, without shots fired.
01:48:53.000And then he went to prison and escaped.
01:49:17.000It was really weird when I went to New York right now, seeing him in the court in New York, like seeing him in the flesh after all these years covering this stuff.
01:49:26.000And I saw him and it was like, you know, I've been to his village before.
01:51:38.000Did you talk to them about the contradiction of being an evangelical Christian, being involved in essentially a mass murder and drug running operation?
01:51:48.000So the cousin is supposedly, you know, he was like a cattle rancher now.
01:51:52.000I don't know exactly, you know, obviously he calls...
01:51:58.000I don't know how much he might have been involved in the past, but he says he's a farmer there.
01:52:05.000And the mother, Chapo's mother, who's 88, was 88 then now, is like 89, 90 now.
01:52:14.000She talks about her son with kind of pride.
01:53:17.000You get into a kind of weird intrigue there about what the government was doing with this whole case.
01:53:23.000There's a history in this country with prosecuting the mob, John Gotti and Sammy the Bull Gravano who was an admitted murderer and talked about the murders that he committed and still they allowed him to get free.
01:53:36.000Yeah, one of his, John Gotti's lawyer was one of the lawyers for our chapel.
01:54:17.000So, they originally tried a bit of a defense of, they wanted to give a defense of how there's a kind of government conspiracy of, like, showing things like Fast and Furious that you mentioned.
01:54:32.000Like saying, oh, how come the government's trafficking guns to the cartels?
01:54:36.000And one of the witnesses had before, one of the witnesses against him, before used this weird defense called public authority, saying he had permission from the United States government to traffic drugs.
01:54:47.000So basically saying there's a kind of conspiracy involving the Mexican government, totally corrupt and working with cartels.
01:54:53.000The US government is corrupt and working with cartels and having various suspicious agencies.
01:54:57.000And El Chapo is kind of a fool guy that they're putting this blame on.
01:56:02.000I mean, one of these weird things you think like, if you're a drug lord and you've got all of the money, you know, you've got millions, billions they say, let's say hundreds of millions.
01:56:11.000I think they exaggerate how much money some of these guys have.
01:58:24.000You know, they're trying to constantly win.
01:58:26.000And also, you have an obligation because you're a CEO of this company.
01:58:31.000So, you're running this enormous business that's...
01:58:35.000Earning money for all these other people as well.
01:58:37.000It's all very complicated, though, that has to do with a lot of psychological factors where people can't put things into perspective and they get caught up in the race.
01:58:46.000I guess, yeah, I mean, drug traffickers are thinking that same thing.
01:58:49.000I mean, also, like, you know, people have explained to me, involved in this world, They make a lot of money, but they spend a lot of money.
02:00:43.000So Keita Castillo, who you see there, she was an actress in a TV series about drug traffickers, which have now become a huge deal in Latin America.
02:00:55.000They're called like, telenovelas means like soap operas kind of thing, series, TV series.
02:01:00.000And a whole bunch of them made about drug traffickers, which are really popular.
02:01:03.000And she was in one called La Reina del Sur, The Queen of the South.
02:01:07.000And in that, she played this drug trafficker.
02:01:11.000And afterwards, in some kind of weird moment afterwards, I think she was really into her role and stuff.
02:01:20.000She came out with this message she wrote saying, you know, Mexico, this is such a tragic situation in Mexico.
02:01:30.000You know, why don't they come, you know, drug traffickers come and like traffic with love.
02:01:37.000I trust you more than I do the government.
02:01:41.000These are kind of sentiments that some people have, but it was kind of a strange thing, kind of a bit of an out there thing for a TV star to say.
02:01:49.000And then El Chapo apparently became kind of enamoured with her, seeing her on TV, and they started this kind of communication.
02:02:01.000Now Sean Penn then got involved in this, And was like, you know, I'm going to go there as well and we can talk about the idea, you know, the pretense of the meeting was as well talking about making a movie or TV series of his story.
02:02:19.000And El Chapo giving the rights to Kate de Castillo and Sean Penn was kind of involved in this somehow.
02:02:25.000Now, Sean Penn, there's a bit of discussion now that Sean Penn and Kate de Castillo fell out over this.
02:02:31.000They have different versions of what happened there.
02:02:34.000But Sean Penn decided to go and write this story for Rolling Stone about the whole experience.
02:02:39.000So they went then and this meeting was arranged and they went up to the mountains and when that photo was taken, Now, at that point, he didn't actually give an interview to Sean Penn, but they had a dinner and they had a meeting up in the mountains.
02:02:55.000And then left, and then they were meant to...
02:02:59.000Afterwards, there was then a big attempt to hit Chapo, but he escaped.
02:03:05.000So that's when some people say that...
02:03:09.000The Mexican government had followed them and used their trace to try and get to El Chapo.
02:03:46.000And am I going to lead, you know, what's my connection with law enforcement, what's your connection with criminals?
02:03:51.000It's a very difficult thing that I've been balancing and thinking about for a lot of years.
02:03:55.000So anyway, Chapo escaped and then said he couldn't meet up again for the interview because it was too hot for him.
02:04:03.000So they made this video interview where he was sent some questions and he videoed himself on Answering the questions, which is kind of interesting.
02:04:13.000It was the first kind of statement he made.