In this episode, I sit down with a man who is a Non-Permissive Environment Specialist who helps people live and work in places where they shouldn't be traveling. He is a former Mexican law enforcement officer who went on to become a non-permissive environment specialist and now teaches others how to survive in such environments. We talk about how he got started in law enforcement, how he became a NPD Specialist, and how he ended up teaching other people how to live and move in places they shouldn t be traveling in. I hope you enjoy this episode and that it gives you some insight into what it's like to live in a Non Permissive Environment in a cross-border environment and how you can adapt to it. If you are interested in learning more about NPD, I highly recommend checking out my YouTube channel, "Non Permissive Ecosystems" where you can get all the info you need to know about the NPD and NEPE. Thanks for listening and share this episode with your friends, family, and family! Peace, Blessings, Cheers, EJ & Rory - The EJ Crew and the EJ Team xoxo - EJ and the crew at EJ Media Thank you for sponsoring this episode! -EJ Media and EJ Podcast! Timestamps: 0:00:00 - What is a NPPE? 6:30 - How do you stay safe in Mexico? 8:15 - What does it take to survive? 9:00 11:40 - What do you're going to do? 14:00 | How do I'm going to survive there? 15:30 | What are you going to be able to survive here? 16:40 | What do I need? 17:20 - What's a good day? 18:30 21:40 22:10 - What kind of job do you want to do in Mexico ? 25:10 27:00 // 22: What's your biggest challenge? 26:30 // 27:10 | Where do you need a safe place to live? 29:30 What s a good place to start? 35:00 / 30: What s your biggest weakness? 36:00 +33:00 & 35:15 32:00 What is your biggest advantage? 37:00
00:01:13.000So you can kind of trace back where it officially kicked off.
00:01:18.000By the start of Felipe Calderon's presidency, which is the second-to-last president we had, he basically said, you know, full-on war against the cartels.
00:01:33.000And by that time, I was kind of just getting done with my training in northern Mexico as a police officer.
00:01:41.000And what I thought was going to be, you know, community policing and stuff like that turned into a full-on, you know, here's a basalt rifle and just go climb up on that humby with those military guys and let's go arrest cartel members.
00:02:04.000I was actually in med school, and the economy all over the border with the tightened security and stuff like that kind of went down the drain, and most of the money that I was using for med school went away.
00:02:19.000That in the newspaper, young, unmarried individuals that don't have any kids, you're welcome to join, type thing.
00:03:57.000So, I mean, basically, the part of the country that I had most of my experience is the Baja, Sonora, Juarez-type region, northern Mexico, basically.
00:04:44.000There's a giant organized crime war going on.
00:04:49.000It used to be overt, like on the streets.
00:04:52.000Middle of the day, you would see these cartel convoys arriving at a restaurant and all the cartel guys outside with their AKs and stuff like that.
00:05:52.000At all those types of levels down there during this time, there was a lot of corruption.
00:05:58.000Things changed, but things in a way in some levels are always the same.
00:06:04.000There was definitely some sort of pact going on, some sort of fear-based pact during that time.
00:06:10.000And when Felipe Calderon finally said, you know, enough is enough, we're going to declare war, he basically militarized a lot of the counter-narcotic efforts in Mexico.
00:06:21.000So the military went from being in their bases or manning stations out there to actually actively going out and looking for cartel cells and trying to eliminate them.
00:06:35.000So basically army on the street type situation.
00:06:39.000And another thing he did was basically a lot of the police chiefs around the country were being traded out for former military officials or military guys, officers.
00:06:52.000One of them was Lieutenant Colonel Lezaola.
00:06:55.000I don't know if maybe your audience could look him up.
00:06:58.000He's a very famous lieutenant colonel from Mexico.
00:07:01.000He actually has a documentary on him called Mexico's Most Bravest Man.
00:07:40.000You expected it to be regular law enforcement.
00:07:44.000When it became this counterinsurgency, militarized effort against the cartels, was there every time where you were like, I gotta get the fuck out of this job?
00:11:22.000Now, if everything is so corrupt down there, how does a guy like El Chapo keep getting popped?
00:11:27.000Because when I saw his escape, I was like, this is hilarious.
00:11:31.000The fact that this guy goes to the toilet, and then he opens a door, and whoop, he's in a tunnel, and on an electric scooter, and goes a mile, pops up on the other side, and they had everything set up for him with electricity.
00:11:44.000I mean, I think the thing that people kind of don't understand about the corruption is it's not just corruption because people are greedy.
00:12:38.000So a lot of the people that El Chapo actually used for these tunnel operations, because the same people that he used for the tunnels in the border region...
00:12:46.000All the active tunnels that are somewhere along the border, all of those guys were pulled in from silver mining companies that used to operate all over Mexico.
00:12:57.000That kind of went into the toilet, so they were looking for jobs.
00:13:05.000When you saw all that shit go down with Sean Penn and Sean Penn visiting El Chapo and Sean Penn writing an article for Rolling Stone, were you like, what in the fuck is going on here?
00:13:24.000Mainly was, why are they giving him this celebrity status?
00:13:32.000There's a lot of glorification and a lot of...
00:13:37.000People venerating some of these people down there, and they do a lot of harm.
00:13:41.000So he's basically giving a voice to somebody.
00:13:43.000It would be the equivalent of somebody up here giving a voice to somebody that was responsible for a lot of damage done to the U.S. Why do you think they did that?
00:16:11.000He's at the top of the list as far as popularity, but as far as the actual drug dealers, is he at the top of the list or are there more clever folks that hide underground?
00:16:20.000Yeah, there's rumors of people above him that are still out there somewhere.
00:16:55.000Well, some people get sick with the fame, probably, and they want to go outside.
00:17:00.000Well, once that TV show Narcos came on, I think there's a lot of people who did not realize how crazy the life of Pablo Escobar was and what really went down in Colombia.
00:17:15.000Pablo Escobar was a phenomenon in his time and age, but he was one man.
00:17:21.000I'll imagine replicating that type of insanity over the span of Mexico and it's about eight or nine guys, you know?
00:17:30.000That was the 90s, early 2000s because these guys were...
00:17:36.000Legion of Doom type thing where they would be enemies, but they would have reunions and they would meet up and kind of agree on certain things.
00:19:02.000And a new upsurging cartel down there that is trying to overtake the Sinaloa cartel, the new generation cartel, is coming out of Guadalajara.
00:19:15.000And they're kind of really militarized, kind of wing of cartel activities that are trying to, you know, take control over the whole thing.
00:19:23.000What is the plan in terms of the government?
00:19:25.000I mean, if they can take out a guy like El Chapo, what is the plan to eradicate all this, and is there really a plan to eradicate it, or is it one of those things where it's sort of a plan on paper, but realistically they sort of accept the fact they're never going to get rid of these people?
00:19:39.000So, I have a thing, like basically, Quetzalcoatl was a feathered serpent.
00:19:47.000I have an image of a feathered serpent biting its tail.
00:19:50.000Mexico has a problem with amnesia, a six-year cycle of amnesia.
00:19:56.000Every president comes in and has all these plans to eradicate the cartels.
00:19:59.000The president goes out, nobody likes them anymore.
00:20:01.000The new guy comes in and says, well, I have a better plan.
00:20:03.000And that's the cycle we always go through.
00:20:08.000And currently we have a leftist president that doesn't want to have anything to do with the past administrations that are more on the right of the spectrum.
00:20:19.000His name is Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, AMLO, vocally supporting Venezuela, that type of guy.
00:20:28.000Apparently he has a good relationship with Trump.
00:22:06.000So they're cleaning each other out and just bodies appear in the morning, you know, on bridges, hung from bridges, torture, shot, you know.
00:22:17.000But again, nobody's doing anything about it.
00:22:20.000They should, you know, but kind of turning a blind eye in a lot of ways.
00:22:27.000And so with this leftist president, this guy who has this idea of amnesty...
00:22:32.000The people that are in charge of handling the cartel, the military and the police officers, they've got to feel like a little abandoned.
00:22:42.000Yeah, or maybe some of them will have a business plan and they're working on one side.
00:23:54.000They change the name, you know, but...
00:23:56.000Try to refresh the public opinion of it.
00:23:59.000There's a famous, you know, investigation, federal investigation police called the AFI. And they were like modern investigative federal police that's going to go after, and they were corrupt as hell.
00:24:12.000And all they did was get a name change and all these guys got shuffled around.
00:24:16.000And literally I was like, hey, I know you.
00:24:58.000And each municipality has its own police force, and they might be completely different politically than the state and federal.
00:25:07.000It must, for you to have your life on the line over there and see all this chaos and obvious either lack of organization or outright corruption, it must be insanely frustrating.
00:25:19.000Yeah, I mean, putting people in that were clearly guilty of things, you know, and then seeing them come out.
00:25:29.000Or the legal system down there that I had to endure, you know, you would have to go and do a face-to-face with all these people.
00:25:37.000Go into a federal courthouse, leave your firearms behind, do a face-to-face with these people inside that you just got for however many tons of cocaine or pot or whatever, and then go outside and they're outside.
00:25:54.000There's no anonymity in that regard, so you would have to sign things.
00:25:59.000And then seeing some of the people that were with you working on your side and seeing how some of them would fall into corruption charges and then sue the government and then get your jobs back.
00:26:09.000But now you have somebody who's compromised within your own unit.
00:26:49.000The problem is that the polygraphs turned out to be unconstitutional to fire somebody over them.
00:26:55.000So a lot of these people got hired back after they would fail basic polygraph exam.
00:27:00.000So again, it's a lot of attempts to clean it up, you know, and You would be on the level, and all these people wouldn't be on the level, but they were still there.
00:27:11.000What percentage of people are not on the level, if you had to guess, roughly?
00:29:35.000They changed what they were producing.
00:29:41.000The reason why there's a heroin epidemic up here and fentanyl epidemic up here I think it has some relationship with how things got legalized up here and how they switched product down there.
00:29:56.000So lighter colored heroin is coming down from Mexico.
00:30:00.000And I've worked with law enforcement up here in the U.S. doing classes and kind of, you know, they send me things like, what do you think about this, Ed?
00:30:09.000And I've seen that lighter colored heroin pop up in places as far off as Chicago.
00:30:43.000It's such a strange relationship because the reason why these drug cartels have so much power is because they're selling drugs to the United States.
00:30:51.000So it's like you have this connection to this country.
00:30:56.000That has this great big wall that it wants to build, and on one side, everybody's buying up all the illegal drugs, and on the other side, everyone's killing everybody to try to make and sell these illegal drugs.
00:31:05.000Yeah, I mean, and there's a lot of holes underneath that wall, and drones, drone technology.
00:33:10.000Every now and then, and this isn't a secret.
00:33:13.000Every now and then you would see a dude out there that's blonde, tall, and has a bunch of tattoos that don't belong down there working on the military side of things in Mexico.
00:33:24.000Or some dudes doing something in some place that you would get a call, you know, oh, they're fine, just leave them alone.
00:33:33.000So, if it's 3 out of 10 were corrupt where you were, it might be like 1 out of 10 CIA guys?
00:33:41.000I mean, you know, usually we would get to, since I have a pretty good spoken English, I would get sent places for training or for liaison work with some people that would go down there, and I would never know where the hell some of these people were from.
00:34:36.000I learned about it from CNN. And a few of my friends were killed with some of those guns down there, which is, you know, everybody talks about the U.S. agent that was in Mexico was killed by some of these guns.
00:34:50.000But there was a lot of You know, Mexican agents and people, civilians killed by these guns as well.
00:34:55.000So there were very specific types of guns, you know?
00:34:57.000So imagine somebody giving you a shopping list about the types of guns you want, right?
00:35:02.000Including in these lists were.50 cal Barrett rifles and FN57s, which are a very, it's a pistol with a very high velocity round that goes through soft armor, like the type of stuff that was issued to us.
00:35:19.000So all of a sudden we're seeing these space pistols in the hands of the cartels in very specific parts of the country.
00:35:26.000But what a preposterous idea that they were going to sell it to the cartels so they could track them.
00:37:44.000All of them had very specific accessories on them that nobody else in the world puts these accessories on their guns at the US because they're pretty ridiculous accessories.
00:38:19.000Well, the main rumor down there, like, conspiracy theory-wise, and you would hear all sorts of things, you know, because down there, there's no such thing as top secret clearance in Mexico, you know?
00:38:29.000There's like, hey, don't say anything, you know?
00:39:27.000And again, this is just weird stuff you want to create this is a crazy perspective right the Cartels would poison the drugs to punish the Americans for the military invading the country and Yeah.
00:39:41.000To create a health crisis in the U.S. So they would have to go back.
00:41:21.000There's a famous video from somewhere down in Mexico where they shoot a Vulcan rifle down at a cartel member in a car, an armored vehicle.
00:41:29.000But then you'd see, well, checkmate government against a cartel.
00:41:34.000But then you realize that the cartels, like the New Generation Cartels in Guadalajara, have actually downed helicopters in Guadalajara, military helicopters, because they have anti-aircraft capabilities.
00:43:40.000Because the men are all getting killed.
00:43:41.000All getting got in the cartel operations and killed or recruited, forcefully recruited or voluntarily recruited, but whole generations just wiped out.
00:43:53.000Now, the people in your line of work, the people that are boots on the ground who really understand the problem, what is the thought in terms of what could be done to fix this?
00:44:04.000I think the main thing is any sort of plan to fight the cartels that involves just a six-year plan won't work.
00:44:14.000Because that's what the main problem has been with Mexico.
00:47:06.000Like the mob, you know, a lot of these guys actually took, you know, a lot of these cartels down there, they kind of venerate the whole gangster era in the U.S. It's like a thing.
00:47:18.000So it's like a thing they look up to, you know?
00:47:40.000A lot of ways, we were, as a group, the group that I used to work with, there was a lot of efforts to professionalize us, to getting that career path to actually making it a career.
00:47:57.000Right now, where I used to work, there's no pension.
00:49:51.000And the cartels realize, you know what?
00:49:55.000We are standing on the richest drug routes on the planet, so we should probably, you know, start fighting over them.
00:50:04.000And also what happened is that, you know, a lot of these people, it's something that Americans kind of don't get yet.
00:50:13.000This isn't a Mexican problem anymore, specifically, as far as the cartel of violence going on.
00:50:18.000A lot of these people had their kids up here in the U.S. in the 90s.
00:50:22.000A lot of these cartel guys, you know, El Chapo had kids in the U.S. And a lot of these people are now coming of age, you know?
00:50:32.000So cartel influence in the U.S. is a thing you're going to start seeing if you're already seeing it, but you're going to see more of it because a lot of these people are actually American-born U.S. citizens.
00:50:44.000Now working in tandem with any sort of interest down there.
00:53:12.000Well, I mean, it's the amount of creativity and problem solving that goes on the criminal side.
00:53:21.000If your best plan is a wall, a secure wall, these guys have been working against that best plan for the past 20 years.
00:53:30.000So they're already way ahead of the curve, you know, in that regard.
00:53:35.000There was an interesting time, and people can look this up, drone technology had an upsurge in innovation in Tijuana out of all places in the world for a time, you know?
00:57:35.000Will they come to your territory to come get you, if you like?
00:57:38.000Yeah, there's been a few high-level singers, Mexican folk singers, that got killed for messing with girlfriends with cartel members or for singing the wrong song in the wrong place.
00:57:59.000Things like Santa Muerte, the death cult that is kind of...
00:58:03.000In different parts of Mexico, it's like, think of a very dark Freemasonry type thing, right?
00:58:11.000Certain levels you have people that are part of that cult, from the cops, to the military, to the cartels, to prostitutes, to drug dealers.
00:58:23.000It's interesting how that kind of also has an influence on the way some people go into very risky businesses like being cops or cartel guys and how they wear or empower themselves by some of these occult iconographies.
00:59:20.000And then you look behind her and there's a reaper behind it because it's a hidden Santa Marta shrine.
00:59:26.000And they do that so the military doesn't destroy them because they have standing orders to destroy these things, which shouldn't be, but, you know, kind of religious persecution, but they actually do that.
00:59:37.000It's so different than the United States.
01:00:21.000Physically for some of these people to do that type of thing, you know, ripping somebody's heart next to a tree is like there's videos of that stuff out there.
01:00:27.000I remember getting contacted by people that I knew on this side of the border in the US that were very curious why all these people from the Middle East were looking at all these cartel execution videos and then a few years later you had ISIS doing some high production execution videos that were inspired by the cartels,
01:01:04.000You go to La Jolla, you see these fucking multi-million dollar estates with this gorgeous view and everyone's driving Ferraris and Porsches.
01:01:49.000We were insured by MetLife, and the MetLife agent said something along those lines, like, you're better off going to Afghanistan or Iraq than...
01:02:00.000You know, working here, basically, numbers-wise.
01:02:03.000And I was like, thank you for that, you know?
01:02:06.000That felt like a good pat on the back.
01:02:09.000But it seems like they're getting cartel on cartel crime confused with regular person crime.
01:02:15.000But that's how it always starts, you know?
01:02:18.000It usually starts off, and again, this goes back to everything cyclical down there.
01:03:07.000And again, I experienced it back in the 2006 era.
01:03:11.000And I saw it get into all the way to when the whole of the municipal police were, basically the army surrounded the municipal police office of the police of Tijuana.
01:04:38.000Myself and some members of my family are actually helping out with his campaign.
01:04:42.000One of his campaign offices got shot up recently.
01:04:48.000So is there any plans or is there any push to try to treat the entire Problem as a counterinsurgency problem to replicate the success that they had in Tijuana.
01:05:39.000Man, for you to have been in that business and to sort of be connected to it but outside of it now, does it seem...
01:05:49.000I mean, it must be incredibly frustrating, but it also must feel futile, like you've wasted time almost, because there's no progress that's ever going to be made.
01:07:35.000There's a store in front of LA, in front of the improv, that I have to put a video up because me and Andrew Santino were there last night making fun of it.
01:07:45.000I'll send it to you, Jamie, right now.
01:10:24.000But the frustration isn't with the pot itself.
01:10:27.000Again, it's what happens around, the politics around it, the amount of money invested into fighting it, and violence and interests around it.
01:10:37.000But the plant itself, again, my mom used to grow it and put it in a jar with alcohol and rub it on her muscles.
01:10:50.000And all of a sudden, you have full-auto machine guns protecting it in a grow somewhere, and full-auto machine guns in another place, people coming in there to burn it because you shouldn't be selling it.
01:11:40.000It seems to me that with the romanticism of the cults and the way that it's ingrained in the culture and that they look at these people like folk heroes, that this is a generational problem.
01:11:53.000It seems like many generations before it changes and calms down.
01:11:57.000And I would struggle to think of what would be the thing that could cause it to calm down.
01:12:25.000We hear about it on the news, like from Fox News talks about it, like scare tactics.
01:12:29.000So I was, I don't know, and people can fact check me on this, but I was probably one of the first ones to publicly say that they were going to go, the first caravan is going to go straight to Tijuana.
01:12:40.000Everybody goes, no, they're not going to go straight to Tijuana.
01:14:29.000And you would see some of the news agencies from the U.S. come down and volunteer groups, hippies, with sending all their donations to these people in some of these Mario Caravan camps.
01:14:44.000They would grab the donations, turn around, and sell it on the backside.
01:14:48.000All of these things they would sell on the backside.
01:16:05.000And then we would see it on the news and it was like flowers and, you know, the narrative was like, I don't know what these guys are talking about.
01:16:14.000Well, Trump is such a polarizing figure that anything...
01:16:18.000That would be anti-immigration like that.
01:16:40.000Yeah, and people have to remember, most Mexicans are very conservative, you know, Catholic, conservative guys, so it kind of resonates with them a little.
01:16:47.000But, you know, again, we're divided as well as you guys are politically, so there's a lot of to-the-left type of leading people down there, so they, you know, again, narrative, you know, divide and conquer.
01:16:58.000But the people on the left, what is their perspective on the migrant caravans?
01:17:01.000Oh, support it, you know, open the borders, you know, let them through.
01:17:33.000And the only reason they came in was to disrupt and create an international scene, which is exactly what they did.
01:17:40.000So did they plan on actually trying to get across?
01:17:43.000They were planning on jumping the fence and claiming asylum on the other side.
01:17:48.000And the famous Lady Frijoles that I kind of made famous on my Instagram account...
01:17:54.000She jumped the fence, claimed asylum, went to Texas, and then her and her sister assaulted somebody somewhere, and then she got arrested, got deported probably.
01:18:02.000So, you know, that's kind of the story of these people.
01:18:06.000And then you would attract some of these people on social media, so they would be all poor in the Maverick Caravan videos they would have on the news, and then you would see them on their social media accounts from back home, Louis Vuitton bags and stuff like that, you know.
01:18:19.000Maybe a fake one, but still, you know, they were fronting.
01:18:23.000You know, it's a weird dynamic on the border.
01:18:26.000And as far as I think it's being utilized in a lot of ways as a political type thing is currently because of the president you guys have up here.
01:18:36.000And correct me if I'm wrong, but they do make an effort to not go into tourist areas and to resort areas and the cartel.
01:18:47.000Well, this is the thing because they own it.
01:19:00.000A lot of people, so I do a lot of training, do a lot of classes, stuff like that, travel safety things.
01:19:05.000And people are amazed with some of the cases that I bring forth that they think they're going to get abducted or drugged by the cartels in some discotheque somewhere down there.
01:19:39.000A lot of the druggings that happen down there during the spring break type time frame, it's always Americans against Americans kind of doing that stuff.
01:19:49.000And people think the cartels are drugging people.
01:19:53.000Sometimes it's Americans taking advantage of the whole...
01:19:58.000I was staying with my family in Punta Mita at the Four Seasons and we had these golf carts and you could take the golf carts out of the resort and they're like can we take the golf carts to the town?
01:20:12.000We leave the resort The first thing you see is a military vehicle armored with soldiers standing at the border of the fucking Four Seasons with machine guns on the roof of this thing standing there ready to rock in case anything goes down.
01:20:30.000Probably waiting for the rival cartel guys to come through.
01:20:34.000So again, a lot of these people legitimized their business years back, so a lot of the money in those resorts probably traced it back to cartel interests.
01:21:23.000I have a few SEAL friends, and mostly just crazy Marine guys.
01:21:28.000And I've been learning about what post-conflict is, post-conflict or being a veteran, a combat veteran, is through them, through their eyes.
01:21:38.000Things like post-traumatic stress disorder and stuff like that, TBI, are things that I didn't even know were a thing until I came up here.
01:21:53.000No, if you go into a situation and you, you know, do something somewhere, you get a few days off, you know, and that's about it, and you come back to work.
01:23:52.000I do know people that, in the Juarez region, that some of the Mitt Romney's family members in that region area, yeah, I know some federal police guys and military guys that...
01:24:09.000We're curious about the amount of firearms that these guys had because they basically fought the cartels off.
01:24:27.000And they're Mormons and they have to get a visa to travel to the U.S. People don't know that Mitt Romney's dad, the reason why Mitt Romney's dad never ran for president is because he was born in Mexico.
01:24:48.000Anybody that's of Irish ancestry, if you go into a bar in Mexico, some bars in Mexico, you can probably get some free drinks if you tell them you're Irish, because the Irish betrayed the Americans in the last Mexico-American War.
01:25:02.000And a lot of them stayed down there and married some of the locals.
01:25:19.000And the cartels wanted to do more against them and these guys...
01:25:25.000Apparently got some high-powered long-range rifles, and they were shooting at these people from afar, and they set up this whole security apparatus around their town.
01:25:35.000And the Mexican government basically looked the other way and kind of said, well, it's fine, just don't get too crazy with it.
01:25:45.000There was some sort of interaction as far as them trying to appease things with them.
01:25:51.000Realistically, the town that they made out there is a paradise.
01:25:55.000I mean, amongst other towns in that area, it's a beautiful place.
01:27:59.000I don't know if it's as open as it was, but back then when it was really rowdy, they were openly doing things to keep people from not coming to their town.
01:28:54.000And I came up here at the weirdest time probably in U.S. history as far as, you know, when I was going through my immigration process, Trump, you know, got elected.
01:29:04.000So it was pretty interesting, you know.
01:29:07.000And, you know, being pulled to both sides of the political spectrum, you know.
01:29:13.000And seeing how people would talk about Mexico in ways that were realistic or just weird things that you would hear.
01:32:16.000The bodies, the brutality, the torture, all that type of stuff down there.
01:32:22.000Again, I tell people, working down there is the closest thing to the Wild West you have currently.
01:32:27.000It's basically, and when people say third world country, there's a lot of cosmopolitan places just across the border that aren't necessarily alien to American eyes.
01:32:41.000Now imagine all this, you know, crazy things happening down there.
01:32:45.000Like, there was a famous firefight in Tijuana, the Cupula, which is basically, there was a big cartel stronghold inside of this castle type thing.
01:32:55.000You know, it had a big giant dome on top of it.
01:33:11.000A lot of the people on the inside, they had a lot of people abducted on the inside and they basically executed all of them.
01:33:17.000And some of the people on the inside with the cartel guys would put zip ties on themselves and, you know, kneel down the ground so you would think it was them.
01:33:25.000And you saw uniformed police officers inside of there shooting outside to uniformed police officers.
01:33:31.000So you would see how the crazy corruption and, you know.
01:33:36.000LA shootout happens, bank robbery, two guys with AK-47s.
01:34:06.000These guys used to roll around dressed as cops with cloned vehicles, and now they roll around in taxi cabs and are more discreet in how they move.
01:34:15.000These guys used to use drug mules and drug tunnels.
01:34:35.000What made you start your Instagram account?
01:34:37.000Because your Instagram account is excellent.
01:34:39.000It's Ed Manifesto, and you talk so much about the problems that are going on over there, and you also do a lot of situational awareness stuff.
01:34:48.000You show, like, what's wrong with this picture?
01:34:53.000Main thing was, when I started, I was still active down there, so it was kind of like a reporting, you know?
01:35:00.000So I was trying to share things with people to try and raise awareness.
01:35:06.000But after that, it became more of a thing of, I just spent over a decade working in this environment down here, and I have nothing to show for it.
01:35:16.000So, I need to take that experience and make it worth it for people, to share some of that experience with other people, and to make it, you know, just to make it, I had to justify it to myself, I need to make it worth my while to having done that.
01:35:33.000There's not a lot of people doing what you're doing, though.
01:35:38.000The strange thing about me is my English and the fact that I worked on the border, so I had the opportunity to cross that border and share some of those experiences up here.
01:36:23.000Yeah, so there's ways of releasing your handcuffs and flipping the side of the arm of the handcuffs so it looks like it's still on, but it isn't.
01:36:31.000And somebody approaches you and you flip it open and use that thing as a meat hook.
01:36:35.000And a 15-year-old kid showed me that after he tried to apply that on one of our guys.
01:36:40.000And that's the stuff I wrote in my little manifesto.
01:36:43.000Basically, a manifesto was a notebook.
01:36:47.000And I would write all these things down, document most of them.
01:36:50.000And when I would come over here to the U.S. to do training, I did some training with NCIS and Coronado during my career.
01:36:58.000And some of those guys were team guys, SEAL guys.
01:37:18.000And, you know, we'd show them a flash drive with a bunch of pictures from stuff down there, and they would, like, be blown away by it and sharing information and kind of basically making use of that experience.
01:38:14.000With the United States of Mexico is our view of Mexico.
01:38:18.000And someone like you, what you provide is a realistic perspective and real information, real photographs, real stories.
01:38:27.000And just enough, and then this conversation, just enough where enough people hear it, it'll shift The idea of what is happening in MEXO a little bit.
01:38:39.000I mean, again, thank you for this invitation.
01:39:41.000Well, if you stop and think about how many guys have worked on the border, how many guys have worked in these counterinsurgency operations, and how few are talking about it.
01:39:48.000And how many of them died, nobody knows who they are.
01:40:46.000Usually fiction kind of has a way of influencing reality further on the line.
01:40:53.000That Denzel Washington movie called Siege, where a bunch of terrorists attack New York and then militarize New York, and that's kind of like a president for 9-11.
01:41:02.000So you'd see Sicario 2, and then Trump now says they're thinking about declaring the cartels as a terrorist organization.
01:41:16.000Mainly because, realistically, Mexico has been calling them terrorists forever.
01:41:23.000Yeah, what did you think about that, about Trump doing that?
01:41:25.000Do you think that that actually is something that could happen?
01:41:27.000If you're going to militarize efforts against it, not just consider it a law enforcement type situation, I think people should be afraid down there if you do go that route.
01:41:38.000But just realize that's going to be open warfare, not in a foreign country across the ocean.
01:41:42.000It's going to be right next to your border.
01:41:46.000Or make things happen down there that will affect you up here in a very real way.
01:41:52.000And it'll get ugly before it gets better.
01:41:55.000You know, I hopefully doesn't, you know, but that's realistically...
01:41:59.000But if that doesn't happen, if they don't treat it as a terrorist organization and try to have some sort of impact on it, what could be done?
01:42:06.000I mean, I think culturally, they're trying to get us ready for that, you know?