The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1253 - Ioan Grillo

00:00:02.000 Here we go.

00:00:03.000 Five, four, three, two, one.

00:00:08.000 First of all, how many people get your name wrong when they try to pronounce it?

00:00:11.000 Well, so many people I don't even care anymore.

00:00:14.000 I just hear where it comes out.

00:00:16.000 Because I live in...

00:00:17.000 It's a funny name where I come from.

00:00:18.000 Right.

00:00:19.000 From England.

00:00:20.000 Growing up, it's a funny name.

00:00:21.000 But in Mexico, it's even stranger names.

00:00:23.000 So I just normally make it Ian.

00:00:25.000 And my second name, Grillo, which in Spanish is Grillo.

00:00:29.000 Right.

00:00:30.000 So everyone...

00:00:31.000 They mess that up too, if they see it spelled.

00:00:32.000 Yeah.

00:00:33.000 Pull this microphone about a fist from your face.

00:00:35.000 Right there.

00:00:35.000 There we go.

00:00:36.000 Yeah.

00:00:38.000 Yoan.

00:00:38.000 I don't think I've ever heard that name before.

00:00:40.000 There's an actor called Yoan Grufford.

00:00:42.000 What's he in?

00:00:43.000 He's in Fantastic Four.

00:00:44.000 Oh, really?

00:00:45.000 He's the stretchy guy. 1.00

00:00:46.000 Oh, no shit. 1.00

00:00:47.000 In Fantastic Four. 0.99

00:00:47.000 So yeah, he's made that name a little bit more. 0.99

00:00:50.000 A little bit more acceptable.

00:00:53.000 How did you wind up living in Mexico City?

00:00:56.000 So, 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.

00:01:21.000 Yeah.

00:01:22.000 Yeah.

00:01:24.000 Yeah.

00:01:33.000 And got a job at an English language newspaper.

00:01:36.000 How old were you?

00:01:37.000 27 when I first left the UK, yeah.

00:01:39.000 I messed around for a bit in Mexico as well and then got the job when I was 28. Mexico City's a wild place.

00:01:44.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:01:45.000 It's so packed.

00:01:46.000 I've only been there twice for UFC events.

00:01:49.000 Yeah.

00:01:49.000 But every time I'm there, I'm just shaking my head like, I can't believe how this traffic works.

00:01:52.000 It's crazy.

00:01:53.000 Yeah, 18 years and I've spent a lot of time in that traffic.

00:01:56.000 Nobody cares about red lights, green lights.

00:01:58.000 They don't care.

00:01:59.000 It's stressful.

00:01:59.000 Everyone wants to cut you up all the time.

00:02:01.000 Yeah.

00:02:02.000 People shout at you a lot.

00:02:03.000 You have to get used to people calling you like, pendejo, cerdo.

00:02:08.000 I try different tactics.

00:02:10.000 Now I just try and relax and not get angry.

00:02:11.000 Did you know how to speak Spanish before you went there?

00:02:13.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:02:14.000 So I spent one year in Spain, living in Spain before I went there.

00:02:16.000 I spent a year in the Middle East as well.

00:02:21.000 But yeah, I started off, when I arrived, I spoke more to Spanish-Spanish, which is like, Oye, tío, coño, tío.

00:02:25.000 And then I changed more to like the Mexican Spanish, which is like, Oye, wey, que paso, wey.

00:02:31.000 Right, right, right.

00:02:32.000 Yeah.

00:02:33.000 So when did you start getting into narcojournalism?

00:02:39.000 So, like I arrived to say with a romantic idea about what I might cover in Mexico or Latin America.

00:02:46.000 And right away I realized all that idea of guerrillas and military dictatorships that had gone.

00:02:50.000 That was the last century. 0.73

00:02:52.000 Che Guevara, all that stuff had gone.

00:02:54.000 But right away when I arrived, my very first arrived.

00:02:57.000 First, back in the UK, I grew up around a lot of drugs in the UK. So, going back to the 80s, I grew up with a lot of people taking drugs.

00:03:06.000 I had a few friends who died from heroin overdoses back then.

00:03:10.000 Four people I knew died of heroin overdoses.

00:03:12.000 I had a sister who became schizophrenic.

00:03:20.000 She became schizophrenic and there'd be a lot of drugs being smoked around that time as well.

00:03:25.000 Was it pot?

00:03:26.000 Yeah, back then it was Moroccan hashish.

00:03:29.000 There is a connection, you know, and we've been exploring that a lot lately.

00:03:34.000 We 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.

00:03:48.000 Where 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.

00:03:59.000 It does happen.

00:04:00.000 I heard that debate.

00:04:01.000 That's one of the reasons why it came to mind.

00:04:04.000 I mean, I don't know...

00:04:06.000 A lot of people smoke weed, smoke hash.

00:04:09.000 A lot of people, it's fine.

00:04:10.000 Now, 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.

00:04:21.000 Right.

00:04:22.000 And I think, I don't know if it was a time bomb waiting to go off, or if it was how much the hash was involved in that.

00:04:29.000 There's other issues as well.

00:04:31.000 So I don't really know the science of it, but...

00:04:34.000 Anyway, going back, so I've been around a lot of drugs before.

00:04:37.000 So 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.

00:04:47.000 It's one of the first people I met.

00:04:49.000 Wow.

00:04:50.000 I 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.

00:04:56.000 I didn't know there were people smoking crack down here.

00:04:59.000 So when I got a job at the local newspaper in English, And I just started looking at the crime thing.

00:05:05.000 One of the first tools I did was on the issue of crack being sold locally and how that linked to cartels.

00:05:11.000 And then very soon, just very, very quickly, I just fell in right away.

00:05:15.000 Like I said, all these things happened by accident.

00:05:16.000 I just fell into covering the crime beat.

00:05:19.000 And this is going back to 2001. So 2001, that was the same year that Chapo's man escaped from prison.

00:05:27.000 Then I was calling a lot then to a great journalist from Tijuana, a real legend from Tijuana, who survived the shooting by cartels.

00:05:38.000 And phoning him up all the time, just getting him to give me information, give me tips.

00:05:42.000 And that was how I really started.

00:05:44.000 Another big story I did back in those days was the court-martial of some generals for drug trafficking.

00:05:50.000 And that was really where it began back then.

00:05:53.000 Generals for drug trafficking, how much of an issue is that?

00:05:56.000 I mean, corruption must be unbelievably rampant.

00:06:00.000 So, I mean, corruption even isn't a strong enough word for it.

00:06:05.000 Sometimes I call it state capture.

00:06:06.000 I mean, so this is the real beginning, and this has been a whole crazy 18 years of covering this stuff.

00:06:11.000 I mean, this was just the very beginning back then.

00:06:12.000 I've seen a whole lot of very crazy stuff in that time.

00:06:15.000 But just to get a sense of how bad the corruption is or what it really means on the ground level there.

00:06:23.000 There's policemen.

00:06:25.000 You interview policemen and you get to know the policemen in a certain town, certain city.

00:06:31.000 And it's hard to know, or military guys or politicians.

00:06:34.000 And you want to believe these are good people.

00:06:36.000 You want to believe there's good policemen out there who really want to stop crime.

00:06:40.000 So 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.

00:06:50.000 And he was friendly with the press, a guy from Michoacan, friendly with the press.

00:06:55.000 And then it came out that he was actually a drug cartel member, a ranking member in the drug cartel.

00:07:03.000 And he...

00:07:05.000 Actually confessed.

00:07:07.000 They used to have a thing where the police, the federal police when they got him, got him to confess on camera.

00:07:11.000 And 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.

00:07:22.000 And he was explaining in graphic detail how he'd like...

00:07:26.000 You 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.

00:07:33.000 So that's the level of corruption.

00:07:34.000 That could be a policeman you're dealing with, and that's really who they are.

00:07:39.000 So that's one of the crazy things about the corruption down there.

00:07:42.000 Did you have any hesitancy in getting involved in narcojournalism knowing this?

00:07:48.000 I mean, I would imagine that's one of the most dangerous...

00:07:52.000 avenues to pursue in journalism.

00:07:55.000 So this was little by little I got involved in covering this.

00:07:57.000 So like going back to 2000, this hadn't happened.

00:08:01.000 This war hadn't happened.

00:08:02.000 It was still like a crime issue at that moment.

00:08:05.000 So I began to cover these things and then around 2004 I got a job for the Houston Chronicle out of Houston, Texas.

00:08:12.000 I was a stringer covering Mexico for them.

00:08:16.000 And I flew up to a lot to Nuevo Laredo.

00:08:20.000 And there was a turf war beginning there, which is really the beginning of the drug war, which has torn Mexico apart.

00:08:28.000 Began 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.

00:08:41.000 There was a whole bunch of bodies piling up there.

00:08:44.000 But 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.

00:08:51.000 They 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.

00:09:01.000 And now, people just don't do that.

00:09:03.000 There's just too much crazy stuff going on.

00:09:05.000 But back then, it was still like, oh, you can just do that.

00:09:08.000 When you say crazy stuff, like what kind of crazy stuff?

00:09:10.000 I mean, now you can get stopped by an armed group driving on those roads.

00:09:14.000 You could just drive along and there could be a group of guys with guns, could stop the car, get someone out, take you away.

00:09:20.000 I mean, there's a whole...

00:09:21.000 People are a lot more careful about where you...

00:09:24.000 Now when you move around the roads, you can be very careful how you move and how you plan this stuff.

00:09:28.000 You don't just wander by yourself, drive around these places.

00:09:33.000 So 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.

00:09:46.000 And I talked to him, you know, very interesting guy.

00:09:49.000 About a couple of weeks later he became the chief of police for the city.

00:09:53.000 And they asked him, they said, are you scared?

00:09:56.000 You know, are you scared about being killed?

00:09:57.000 He said, no, I'm not scared.

00:09:58.000 It's only the corrupt people who get killed.

00:10:01.000 And he was shot dead six hours after he gave that statement. 0.92

00:10:05.000 They shot him dead.

00:10:07.000 And that was one of the real markers of something really strange is going on in Mexico.

00:10:10.000 Something is, like, going to erupt in Mexico.

00:10:14.000 And then from there, it kind of just escalated and escalated.

00:10:17.000 And I started working for other media, Time Magazine, New York Times.

00:10:22.000 Different 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.

00:10:31.000 It must be immensely complicated.

00:10:33.000 For the people that live there, it seems like there's no escape.

00:10:37.000 I 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.

00:10:49.000 Yeah, I mean, there's been some very, very desperate people.

00:10:52.000 I mean, there's been some inspirational people as well fighting this.

00:10:56.000 There's been heroes.

00:10:57.000 There are heroes.

00:10:59.000 Just 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.

00:11:07.000 You know, for a while it was quite romantic covering this.

00:11:09.000 It was like, wow, I'm covering, I'm going to these places where Chapo Guzman is from.

00:11:14.000 You know, I'll go up to the village and meet his mother and meet his family.

00:11:17.000 I'm writing about these crazy people.

00:11:20.000 But then you start seeing the human pain in all of this.

00:11:25.000 One of many stories that stick with me was a mother in Monterrey, a school teacher.

00:11:30.000 When you have armed guys moving around, they're also really affecting the civil population, attacking the civil population.

00:11:38.000 And one mother, she was in her home with her two children in Monterrey.

00:11:45.000 And 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.

00:11:59.000 Held the family, you know, pinned them down and they said to their mother, Which of your children is the oldest?

00:12:06.000 And she was like, didn't know how to reply.

00:12:08.000 I mean, which of your children are the oldest?

00:12:09.000 How do I reply to that?

00:12:11.000 She just couldn't speak.

00:12:13.000 And the eldest son, she had two sons, one 18, one 15. The 18-year-old was a philosophy student.

00:12:19.000 And he said, I'm the oldest.

00:12:23.000 I said, okay, you're coming with us.

00:12:25.000 And took him away.

00:12:27.000 The next day she got a phone call saying, okay, we've got your son.

00:12:30.000 Give us this amount of money.

00:12:31.000 We'll give him back.

00:12:32.000 So she went around to like relatives, just got the money.

00:12:35.000 She wanted to get the money right away.

00:12:37.000 She turned up with the money, gave some money, and then they just cut off the calls.

00:12:41.000 She hadn't heard from him since.

00:12:43.000 And I've been seeing her face, the devastation.

00:12:47.000 The pain, she said, I just couldn't get on with life after that, just not knowing, not having the closure.

00:12:53.000 And 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.

00:13:10.000 And they were taken to the morgue in Monterrey, and I arrived at the morgue.

00:13:13.000 I 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.

00:13:26.000 And I was inside the morgue and I came out and she was outside the morgue.

00:13:29.000 And she was trying to see if her son might be among those people, among those bodies.

00:13:40.000 It'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.

00:13:56.000 That would be one gigantic step.

00:13:59.000 You're not going to stop people from doing drugs. 0.99

00:14:02.000 This is an illogical, ridiculous approach. 0.76

00:14:05.000 I don't think people should do most of those drugs. 0.94

00:14:08.000 But when you make drugs illegal, only criminals are going to sell those drugs.

00:14:13.000 And this is exactly what you have right next door to America.

00:14:15.000 I mean, it's just unbelievably insane that there's this amount of crime, a drive away from San Antonio.

00:14:23.000 Yeah, and talking about that issue of the money and the economics of this.

00:14:27.000 Yeah.

00:14:28.000 I mean, you look at cocaine.

00:14:31.000 There was four main drugs.

00:14:32.000 Now you've got fentanyl coming in as well, and the cartels are making fentanyl.

00:14:36.000 They're making it?

00:14:37.000 Making it, yeah.

00:14:38.000 They're making it, bringing in precursors.

00:14:40.000 There was one lab.

00:14:42.000 I was in Nogales about a year and a half ago.

00:14:45.000 They passed a lab in Nogales right on the border.

00:14:47.000 They had the lab there making the fentanyl and bringing it up.

00:14:51.000 But as well as that, you've got the other four main drugs.

00:14:54.000 Historically, Marijuana, heroin, cocaine, and crystal meth.

00:15:00.000 And this goes back 100 years.

00:15:02.000 So Sinaloa, which is the cradle of Mexican drug trafficking.

00:15:06.000 Sinaloa is a bit like Sicily is to the mafia, like Sinaloa is to the Mexican drug cartels, where it began.

00:15:12.000 And it began right...

00:15:15.000 So you go back to 1914, you had in the US the Harrison's Narcotics Tax Act, when they restricted opium and cocaine in the United States.

00:15:25.000 And from 1915, they began a cross-border trade from Mexico to the United States.

00:15:30.000 So that's when it started.

00:15:31.000 All the way back then, so over 100 years ago.

00:15:34.000 Some of the very first people doing it were actually Chinese Mexicans.

00:15:38.000 They were Chinese immigrants who'd arrived in Mexico.

00:15:40.000 They began doing this.

00:15:41.000 They bought opium from China and planted it in Mexico.

00:15:47.000 And some of the first people receiving it were Chinese Americans.

00:15:49.000 Some 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.

00:15:58.000 And at that time there was a governor of Baja California involved right back then.

00:16:04.000 What is the solution?

00:16:05.000 Is there any solutions to this?

00:16:07.000 Well, I mean, I think a lot of people covering this, you get very weary.

00:16:12.000 You want to see solutions.

00:16:15.000 You want to find solutions.

00:16:16.000 And you want to come with that optimism of finding solutions.

00:16:19.000 And you want to justify why you're doing this, what you're doing this for.

00:16:23.000 Not just to tell the stories, but to look for solutions to this.

00:16:27.000 And it gets weary, but there's three areas, I believe, that are solutions.

00:16:31.000 First, I do agree with you on the idea of drug policy reform.

00:16:35.000 Again, it's a tough uphill battle.

00:16:38.000 I 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.

00:16:51.000 But 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.

00:17:00.000 So 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.

00:17:11.000 They steal crude oil, which is a big deal.

00:17:13.000 They steal billions of dollars worth of crude oil, criminals down there, from pipelines.

00:17:18.000 Just tap into a pipeline or something?

00:17:20.000 Yeah, you go into a pipeline.

00:17:21.000 You normally put in two taps.

00:17:23.000 You drill two holes in the pipeline.

00:17:25.000 You drill a hole to take the oil out, and you drill a hole to put water in to try and keep the pressure.

00:17:33.000 I don't know if you saw this crazy video recently in a small town in Mexico where a bunch of, there was a tap open, a really bad tap.

00:17:41.000 The oil was just spraying out.

00:17:43.000 And a bunch of people were lining up just to pick up the oil from the pipeline.

00:17:47.000 And it exploded.

00:17:49.000 And it was just like crazy death toll.

00:17:52.000 Yeah, I did see that.

00:17:54.000 But anyway, I do believe in drug policy reform.

00:17:58.000 We have to talk about this.

00:17:58.000 It has to be on the table.

00:18:00.000 I mean, Americans, you know, no one knows really what Americans spend on drugs.

00:18:03.000 But there's this survey, which you can find online, if you just tap in what do Americans spend on illegal drugs.

00:18:11.000 And there's an estimate of $100 billion a year.

00:18:14.000 Phew.

00:18:15.000 So, you know, that amount of money, I mean, that's an estimate.

00:18:18.000 I mean, it could be right, you know, it's hard to know.

00:18:20.000 It's a very round number, but like $100 billion a year.

00:18:23.000 Now, 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.

00:18:38.000 That really creates this monster.

00:18:40.000 But a second area, so I believe in drug policy reform.

00:18:43.000 I mean, I don't know how, I mean, rehab for everyone who needs it, because heroin addicts buy a lot of heroin.

00:18:48.000 So 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.

00:18:58.000 But a second area, I believe, is social work in the neighbourhoods.

00:19:04.000 I've done a lot of interviews with, particularly with the assassins, with the killers in cartels in Mexico and also around Latin America.

00:19:13.000 I've been traveling around Jamaica, Brazil, Central America, Colombia, talking to a lot of the killers especially.

00:19:21.000 And when I sit down with them, I try and get their life story.

00:19:23.000 Like, how did they first get into this?

00:19:25.000 Because you're not born doing this stuff.

00:19:28.000 And often, I mean, in some cases, there's different profiles.

00:19:32.000 There's some of them...

00:19:35.000 You know, there's one guy.

00:19:37.000 This is down in Honduras, which is also a crazy situation.

00:19:41.000 There's a guy there.

00:19:42.000 I'd actually met him before.

00:19:43.000 I'd met him when I was doing some reporting down there back in 2015. And he was driving for us.

00:19:49.000 And he was also carrying a gun to help protect us.

00:19:54.000 I was with a journalist who'd been hit before, who'd been actually shot before.

00:19:59.000 And then I met him again afterwards and got him to tell his story, which is kind of typical of a lot of these guys.

00:20:06.000 And he described how he'd been abandoned as a kid by his parents.

00:20:13.000 And had this real hate that he had with the world. 1.00

00:20:20.000 Like, you know, just fuck the world. 0.99

00:20:23.000 And he described the first time that he... 1.00

00:20:27.000 Carried out murders.

00:20:30.000 Later on, he documented all these hits he'd done and decapitations he'd done and this kind of crazy stuff.

00:20:38.000 But the first time he carried out a murder was probably the freakiest when he was, I think, 14. And they got a family.

00:20:47.000 They went into a house.

00:20:48.000 They got a family and they butchered a family.

00:20:52.000 And he described, when he described that, and then described later on, you know, how he became a hired killer.

00:21:00.000 And the thing about him, like some of these people, you think they're psychopaths.

00:21:03.000 They just, they really don't care.

00:21:05.000 But some of them really do have these conflicts inside their heart.

00:21:09.000 I 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.

00:21:20.000 And you feel that pain.

00:21:22.000 Since then, he's himself been murdered.

00:21:27.000 So 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.

00:21:37.000 So he butchered this family when he was 14. Was he stealing money from them?

00:21:41.000 So the story with that was he said that he was hanging around with these basically street kids.

00:21:46.000 And one of the other kids said, I know where there's some money in a house.

00:21:50.000 We can get some money in a house.

00:21:52.000 So they went in there and killed this family.

00:21:56.000 And it turned out there was no money there.

00:21:59.000 And the reason the other kid had said go there was because he'd actually been living with this family.

00:22:05.000 And he said they'd been abusive to him.

00:22:07.000 So he wanted to have revenge on his family.

00:22:10.000 But 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,

00:22:26.000 how the other ones didn't really know what was going on.

00:22:29.000 And think, I mean, the action itself, but how teenage kids can think about that stuff.

00:22:35.000 And then later on, when he was talking about the decapitations, he was talking about...

00:22:40.000 They get contracts with decapitation inside the...

00:22:43.000 Like they say, we want this killing. 1.00

00:22:45.000 We want you to decapitate the guy. 1.00

00:22:47.000 We want this... 1.00

00:22:48.000 We want to see video of the guy being decapitated. 0.96

00:22:50.000 We want that. 0.99

00:22:51.000 We want the guy to suffer. 0.98

00:22:54.000 And when he hacks the heads off, there'll sometimes still be a moment when the life goes out of them. 0.94

00:23:02.000 And when the body is still like twitching.

00:23:05.000 Like he says, they can still see, like, there's a bit like nerves, like a chicken, like a headless chicken.

00:23:10.000 There'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.

00:23:22.000 Now, when you're interviewing these people, how nervous are you?

00:23:26.000 I 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.

00:23:36.000 So there's a whole bunch of different situations around interviews.

00:23:39.000 Sometimes I've interviewed people in prisons, a lot of time in prisons.

00:23:43.000 This took me years to get to a lot of these people.

00:23:46.000 First of all, when I first started doing this, I was like, how do I reach them?

00:23:52.000 I started going around to drug rehab places and talking to people in drug rehab.

00:23:56.000 I'm going into prisons in Ciudad Juarez.

00:23:59.000 I did a lot of interviews in one prison.

00:24:01.000 I got to know a lot of prisoners in the prison in Ciudad Juarez in a Christian evangelical wing there.

00:24:08.000 And they were going through this weird Christian discovery of God there.

00:24:14.000 And then on the street, often like through contact, I mean, well, all the time through contacts on the street.

00:24:21.000 In Honduras, a lot of great contacts with a friend who's a journalist who grew up in his neighbourhoods with all these guys.

00:24:26.000 He just knows loads of these guys from growing up.

00:24:29.000 Now, there's different things.

00:24:33.000 There have been bad situations.

00:24:34.000 I think anybody covering this has had some bad situations.

00:24:37.000 Sometimes people get angry, people threaten them and so forth.

00:24:41.000 But 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.

00:25:08.000 And they have been themselves murdered, butchered after they've given these interviews.

00:25:13.000 Or like other things that happened, they've been threatened or something, their family or arrested or so forth.

00:25:18.000 So you've really got to protect people's identities.

00:25:22.000 In 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.

00:25:30.000 I probably feel more nervous here talking to you.

00:25:34.000 That's just probably because it's on a big show.

00:25:36.000 It's a different thing when you're talking to...

00:25:40.000 First, you start with easy questions.

00:25:43.000 Like anything, you start talking about how you...

00:25:47.000 People are human beings, and people are complicated.

00:25:50.000 And 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.

00:26:02.000 What's the most time you've ever spent with these people?

00:26:04.000 I mean, several days.

00:26:07.000 Several days, yeah.

00:26:08.000 Like, you know, like, I mean, I'll see them, see them again, hang out, you know, hang out with them.

00:26:13.000 In different places.

00:26:15.000 Not all the time.

00:26:15.000 Sometimes just, you know, sit down, do interviews and just leave.

00:26:21.000 But it's a complicated world.

00:26:22.000 For them, it's their normality.

00:26:24.000 For them, it's normal.

00:26:26.000 It's what they've lived, what they've been through, what's happening around them.

00:26:32.000 I mean, this level of murder that's happening in a lot of parts of Latin America now, it's crazy.

00:26:36.000 But in these areas, in this world, you talk to other people who are just on the edge of this or have family members involved in this.

00:26:42.000 And it's just...

00:26:43.000 They're living this.

00:26:44.000 I 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.

00:26:56.000 And these are places which have levels of violence which are like way worse than medieval Europe.

00:27:05.000 A lot of places in medieval Europe.

00:27:07.000 I mean, look at the figures per 100,000.

00:27:09.000 Because some of them have over 100 per 100,000.

00:27:13.000 150 per 100,000.

00:27:15.000 And medieval Europe, a lot of these cities were like 20 per 100,000.

00:27:18.000 So 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. 0.99

00:27:31.000 And that's a high level, that's 40 per 100,000.

00:27:34.000 That's not the same level, but it's significant.

00:27:38.000 Still more than medieval Europe?

00:27:39.000 Yeah.

00:27:40.000 Wow.

00:27:40.000 Baltimore is worse than medieval Europe.

00:27:42.000 Yeah, 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.

00:27:57.000 But the overall average?

00:27:58.000 Yeah, overall average, yeah.

00:28:00.000 That's a significant leap, 100% leap.

00:28:02.000 Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

00:28:04.000 Baltimore.

00:28:04.000 What about South Side of Chicago?

00:28:06.000 It's not that, I mean, like, the level, I think, in Chicago comes at around 20 or something, so it's not...

00:28:14.000 Now, the whole city.

00:28:17.000 Now, again, one of the things about the violence in the United States compared to Latin America... 0.98

00:28:22.000 I mean, Baltimore is significant, but it's a fairly...

00:28:26.000 Well, the city of Baltimore is a fairly small place, what they're talking about.

00:28:30.000 So in Mexico, you have entire states that are, like, really violent, or entire countries in Latin America...

00:28:36.000 Whereas in the U.S., it tends to be neighborhoods which are violent.

00:28:39.000 So if you really focus on the south side of Chicago, it's probably similar levels to Baltimore.

00:28:46.000 But if you look at the whole city, you've got neighbors that are pretty safe in Chicago as well.

00:28:50.000 Now, through all of this time that you spent down in Mexico, have you seen it escalate?

00:28:57.000 You've seen it get worse and worse?

00:28:58.000 Yeah.

00:28:59.000 So first, this really big escalation happened in 2008. It was the first big escalation.

00:29:05.000 What was the cause of that?

00:29:07.000 So you had...

00:29:08.000 There was a steady build-up that was happening.

00:29:12.000 And then in 2006, you had the president, Felipe Calderón, declared a military crackdown on drug cartels.

00:29:22.000 And after that, there was this big response and things started really getting out of hand.

00:29:26.000 We'd already seen violence escalating before.

00:29:31.000 And 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.

00:29:44.000 You had the PRI in power.

00:29:46.000 And they were, basically they were controlling it through corruption.

00:29:50.000 So back then they'd have the drug cartels working for them.

00:29:54.000 An 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.

00:30:04.000 When he got his job as the hefe de plaza, which is the head of a certain territory.

00:30:09.000 When he got the job, he went with the state police at the time and said, I want to become the head of the plaza.

00:30:17.000 And 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. 0.83

00:30:30.000 It's not like one of these big, so your whole face burns. 0.82

00:30:32.000 These are like torture techniques they have.

00:30:35.000 And after two days of torturing, they said, yeah, well done.

00:30:37.000 You know, you survived well.

00:30:39.000 You've got the job.

00:30:40.000 So, you know, what it shows is that the police had the upper hand.

00:30:46.000 The police controlled this.

00:30:47.000 They were like, okay, we control this racket. 1.00

00:30:48.000 And, you know, we can fuck around and torture and kill drug traffickers when we like. 1.00

00:30:54.000 You know, and all up to the presidency. 0.99

00:30:56.000 I 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.

00:31:11.000 So right up to the presidency, this was being run.

00:31:14.000 Oof.

00:31:15.000 When Mexico changed democracy, so when I arrived in Mexico, it was changing to democracy.

00:31:19.000 It was like, wow, great, democracy is going to happen.

00:31:21.000 Free markets are going to happen.

00:31:23.000 You know, we're in the good days of the 21st century now.

00:31:28.000 But what happened was you looked, the political control shifted.

00:31:31.000 So you had a bunch of different political parties.

00:31:34.000 And they were fighting over the drug trade.

00:31:37.000 And, you know, I was one time in Nuevo Laredo when the federal police had a shootout with the municipal police.

00:31:42.000 They were fighting each other, probably because they were working for different drug cartels.

00:31:47.000 So that's what started.

00:31:48.000 But then you had the techniques, like the technique of beheading wasn't really a big deal.

00:31:54.000 It 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,

00:32:14.000 which was shown in full on Mexican TV. I remember when that came out, when they decapitated the guy in Iraq.

00:32:19.000 And they decapitated, first it was two policemen they decapitated.

00:32:23.000 Later that year, in September 2006, there was five heads they rolled onto a disco dance floor.

00:32:31.000 And then this thing just became just escalating.

00:32:34.000 It just became this kind of like using this terror, public terror.

00:32:37.000 So 2008 was a big escalation.

00:32:40.000 And then 2011-12 were like crazy.

00:32:45.000 And then it subsided a bit and the violence got a bit less public.

00:32:49.000 And it was more like hidden, like mass grave stuff.

00:32:52.000 Now the worst mass grave that's been discovered so far It was in Veracruz.

00:32:57.000 I've been to the side of it.

00:32:59.000 And it was 250 bodies were found in this mass grave in one place.

00:33:06.000 And it was right next to a housing estate.

00:33:10.000 And there's families.

00:33:12.000 One of the saddest things was you could see there...

00:33:15.000 Kiddies' bicycles and basketball hoops and stuff right next to this.

00:33:19.000 And the field next to that, they dug up 250 bodies.

00:33:23.000 And the smell was like emanating to this housing estate.

00:33:28.000 And it's like the dream of becoming middle class that was the kind of something, this housing estate, and right next to it, this violence.

00:33:35.000 But when I say a lot of these stories, I mean...

00:33:38.000 These are crazy stories, but the weird thing is a lot of Mexico lives a normality around this.

00:33:43.000 This is not what you see every day.

00:33:45.000 This 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.

00:33:55.000 What is the response in Mexico?

00:33:58.000 After they wanted to have this military action against the cartels, obviously that hasn't really put a dent in it.

00:34:07.000 What's the current thought process behind dealing with this?

00:34:11.000 So there's a bunch of like citizen protest movements various times.

00:34:18.000 During 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.

00:34:26.000 And he, when it first happened, his son was murdered and he just came out. 0.99

00:34:29.000 The press was like, you know, I can't.

00:34:31.000 This is just like, this is just, you know, Mexico's gone. 0.72

00:34:33.000 I can't deal with this.

00:34:34.000 My son's being killed.

00:34:36.000 And then he began talking in very, you know, and then he went to the streets and people were coming out publicly, crying.

00:34:43.000 And that was one of the first times there was a realization a lot of innocent people are dying with this.

00:34:47.000 And people come out and, you know, I went to some of these things, people come out crying, family members.

00:34:53.000 Actually, in a sense, we're victims here because there was, for a long time, a sense of simply bad guys killing bad guys.

00:34:58.000 And that wasn't the case.

00:35:00.000 Now the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who just won the election last year and just took power on December 1st.

00:35:08.000 So he's got two mixed things.

00:35:10.000 So one of them is this idea of the war's over.

00:35:13.000 I'm going to create peace.

00:35:14.000 We can have forgiveness, reconciliation.

00:35:18.000 It's hard to know what that really means.

00:35:20.000 And the second thing is we need to have more of a unified state police.

00:35:27.000 So like what I described before about you had Local police fighting the federal police.

00:35:32.000 So we've got to have...

00:35:33.000 So he's got this idea now of a National Guard, which is a kind of hybrid between military and police thing around.

00:35:40.000 And that's basically his...

00:35:42.000 These kind of two thrusts he's in now.

00:35:44.000 He's only been in power a couple of months.

00:35:46.000 January was still a bad month in terms of murders, in terms of bodies.

00:35:51.000 Last 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.

00:36:00.000 Imagine what that would mean in the United States if you had that many people dying in a year.

00:36:05.000 A month.

00:36:06.000 Or the whole year.

00:36:07.000 In the year, yeah, 100,000.

00:36:09.000 Now, 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?

00:36:21.000 Safety, like if they don't join the cartel, they'd probably get murdered.

00:36:25.000 And 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.

00:36:33.000 Yeah, sure.

00:36:33.000 And that's like known famously, plateau plumber, like silver or lead.

00:36:38.000 You want to have the silver of the bribe, the lead of the bullet.

00:36:42.000 But 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.

00:36:58.000 And 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.

00:37:06.000 And one of them was like, I want to be a policeman.

00:37:09.000 And he was like, I want to be a policeman and make some money, basically through corruption.

00:37:14.000 So that is the mentality of some of these people joining the police from early on.

00:37:19.000 Another 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.

00:37:29.000 Played American football from Durango.

00:37:31.000 Became a policeman when he was 18. And in the police, learned to torture and learned to murder.

00:37:37.000 He said, that's what I learned in the police.

00:37:39.000 And just at 20, after two years, just left the police and went full-time into crime.

00:37:43.000 It was like...

00:37:44.000 So, 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.

00:37:55.000 God, so all of this essentially has escalated from the time you came to Mexico.

00:38:00.000 So 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.

00:38:08.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:38:09.000 In a horrible way.

00:38:10.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:38:11.000 I mean, it's...

00:38:12.000 I mean, like, you know, you don't do these things on purpose.

00:38:16.000 You know, you don't think...

00:38:17.000 If I look back 20 years ago, I mean, it's 18 years I've been in Mexico now.

00:38:22.000 I had a whole...

00:38:22.000 I'd grown up in Mexico in that sense.

00:38:25.000 I never look back and think that.

00:38:27.000 Now, in terms of myself...

00:38:31.000 Seeing this, I mean, I think for anybody, it's painful.

00:38:35.000 I mean, how you process that level of death, that level of murder, that level of suffering, it's horrible stuff to see.

00:38:48.000 You can still have a lot of people...

00:38:52.000 Separated from that, you know, families, people are bringing up children.

00:38:57.000 And, you know, you want to separate, you know, kids from that.

00:39:02.000 So often, like, middle class kids in Mexico are quite sheltered.

00:39:06.000 Because families want to shelter them as much as they can from that violence.

00:39:10.000 And just, you know, not let them see that side of things.

00:39:13.000 How much of that do you have to deal with in Mexico City?

00:39:16.000 So Mexico City, you know, is about the same murder rate as Houston.

00:39:22.000 So Mexico City is not super violent.

00:39:24.000 Now it's still not super safe.

00:39:26.000 But it's not super violent.

00:39:27.000 So Mexico City is kind of...

00:39:31.000 And there are parts of Mexico which are fairly safe.

00:39:34.000 Now, the state of Yucatan, where Merida is, is the same murder level as Belgium.

00:39:40.000 So you've got oasis within Mexico where you don't have this level of violence.

00:39:46.000 So Mexico City is a great city.

00:39:49.000 Mexico City is a great city to live in, in many ways, apart from the traffic and the pollution and various things.

00:39:55.000 I mean, there's a bunch of things that are...

00:39:56.000 And I love all of Mexico and I love all of Latin America.

00:39:59.000 I love even the bad places I still love.

00:40:02.000 I enjoy going to these places.

00:40:03.000 I enjoy meeting people there and hanging out in these areas.

00:40:08.000 There's a lot of good things about them still.

00:40:09.000 But dealing with all the horrific tragedies that you report about and experience, do you look for an escape route? 0.98

00:40:18.000 I mean, are you looking to get the fuck out of Dodge? 0.59

00:40:22.000 Yeah, 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. 0.93

00:40:33.000 And 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.

00:40:48.000 And he was like, he just said to me, oh, but I've got some stuff, maybe I can give you this.

00:40:52.000 This is the...

00:40:54.000 This is the last thing I'm going to do covering drugs now.

00:40:57.000 We'll see if that's true.

00:41:01.000 I think a lot of the time you get caught still doing this stuff.

00:41:05.000 Especially when you've covered something, people want more, people are interested.

00:41:09.000 And there's relevance to this.

00:41:11.000 I think some of the other struggles beyond the danger and stuff is simply with journalism in a bad way.

00:41:20.000 A lot of the media are in a bad way.

00:41:25.000 I'm a freelance journalist.

00:41:26.000 I love being a freelance journalist.

00:41:27.000 I love the independence.

00:41:29.000 I love being able to write books and travel and write magazine stories and make documentaries and do these things.

00:41:35.000 But having the economic base for that has degenerated a lot in the time that I've been doing it.

00:41:40.000 Have you personally been targeted at all?

00:41:45.000 There's a couple of situations I've had.

00:41:48.000 First, 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,

00:42:05.000 and they've had it bad.

00:42:07.000 Including a friend, a good friend, a great colleague called Javier Valdez, who was shot dead In 2017, May 2017 in Kulikan.

00:42:18.000 A guy who I'd known since 2008. Great guy.

00:42:22.000 Got drunk with him in the cantina.

00:42:25.000 Very generous guy.

00:42:26.000 Wrote eight books.

00:42:27.000 A charismatic, I mean, you know, really lovely guy who was shot dead.

00:42:32.000 And many other stories.

00:42:34.000 So I kind of don't want to compare my own words to a lot of them in many ways.

00:42:39.000 But yeah, sure, there's been times.

00:42:40.000 There's one time in...

00:42:43.000 It was in a state called Michoacan.

00:42:45.000 And this was 2014. And there was a thing that happened there when a lot of regular people rose up with guns against the cartels.

00:42:54.000 They were known as out-of-defensers or like self-defense squads.

00:42:58.000 And they rose up to fight the cartels.

00:43:02.000 And a bunch of guys with guns.

00:43:06.000 There was this kind of crazy situation where there was this almost like a trench warfare happened between cartels and these self-defense groups.

00:43:13.000 And then what happened was a lot of regular gangsters started saying, oh, we're self-defense groups as well.

00:43:19.000 You know, just coming up saying, oh, yeah, we're self-defense groups.

00:43:21.000 You know, those guys are out on the street with guns.

00:43:22.000 You know, we're just going to go out with our guns.

00:43:25.000 So anyway, I went down, I drove down at the end of this.

00:43:28.000 I've been covering this right through and it had been fairly okay to do.

00:43:32.000 The self-defense squads, the outer defenses were pretty easy going to work with.

00:43:37.000 But I drove down there to Michoacan and I wanted to do some stuff on it.

00:43:42.000 And I was going to meet a friend on a journey.

00:43:44.000 She just backed out at the last minute. 0.97

00:43:46.000 I just went down there anyway.

00:43:48.000 And arrived there, and there was about 50 guys, arrived in this place near the city called Apatzingan.

00:43:53.000 And 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.

00:44:08.000 And they were sitting there.

00:44:10.000 There was a guy signing them up for this kind of mission.

00:44:12.000 And there was a bunch of guys.

00:44:13.000 They were...

00:44:15.000 And they had very heavy weaponry.

00:44:17.000 They had AK-47s, they had AR-15s, they had grenade launchers on the top of their guns and beneath their guns.

00:44:26.000 They had grenades strapped to them, like actually grenades on belts around them, ammunition belts around them.

00:44:32.000 I mean like crazy, you know, like you see old revolutionary stuff.

00:44:35.000 I mean like real crazy like desperado stuff.

00:44:39.000 And then...

00:44:41.000 I was talking to them and I realized quickly these were not self-defense guys.

00:44:44.000 These were narco. 0.92

00:44:45.000 These were gangsters.

00:44:46.000 They came out and they were like, how long have you been in the self-defense movement?

00:44:53.000 Oh, a couple of days.

00:44:55.000 And then they had guns with diamonds, jefe.

00:45:00.000 What does jefe stand for?

00:45:02.000 The boss.

00:45:04.000 And...

00:45:06.000 And I was kind of like joking with these guys and taking some photographs of them.

00:45:11.000 So they were posing for photographs.

00:45:13.000 So they were sitting there posing with their guns and stuff.

00:45:17.000 And they said the word huero is like, it's not really white boy, it's like blondie.

00:45:24.000 It can mean like, if you're white in Mexico, you often get called a huero. 0.95

00:45:29.000 So we're like, Wero, how much do prostitutes cost in your country? 0.98

00:45:34.000 I was like, I don't know, you'd have to go there and see. 0.84

00:45:38.000 And they're like, Wero, do you like taking meth?

00:45:41.000 Do you like taking meth?

00:45:44.000 You know, I'm okay.

00:45:46.000 And they were still like, you know, kind of joking.

00:45:48.000 And this guy came up among them and he said, to the other guys.

00:45:52.000 At first, there was a big guy.

00:45:53.000 And he said he was carrying a big gun.

00:45:56.000 He's got a really massive head.

00:45:58.000 And he said to me a bit aggressively, just don't take my photo.

00:46:01.000 I was like, yeah, no problem, I won't take your photo.

00:46:04.000 And then a guy came up and said to the other guy, he said, what are you doing?

00:46:08.000 It's a DEA guy here.

00:46:09.000 It's a DEA agent among you taking your photographs.

00:46:15.000 You know, what are you doing?

00:46:16.000 And I was like, I'm not even American, I'm British.

00:46:20.000 And he said, no, no, this is a DEA guy.

00:46:22.000 My brother was arrested in Texas and the DEA guy pretended to be a journalist. 0.99

00:46:27.000 That's some bullshit story. 0.97

00:46:30.000 And I said, look, I can show you my website. 0.96

00:46:33.000 So they got the cell phone out and looked through the cell phone and found my website. 1.00

00:46:41.000 And the guy calmed down a bit and he said, if I see you, I'm going to put a bullet in your head. 1.00

00:46:47.000 I'm going to throw a grenade at you. 1.00

00:46:50.000 He added. 0.99

00:46:51.000 So, I left.

00:46:53.000 I kind of tried to talk a bit.

00:46:55.000 I left.

00:46:56.000 And...

00:46:58.000 Yeah, and they went.

00:47:00.000 And then I didn't publish the photographs.

00:47:02.000 One of the guys sent me an email saying what happened to the photographs.

00:47:06.000 My email's on my website.

00:47:08.000 So I just ignored it.

00:47:10.000 And I think a lot of them got killed in a big fight they had with the federal police afterwards.

00:47:16.000 So that was one.

00:47:18.000 And there's been a few more.

00:47:20.000 So it's a lot of touch and go when you're in these situations.

00:47:22.000 Yeah.

00:47:24.000 The federal police, do they have a plan to try to eradicate these mobs or is it a lot of lip service?

00:47:31.000 Is 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?

00:47:41.000 You know, there's been different times.

00:47:45.000 I mean, sometimes there's been the federal police have done well going after a particular guy or sometimes with the Americans.

00:47:52.000 You know, there's been...

00:47:54.000 You know, arrests of very many significant kingpins.

00:47:58.000 The 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.

00:48:11.000 So, 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.

00:48:23.000 Now what's happened and one of the reasons the violence has increased in Mexico is because they've had this onslaught attacking cartels.

00:48:31.000 Over the years.

00:48:33.000 Then you end up with like the lieutenants then taking over and then their lieutenants taking over and then their lieutenants taking over.

00:48:40.000 That's what happened in Chicago as well.

00:48:42.000 I spoke to a police officer in Chicago and he said the violence escalated afterwards some big gang arrests.

00:48:48.000 And once they had gotten some leaders of some gangs and other people tried to fill the void.

00:48:53.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:48:54.000 Exactly.

00:48:55.000 So then you get some of the people who are in power now.

00:48:58.000 Like very young, very violent people and people who are not as smart, not as mature.

00:49:04.000 Not calculated.

00:49:05.000 Yeah.

00:49:06.000 And also you end up, they're fragmented territories.

00:49:09.000 So 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.

00:49:19.000 Now there's one state called Guerrero, which you've seen this really like cartel fragmentation.

00:49:24.000 And you've got maybe 12 different groups in this one state.

00:49:28.000 And 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.

00:49:37.000 So there were some friends went up there.

00:49:42.000 Seven journalists went up there and got held up on this road up there.

00:49:46.000 2017 as well.

00:49:48.000 And they were in a car going up there, two vehicles.

00:49:51.000 And about 200 guys blocked the road.

00:49:56.000 And the leader of this group was a guy I believe called El Huero Palaya.

00:50:00.000 Like again his name, Blondie Palaya.

00:50:03.000 And he's like maybe 23 years old.

00:50:06.000 Like 200 guys there.

00:50:07.000 They said some of the kids, I talked to one of the friends who was there.

00:50:11.000 And they said he saw kids who was young, like 10 years old among this mob of people.

00:50:16.000 And they held him up.

00:50:17.000 They took away one of the vehicles.

00:50:19.000 They took away all their laptops, cameras, all that equipment.

00:50:22.000 Stuck them in the car.

00:50:23.000 Said go.

00:50:24.000 Do 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?

00:50:31.000 I think from the point of view of it, they can take it away.

00:50:34.000 It's happened a lot of cases recently of colleagues just being robbed.

00:50:39.000 I mean, you get like an armed group and they'll take away their...

00:50:42.000 Basically, they'll hold them down, take all their stuff.

00:50:45.000 So you don't...

00:50:45.000 So I've got, you know, I know various colleagues, photographers.

00:50:48.000 If you're a freelance photographer and you lose a good camera, then, you know, like...

00:50:55.000 You know, some of the TV people, they have less expensive cameras than they used to.

00:50:58.000 I remember a few years ago, a TV group interviewed some gang members in Honduras and they stole their camera.

00:51:05.000 And at that time, it was like an $80,000 camera.

00:51:08.000 And 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.

00:51:21.000 What is the attitude in Mexico, especially amongst people who are studying the narco wars, with all this build that wall stuff?

00:51:32.000 All 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.

00:51:43.000 Sure. 0.94

00:51:44.000 I 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. 0.97

00:51:56.000 And murders, yeah. 0.99

00:51:57.000 Someone's doing the raping, yeah. 0.99

00:51:59.000 I mean, he's kind of, you know, if you look at surveys, the level's very low. 0.88

00:52:03.000 Does anybody like Trump in Mexico?

00:52:06.000 There's always contrarians somewhere.

00:52:08.000 I mean, I've seen numbers like, you know, people say like, I don't know, 80% or something think he's terrible.

00:52:14.000 So it means there must be a 20% somewhere who don't.

00:52:16.000 I haven't met a Mexican who's been, like, pro-Trump.

00:52:21.000 I never have.

00:52:22.000 I met a Salvadoran who was pro-Trump one time, and he had a guy who'd been deported.

00:52:28.000 And he was like, you know, this guy Trump's going to turn out to be a great president.

00:52:32.000 So I see that.

00:52:34.000 But, no, Mexico's very, very anti-Trump.

00:52:37.000 In terms of the wall, I mean, in terms of what...

00:52:44.000 In terms of the smugglers, I was talking to a smuggler in Nogales about this.

00:52:48.000 And he was describing...

00:52:50.000 He was from Nogales, from a neighborhood called Buenos Aires, which is right on the border with the United States.

00:52:57.000 You know, it's Nogales, Sonora, Nogales, Arizona.

00:53:01.000 Sorry, Nogales, Sonora, Nogales, Arizona.

00:53:03.000 And he was from the neighborhood right on the border there.

00:53:06.000 And he described...

00:53:09.000 He first took people over the border of the United States back in the 1980s when he was at school.

00:53:15.000 He was at high school.

00:53:16.000 And the reason was that time it was just an old fence.

00:53:19.000 And 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.

00:53:25.000 And 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.

00:53:33.000 And they give him a tip.

00:53:34.000 He said the first time he got the equivalent of about 50 cents was what he made to take people into the United States.

00:53:39.000 50 cents.

00:53:41.000 Nowadays, the cost of going into the U.S. is $5,000.

00:53:45.000 That's what you pay to go illegally into the United States, $5,000.

00:53:49.000 So we're saying, wow, look at that increase.

00:53:51.000 Every time that the U.S. puts more security, it means it's more expensive.

00:53:56.000 When it's more expensive, that means more money going to criminals, which means there's an industry doing it.

00:54:02.000 So 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.

00:54:19.000 And 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?

00:54:30.000 And then it was like, wow, he's really going to try and shake down Mexico for, like, billions of dollars. 0.62

00:54:35.000 He's really going to try and do that.

00:54:38.000 And that was a kind of scary moment then, I think from the point of view of Mexico. 0.69

00:54:42.000 When 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.

00:54:53.000 Actually, if you look over the last couple of years of Trump, it hasn't really hit Mexico very hard.

00:54:58.000 So 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?

00:55:08.000 I mean, no one really knew.

00:55:09.000 When he first came in, he was like, Mexico's going to pay for this wall.

00:55:11.000 Right, the wall just got 10 foot higher.

00:55:13.000 Remember that?

00:55:14.000 Yeah, and it was like, how are you going to do that?

00:55:16.000 Are you going to start threatening Mexico militarily and say, give us money?

00:55:19.000 I mean, it was kind of like, is it a shakedown?

00:55:22.000 It was kind of a crazy diplomatic thing when he first got in.

00:55:26.000 So that was kind of scary for a moment from the point of view of Mexico.

00:55:30.000 But I think after you look at the last couple of years, he hasn't really hit Metzger with it.

00:55:34.000 Now, if he wants to build the wall, obviously there's the big fuss in terms of the spending here.

00:55:40.000 But if he wants to build it or extend it, because there is wall in sections of the border already.

00:55:46.000 If he wants to extend it, it won't stop a lot of the hard drugs.

00:55:51.000 I mean, if you look at heroin, cocaine, crystal meth, high-value drugs, they normally go through the ports of entry.

00:55:58.000 Right.

00:55:59.000 Shipping?

00:56:00.000 Yeah.

00:56:01.000 Or through the ports of entry, through like, I mean, you have, in cars.

00:56:06.000 Right.

00:56:06.000 Cars, trucks.

00:56:07.000 I 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.

00:56:18.000 There's something like 8,000 trucks go over that border every day.

00:56:23.000 Now, if you have 8,000 trucks, how many of those can you search in a day?

00:56:28.000 And 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.

00:56:43.000 So 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.

00:56:50.000 They were putting them inside wheels.

00:56:52.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:56:54.000 Inside tires and stuff, that's one of the older tricks from the 70s.

00:57:01.000 There's a song, one of the first Narco Corridos, the drug ballads.

00:57:05.000 It was called Contraband and Treason from the 1970s, and that was about hiding marijuana back in tires back then.

00:57:15.000 But yeah, the trap cars now are super sophisticated.

00:57:18.000 They 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.

00:57:27.000 Oh, there's like some trick sort of door that has to be activated.

00:57:32.000 Yeah, I would imagine if there's a will, there's a way.

00:57:35.000 I mean, I remember hearing that from, I mean, it's not a reliable source, but from the Sopranos.

00:57:40.000 They were talking about only 20% of all the shipping containers that get brought into America get searched.

00:57:44.000 Yeah.

00:57:45.000 Well, that's crazy.

00:57:47.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:57:48.000 So the hard drugs are going a lot of time through the ports of entry.

00:57:53.000 And another classic trick they have is they allow some to get busted.

00:57:58.000 So you allow one guy to get busted.

00:58:01.000 They set somebody up.

00:58:02.000 So they're taking some drugs through.

00:58:04.000 They get busted.

00:58:05.000 All the energy is on them.

00:58:07.000 And then meanwhile, more drugs are going through.

00:58:09.000 And is this the United States border that's catching this guy?

00:58:15.000 Yeah.

00:58:16.000 So they're not getting tested in Mexico as they cross over, right? 0.98

00:58:20.000 It's only the United States border.

00:58:21.000 Yeah.

00:58:21.000 Sometimes they might catch him in Mexico.

00:58:24.000 Sometimes.

00:58:25.000 But the majority is going to be the United States.

00:58:27.000 Are the United States Border Patrol guys, are they ever caught being corrupt?

00:58:31.000 Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

00:58:32.000 There'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.

00:58:44.000 Of course.

00:58:45.000 Certain vehicles through, so yeah.

00:58:46.000 How does one fix this?

00:58:48.000 I mean, if you had a magic wand, you were going to wave it over Mexico and fix this problem. 0.99

00:58:54.000 Like if somebody said, Yohan, you're a smart guy.

00:58:58.000 You've been in the business for a long time.

00:59:00.000 We're going to let you dictate how this takes place.

00:59:03.000 So I'd say, yeah, three things.

00:59:04.000 So like drug policy reform.

00:59:06.000 So we've got to talk about how we deal with this drug situation.

00:59:09.000 So, I mean, some of that is here, isn't it?

00:59:14.000 And you've probably got a better idea than me about how to...

00:59:17.000 Why do Americans take so many drugs?

00:59:19.000 I mean, I come from a drug-taking community myself in the UK, I guess, so maybe it's not that different.

00:59:24.000 Well, I think there's a lot of answers to that.

00:59:27.000 The biggest one is entirely that most people don't enjoy what they do and they want an escape.

00:59:35.000 I think that's probably the biggest one.

00:59:38.000 There's some ridiculous number that was just...

00:59:41.000 Who's discussing the number on the podcast of how many people actually...

00:59:45.000 It was Johan Hari, wasn't it?

00:59:49.000 Yeah.

00:59:49.000 He was talking about the number of people that actually enjoy their job.

00:59:52.000 67% of people in this country don't like what they do.

00:59:57.000 Or just sleepwalking through their life.

01:00:02.000 There's another significant percent that hate what they do.

01:00:06.000 And then there's a few left over that love what they do.

01:00:10.000 I 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. 0.98

01:00:19.000 Most people are just working a job and they fucking hate it. 0.99

01:00:22.000 And then when they get off work, they want to get fucked up. 0.99

01:00:24.000 And a lot of these people, you know, they have psychological issues, they're suffering from abuse, childhood abuse. 0.97

01:00:32.000 I 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.

01:00:44.000 It's about pain, pain and suffering, and trying to remove that pain and suffering from your life.

01:00:50.000 And, 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.

01:00:59.000 That's a big, big part of it.

01:01:00.000 There's another part of it because it's illegal.

01:01:02.000 There's something about things that are illegal that are intoxicating and enticing.

01:01:06.000 You 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.

01:01:13.000 Not that many people smoke marijuana in Holland.

01:01:15.000 It's a lot of marijuana tourism, especially back in the day. 0.96

01:01:21.000 Now that America has legal marijuana almost everywhere, not a lot of people are going to Holland specifically to get fucked up. 0.96

01:01:27.000 But that was always the thing, man. 0.92

01:01:29.000 When we were younger, it was always like, hey, he's going to go to Holland.

01:01:32.000 Go get high.

01:01:34.000 I used to go there when I was a teenager.

01:01:36.000 I went over there for some of that on a boat and arrived in Amsterdam back in those days.

01:01:43.000 Actually, it made me smile what you were saying just there about enjoying the job.

01:01:48.000 And it's true. 0.56

01:01:48.000 I mean, when you said that, I do love what I do and enjoy what I do. 0.56

01:01:52.000 You can tell.

01:01:53.000 That's one of the sides to that thing.

01:01:54.000 But...

01:01:56.000 In terms of the issue of drugs, we have to talk about this.

01:02:00.000 How 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?

01:02:09.000 But also a lot of issues in Mexico as well.

01:02:13.000 Again, that social work.

01:02:14.000 How do you change the reality?

01:02:16.000 People who are abused and suffer taking drugs, but people who are abused and suffer In Latin America, becoming assassins. 0.59

01:02:26.000 Because one of the weird things on a moral level, on a level of morality, you know, I knew a lot of kids growing up who sold drugs.

01:02:33.000 And it wasn't really an amazing immoral thing to think about.

01:02:37.000 I sell drugs.

01:02:37.000 It was an easy step to take.

01:02:39.000 I'm going to sell some weed and then I'm going to sell some speed and sell some ecstasy and then later on heroin or whatever.

01:02:46.000 But for somebody to commit a murder, that seems like a lot bigger deal.

01:02:50.000 How do you cross that line to becoming a murderer?

01:02:53.000 How do they cross that line?

01:02:56.000 Well, I think it goes back to that young boy that you were talking about that butchered that family.

01:03:00.000 He was abandoned and angry and hurt and just so much pain that he's suffering.

01:03:06.000 That's often the case.

01:03:07.000 They want other people to suffer.

01:03:08.000 When you see people that are doing terrible things to people, they're almost always suffering.

01:03:13.000 They're almost always wanting other people to feel what they feel.

01:03:16.000 They're lashing out.

01:03:19.000 That 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,

01:03:44.000 years 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.

01:03:53.000 This is what you were talking about with Baltimore.

01:03:56.000 This is what we're talking about with South Side of Chicago and various cities all over this country.

01:04:00.000 They don't get better, man. 1.00

01:04:02.000 They stay fucked up. 0.99

01:04:05.000 I 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. 0.99

01:04:27.000 Just overwhelming futility.

01:04:29.000 There was nothing that he was going to be able to do that was going to put a dent in this.

01:04:33.000 A 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.

01:04:43.000 So they kept these people in these poor areas.

01:04:46.000 And even though they had this desire to escape into the more affluent or safer communities, they weren't allowed to for a long time.

01:04:54.000 I 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.

01:05:01.000 Everybody just wants to, you know, and then once they get elected, then they're looking to get reelected.

01:05:05.000 So they spend a gigantic percentage of their time campaigning.

01:05:09.000 There'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.

01:05:18.000 Just because you don't live in the south side of Chicago, those are human beings.

01:05:22.000 Those are just like you and I. You could have been them.

01:05:25.000 They could have been you.

01:05:26.000 If they were you and you were them, wouldn't you hope that you would help?

01:05:30.000 Wouldn't you hope that someone would come in and try to fix this area?

01:05:34.000 We pour so much money into foreign countries.

01:05:37.000 We pour so much money into subsidizing various industries that a lot of people disagree with.

01:05:43.000 I mean, I'm not an economist.

01:05:45.000 I 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. 0.98

01:05:54.000 Well, it's not better for all of us to keep these communities as fucked up as they are right now. 0.97

01:05:59.000 There's no effort. 0.99

01:06:00.000 Nothing.

01:06:01.000 Very little done.

01:06:02.000 No movement.

01:06:03.000 No change.

01:06:04.000 No gigantic step.

01:06:06.000 No 10-year plan to eradicate gang violence.

01:06:10.000 No 10-year plan to eradicate illegal drug sales and murder.

01:06:13.000 There are some great social workers down there.

01:06:17.000 There are some heroes in these places.

01:06:20.000 There's somebody I talk to a lot, based in Sierra Juarez, a woman called Sandra, who grew up in this neighborhood.

01:06:25.000 She was one of the first people who introduced me to young gang members in this area.

01:06:29.000 She used to work in a factory there, got into social work.

01:06:32.000 Now she's a psychologist.

01:06:34.000 And she's somebody who really will do the work and reach people and will save lives.

01:06:40.000 And some of the basic stuff you really get in the community and try and reach.

01:06:43.000 And you have to reach the kids.

01:06:45.000 When 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.

01:06:56.000 They haven't got their families.

01:06:57.000 I was talking to some guys from the Barrio Azteca, which is one of the big gangs there.

01:07:03.000 It started in the U.S. actually among prisoners and spread into Mexico and became almost like a paramilitary group in Mexico.

01:07:10.000 About how they recruit people.

01:07:12.000 And 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.

01:07:22.000 And 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.

01:07:28.000 I need someone who's, like, got hate, who's got anger in them, and I can do something with one of those.

01:07:33.000 It's kind of a perverse...

01:07:35.000 Opposite 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,

01:07:51.000 you 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.

01:08:24.000 And put it in the poorest neighbourhood.

01:08:26.000 So 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.

01:08:33.000 Because if you see around you a horrible neighbourhood, a dirt street, no light, nothing working, what do you turn into?

01:08:39.000 And if you see a nice environment around you, can you change people that way?

01:08:44.000 Wow, how did it work?

01:08:45.000 You know, it worked for a while.

01:08:47.000 It's hard to know exactly because also there was a truce between some of the gangsters there as well for a while.

01:08:53.000 Was it related to the construction of the conservatory?

01:08:56.000 I 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.

01:09:05.000 I don't know if people have carried on, but Medellin has improved.

01:09:08.000 I 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.

01:09:19.000 Wow.

01:09:19.000 So it had some impact.

01:09:21.000 Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

01:09:22.000 And 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.

01:09:33.000 But 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.

01:09:48.000 And there was 9,000 killed in that city over four years of that war.

01:09:54.000 It was crazy.

01:09:55.000 I was covering it there and just driving around from scene to scene.

01:09:58.000 It'd be like, massacre here, massacre there, just driving around.

01:10:01.000 Bang, bang, this thing's happening.

01:10:03.000 And afterwards, there was a lot of social work put into the city.

01:10:08.000 And Sandra described right then, she said there's a waterfall of aid money coming in.

01:10:15.000 There was like USAID and stuff would start putting money into this and other different groups.

01:10:21.000 And the murder rate did really drop.

01:10:24.000 So, and it hasn't gone back up to that level since.

01:10:27.000 So I think it does have a real effect when it's put as a policy.

01:10:33.000 You know, it does have an effect on these things.

01:10:35.000 But 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.

01:10:45.000 I 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.

01:10:56.000 And now I appreciate, wow, you know, you have police who actually protect the community in some way.

01:11:00.000 And the same in the United States.

01:11:02.000 I mean, in the United States, the police do protect people to a large extent compared to these countries.

01:11:08.000 And, you know, obviously there's issues here.

01:11:10.000 There's an issue with racism and killing and violence and so forth.

01:11:13.000 But still, I think a lot of the people who believe that they're, you know, a lot of people believe they have guns for self-defense.

01:11:21.000 And I respect the right to have guns for self-defense.

01:11:24.000 But really in America you're generally safe because the police are pretty hard on clamping down.

01:11:30.000 But how do you create a police force which really has the will to protect people?

01:11:36.000 How do you have that with the word and the passion and the commitment to help people in Mexico?

01:11:43.000 That would be a dream.

01:11:44.000 The people that have dealt with police officers that are corrupt have a very difficult time hearing what you're saying, right?

01:11:50.000 Those 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.

01:11:58.000 Yeah.

01:11:59.000 And 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.

01:12:23.000 I just don't think I think most people are very ill-equipped to handle something like that.

01:12:30.000 I mean, I agree there are definitely problems with the police, and there are problems.

01:12:35.000 I mean, the police shootings are very real problems.

01:12:38.000 Police killing innocent people here is very real.

01:12:41.000 And you've always got to look for improvement.

01:12:43.000 And you know there's people, families again, suffering from that violence.

01:12:47.000 I don't want to belittle their story.

01:12:48.000 No, you're not.

01:12:49.000 I know you're not.

01:12:50.000 I 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.

01:12:58.000 The real issue though is we're also dealing with the sheer number of interactions that police have with people.

01:13:05.000 The vast majority of them are fine.

01:13:07.000 Yeah, but I was going to say on the other thing, like, say the crime of kidnapping.

01:13:11.000 Kidnapping is a horrific antisocial crime.

01:13:14.000 I mean, a horrific crime that destroys lives.

01:13:16.000 There'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.

01:13:31.000 And they were beating this kid and saying to this kid, you know, this is... 0.99

01:13:35.000 And the guy was saying to the camera, this is your fault, you bitch, to the mum. 1.00

01:13:39.000 This is your fault. 1.00

01:13:40.000 Look how your kid's getting beaten.

01:13:41.000 Now you're going to give me the money.

01:13:42.000 So I was asking for like, what was it, $300,000.

01:13:48.000 And 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.

01:13:57.000 I 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.

01:14:05.000 So you really want to live like with no police.

01:14:08.000 You 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.

01:14:15.000 Right.

01:14:16.000 I mean there's definitely problems here but also you've got to see the other side of having a completely dysfunctional police.

01:14:23.000 There'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.

01:14:33.000 It's so different.

01:14:34.000 The fact that you could just draw a little line in the dirt.

01:14:38.000 You cross that line, you're in hell.

01:14:40.000 And then you cross this line, you're in Houston. 1.00

01:14:44.000 I mean, that's fucking crazy. 0.99

01:14:46.000 Yeah, yeah. 0.99

01:14:46.000 I mean, again, I mean... 0.99

01:14:49.000 I 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.

01:14:59.000 And 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...

01:15:13.000 You know, knock people out.

01:15:14.000 So I do want to say, as well as that, it still is a great country.

01:15:18.000 I still...

01:15:19.000 I love the United States, but I probably love Mexico more.

01:15:24.000 What do you love more about Mexico besides the food?

01:15:27.000 I would say generally the atmosphere is good.

01:15:31.000 I just feel people are nice, generally, despite all of this horrific violence.

01:15:38.000 Do you think it's because they don't have the same sort of ruthless ambition that people in the United States have?

01:15:44.000 I think there is a sense...

01:15:47.000 We were talking before about why people are into drugs.

01:15:49.000 And one thing that occurred to me is this kind of hyper-competitiveness of society.

01:15:56.000 And people can feel like failures.

01:15:59.000 Like 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.

01:16:07.000 Right.

01:16:07.000 And you feel you haven't lived up to it.

01:16:09.000 I think in Mexico people, you know, if you're broke in the United States, you can often maybe feel like a personal failure.

01:16:16.000 How come you're living in America and you're broke?

01:16:17.000 Right.

01:16:18.000 Whereas in Mexico, lots of people are broke.

01:16:20.000 So you don't feel that same kind of personal failure with that.

01:16:25.000 When I'm there, one thing that always strikes me is how happy people seem.

01:16:29.000 And 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.

01:16:41.000 And that oftentimes this leads to...

01:16:44.000 Really exacerbated stress levels, and it doesn't make you happy.

01:16:48.000 The whole idea of having things in our mind is, someday, if I buy this car, I'll be happy.

01:16:55.000 If I live in this neighborhood, I'll be happy.

01:16:57.000 So they work 12 hours a day to try to achieve that dream, and they're never happy.

01:17:02.000 And they're always stressed out.

01:17:05.000 The 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.

01:17:14.000 So, 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.

01:17:27.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:17:28.000 I 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?

01:17:35.000 So yeah, so that's part of it.

01:17:37.000 I mean...

01:17:40.000 Yeah, and the food is great.

01:17:41.000 The food is amazing.

01:17:42.000 I'm a giant fan of Mexican food.

01:17:44.000 I love it.

01:17:45.000 There's a place down here that I take the guys here that work here all the time.

01:17:48.000 It is as Mexican as you get. 0.93

01:17:50.000 No one speaks English there.

01:17:51.000 They have Mexican soap operas playing on the television, and the food is just sensational.

01:17:58.000 It's so good.

01:17:59.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:18:01.000 So some of these things as well as that.

01:18:03.000 But before you talk about this border between Mexico and the U.S., yeah, it's a huge...

01:18:08.000 It's that vast difference between countries and cultures.

01:18:12.000 And the interaction.

01:18:14.000 Another issue, I guess, is the issue of guns going south.

01:18:17.000 And we talked about how the drugs come up.

01:18:19.000 We've also got a lot of firearms.

01:18:20.000 A lot of firearms.

01:18:21.000 Like that Fast and Furious deal.

01:18:23.000 Yeah.

01:18:24.000 The 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.

01:18:36.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:18:37.000 So 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.

01:18:46.000 That came to the conclusion that over 200,000 guns every year go from the United States into Mexico.

01:18:54.000 Wow.

01:18:56.000 That's an insane number.

01:18:59.000 200,000 guns.

01:19:00.000 And I interviewed a guy in prison in Ciudad Juarez for gun trafficking.

01:19:04.000 And 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.

01:19:21.000 And it's pretty easy to get into Mexico. 0.98

01:19:23.000 So you drive them in, it's like a piece of piss. 0.99

01:19:27.000 It's very easy. 0.76

01:19:28.000 Basically, most of the time, you've got no control.

01:19:30.000 Now, he would actually hide them...

01:19:32.000 In fridges and in stoves and would pay an import tax for the fridges and stoves.

01:19:40.000 But he was buying them and he said to himself, how did you buy the guns?

01:19:44.000 He said, I would have no idea.

01:19:46.000 So what idea did you show to buy your guns?

01:19:47.000 He said, nothing at all.

01:19:49.000 He said, no idea whatsoever.

01:19:50.000 He said, no, nothing at all.

01:19:51.000 So did you buy them from gun shows?

01:19:52.000 So he'd buy them from gun shows.

01:19:53.000 But then what he would do was he would use the private sale loophole.

01:19:57.000 Which they're trying to close now.

01:19:59.000 Yes.

01:20:00.000 So he would go in there and then I went to a gun show in Mesquite in the greater Dallas area, known as the Gun Show Capital of America.

01:20:09.000 And went to a gun show there and asked people, can you sell me guns?

01:20:15.000 I don't live here, can you sell me guns?

01:20:17.000 And first they said, no, you need to be a tax resident.

01:20:20.000 Someone said, oh yeah, sure, I can sell you these guns.

01:20:22.000 The reason they get out is they say it's a private sale.

01:20:25.000 However, some of them, and I know some of the pro-gun people get angry talking about this, but I saw this with my own eyes.

01:20:34.000 They've got a whole bunch of boxed up AR-15 rifles and they're selling them as being private sellers.

01:20:38.000 Yeah.

01:20:40.000 Now, so he was just simply buying these guns and taking them down.

01:20:44.000 I 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.

01:20:54.000 I can't use ID to buy the gun.

01:20:57.000 And the person, you know, is still happy.

01:21:00.000 Like, 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.

01:21:08.000 But they don't care.

01:21:10.000 And 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.

01:21:20.000 But then, yeah.

01:21:23.000 So that's a big issue as well.

01:21:25.000 Yeah, those gun shows are pretty bizarre.

01:21:27.000 You're walking around with a bunch of people just itching to shoot somebody.

01:21:33.000 They're just hoping somebody breaks in their house.

01:21:35.000 I know a guy who keeps a gun on his ankle at all times.

01:21:38.000 He keeps one on his back.

01:21:40.000 He's got a holster that he carries with him sometimes.

01:21:43.000 He carries a knife as well. 1.00

01:21:44.000 I mean, he's literally begging for someone to fuck with him. 1.00

01:21:48.000 I mean, I've got no problem with the people who like... 0.99

01:21:52.000 I talked to a guy from the Alaska Machine Gun Association.

01:21:57.000 He has about 200 guns in his basement.

01:22:02.000 200 guns.

01:22:03.000 Wow!

01:22:04.000 And I don't have a problem with people doing that.

01:22:08.000 But then there's still like, how do you stop...

01:22:11.000 The guns go into criminals.

01:22:12.000 The criminals in Baltimore.

01:22:15.000 I also interviewed in Baltimore a gun trafficker who was taking guns into the city of Baltimore.

01:22:20.000 Yeah, the gun show loophole is very strange.

01:22:23.000 It's very strange that that's allowed.

01:22:24.000 And this is coming from someone, me personally, who owns guns.

01:22:27.000 And I believe in the Second Amendment.

01:22:30.000 I 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.

01:22:38.000 I 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.

01:22:50.000 Cure it at a base level, at a human level.

01:22:52.000 That's what's really wrong.

01:22:53.000 It's not the inanimate object of a gun that's the problem.

01:22:56.000 It's the human beings that are willing to use these guns to commit horrific acts.

01:23:00.000 That's what I think.

01:23:14.000 You've got water pouring right through right there.

01:23:16.000 How do you not fix that up?

01:23:17.000 If 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.

01:23:25.000 Because that represents a gigantic problem.

01:23:28.000 And that also represents a threat to legal gun ownership.

01:23:31.000 Because 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.

01:23:42.000 Yeah, I'm actually doing a new book about gun trafficking.

01:23:46.000 So I'm really interested to hear about these issues and what the actual room for compromise is.

01:23:50.000 Or like someone like yourself who believes in the Second Amendment, how much room for compromise do you think there is on these issues?

01:23:59.000 I mean, like closing the gun show loophole.

01:24:01.000 The other thing, like for example, the issue of 50 cals.

01:24:05.000 Yeah.

01:24:05.000 Now, 50 cals in Mexico, the cartels use 50 cals.

01:24:09.000 They use them to set up ambushes.

01:24:12.000 They use them to hit military vehicles, police vehicles.

01:24:15.000 So they sit on the side of a mountain and they have 50 cals and go bang, bang and go right through.

01:24:20.000 They're like baseball-sized bullets.

01:24:22.000 It's crazy. 0.95

01:24:23.000 Not quite that big, but they're big-ass bullets.

01:24:26.000 Now, 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.

01:24:37.000 So is there any room there, do you think, for like, clamping down on 50 cows?

01:24:42.000 I've never heard that discussion that much.

01:24:43.000 I have a friend who has one, Anthony Cumier.

01:24:46.000 He's got a.50 caliber. 0.96

01:24:47.000 It's ridiculous.

01:24:49.000 I 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. 0.68

01:25:02.000 I mean, it's the same argument, I think, for having a fighter jet with Hellfire missiles.

01:25:07.000 Do I think you should be able to own a Cessna and fly a little plane around?

01:25:11.000 Sure.

01:25:12.000 Okay.

01:25:13.000 Do I think you should be able to own a jet?

01:25:15.000 Well, I mean, there are a lot of rich folks with private jets.

01:25:19.000 Okay.

01:25:19.000 Do I think you should be able to own a fighter jet that goes the speed of sound?

01:25:23.000 Oh, I mean, it's just a faster jet, right?

01:25:27.000 Yeah, okay, okay.

01:25:28.000 Do you think you should be able to own a fighter jet with.50 caliber guns strapped to it? 0.99

01:25:34.000 Oh, well, what the fuck is that? 1.00

01:25:36.000 Are you starting a war? 0.99

01:25:37.000 Like, what are you doing?

01:25:38.000 There's like these levels that things get to, you know?

01:25:42.000 That's the argument against automatic weapons.

01:25:46.000 Like, 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.

01:25:54.000 I don't know why, because it's very bad to have that loud bang of a gun.

01:25:59.000 It's terrible for your ears.

01:26:00.000 And if you're a hunter or someone who likes to shoot target practice or something, that's a terrible thing for your ears.

01:26:06.000 And there's a suppressor that they could put on the end of the barrel and it'll mitigate that.

01:26:09.000 But 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.

01:26:18.000 You're using to kill people.

01:26:19.000 So they convert the semi-automatics from the States. 0.87

01:26:22.000 In Mexico, they convert them to fully automatics.

01:26:24.000 Yes.

01:26:25.000 They do that here, too.

01:26:26.000 And then, of course, you know about bump stocks, which makes it much more free with the trigger, much easier to fire rapidly, rather.

01:26:35.000 So how do you feel about the issue?

01:26:36.000 You know, one of the issues is of having a database, like the ATF, or they're not allowed to have a searchable database.

01:26:47.000 On guns in the United States.

01:26:49.000 So they have like paper files and stuff they go through still.

01:26:52.000 They can't have like a digital database on guns.

01:26:55.000 That seems ridiculous, doesn't it?

01:26:57.000 Yeah.

01:26:57.000 I 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.

01:27:11.000 But how do you think there's flexibility on that issue of like the gun...

01:27:15.000 I like having searchable databases.

01:27:17.000 I 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.

01:27:24.000 With 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.

01:27:31.000 They have to go through a whole formal trace and go through this kind of search.

01:27:37.000 So you think there's flexibility on that issue as well, or how do you feel about that yourself?

01:27:40.000 Well, I myself feel there should be a traceable database.

01:27:43.000 I 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.

01:27:55.000 In order to have a license to drive a car, you have to take a test.

01:28:00.000 We're good to go.

01:28:21.000 Yeah.

01:28:43.000 I mean, you can own 150 guns and know how to operate zero of them, and they're all yours. 0.98

01:28:49.000 You don't even have to prove you know what the fucking safety is. 0.98

01:28:53.000 You don't have to prove you know anything. 1.00

01:28:54.000 That's crazy.

01:28:56.000 I mean, I admit it's fun to shoot guns.

01:28:57.000 And since I've been doing research for this new book, I've been shooting a few guns in places.

01:29:01.000 I went over to Serbia.

01:29:03.000 And I arrived in Serbia on a hangover.

01:29:06.000 I'd seen my friends in the UK and got drunk with them.

01:29:08.000 I arrived on a hangover and I'd met the contact there and said I wanted to go to a gun club.

01:29:13.000 And he took me into a nuclear bunker and fired an AK-47.

01:29:17.000 Just came off the plane.

01:29:19.000 Wow.

01:29:20.000 And it was like, wow, they had a crazy amount of guns there.

01:29:25.000 So I can see it's fun to fire these things.

01:29:28.000 Do you think they actually are good in self-defense?

01:29:30.000 I mean, do you actually think, I mean, I don't, in Mexico I don't have guns.

01:29:34.000 I wouldn't, when I travel in the field, I won't go with security.

01:29:40.000 Generally, security is going to be more of a hindrance.

01:29:45.000 They attract attention.

01:29:46.000 Yeah, attract attention.

01:29:47.000 And they've got to go basically with my hands up and say, look, this is me, this is what I'm doing.

01:29:51.000 Most of the situations there, you've got to have a lot of people with heavy guns.

01:29:54.000 You're not going to outgun these guys.

01:29:56.000 Yes.

01:29:57.000 In Central America, it was a bit different.

01:29:58.000 In Honduras, I was with guys with guns there, not out of choice of choosing security because the journalist himself was carrying a gun.

01:30:07.000 And had friends carrying guns.

01:30:09.000 And he was carrying a mini Uzi.

01:30:11.000 He was driving with this journalist friend of mine, Orlean Castro, his name is.

01:30:14.000 Great, great journalist.

01:30:15.000 He was driving around and he had a mini Uzi.

01:30:19.000 On his lap as he was driving around to crime scenes and running around doing stuff.

01:30:26.000 But do you think guns are actually effective for self-defense?

01:30:29.000 I mean, do you have guns for self-defense and believe in that or simply just enjoy the sport of shooting guns?

01:30:33.000 Well, 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.

01:30:48.000 But I have rifles for hunting.

01:30:50.000 I have handguns for self-defense.

01:30:53.000 And it depends entirely on the situation.

01:30:56.000 That's like saying, do you think cars are effective to get you where you want to go?

01:31:00.000 Well, 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. 0.99

01:31:13.000 But if you're an asshole, no, they're not effective. 0.99

01:31:15.000 You're going to wind up dying in a car accident. 1.00

01:31:17.000 You're going to flip your car over on the side of the road.

01:31:19.000 If 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.

01:31:25.000 If someone's breaking into your house, there is countless stories of people protecting their families from bad guys when they have guns.

01:31:35.000 These are real stories.

01:31:36.000 They do exist.

01:31:37.000 There are people that I've talked to.

01:31:39.000 You can find them.

01:31:40.000 There's countless stories.

01:31:42.000 There's also countless stories of people leaving their guns unlocked and a child gets a hold of it and kills himself accidentally.

01:31:49.000 There's stories of children accidentally killing their mothers.

01:31:53.000 There's all those stories, too.

01:31:55.000 So, can a gun be effective in self-defense?

01:31:58.000 For sure.

01:31:59.000 That's why the military used them.

01:32:01.000 That's why police officers used them.

01:32:02.000 That's why people train and they go to the range and they take tactical courses to learn how to use a gun for self-defense.

01:32:10.000 Absolutely, a gun can be used for self-defense.

01:32:12.000 It's the best thing, the best tool for self-defense.

01:32:16.000 Other than, you know, obviously living in a good neighborhood, having a...

01:32:21.000 Security alarm, all these different steps.

01:32:23.000 A dog.

01:32:23.000 Dogs are good.

01:32:24.000 Especially a dog that's a trained dog.

01:32:27.000 But, yeah, guns absolutely can protect you.

01:32:30.000 If you're in a situation and someone breaks in your house and you shoot that person dead, you're safer than that person killing you.

01:32:37.000 That has happened.

01:32:39.000 But this is a gross generalization that's entirely dependent upon the situation that you find yourself in.

01:32:45.000 But if you're not protected...

01:32:50.000 If 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, 0.79

01:33:08.000 How do you know you can keep it together and even hit something you're aiming at?

01:33:12.000 People have wild trigger panic.

01:33:15.000 And 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.

01:33:27.000 There's a lot of factors there.

01:33:30.000 But I would say the same thing as, like, You would also say that with martial arts.

01:33:34.000 Like, can you defend yourself if you know martial arts?

01:33:37.000 Well, it depends on what you know. 1.00

01:33:40.000 I mean, some martial arts are fucking horse shit. 1.00

01:33:43.000 There'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. 1.00

01:33:50.000 And 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.

01:34:01.000 It really is dependent upon the situation, how much effort you've put into it, how much thought you've put into it.

01:34:06.000 But 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.

01:34:16.000 And it doesn't mean they're bad people.

01:34:18.000 And I think we have a problem in this country where we look at things.

01:34:22.000 They're very binary.

01:34:23.000 They're one or zero.

01:34:24.000 They're good or bad.

01:34:25.000 Guns are bad. 0.92

01:34:26.000 Guns are always bad. 0.79

01:34:27.000 I don't want a gun.

01:34:29.000 Bad guys take your guns sometimes.

01:34:31.000 Sure, sometimes.

01:34:32.000 Sometimes you kill the bad guy and you protect your family, though, too.

01:34:34.000 That's real, too.

01:34:35.000 Yeah, no, I have respect for people having guns for self-defense.

01:34:38.000 When we're talking about shooting, I've been around a few shootouts in Latin America.

01:34:45.000 We're good to go.

01:35:03.000 It's funny, you can't see bullets.

01:35:05.000 It's not like a small thing, but you can't see the thing that's hurting you.

01:35:09.000 When you see a guy with a knife, it's like the guy's scary.

01:35:12.000 You can see, you can imagine that knife sticking into you.

01:35:15.000 But the gun, it's like you're seeing the object.

01:35:19.000 You can't see really the bullet going in.

01:35:21.000 So one of the times I was in Haiti, and I went there to cover the earthquake in 2010, which was real sad, like crazy amount of dead there.

01:35:32.000 And we were covering the looting afterwards.

01:35:37.000 And the police came and started firing right into where people were looting.

01:35:44.000 And I was with a cameraman.

01:35:46.000 And the police were firing, bang, bang.

01:35:49.000 And during the same situation, not right in that scene there, but in another scene, they shot and killed somebody.

01:35:55.000 The police just firing at the looters.

01:35:57.000 And all the looters started running.

01:35:59.000 When the police were firing, they were firing...

01:36:02.000 How high were they firing?

01:36:03.000 But they were firing, you know, bang, firing these police down.

01:36:06.000 And the cameraman I was with was just sat there and he was, like, filming this.

01:36:13.000 And I think this is one of the problems that why a lot of cameramen get shot in these places.

01:36:17.000 You start to feel like you're watching it on TV. Oh, wow.

01:36:20.000 Because you feel like, you know, you're sitting there listening, wow, this is amazing.

01:36:23.000 Look at what I'm watching.

01:36:25.000 Yeah.

01:36:25.000 And you're seeing this.

01:36:26.000 And I was saying, run, we've got to go.

01:36:28.000 Like, they're firing.

01:36:29.000 It was like...

01:36:30.000 Who wants to get the shot?

01:36:33.000 We've got to go.

01:36:35.000 There'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.

01:36:56.000 And he filmed these guys shooting, and he fell and was hit, and it carried on filming.

01:37:02.000 So he literally filmed his own death.

01:37:04.000 I mean, you can literally see there.

01:37:07.000 Yeah, I was working for a news agency that day when he was killed then.

01:37:12.000 Yeah, 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.

01:37:24.000 And although there are a lot of murders, if you're there on a daily basis, it seems almost like a regular life.

01:37:30.000 A lot of these cameramen, I mean, they're courageous people.

01:37:33.000 You 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.

01:37:40.000 It'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.

01:37:54.000 I 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.

01:38:07.000 So that was ISIS. They took over a city called Marawi.

01:38:11.000 And it was an area, they called it, it was interesting, it was more self-contained.

01:38:16.000 They had an area called the Main Battle Area, the NBA, the Main Battle Area.

01:38:21.000 So 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.

01:38:28.000 And planes gung over and bombing.

01:38:30.000 But 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.

01:38:41.000 Whereas in something like Mexico, South America, a lot of times this fighting is kind of happening everywhere.

01:38:46.000 There's no real control over where the main battle area is.

01:38:51.000 But they didn't really let any journalists inside, like deep into the main battle area.

01:38:56.000 They didn't really let any journalists in.

01:38:58.000 We're sitting outside and hearing this constant ricochet of gunfire.

01:39:02.000 But sometimes bullets will come out of the area.

01:39:05.000 So there was an Australian guy and I think he bent over to pick up some cookies and a bullet hit him in the neck.

01:39:14.000 I saw the x-ray, actually, of the bullet embedded in the side of his neck.

01:39:20.000 And actually, it was taken out.

01:39:21.000 So it must have been at the end of its terminal velocity.

01:39:24.000 Yeah.

01:39:25.000 Yeah, so it must have been a far, far, far shot.

01:39:28.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:39:29.000 Or it went through something else before it hit him.

01:39:31.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:39:32.000 So he maybe didn't go in too fast.

01:39:35.000 That's crazy.

01:39:36.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:39:37.000 So it was kind of a...

01:39:38.000 He's okay?

01:39:39.000 Yeah, I think he was okay.

01:39:41.000 He's okay with it.

01:39:42.000 Boy, that guy's lucky.

01:39:43.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:39:44.000 Get shot in the neck and you're okay. 1.00

01:39:45.000 Yeah. 0.97

01:39:46.000 But yeah, in terms of some of the people who've really been in...

01:39:50.000 One of the guys, one of the police special force guys had a camera on his helmet.

01:39:58.000 And he showed me that footage.

01:40:00.000 And he was right there, right inside there, going there like really, really close buildings, fighting with these Islamic, ISIS people.

01:40:08.000 And it was the same techniques.

01:40:09.000 I 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.

01:40:27.000 So basically it's suicidal kind of guerrilla war.

01:40:29.000 They rise up.

01:40:31.000 And they'll be like, you know, super close, fighting really close.

01:40:34.000 And then when they're born, they hide in like, you know, basements and stuff.

01:40:38.000 And they drill holes in the walls so they can fire through and fire through.

01:40:43.000 And 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.

01:40:51.000 And it was like, wow, this is just crazy.

01:40:54.000 I was trying to persuade the guy to let me...

01:41:08.000 I mean, Mexico right now is almost like a war.

01:41:14.000 I 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.

01:41:31.000 Yeah, so I've been talking a lot about this over the years and with some experts.

01:41:35.000 There's a good writer called Robert Bunker who's an external researcher for the Pentagon and he investigates this stuff.

01:41:42.000 There'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.

01:41:51.000 Talk to them about their ideas about what this means.

01:41:56.000 How can you define this in terms of warfare?

01:41:59.000 How does it fit in?

01:42:01.000 And they directed me to one book by an Israeli historian called The Transformation of War.

01:42:07.000 And this was written back in the early 1990s.

01:42:09.000 And he basically predicted then you're going to see a transformation in war, an armed conflict around the world.

01:42:16.000 And, you know, we have like nuclear weapons, but they're useless in these situations.

01:42:22.000 Nuclear weapons, you can't use a nuclear weapon to solve the problem in Mexico. 0.74

01:42:26.000 You can't use a nuclear weapon to deal with the Islamic State.

01:42:29.000 You know, these are internal insurgencies in countries.

01:42:33.000 So if you look at Mexico, it's a kind of weird hybrid. 0.99

01:42:38.000 So between crime and war.

01:42:42.000 So I use the word crime wars in some of these places.

01:42:46.000 El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, where you have...

01:42:50.000 I mean, there are some situations in Mexico where, you know, there was a group called the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

01:42:57.000 Some of their guys shot down a military helicopter using an RPG-7.

01:43:02.000 Wow.

01:43:03.000 And they killed eight soldiers and a federal policeman in that helicopter.

01:43:07.000 There was one shootout which involved 2,000 federal police and 500 soldiers.

01:43:15.000 It's like 500 cartel hitmen had this crazy battle in Michoacan.

01:43:21.000 Wow.

01:43:21.000 So 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.

01:43:29.000 So it's kind of weird mix.

01:43:30.000 And so I was trying to get my head around this for a long time.

01:43:32.000 For some years I was trying to think, is this a civil war?

01:43:35.000 Right.

01:43:35.000 Should we look at this?

01:43:36.000 And then it becomes, okay, this.

01:43:37.000 And then it was, you know, Robert Bunker when I talked to him one time and he said, You know, like, this doesn't fit into these theories.

01:43:44.000 You know, it's not quite war.

01:43:46.000 It's more than crime.

01:43:46.000 It's a weird hybrid in between.

01:43:49.000 It's a kind of crime-war, and that's the way you've got to understand these things.

01:43:53.000 But a lot of the conflicts around the world today, these are spreading.

01:43:56.000 I mean, you look at Somalia, you look at Libya, you look at a lot of these places, the kind of weird mix, instability.

01:44:03.000 And then this is what a lot of refugees are fleeing from.

01:44:07.000 And I was down in Tijuana at Christmas.

01:44:12.000 I 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.

01:44:21.000 What was that like?

01:44:22.000 Was that overblown?

01:44:25.000 I think it was a big deal.

01:44:27.000 Was it a publicity event?

01:44:29.000 Like, is that why they were doing it and making it such a big deal and everybody's walking towards the border?

01:44:33.000 Like...

01:44:34.000 There's a bit more than that.

01:44:35.000 I think there was...

01:44:37.000 These caravans had started a few years ago, and they started off in Mexico for security.

01:44:44.000 There was an issue back a few years ago where the cartels would kidnap migrants en masse.

01:44:50.000 They would just get loads of migrants. 1.00

01:44:52.000 Now, you think these people are poor, how can they make money from them?

01:44:55.000 But they'd get them, put them in camps, and they know they have family in the United States.

01:44:59.000 So they say, okay, we've got 50 people in a camp.

01:45:02.000 We want $5,000 off each one of you, off your family.

01:45:06.000 Like, give us a number.

01:45:07.000 We're going to call your family.

01:45:08.000 Okay, send us the money down.

01:45:09.000 And then sometimes they'd agree on, okay, $2,000.

01:45:12.000 So it sounds like you're making money out of poor people, but you do it en masse.

01:45:16.000 You do it 10,000 people, and you get a couple of thousand dollars each.

01:45:20.000 That's like $20,000, $200 million.

01:45:25.000 So they started doing caravans for strength to avoid these mass kidnappings.

01:45:30.000 What was different about the latest caravan, they actually became a caravan crossing borders.

01:45:34.000 They used to be going through parts of Mexico together.

01:45:38.000 Then they started crossing borders.

01:45:39.000 Now the caravan began in October, around October 12th.

01:45:45.000 And there was a call for them to meet.

01:45:48.000 And 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.

01:46:03.000 Now the desperation was so heavy, now Honduras is in a real meltdown kind of stage.

01:46:08.000 Honduras is bad.

01:46:10.000 Venezuela's worse, but Honduras might be like number two for our real meltdown cases in Latin America right now.

01:46:17.000 So 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.

01:46:22.000 Just decided right away, I'm going to get my bag and I'm going to go.

01:46:26.000 So they arrived, when they went through Guatemala into Guatemala, you know, they became big, like 7,000 people.

01:46:32.000 We 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,

01:46:49.000 some of them going across on tyres.

01:46:52.000 It 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.

01:46:59.000 The 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.

01:47:08.000 And what was the overall goal to make it through to the United States?

01:47:13.000 Yeah, I mean, you know, different people had different ideas.

01:47:15.000 It was kind of one of these weird things, you know, like it was go to the United States.

01:47:18.000 Now, some people had no idea where they were going, had no real plan.

01:47:22.000 Some people had very clear cases of being like, I'm a refugee, you know, understanding a bit about refugee legislation.

01:47:31.000 And, 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.

01:47:45.000 Someone was seeking refuge in Mexico, which is not the safest place to seek refuge.

01:47:50.000 I mean, like, there's been cases of people who have, one cameraman I know who fed Honduras and then was killed in Mexico.

01:47:57.000 Yeah.

01:47:57.000 Has there ever been any discussion of the United States military intervening and trying to do something about the cartels?

01:48:04.000 So 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.

01:48:22.000 And I think the kind of idea really of U.S. military is pretty out there.

01:48:28.000 It wouldn't help if it would be bogged down into more problems and there'd be no appetite in Mexico for that. 0.75

01:48:35.000 But 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.

01:48:49.000 They got him the first time, actually, without shots fired.

01:48:53.000 And then he went to prison and escaped.

01:48:55.000 That one escape?

01:48:57.000 He's escaped more than once, right?

01:48:58.000 Yeah, escaped twice, yeah.

01:48:59.000 Did he get helicoptered out once?

01:49:01.000 No, there have been...

01:49:03.000 Prisoners have been helicoptered out, which is crazy.

01:49:05.000 He had the one tunnel escape with the electric bike, which is crazy.

01:49:10.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:49:11.000 When he went to the John and went to the bathroom and just stepped behind the door and he's gone.

01:49:16.000 That was insane.

01:49:17.000 It 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.

01:49:26.000 And I saw him and it was like, you know, I've been to his village before.

01:49:30.000 I talked to his mother.

01:49:31.000 I'd stayed the night with his cousin in his village.

01:49:34.000 Wow.

01:49:34.000 Up in the mountains.

01:49:36.000 Wow.

01:49:38.000 What's it like up there?

01:49:40.000 It's quite rugged mountains.

01:49:44.000 Sierra Madre is like you go in a car up in a 4x4 series off-road up and down.

01:49:54.000 And There's people, you know, wandering around there, fully armed.

01:49:59.000 I saw guys with, like, ski mask.

01:50:02.000 One guy, like, camouflage gear, camo gear, ski mask, AK-47, just, like, on, like, quad bikes, just driving around the area.

01:50:09.000 Wow.

01:50:09.000 And we went up there with a colleague and a photographer, Story for Time magazine.

01:50:16.000 And we went up there and drove into the village.

01:50:20.000 And I bought a bottle of whiskey, thinking to kind of offer to the family member to say, here's a bottle of whiskey.

01:50:28.000 And when we arrived there, and he said we could stay at his house, and I bought out a bottle of whiskey.

01:50:34.000 And he said, we don't drink in this house.

01:50:37.000 We're Christians.

01:50:39.000 Wow.

01:50:40.000 We don't drink.

01:50:42.000 And there's this nice guy, and he was like evangelical Christian.

01:50:45.000 Wow.

01:50:45.000 And we'd sit there talking, and he'd be like quoting the Bible.

01:50:48.000 Wow.

01:50:49.000 Whoa.

01:50:50.000 Does he not understand that?

01:50:54.000 And there's a church.

01:50:55.000 It's an evangelical church right there, which is supposedly built by Chapo, which his mother goes to, right in front of her house.

01:51:02.000 And we sat through a three-hour evangelical service, sitting there with Chapo's mom there and all these family members were sitting there.

01:51:10.000 And the cousin even said, oh, we've got some friends here.

01:51:13.000 Basically, he said, stay with me.

01:51:17.000 You're my responsibility.

01:51:18.000 If something happens, I'm going to have to pay for this.

01:51:21.000 So we're like, yeah, we're going to behave ourselves in the village.

01:51:25.000 And he said during the church, we want to also have somebody from England here and somebody from the US come out in this church ceremony.

01:51:34.000 So yeah, really, really bizarre scenes up there.

01:51:37.000 So bizarre.

01:51:38.000 Did you talk to them about the contradiction of being an evangelical Christian, being involved in essentially a mass murder and drug running operation? 0.73

01:51:48.000 So the cousin is supposedly, you know, he was like a cattle rancher now.

01:51:52.000 I don't know exactly, you know, obviously he calls...

01:51:58.000 I don't know how much he might have been involved in the past, but he says he's a farmer there.

01:52:05.000 And the mother, Chapo's mother, who's 88, was 88 then now, is like 89, 90 now.

01:52:14.000 She talks about her son with kind of pride.

01:52:17.000 I didn't push too hard.

01:52:19.000 There was a bunch of gumming around and stuff.

01:52:21.000 I didn't push too hard.

01:52:22.000 Yeah.

01:52:25.000 But yeah, this is their way of life.

01:52:28.000 So seeing him in the court was kind of bizarre.

01:52:32.000 Seeing him right there in New York, in Brooklyn.

01:52:36.000 Right there in Brooklyn.

01:52:37.000 And they brought in all of these crazy characters as cooperating witnesses.

01:52:42.000 They brought in 14 cooperating witnesses and a bunch of other gangsters.

01:52:46.000 How do they protect those people?

01:52:48.000 Yeah, I mean, heavily, heavily protected.

01:52:50.000 I mean, I think...

01:52:53.000 I think it was ethically very questionable why they brought a lot of those people in.

01:52:58.000 They brought in one guy whose nickname is Chupeta, who confessed himself to as many as 150 killings.

01:53:07.000 And maybe he did a lot more.

01:53:09.000 And he makes a deal, likely, makes a deal to cooperate against Del Chapo.

01:53:16.000 So...

01:53:17.000 You get into a kind of weird intrigue there about what the government was doing with this whole case.

01:53:23.000 There'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.

01:53:36.000 Yeah, one of his, John Gotti's lawyer was one of the lawyers for our chapel.

01:53:42.000 Of course.

01:53:42.000 Yeah, and then they had...

01:53:44.000 So then they got some of these lawyers there.

01:53:48.000 It was a crazy kind of show.

01:53:50.000 Yeah.

01:53:50.000 It was weird.

01:53:51.000 It was like in New York and the show they were putting on there.

01:53:53.000 Yeah.

01:53:54.000 I felt a kind of disconnect with the things I've been seeing over the last few years and it didn't really...

01:53:59.000 Why was it in New York?

01:54:02.000 You know, they indicted him in a bunch of places, and I think they chose New York for the reason they wanted more of a show.

01:54:08.000 Wow.

01:54:08.000 I think they brought more than 50 witnesses, you know, three months of trial.

01:54:15.000 What was his defense?

01:54:17.000 So, 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.

01:54:32.000 Like saying, oh, how come the government's trafficking guns to the cartels?

01:54:36.000 And 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.

01:54:47.000 So basically saying there's a kind of conspiracy involving the Mexican government, totally corrupt and working with cartels.

01:54:53.000 The US government is corrupt and working with cartels and having various suspicious agencies. 0.99

01:54:57.000 And El Chapo is kind of a fool guy that they're putting this blame on. 0.99

01:55:02.000 Now that didn't really... 0.97

01:55:04.000 The US prosecutors shut that down and the judge, they just said, you can't talk about this stuff.

01:55:09.000 You can't say that.

01:55:10.000 So when Fast and Furious came up, They said, no, you can't talk about it.

01:55:15.000 You can't talk about it.

01:55:16.000 You couldn't talk about it in a court.

01:55:18.000 Well, that's ethically ambiguous, right?

01:55:20.000 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

01:55:20.000 Because, like, that's a real thing that happened.

01:55:22.000 Yeah.

01:55:22.000 So, you know, we can't talk about that.

01:55:25.000 And then the defense tried a bit well.

01:55:27.000 They had audios of their chatbot, and they said, well, you know, how do you know it's him?

01:55:31.000 And is he really the main guy in the lower cartel?

01:55:34.000 Now, there is...

01:55:35.000 As well, very possibly he's not the top guy in the Sinaloa cartel.

01:55:39.000 There might well be another guy called Miles Ambada, who's really the number one.

01:55:44.000 And he might be more of an emblematic figure.

01:55:47.000 But for some reason, El Chapo became the most famous In the world.

01:55:52.000 And so this other guy, is he still free?

01:55:54.000 Yeah, he's still free.

01:55:54.000 What is his name again?

01:55:55.000 Mayo Zambada.

01:55:57.000 And where's he at?

01:55:59.000 Somewhere in the mountains.

01:56:00.000 They're always in the mountains?

01:56:01.000 Often.

01:56:02.000 I 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.

01:56:11.000 I think they exaggerate how much money some of these guys have.

01:56:16.000 We're good to go.

01:56:19.000 We're good to go.

01:56:37.000 Hundreds of billions of dollars.

01:56:38.000 They're dealing with a billion dollar international business and they've got the capacity to understand and deal with that.

01:56:45.000 But at the same time, they're still really hyper local in some ways.

01:56:49.000 They're still like people who they understand their world.

01:56:52.000 They understand it from their environment to control and become masters of their environment to become kind of powerful in in that place.

01:57:03.000 The idea of them going to, like, sitting in Italy in a cafe and kind of running it from there, it's kind of beyond them.

01:57:09.000 They would have to be there near the business because otherwise someone would just take it over, right?

01:57:13.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:57:15.000 You probably have to run that thing with an iron fist.

01:57:18.000 Yeah, I mean, you could think, though, or maybe, like, yeah, I guess so.

01:57:22.000 Maybe get your Christian cousin. 0.91

01:57:23.000 He won't rip you off.

01:57:24.000 Yeah.

01:57:26.000 But also, how much money do you need to make?

01:57:28.000 Right, right.

01:57:29.000 When can you get out?

01:57:31.000 Again, with corruption.

01:57:32.000 I mean, there's the issue of a lot of police in Mexico are poor, so that's why they take deals.

01:57:37.000 But there's an ex-governor called Thomas Yarrington, who I met a few years ago when he was governor of Tamaulipas State.

01:57:45.000 And again, he was not only taking money from drug traffickers.

01:57:48.000 After he left being governor, he got into drug trafficking himself.

01:57:52.000 And it's like, you think, well, once you've made a couple of million, do you need to make another 10 million?

01:57:59.000 But then again, the same with, I don't understand that.

01:58:01.000 With business.

01:58:02.000 With businesses.

01:58:03.000 What's that incentive?

01:58:03.000 Why do they think they always want to make more money?

01:58:05.000 I don't know.

01:58:06.000 I mean, we were talking about that recently with Jeff Bezos when we found out he has $150 billion.

01:58:11.000 Like, when do you just say, we're good?

01:58:13.000 We're good?

01:58:14.000 I mean, I don't know.

01:58:16.000 I think it becomes...

01:58:17.000 It's a game more than it is anything else.

01:58:20.000 Like, they might as well be playing Parcheesi or Monopoly or whatever.

01:58:23.000 They're trying to win.

01:58:24.000 You know, they're trying to constantly win.

01:58:26.000 And also, you have an obligation because you're a CEO of this company.

01:58:31.000 So, you're running this enormous business that's...

01:58:35.000 Earning money for all these other people as well.

01:58:37.000 It'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.

01:58:46.000 I guess, yeah, I mean, drug traffickers are thinking that same thing.

01:58:49.000 I 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.

01:58:58.000 Oh, yeah.

01:59:18.000 But really, all the time, you're paying back suppliers.

01:59:21.000 You're paying people off.

01:59:23.000 You're owing money.

01:59:24.000 And you're buying hippos and jets and gold-covered Rolls Royces.

01:59:30.000 Yeah.

01:59:32.000 Though some of that might have been exaggerated with him.

01:59:35.000 He had a lot of more middle-class houses.

01:59:37.000 Oh, yeah.

01:59:37.000 I went to one of the last hideout he was caught in.

01:59:40.000 It was more like a middle-class house.

01:59:41.000 It's a normal house.

01:59:42.000 Kind of house, but you'd have a lot of those. 0.99

01:59:44.000 What the fuck happened with Sean Penn? 0.98

01:59:46.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:59:46.000 Why was Sean Penn up there talking to him? 0.99

01:59:49.000 That was so strange.

01:59:51.000 Yeah.

01:59:51.000 That photograph of Sean Penn shaking hands with him.

01:59:54.000 And then Conor McGregor wore that same t-shirt and took that same pose on when he was going to fight Eddie Alvarez, I believe it was.

02:00:04.000 Yeah.

02:00:04.000 What was that about?

02:00:05.000 Why was Sean Penn visiting him?

02:00:07.000 Yeah, bizarre moment.

02:00:08.000 I mean, you have a...

02:00:11.000 An actor who's played gangsters.

02:00:13.000 There he is, right there.

02:00:14.000 So strange.

02:00:16.000 An actor who's played gangsters with a gangster who they're having, you know, movies made about him.

02:00:23.000 And there was a woman that Sean Penn knew that hooked this all up, right?

02:00:26.000 Kate de Castillo.

02:00:27.000 She's a famous Mexican actress? 1.00

02:00:30.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:00:30.000 So the whole story starts, there she is, yeah.

02:00:33.000 Look at them all palling around.

02:00:34.000 Hey, here's me with the murderer.

02:00:36.000 Hi.

02:00:38.000 Nice to be married to Madonna.

02:00:41.000 So the story started.

02:00:43.000 So 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.

02:00:55.000 They're called like, telenovelas means like soap operas kind of thing, series, TV series.

02:01:00.000 And a whole bunch of them made about drug traffickers, which are really popular.

02:01:03.000 And she was in one called La Reina del Sur, The Queen of the South.

02:01:07.000 And in that, she played this drug trafficker. 0.99

02:01:11.000 And afterwards, in some kind of weird moment afterwards, I think she was really into her role and stuff.

02:01:20.000 She came out with this message she wrote saying, you know, Mexico, this is such a tragic situation in Mexico.

02:01:30.000 You know, why don't they come, you know, drug traffickers come and like traffic with love.

02:01:37.000 I trust you more than I do the government.

02:01:41.000 These 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.

02:01:49.000 And then El Chapo apparently became kind of enamoured with her, seeing her on TV, and they started this kind of communication.

02:02:01.000 Now 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.

02:02:19.000 And El Chapo giving the rights to Kate de Castillo and Sean Penn was kind of involved in this somehow.

02:02:25.000 Now, Sean Penn, there's a bit of discussion now that Sean Penn and Kate de Castillo fell out over this.

02:02:31.000 They have different versions of what happened there.

02:02:34.000 But Sean Penn decided to go and write this story for Rolling Stone about the whole experience.

02:02:39.000 So 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.

02:02:55.000 And then left, and then they were meant to...

02:02:59.000 Afterwards, there was then a big attempt to hit Chapo, but he escaped.

02:03:05.000 So that's when some people say that...

02:03:09.000 The Mexican government had followed them and used their trace to try and get to El Chapo.

02:03:15.000 But he did escape.

02:03:16.000 He almost got caught close to there quite soon afterwards, but escaped.

02:03:20.000 It makes sense.

02:03:21.000 I mean, how else would Sean Penn be able to slide through?

02:03:23.000 He's a famous actor.

02:03:25.000 I bet he doesn't even speak Spanish.

02:03:27.000 Does he?

02:03:28.000 I mean, I don't know.

02:03:30.000 If so, if he was followed, I'm not saying that he was in any way deliberately leading them there.

02:03:37.000 But it's something that I think about all the time.

02:03:39.000 I think about, okay, if I'm going to meet criminals, am I being followed?

02:03:45.000 Right.

02:03:46.000 And am I going to lead, you know, what's my connection with law enforcement, what's your connection with criminals?

02:03:51.000 It's a very difficult thing that I've been balancing and thinking about for a lot of years.

02:03:55.000 So anyway, Chapo escaped and then said he couldn't meet up again for the interview because it was too hot for him.

02:04:03.000 So they made this video interview where he was sent some questions and he videoed himself on Answering the questions, which is kind of interesting.

02:04:13.000 It was the first kind of statement he made.

02:04:16.000 And he said, I know various things.

02:04:18.000 I've been doing this since I was 15. Didn't really give much away.

02:04:22.000 And then he was caught.

02:04:23.000 And when he was caught, they were like, we've got to move the stories.

02:04:26.000 And then the story came out, like, bang after he was caught in early 2016. So it had to have some sort of an impact in them catching him.

02:04:33.000 It must have.

02:04:34.000 I mean, it's possible.

02:04:36.000 It only makes sense.

02:04:37.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:04:38.000 It's possible.

02:04:38.000 I mean, Chapa, I think, was pretty...

02:04:40.000 You know, he'd already been caught before.

02:04:42.000 He was caught in 2014. Was...

02:04:47.000 In prison, escaped in 2015 through that tunnel, and then was caught again in 2016. So, yeah, I mean, maybe it had an impact.

02:04:56.000 I don't want to...

02:04:56.000 But they were looking for him.

02:04:57.000 Yeah, they were looking for him, and he seemed to have lost a lot of his protection.

02:05:01.000 Before, going back a few years...

02:05:04.000 He had enormous protection.

02:05:05.000 And there's mountains.

02:05:07.000 I mean, in the village, you see there's a house above.

02:05:10.000 There's kind of a main clearing where his mother's compound is.

02:05:13.000 It's pretty basic still, that village.

02:05:15.000 Then up from there, you see a house on a hill.

02:05:20.000 And apparently that's where El Chapo, for a long time, used to go and just stay in that house.

02:05:24.000 You know, when he was on the run in the past.

02:05:27.000 He had so much protection.

02:05:28.000 Anytime the military would come close up the mountain, you've got hundreds of people on radio saying the military are coming up.

02:05:34.000 Get clear.

02:05:36.000 Man, what a crazy world you study.

02:05:39.000 Really, it's amazing.

02:05:41.000 I really appreciate you coming here and talking to me about this.

02:05:44.000 And this book is El Narco.

02:05:46.000 Do you have more books that are available?

02:05:48.000 Yeah, sure.

02:05:48.000 So my first book is El Narco.

02:05:50.000 My second book is Gangster Warlords, which also has stuff on the MS-13, on the gangs in Brazil, the gangs in Jamaica, as well as Mexico.

02:06:01.000 And I'm working on my third book now.

02:06:04.000 And the third book is about?

02:06:05.000 About gun trafficking.

02:06:07.000 Well, listen, man, I really appreciate your time and you've lived a very, very fascinating life.

02:06:12.000 Stay safe out there, man.

02:06:14.000 Great to be here.

02:06:14.000 Thank you, brother.

02:06:15.000 Appreciate it, man.

02:06:15.000 Thank you.

02:06:16.000 Thank you very much.

The Joe Rogan Experience - February 26, 2019

Joe Rogan Experience #1253 - Ioan Grillo

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript