C*rtel Wars: The Brutal Truth Behind Tijuana's Chaos!| Ed Calderon DSH #623

Intel back then was basically the U.S.

would tell us certain things, or we would get information handed to us from either the investigative branch of our department or some of the military intelligence units.

One guy would turn into four houses that we would hit in a night.

Were you ordered to kill them on the Spartan or just capture them?

There was an open call specifically for our group to have us murdered.

There were bounties on our badges.

Wherever you guys are watching this show, I would truly appreciate it if you follow or subscribe.

It helps a lot with the algorithm.

It helps us get bigger and better guests and it helps us grow the team.

Truly means a lot.

Thank you guys for supporting and here's the episode.

All right guys, we got Ed Calderon here, former state police officer in Tijuana during the Cartel Wars.

Live to tell the tale.

The beginning of the of the

literal shit hitting the fan of the cartel wars.

Wow.

2004 era.

So walk me through that year.

That's when it all started.

Did you see that war coming?

Cartel stuff had already been happening across the country,

but not to a level where it was heading.

I was part of an experimental police force that they were trying to set up

in Baja specifically.

Back then, there was no state agency basically that was able to police the whole state region of Baja.

It was too big.

It was too big, and also there was just no, that just didn't think about it.

It was not an issue.

The federal police were basically army guys dressed in gray, which, funny enough, that's the same place we're at now.

And really, nobody knew exactly what was coming.

They just saw a militarization aspect of cartels in Mexico.

They realized that

larger groups were fragmenting.

And

what used to be

a Tijuana cartel

by the name of the Ariana Fetus Cartel that we used to control the whole of Tijuana specifically, which is basically the richest drug route into the United States, started to get fragmented.

Some of its leadership got killed and arrested.

And like this the

phenomenon of cutting off one head and having it turn into three or four started to happen.

So

they started basically training up people like myself in a paramilitary way fashion.

I was trained by members of the GAFE, which are Army Special Forces people.

I thought

when I saw a police academy,

I thought I was going to go into a police academy,

be

some sort of law enforcement professional and community policing stuff.

It was not that.

That's an understatement.

Yeah, so they shaved all our heads and they told us the first day we have bread and dick for you and bread ran out a week ago.

So

it was pretty brutal training.

These guys were basically there to try and make us quit.

A lot of the training was basically militarized.

It was assaulting training, vehicle assaults,

hardcore physical training, and basically a lot of things to make us quit.

Meanwhile, that was going on, all of us were getting basically FBI background checks and our backgrounds in Mexico checked.

So as you were going through training, you would have people being pulled out of training.

Like, hey, did you move a few pounds of marijuana across the border here in Texas?

It's like, how did you know that?

Well, wait, so the FBI was involved at this point?

The FBI was doing background checks on all of us as we were going through this.

So this was very much a transnational effort at that time.

The U.S.

had good relations with Mexico in this specific timeframe, which has changed now.

Yeah, changed a lot, right?

Yeah.

We don't work together anymore.

So that was kind of the start of my

entry into this world.

Once I got out, this was around the presidency of Vicente Fox.

Once I got out, we had Felipe Calderon, no relation, by the way.

He's not my uncle.

Although some people are like, hey, what's your name tag?

Not related.

We got basically pulled into this militarized war

He basically declared a full-on assault on cartels all over Mexico.

He took the military out of their barracks and put them front and center as far as a as far as a main weapon against cartels.

Not a lot of planning, not a lot of smarts behind it.

It was very much a

like there was nobody else.

Wow.

And during this whole process, they didn't have

a good idea about how to do the work that they had to do.

with

coming on the digital social hour podcast as a guest well click the application link below in the description of this video we are always looking for cool stories cool entrepreneurs to talk to about business and life click the application link below and here's the episode guys

in certain regions they didn't know their way around uh people don't know this uh in mexico most of the military forces are drawn for certain parts of the country and they get moved for security purposes.

So you would have members of the military in Baja operating in places where they didn't know their way around or they couldn't blend in realistically.

And also, the law was pretty vague back then, so a lot of them didn't have arresting powers per se, or like they couldn't document certain things.

So, I was part of a very big effort by the government to basically integrate state, local, and federal forces into a cohesive unit to go after cartel.

So, it was everybody's problem.

Wow.

The first attempts of that basically was these groups that they would call boom groups,

basically mixed operations groups where we would be the military us

and

federal agencies or

federal law enforcement personnel, and we would basically go out and see what we could find.

You had no Intel, you just go out there.

So Intel back then was basically the U.S.

would tell us certain things

sometimes, or we would get information handed to us from either the investigative branch of our department or some of the military intelligence units.

Or if something popped up somewhere and we managed to grab a few of them, that would lead into more work for us, basically.

One guy would turn into four houses that we would hit in a night.

And were you ordered to kill them on the spot or just capture them?

Well, that's an interesting question.

There was an open call specifically for our group to

have us murdered.

There was bounties on our badges.

Oh, wow.

During the beginning parts of this weird war, what happened in Tijuana specifically was there was a faction of the Sina Loa cartel battling it out with remnants of the Tijuana cartel, what was left of the Ariana Fias cartel for control.

And in the middle was us.

On one side, they had people trying to infiltrate us and have people that worked with us basically started being corrupted and flipping.

And on the other side of it, they were offering bounties for badges.

Holy crap.

Because

we were known for showing up to places where other people wouldn't show up.

The whole command structure around it was militarized, so we had military leadership above us.

The order was less detainees and

more bodies.

Jeez, that is scary.

On the leadership side, that was kind of the mindset, you know.

It was,

I mean, it was, I think Tijuana at that point was

the most dangerous city on the planet.

According to MetLife told us that it was,

we had one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet for the people because we had MetLife

insurance.

A lot's changed there.

Now it's the party city of the world.

Now it's San Diego South is what they call it.

But

it was pretty dire.

And

a lot of interest came together and basically started pressuring both government, private sector, and

the military and security to basically do something about it.

And

that's how we got a lot of

support and push to try and do our jobs.

You guys were outnumbered, right?

We were, it's not that we were outnumbered per se.

I think there was not a lot of us.

The operations group that was part of wasn't numerous, but we would work with the military, so we would we would show up in in bulk.

But uh

what there wasn't a lot of was support.

Um

we were undermanned at times because of shitty decisions in leadership, uh underarmed.

I mean, I remember going on on my first uh operational work uh with a handgun, two magazines and a rifle with two magazines, and

some soft armor that was probably third or second hand.

Jeez.

The first solid plate armor I had, we found at a safe house.

Wow.

Like, we went in there and we saw a bunch of vests on the ground, and

the commanding officer was like,

if it fits, you know, just put it on.

Damn.

So he flips some of those.

We were fighting with scraps.

We were basically undermanned, under supported.

We didn't have a lot.

It was a running joke that we would run into shit naked.

Then a figure by the name of Lieutenant Colonel Liza Ola kind of made an appearance as far as leadership for us.

He has a few documentaries

on him, and he's a very legendary character,

a lieutenant colonel from the Army,

who basically came in.

And he was involved way back in

the formalization of the unit that I was in.

So he he was there for our training, our selection.

He was there for the planning of our unit and what it was going to do.

And all of a sudden, he was now the guy in charge.

So he was basically from start to finish, he was there trying to figure out how to use us.

And once he got into a command position, basically it was game on for us.

Weaponry started being like, we went from having an AR.

an AR rifle with two magazines to now having a German G3 rifle and all the magazines we could carry.

Nice.

And we started basically doing a lot more with the support that we had.

That's incredible.

And again, the society as a whole was just like done with it.

There was curfews.

People couldn't go out.

Abductions for ransom were rampant

across the city and across the state.

And

shootouts, middle of the day.

When I first started working in Tijuana, you would see these cartel convoys in the middle of the day, broad daylight, just rolling around Tijuana.

The no fear.

Wow.

And that changed when they started basically supporting us a bit more and started implementing some of the

some of the upgraded tactics with Lieutenant Colonel Lizaol and the militarization of what we were doing.

How did these cartels get so big?

Were they recruiting people at a young age?

Yeah, I mean, it's Tijuana.

Like,

I grew up skateboarding

and I was into punk rock.

I was in a few bands.

I was a dork.

I went to medical school for about two years.

Yeah.

And it didn't work out for me.

And there was realistically,

once I got out of school and tried to figure out my future, I realized how there's absolutely no opportunities for people like me.

There was no job opportunities.

It was barren.

Wow.

A lot of my friends started showing up in fancy cars and started showing up in parties with money.

And like, what are you doing for money?

So, a lot of them were started working as drug mules, kind of crossing stuff into San Diego.

Some of them started working as pistoleros or sicarios for some of the organizations out there.

And again, some of these kids were,

they aren't who you would expect.

We had this concept that kind of originated itself in Baja, the Narco Juniors, which are basically middle-class cartel, middle-class kids going into cartel work

because they're bored and also because their

future, basically taking over their family businesses, wasn't romantic enough for them.

And

going out, seeing the life and hearing some of the music and being enticed by some of the romanticism of some of these cartels, because the cartels and some of these criminals are the heroes in the songs down there, and they're the heroes of the movies and the novellas.

So a lot of them went that route.

I was a punk rock kid, I was an anarchist, and I was very anti-all of that shit.

Did you get approached at any point?

Of course, of course.

Early on, when I was trying to figure out my way after school, I had about a year and a half where I didn't have a fucking clue what I was going to do in my life.

And I started seeing a lot of my friends basically just show up with money and cool cars.

There was a

kid, a redhead kid,

who showed up with this Dodge Ram, this brand new fucking Dodge Ram to a house party that I had.

And this is a kid that grew up in a house that had garage doors for a wall.

Wow.

And all of a sudden, he shows up in this Dodge,

Dodge pickup truck.

And he's the first one that kind of told me, Hey, you know,

you're young and energetic, and you have a lot of cardio because you skateboard.

Wouldn't you want to

come work?

And

again,

I was very into the counterculture.

Money as a whole didn't really entice me, although I did want opportunities for myself.

I just didn't see that as a life for me, though.

So I shied away from it.

I

shied away from it.

I actually put my paperwork into work at a call center

that was down in Tijuana because of my good spoken English that I have.

And that didn't work out.

And I saw the ad ad in the newspaper for this weird experimental police force.

And

my brother and my dad made the worst mistake by telling me that I couldn't do it.

That I was

they thought it was too risky, too dangerous.

No, they thought I wasn't man enough to go through that type of training.

Because a lot of people probably didn't make it through the training, like you said, right?

It was

something challenging.

And they saw me as this

skinny, skateboarding, punk rock kid.

and like what are you going to be doing there with all these men you know it's not for you right

and that's probably the worst thing they could have done i guess it fueled you it uh it it motivated me to to try wow i did my i did my qualification run wearing idney skateboard shoes

classic um

the uh

the the but the the amount of times that people approached everybody everybody was approached you know money yeah and you say they even approached police officers to bribe them, right?

Constantly.

Like when we were active, when we were cops,

it was always somebody inside that would approach you.

So

we would do things called carreos.

Carreos are basically when you go and face off with the person you arrested for something.

Right.

Which is back then the

the justice system was different.

Something changed probably

10 years ago.

The justice system system changed in Mexico.

But back then, if you arrested somebody with an amount of drugs, you would have to go to a federal courthouse and basically sit in front of the accused that you arrested for something.

And

his lawyer would question you

about how you did your arrest and if everything was on the up and up.

And the judge would question you.

And in these moments, basically you were exposed.

There's no hiding who you were, your name, or anything.

So it was risky.

Damn.

So you didn't want to arrest the wrong person because then.

And even if you arrested the wrong person, you would find out there.

One, because if you arrested the wrong person,

he probably wouldn't be in that chair anyways because he would get paid out from high up because the corruption ran all the way to the higher federal judges.

Wow.

So even the judges were.

Yeah, so you would arrest somebody and you had everything on them, and the judges would say, Well, this is

he's no, this is all wrong.

You did, you did this arrest.

This was wrong.

You weren't here.

You lied about this and this is wrong.

So he's off.

Damn.

And you would be like, wait, what?

And then somebody would approach you and say, you just, just let it go.

Oh, wait, you're up.

Because the corruption was that high.

It still is.

It's still like that or not?

It's still like that in a lot of places.

That's when you would get approached.

People would see who was working with who, and also now they had a name to the face.

So that's where you would get approached by lawyers, by other members of the groups that you were in, because

we were placed through various background checks and verifications and

safety checks.

FBI background checks were done regularly.

If somebody looks me up, I have a few in my career because of weird access I got to training here in the U.S.

But also we were polygraphed.

Our financials were looked into.

They would show up to your domicile wherever you were living and they would inspect your house to see how many tvs you had and if you had one more than the last time

you would have to verify and document how you got that tv basically yeah so your privacy still don't bribes right your privacy was gone wow and if you were up to some and they asked your neighbor about you and he's oh yeah he has weird cars coming here all throughout the night then you would be screwed they were really anal about it so they were trying to keep us clean this lasted for a few years.

It didn't last long, though.

But all it took was one of us to flip and he would approach the rest.

Wow.

For me, it was an easy choice.

I saw the older generation that was in front of me when I got out go through the same process.

And I knew as soon as one of the guys started showing up with a new car or money,

his time frame as far as being alive was going to be short.

That's crazy.

Because if you get flipped by one of these cartels, they're basically battling it out for the city,

the other cartel is your enemy.

They're going to go after you.

They're going to go after whatever exposed heads the other side has.

Holy crap.

So if you're working for one side, they'll get to you.

So if you flip, it's like a death sentence.

It's not a long-lived type

lifestyle.

And it's probably tempting to to flip, too.

I mean, the amount of money,

I mean, the amount of money that some of these guys would get, tempting.

The influence, the power, the access.

Yeah.

Again, I was a punk rock hit.

I didn't care about a lot of that shit.

My days were spent playing PlayStation in an empty fucking apartment with a mattress on the ground.

That was my heaven.

So that's what saved you that no desire for money.

It's in your favor.

It wasn't that I didn't desire money i realized early on that the way you survive there is if you did your job you didn't make anything personal and you just fucking kept it on straight and narrow right not a lot of people had that fucking mind mindset uh

i mean you can have that mindset being single and not having any kids right but once you have kids are you gonna fucking live off that uh that uh the amount of money that they're paying you at the uh

so being single helped you too then yeah like i i i got I got married later on in life and had a kid later on.

But like while I was going through that whole process, it was just me.

Right.

Some of the other guys didn't, you know, they're Mexicans, fertile Mexicans.

So I saw them

as soon as I saw something getting ma getting married, having kids, the need,

the need appears.

Sign of weakness because they can expose it, right?

Also, you're and also you have family now, so they can go after them.

Right.

So it was.

So were they actually going after like kids and wives and stuff, too?

Yeah.

One of my friends, and we're talking about Insanata.

Yeah.

One of my general,

we would have

we would, all of us would identify with the generation of police that we came out of as far as training.

So it was like first generation, second generation.

I was of the seventh generation

of the operations group that were coming out of the academy.

One of the eighth or ninth generation old guys,

he was coming out of his house with his wife and kid in the back seat.

And

they got shot

by

FN57 pistols, which I'd never seen before.

This was like when things started getting really escalated down there.

They had their kid in the back.

She lost her arm.

She's still around.

Oh, my gosh.

But they got him and his wife.

These guns

have a,

they call them copular guns up here.

They have a pointy,

fast round.

It's almost like an AR round, but shorter.

We start seeing a lot of them show up down there.

So it goes straight through you, basically.

It's a high-velocity round, so like soft body armor goes through it.

Wow.

We start seeing a lot of those.

And later on, we found out all of those guns were looked at Fast and the Furious.

Dang.

So that was like a

that was both a wake-up call as far as the fact that they're targeting family now and they didn't give a shit about family or kids.

So there was a weird escalation to that.

And also the fact that they had these new guns.

Yeah.

You know, it's scary.

Yeah, because with the mafia, the Italian mafia, they wouldn't touch the wife or the kids ever.

There was some sort of

code down there it's it's been dead for years jeez and now it's it's a free-for-all like anybody that's involved is it still really bad right now

in certain parts of mexico uh baja itself is complex right now the violent isn't as overt as it used to be um when i say overt i mean um

abductions for ransom are low uh basically people would get snatched in the middle of the street if you have a business or something you would get snatched, abducted, and you're ransomed off to your family for whatever they own, basically.

You would have roving gunfights between the military and the cartels and the cops out there.

Some pretty legendary ones.

But now what you see is basically people working their sales points.

So

if I sell drugs for this cartel over here, the rival cartel will kill

my sales rep, basically.

So that's a lot of the murders that you're seeing are that.

Now you're seeing a lot of extortion, paid extortion.

So if you don't pay for your business to operate here, we'll burn it down or shoot your employees.

Wow.

So that's a lot of the violence that's happening in Tijuana right now.

You're seeing this revival of

personalities and people that I used to work with are now stepping forward into politics now.

So like the lieutenant colonel that I was working with

is running for office.

The general that I was under

that

Duarte is also running for office.

And they're all basically trying to get the band back together.

Like all successful

operations, I guess,

Tijuana and Baja itself and what was done in that region by all involved from the army to the state to the private sector and to and to the government.

It's probably the only successful

counter-cartel operations that happen in Mexico.

Wow.

A few people have written books about

this whole debacle that happened there.

But

we managed to take Tijuana from the number one city, the most dangerous city on the planet, to not even being on the list.

Yeah.

And with calm comes amnesia.

You know,

having roban gunfights in the middle of the street to now being calm and peaceful and now attracting investment.

And 90% of all housing in Tijuana now being bought up by people from San Diego.

Yeah, the real estate is skyrocketing over there.

Yeah, you're starting to make a million dollars to get a place out there now.

You're starting seeing apartment building going up all over the place.

So, this prosperity and peace that came after all the work we did also made us irrelevant

and obsolete.

Interesting.

When I was on my way out of that job,

all of us were pulled into retraining.

And one of the first things they told us that there was no need for us to walk around with rifles anymore because

everything's okay now.

Yeah.

You know, so chill out.

There was no need for you to show up operationally like you always did in the past to some of these situations because everything's just basically told us to chill out.

because we're not in war anymore.

So a lot of us were viewed differently after

things started to calm down.

We were no longer needed.

The boss we had, Lieutenant Colonel Lizaola, was

sent away.

The safety measures that they put in place for us, from the background checks to

the polygraphs

every couple of years, to the home checks and all of that was slowly but surely taken away because it was deemed unconstitutional unconstitutional and against human against our basic human rights, apparently, and privacy.

So a lot of that was taken away.

But with it, basically, it made corruption faster.

And all of a sudden, I found myself in a room with the new leadership of the group that I was in, who were all basically on the take.

And now

there's nowhere to hide.

So you just left.

Wow.

You just left.

And things have been spiraling after

that.

And I mean, again, you say Tijuana is booming right now economically, and with it

paid extortion, cartels, abductions are back, human trafficking,

sex trafficking,

and a giant local drug market that is growing off the U.S.

money basically there with all the people that can't afford to live in San Diego are now living in Tijuana, and with them they bring their drug habits.

So all weed trafficking is now from San Diego to Tijuana, for example, which is a weird

phenomenon.

Yeah, it's beautiful.

It's a beautiful phenomenon.

Well, weed prices have gone down and I feel like it's legal in a lot of places now.

I wonder if the cartels are still making as much off that.

So

the way you think about it, though, is the cartels have been making money off legal and illegal weed in the U.S.

for years.

They're the ones that

grew the original large bakros here in the U.S.

Really?

In federal lands.

Oh, wow.

I didn't know that.

I mean, they've been

having their hands in legal and illegal weed here for years.

There was recent

discovery of them pooling their money into some money laundering scheme with the weed money in places like Colorado.

So they didn't lose money or velocity with the legalization of marijuana in the states.

I think

that was talked about as a positive if they legalize weed in the states.

I remember that.

Realistically, it didn't do a lot.

I mean, it didn't affect them a lot.

And there's still weed being trafficked from Mexico up into the U.S.

I don't know why, but there's still some of it.

There's a lot of border issues right now.

Yeah.

People are just walking over it at this point.

Well, I mean, that's the border itself.

And it's from to me, it's been

look,

I've been able to see all the

since 90 I was born in 82 in Tijuana.

So I remember when the border was just the

metal panels.

Yeah.

The brown metal panels that you could put a you can go to Home Depot and

buy some stepladder and just jump over it or not even that, just have a guy just give you a boost.

And I remember seeing them basically line up on the border.

They would wait for a moonless night with fog.

And

there's no technology that the Border Patrol could use to basically nab them.

That was then.

And then I got to see the

post-9-11 border wall being built up.

Yeah, armed security.

Armed security cameras, FLIR systems, camera nest, motion sensors, you name it.

They put it on that border.

But the enemy that they're trying to stop, you know, it's not just

they were trying to stop people trying to cross the border for immigration.

They were also trying to stop drugs.

And, well,

Cartel started making some of the most sophisticated drug tolerance on the planet.

So sophisticated in some cases that technology being utilized in Israel to detect Hamas

terror tunnels was completely useless to detect some of the tunnels

in Baja.

Wow, they were that deep underground?

They were that deep underground and they were, I mean, that well made.

Or maybe some of the, I've heard stories of the soil type being different, the clay type being different.

I don't know.

But a lot of those technologies were tried in Baja and they wouldn't work.

Wow.

My unit was one of the first ones that found some of the first cartel drones on the borders.

Yeah.

Bad drones?

2011 we found, I think it was 2011, 2012 era.

We found these

big agricultural Chinese quad drones about that big

with

a giant brick of meth on them.

Holy crap.

Just crashed near the port of entry in San Isedro.

I'd seen them on YouTube, but I've never seen one for real.

And then all of a sudden I saw this, and everybody had their sirens on.

So I was like, hey, shut the sirens off.

And as soon as we shut the sirens off,

we didn't see them, but we could hear them.

Did you shoot it down?

It's a bad idea to try and shoot down something like that in the city.

It's an urban area and bullets tend to go down.

We just didn't know.

We didn't know.

It was nighttime.

We didn't know anything about these new technologies.

RC cars, small RC vehicles being

back and forth.

Wow, they got creative.

Oh,

we know that at some point, submersibles, fully submersible, somewhere, somewhere on the on the on the on the Pacific side, uh, going across.

Dang.

Um, drug boats, speed boats, uh, back then.

I don't know if they're still around.

Into Miami, right?

That was a big thing.

But also on the Pacific side.

No, they would have these banga boats basically roll in, in, drop a load, mark it with floaters, and another ship would come by and pick it up.

Catapults, like old style.

Catapults?

Old-style siege engine.

I don't know if anybody know if you know what a trebuchet is.

I don't.

It's a French siege engine.

It's basically a catapult arm with a rope.

and the load tied to it.

So when you activate it, it has extra fulcrum.

Oh, okay.

And they would use that to launch loads across the border.

Wow.

We found a few of those.

That went far.

Small, just small planes.

These

and it was weed mainly they were sentencing over?

Cocaine, weed, heroin.

Damn.

Back then.

Hero, a lot of heroin, but like

this, this different the Mexican heroin is different.

It's a brown, it's brown, powdery, light brown, powdery heroin.

I remember when the 2005, 2006 era, I found a ball of tar heroin

on a kitchen table

somewhere down in Baja.

And I never saw one.

I saw heroin on TV and stuff like that, but I never saw that much of it.

It was this

black tar heroin ball.

It looked like a ball of tamarindo candy.

And you can smell it.

You can smell it from outside.

It has a very distinct smell.

That was the first and last time I saw that type of heroin.

I don't know where they sourced that specific heroin, but later on, the type of heroin you were seeing was lighter colored powdered heroin that was laced with fentanyl.

Right.

That got big.

And that started to seep its way into preferences, both in local markets, because Mexico has a giant local drug market problem it's not just drugs crossing it to go to the u.s it's also the drugs that are being sold in local oh really wow so uh we started seeing the shift in those so some of the loads that we would see were that we wouldn't recognize it look like nest quick you know in a package they would get it from china apparently right The precursors to make it and some of the fentanyl, most of the fentanyl, yes, China, China source.

There were some facilities in Mexico that were found during uh during a period that were basically manufacturing it

realistically mexico has i mean there's pharmacies on every corner in mexico and with it there's basically giant pharmaceutical companies across the country fabricating things legally and not a lot of oversight wow so what else could be could they be making yeah

so some of that yes source from china And you saw proof of this during the COVID epidemic.

Everything shut down, supposedly.

but not the fentanyl.

Shit was everywhere man.

Yeah, not the fentanyl.

So that's still that was still going.

Is it true the oh go ahead?

So you started to see the U.S.

started putting a lot of money into the border security, specifically in Tijuana.

And where the most secure border on that whole border region is is probably the Baja region.

And that's where all the drugs go through it through.

Baja region.

That's the San Diego, the San Diego port of entry is the richest drug port on the planet, probably.

Wow.

So it paid off all those guys.

There's corruption on both sides.

Yeah.

You hear that, right?

Because there's conspiracy theories that the government, the U.S.

government, knew about all this.

And

it's horrible to say this,

but it's true.

The most corrupt federal police agency in the United States is...

Customs and Border Protection and the Border Patrol because of convictions of people that they caught doing shit there uh

i get a lot of shit online when i say yeah i was a cop in mexico so automatically i was a corrupt you know

you know i get it you know uh people that know me personally can tell you that i i i fucking drive the same truck that i used to drive when i was a cop it's uh i came out of that job

without with a with less teeth,

with the money in my pocket and not a lot to show for it, just experience.

But yeah, there's rampant corruption in Mexico, but there's also corruption here in the United States.

I could see that.

We would see

Border Patrol moving

suspiciously out of the way before

a big group of people would cross.

Wow.

Or

patterns.

You would see people

see people

on the Mexico side of the border, basically, with binoculars and spotting scopes, looking at the border crossing and radioing something down to the people that were trying to cross the drug mules that were in the vehicle lanes.

And all of a sudden, you started seeing all the vehicles start

because they knew that their guy was in one of the

inspection.

That is crazy.

They say money is the root of all evil.

Yeah, I mean, but it's like

one thing you learn there is everybody has a price.

Right.

You can hire politicians.

And well, you say when you say that,

the head of all of our operations was the

public safe, the security chief, Martinez Luna, who was basically the head of the drug czar of Mexico, per se,

under Felipe Calderon.

And he is in federal prison in the United States right now for cartel ties.

And he was in charge of keeping us honest and setting up the programs to keep us honest.

He was the one that installed these processes to keep us clean and polygraph tests and drug tests and all that.

That's insane.

And now,

you know, after all that's said and done, he's in prison.

I think he was recently caught trying to convince somebody else to do some false testimony for him in prison.

So he's like, he's all he was the guy in charge.

Wow.

So you can imagine,

you know, what a mind feel of a life and professional life that was.

So you couldn't trust anyone.

You were just doing your own thing.

The people that I did trust back then, it turned out, you know, later on, it turned out like, hey,

you were on the take.

You were on the day.

I recently, I have a, I have a small podcast that I film out at Tijuana.

And I had my former boss, Lieutenant Colonel Izola, show up for it.

I talked to him for about three hours about the work we did.

We was surreal, you know, somebody that I

worked in that life.

It was long ago in my, it's a lifetime ago in my head.

He had a warrant out for his arrest when he was when we were interviewing him for the podcast.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Wow.

Because

he represents a political party and interest that is counter to the one that is in power now.

So

that they they make villains of even if you were, you know, he's considered a local and almost a national hero,

but he doesn't represent the interest of the current party.

Oh, my gosh, that is scary.

So,

yes,

you can trust a lot of people, and the people you did trust,

they would eventually be turned into the villain somehow, in some way.

I mean,

when it came time for me to leave, they basically told me, hey, you either work for us or you don't work.

What does that mean?

Well, I mean, subjective, right?

Yeah, I mean, I left in a hurry.

Yeah, but

they gave me that offer, and I, there's some people still around that work in that office that remember this.

And I've recently reconnected with some of them.

Uh, they were all freaked out.

You know, it was I was doing pretty well for myself.

Um, when I left the job, I had a rank of policia segundo, it's a second police officer, which is the rank uh i was a regional sub-commander for a while had about 80 people under my command for a bit wow uh i had my record was clean i never did shit i didn't have any investigations underneath me and uh i got to work uh security i got to manage security for a governor i got to work with

i got to work with all these amazing people i did a

great work

a stellar work uh

and they basically told me that if i didn't play ball this time that i was not going to play wow That was basically a death threat.

Holy crap.

You spent your whole life getting up to that level, second in command.

And you're gone.

Gone, just like that.

Yeah.

I put everything in a garbage bag, all my shit in a garbage bag, my vest, my badge, my radios,

work phone,

gun, everything, all the gear they gave me because everything's signed, so you have to give everything back.

I told them that I was going to...

Try and see if I could get a vacation time.

And I actually went there and I printed out my resignation

after that meeting.

Crazy.

Dumped everything in the uh and the uh armory downstairs from the office

and I left the next day.

Damn.

So your family must have been pretty scared.

It was

I was a ghost to my family for most of my career.

Oh, yeah.

I didn't I didn't show up a lot for obvious reasons.

For their safety.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But

yeah, they got wind of my departure and

I had an opportunity here in the States to seek out my immigration.

And I had friends up here,

great friends, that I had met and trained with and liaisoned with when I was still active, that basically

helped me figure out how to become an American.

So

that was a godsend.

But it was

from one day to the other, I had two phones and a bunch of military equipment that I would roll around with.

And

then I didn't have anything.

Crazy.

Starting a new life in America.

Starting a new life in the U.S.

And

with a job like that,

I remember watching

True Detective, which is probably the best show ever made.

Be very careful what you get good at is something they say in that show.

I was very specialized and highly trained in a very specific field in a very specific country.

And it's very hard to get a job when you do that type of shit.

Yeah, I bet.

While I was still active, I started doing

small training engagements with people.

basically showcasing and showing them some of the stuff that I know how to do just from the experiences that I had.

And when I came up here, I got some pretty amazing opportunities from some of the people that I used to liaise on with and work with up here.

Amazing.

And slowly but surely I started becoming an instructor and starting a company and just figuring my shit out.

I came here with

a nine with a with a two-year-old in my arms

and the money in my pocket.

Wow.

And that was it.

The

there was no severance package down there.

I bet.

It was just basically leave now.

Yeah.

I'm glad you're here, man.

And I'm sure fellow Americans are as well.

People see the way I talk about the U.S.

and

it's weird.

I mean, I'm an immigrant.

I'm new here.

Yeah.

And I'm very appreciative of the opportunities that this country has.

I'm also scared for a lot of the shit that I see in this country, you know, and how familiar it is in a lot of ways as far as some of the things I'm seeing.

But

my kid's American, you know, and I have a vested interest in this country doing well.

And I haven't forgotten about where I come from.

Tijuana right now is going through a lot of changes.

It's my hometown.

I have the podcast set up recording in Tijuana specifically because I want to try and get people there.

so they can see the realities of

what's happening.

Every guest that comes on my podcast

has to go with the Tijuana.

So that's a filter for people in a lot of ways.

I always take him out to get amazing tacos.

We had Eddie Gallagher on,

amazing guy.

Took him to get some tacos.

But I haven't forgotten about where I'm from.

I'm pretty active

as far as an advocate for some of the people and some of the issues that I had to deal with down there.

I've spoken to Congress a few times.

I've been in the U.S.

Nice.

And some of the people that I used to work with are now in politics and I'm like Lieutenant Colonel and like General Duarte and I'm

being useful in the new format that I have basically.

I love it, man.

As a public face and a voice for a lot of people down there that are not alive to speak about some of the things that we went through and

or are just, you know, just don't have the ability to speak about some of these things.

Yeah, it's important.

Well, I love that.

Where can people find you, your programs, and your podcast?

Manifesto Radio podcast on Instagram.

We're shadow banned like most people out there.

I think I am too.

Meta, Meta, and whatever new algorithms they have are being horrible.

Ed's Manifesto on X or Ed's Manifesto.com.

They can find out more about our company, our charity, and also our training

that we provide for people.

Yeah, we'll link it below.

Thanks for coming on, Ed.

Thank you.

Means a lot.

Yeah.

Thanks for everything.

Thanks for watching, guys.

See you tomorrow.