Cartel Land: How Acapulco went from Sinatra Singing to Sicarios Shooting
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There's a special type of fixer you can find often in Latin America, if you're lucky. Fixers, for those of you who don't know, are generally local press or simply well-connected people who help reporters gain access and figure out stories, translations, set up interviews, you know, that type of thing. In dangerous places, there's an added emphasis because they're kind of the ones who are in charge of your safety.

The type of fixer I'm talking about, usually he does a lot of work for a small local paper, but he's the type of person that may have a checkered past. Maybe he's been on the other side of the law when he was younger, and he somehow maintains his connections to both the underworld while also now having a ton of connections on the police force and things like that.

The type of guy who knows how to wait next to the coroner's office to find out when they're going to pick up a body, who gets tipped off to police operations before the police, but can still rustle up some local gangster to answer a few questions. You know, grizzled. For some reason, these guys always have a ponytail and like a really beat up car that they're fond of driving at speeds that imply they may think they're already dead or not scared of death, that sort of thing. Yes, these guys are my heroes. I wouldn't be worth shit without these guys. Like, they are the bomb.

So I'm going to use a changed name. I don't know how much of this I should put out there, but Felipe was one such guy. He was working with me and a cameraman producer by the name of Zach Fannin when we were doing a piece for PBS NewsHour on how Acapulco had become the most dangerous city in the world. This is 2017, late in the year, but Acapulco is usually in the top of the most dangerous cities in Mexico and therefore the world. Anyway, Felipe was driving us around at 90 miles per hour and hooking us up with contacts left and right.

We had just been to a murder scene earlier in the week, which I'll get into a little bit later, but let me just note that right now because it's important. So Felipe had arranged for us to meet a local gang member from Acapulco, and we were headed there after dark to the meeting spot. These are always tough things to arrange, but he was the kind of guy who could pull it off.

Generally, these things take time and the fixer has a relationship with the guy. I can get him to talk and they sort of go back and forth for a while to set it up. I mean, also, a lot of the times you see this stuff in some doc series show or even sometimes with journalists, people have paid for this access. Not the fixer. I mean, the gang member, he gets paid. And a favorite expense account trick people use is they put it down as a location fee. Anyway, we had done no such thing.

And we're headed up into the hills in Acapulco where the slums are and where you hear automatic weapon fire at night. And I was a bit nervous. So I'm double checking everything with Felipe where we're going to meet this guy. Does he know the neighborhood, how we can keep everything safe and make sure we don't get jacked, how long he's known this guy. And he's like, yo, it's cool. It's a neighborhood. I know we should be fine. I actually just met the guy yesterday at the murder scene. It's only another 10 minutes.

And I'm just like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What do you mean? Hold up. You just met this guy yesterday at the murder scene. And he's like, yeah, I met the guy at that murder scene you filmed where they were taking the bodies out and he gave me his number. And I'm like, okay, but did he make the bodies? Like, I feel like that's some important information to know before we go to meet him in a dark alley in the hills.

And then Zach and I, we had one of those spirited debates where you weigh the pros and cons and the cost benefit analysis that, you know, all while knowing that you're just going to do it anyway because it's already in motion. Yeah. I mean, how many beers are getting sunk during this conversation? No, we're actually in the car headed to talk to him. So it was not, it was not like the night before where we did it. Like we're, we're on the way to talk to him. Oh, you're there. Yeah.

So we pull up to the side street. One of his other guys was at the end of the street, armed, like keeping watch. We passed him as we pulled onto this dirt road one way. And there he was, you know, it's dark,

He's a little cracked out. It's always kind of awkward when we need to mic these types up. But Zach is a pro. And soon enough, we got the interview about his life of crime and why Acapulco was so murderous from his perspective. And then we went on our way without being robbed or murdered. So it was a good day. And I say all that to say this, welcome to another episode of The Underworld Podcast. ♪

I'm Danny Gold. I'm here with my co-host, Sean Williams. By now, you've probably heard we've sort of switched over things. We are now on Podcast One, that network, which is really good for us, but we've got the Patreon going with bonus episodes. Our merch should be back up. It was a headache before, but they're helping us run things right now. So things are looking solid. I mean, it's the summer of the Underworld podcast. The grownups are in the room.

Yeah, we're finally doing things right and proper. So yeah, I was down there in Acapulco doing this story for PBS NewsHour. And we're going to talk about how it went from come fly with me with Frank Sinatra in the 60s to don't go there. Otherwise, you might get murdered in the last decade. And actually, it happened kind of quickly that it went from this vacation hotspot to murder zone. I think for at least six or seven years of the last decade, it's been the city with the highest murder rate in Mexico and everywhere.

I think the world too. Yeah, this is crazy. I only know this like kind of tourist going loco in Acapulco side of this. Like I've never heard of this being a murder capital. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's not there, man. And I know this because in 2017, I was there reporting on it being incredibly dangerous. And like a little more than a decade before that, I was there on spring break, just doing things that should have by all means gotten me killed, but didn't.

I mean, just reckless. It was what they call the dance with the devil days, which was a famous thing in Acapulco nightclubs where they would play this song and this dude would come out dressed like a devil. And like the whole club had all glass windows and overlooked the city and fireworks came out. Like when the devil came, it was just, it was wild, man. And honestly, it's all kind of a blur. Okay. Okay. I get it now. Like this is your Magaluf, Santee, Sunny Beach, that kind of like, yeah. What does that mean? What does that mean?

islands mediterranean islands places where people go to get screwed up uh i have some stories from magaluf that probably shouldn't say right now but um yeah you go there you get you get messed up you come home and you feel bad about your life choices for like a year afterwards right oh so it's like where 19 year old british kids go to to have like a little five year vacation and just get all yeah

Oh, that sounds like a nightmare. It is. Yeah. It's absolutely disgusting. Yeah. Like American spring breakers get a bad rep and like, you know, earned, but like the sort of British kids doing the same thing. I mean, yeah. Oh, it's the same deal. It's the same deal. Those poor, like Greek restaurant owners that have to deal with tons of like 18 year old Brits coming over singing Chumbawamba and shit. That's awful. Christ. I sound so old saying that.

Anyway, 2019 Acapulco actually saw a murder rate of 127 people killed per 100,000, which was first in the world. And it was the most murderous city in Mexico every year from 2013 through 2017. So-

How did it get there, right? Acapulco in the Guerrero state of Mexico is based around this natural, beautiful bay. Apparently the largest natural port in the world. Just what was once a pristine beach with perfect 90 degree weather almost year round, like a tropical paradise, right?

It had been an important port and fort city since the colonial days. I think it was the main port used for trade with Asia back in the day, but it really started to grow a bit once a road licking it with Mexico city was constructed in the year 1946. Yeah. Like I have a, like a really, I have a really lame like quiz question facts, which is that it was like the main trading point with Manila, I think. And that was what the Spanish used to transfer all this stuff from Asia to South American one up. But, um,

Yeah, that's that's I can just like read the line edit from my editor saying get this history crap out of the story. So moving on. It starts getting popular as a vacation spot in the late 1940s and 1950s, back when Mexico actually didn't have much of a tourism industry like it does now.

There was no Cancun back then. Acapulco was the spot. I think the first beach resort spot there in the country. And it was glamorous. It actually started as a vacation spot for the Mexican elite, but it gets going in the post-World War II boom in America. And remember, this is back when air travel was super glamorous, TWA, people wore suits and drank martinis and everything involved with traveling just looked awesome. Yeah. Mad Men was a documentary, right? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's the same sort of vibe, you know? There's actually a TWA hotel or a hotel based on it at JFK right now, which is really like a fun thing to check out for an hour or two.

Flying back then, it just seemed incredible. Not only did everyone look great, there was basically no security. So air travel related crimes were super easy. You could smuggle anything. I think in like the 1970s, they still didn't have great security and they were hijackings like every week. Maybe we'll do an episode on those days. Yeah, literally the next show we're recording is going to get into stuff just like that. I was mad back then. Yeah, there's a book on it. I forget the name, but we'll talk about it later on.

Anyway, think Come Fly With Me with Frank Sinatra singing, which makes sense because he shouts out Al Capulco and it becomes the place for the Rat Pack, Elvis, Elizabeth Taylor, everyone your grandparents wanted to sleep with when they were your age. Kennedy's honeymoon there, which shout out to Grandpa Kennedy, one of the most successful organized criminals of all time.

In 1963, Elvis Presley even made a famous movie about it called Fun in Acapulco. I don't know what the plot was back then, but like with all movies, the plot could just be beach parties. And like, that's it. That's the whole movie. Yeah. People were really, really easily pleased back then. Nathaniel Flannery, whose work I use a lot of here, and who has done some great work on Gangs in Acapulco says, quote,

The joke in Acapulco is that Fidel Castro was really the main patron behind the city's ascendance. The start of Castro's revolution in Cuba forced jet-setters in the U.S. to look for an alternative destination. For actors from California, Acapulco was an attractive and convenient choice.

By the mid 1950s, Acapulco was home to a group of actors from the US known as the Hollywood Gang. I mean, guys, this is awful, right? You can't just make a gang name with the place where you live and gang on the end. That is not going to make our top gang names list this Christmas. It could use some work. Rat Pack was solid though.

In the 1940s, the city had only 5,000 residents. And by the 1960s, it had 50,000 or so. And it kept growing and growing as the tourism industry there boomed. Practically the whole economy there depended on tourists. Now, by the way, the population stands at about 700,000 to 800,000. And Guerrero, the state where Acapulco is, has always been one of Mexico's poorest and most problematic. I think something like two-thirds of the population still lives in poverty. So this was a much-needed boon back then.

By the 1980s, the city had gone from a small village to a small glamorous resort spot to a giant booming place with the invent of mass travel and cruise ships and all-American yokels stopping by to the point where by the early 2000s, it was a hotspot for American college spring breaker morons such as myself and middle-class Mexicans.

This is a true story. For spring break America, when colleges go down there, the nightlife becomes serious business. And some enterprise and college hustlers end up selling tickets and doing promotion for the clubs for everyone going down there. And they do it in New York. And these tickets, they cost decent money. I mean, I think it's into the hundreds. So one person I'm very close with who I won't name,

did this for his spring break, and he ended up selling 40 Gs worth of tickets in New York. Jesus. And had to bring it down there to pay off the Mexican nightclub guys who, you know, you don't want to get on their bad side. You don't want to stiff them. So anyway, he ended up dividing it up between like four or five of his friends, giving them like $9,000 each to bring down, which is the largest amount of money you can bring without having to declare it. Wow. I mean, that's entrepreneurialism right there. That's bootstrapping.

This is, yeah. I mean, this is exactly like Magaluf, right? Like different accents, maybe fewer tribal tattoos, but it's pretty much the same kind of deal. It's a solid hustle.

So somehow in the next decade after that, it became amongst the most violent cities in the world. A place where sicarios would decapitate people to send a message and the police would do nothing to stop the flow of blood. So how does this happen, right? That's your most NPR segue. Yeah, I'm here for it. I saw a comma in the scripts and I thought, I really want to hear how he's going to do that one. Yeah, I think I used it earlier. But I mean, you guys will forgive me, right? We don't have any of this.

We have to go back in time a bit, but first, you know, there's something about the typical violence in Mexico. Usually it's mostly kept out of vacation spots, even though it does tend to sometimes encroach. Actually, the other story I was working on there in 2017 when NewsHour had to do with some of the violence that was popping up in the areas near Cancun and Tulum, you know, all the crazy vacation spots.

But the thing is, violence in these hotspots, it's going to mess up a lot of powerful people's money. And if you do that, even the cartels know that's not good. Also, because some of the money messed up is probably their money. And the truth is, still, tourists in Acapulco can avoid a lot of the violence. Yeah, I mean, surely the cartels own a bunch of these places, right? Like, they wouldn't be up to much if they weren't invested in bricks and mortar. That's like violation of a key underworld podcast convention. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I'm sure a lot of the money gets laundered through, through all the hotels, restaurants, other cash businesses that are there. You know, property is like the number one thing you want to do when you're, when you're trying to, when you're a mobster trying to figure something out. Yeah.

When I was there, the police and even the military, they're super focused on the tourist strip. Though there have been some wild shootouts right there and even some stories about sicarios fleeing on jet skis and all that. And the gangs in Acapulco, they definitely extort and prey on all the local businesses built around tourism. But for the most part, the violence happens up in the hills away from the tourist strip and

in the rundown neighborhoods way up there. It's one of those cities where the tourist trip is like on the beach and then the rest of the city sprawls outward up into the hills, overlooking the bay and whatnot. And that's where the violence is most concentrated.

And the violence there, it's not your typical cartel war where you have like Sinaloa fighting the Juarez cartel over trafficking routes or something like that. No cartel has been in charge of Acapulco for quite some time. So what you have is dozens of fractured gangs trying to scrape out their own small territories and money, whether through robberies, kidnapping, extortion, or low-level dealing.

And with no one group in charge, it's this massive free-for-all that just gets bloodier and bloodier. It's sort of the blueprint for why the Kimpin theory fails. But yeah, a big problem in Acapulco is extortion. Again, this isn't the big cartels fighting over drug trafficking routes, right? It's smaller, fractured, less hierarchical groups. And that's one of the biggest contributions to the violence. There's no dominant power in charge. Back in the 2000s,

Before all this really kicked off, Acapulco was always known as this party town. So of course there were retail drug sales to be made. And Coastal Guerrero is also known as a popular transshipment point for coke going north. Have you ever heard that story that Napoleon used the Egyptian Sphinx for target practice and shot its nose off? Or maybe you've heard that a French astrologer named Nostradamus correctly predicted nearly 500 years of human history.

Or maybe someone told you that the legendary blues guitarist Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in Mississippi. These stories are what I like to call historical myths. Great little tales that may or may not have any basis in historical fact.

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The Beltran Lavier brothers, at that point under the Sinaloa cartel, which is run by Chapo and El Mayo, who I think – I mean you guys know who Chapo is, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. The Beltran Lavier brothers, they're Sinaloan like Chapo, and that's where a lot of the big early narcos are from. There's five of them, and they operate as a faction of the Sinaloa cartel.

They're very adept at trafficking huge shipments and also at infiltrating Mexico's political and law enforcement establishment and, you know, turning them corrupt. They were basically the ones in charge of Acapulco back then. And there's a slight chance, like it's not zero, that I partied with one of them at the Palladian nightclub. I can't say for certain, but like, you know, we're going to leave that open-ended. According to the New York Times,

Many trace the start of Acapulco's downfall to a wild 2006 shootout between the Beltran-Lavia crew and Los Zetas, another cartel that started out as a militant wing of the Gulf cartel before becoming their own thing and famously were started by highly trained Mexican soldiers.

I think we'll eventually end up doing episodes on like the cartels and all these guys, but it's a really covered topic. And there are some amazing books on it by Owen Grillo, who's a friend of the podcast that we had on El Narco one, Malcolm Bates, The Last Narco, which you can read if you want more. And our friend Noah Horwitz has a book coming out on El Chapo, I think in July. Yeah, there's like Narconomics and a Narco history that were good. Maybe not Narcos after the first season though. I find it like super interesting that, um,

All these different cartels, they kind of took over a different bit of society, right? The Beltran Leivas kind of went from top down. Zetas went into the military and the Sinaloa stuff was going on with the civilians. I don't know. It's kind of like every single bit of this country is just getting flooded by the narcos. Well, the Zetas weren't infiltrating America. They were the military. They were the military. Yeah, they got turned.

But yeah, I mean, it seems like, you know, I never read that about the Beltran-Lavier crew, but it seems like they were the ones sort of tasked with, you know, handing out the briefcases of money and really making that happen, which is interesting. I didn't know that was like a specialty, but I mean, it gets more interesting because you'll see what happens. They're controlling Acapulco and they're fighting off a few other cartels, working closely with El Chapo and the Sinaloa cartel.

But in the beginning of 2008, the main brother running things, Alfredo, gets arrested and a rumor goes around that Chapo himself provided the tips on where and how to get him as a way of deflecting attention off himself.

This, of course, means the other brothers break with Chapo and they become enemies. And they actually end up killing one of El Chapo's sons. So this Chapo guy, right? So can I read any books or any films or TV shows about this guy? I've never heard of him. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot. But Noah's book is going to be great. So buy that. We'll have him on the show. We want to support him. Yeah, we got him on. Yeah. Also at this time, Felipe Calderon, who was Mexico's president, is issuing like a full-throated declaration of war in the cartels.

setting police and military to essentially go to like actual war with them, which of course ratchets up the violence and split some of the bigger cartels into smaller factions. We talk about this often, how things are actually safer when there's only one dominant group in control.

But at that time, Calderon has, he's just had enough. In June of 2009, hundreds of soldiers and federal police get into a day-long shootout with a bunch of Beltran-Leyva cartel members. We are talking machine guns, grenades, all within spitting distance of the tourist areas. There was a chase. You know, there's gunmen firing at SUVs, police and soldiers taking cover and shooting it out in pitch battles, even having law enforcement gather people staying at a hotel nearby to take them to safety.

The cartel members toss grenades. I mean, when it's all said and done, there's 19 bodies, I think two dead soldiers, 16 gunmen, and I'm not sure who the last body was. And another report says 13 cartel gunmen,

two regular soldiers two tourists soldiers later recover 49 rifles and handguns 13 grenades and two grenade launchers and the army said there was more than 3 000 rounds of ammunition and a few days after the cartel start going after the police they kill two police gunmen they kill a bunch of others and this is like you know this is a new level that's being reached in the city i mean the body counts on these cartel shootouts is insane right it's like a john wayne movie

I mean, it's more than most wars, the amount of people that are getting killed in the narco wars in Mexico. At the end of 2009, you know, another couple of hundred police officers go to capture another brother, Arturo. He was now leading the cartel and had tried to have a bunch of top level police officials killed to avenge his brother's capture. So the police go to get him a few hours away from Acapulco at his, you know, whatever narco mansion in the hills, whatever it is. There's a massive shootout and he gets killed.

And shortly after that, another brother, Carlos, gets arrested. And I've lost track. I think we're running very low on brothers here. There's like five. I feel like we've done nearly all of them. I don't know.

I don't know. I hate when stories when people have double-barreled names as well. That pisses me off. There's like three or four, I think, that we've mentioned so far. But things are just getting crazy now. It's just a brutal war of assassinations, shootouts, police and high-level officials getting killed, hitmen being arrested, and Hector, another brother, he now takes over. But Hector doesn't get along with one of Arturo's top lieutenants.

An infamous guy by the name of LaBarbie, a fair-skinned Mexican-American who actually grew up in the States and became infamous for his brutality. And the cartel splits off into different factions. So a quick note about LaBarbie since he got a bit of fame. He was born in America and looked so much like a Ken doll when he was in high school, like he was a jock in Laredo, and that's how he got his nickname. Yeah.

That's good. Yeah. Yeah, it's good, right? He was a middle-class kid, but he got into some trouble selling weed and fled across the border to avoid charges. He joins a gang there in Nuevo Laredo called Los Chachos, where he comes into conflict with the Zetas as they're coming up.

He then ends up getting a start in the enforcement arm of the Beltran-Leyva cartel called Los Negros. He played a major role in the battle between Sinaloa cartel and the Gulf cartel, who Los Negros were working for. I guess he was just a prodigy and just like being a psychopath. And by 2003, he's in charge of Los Negros. And then 2004, he's overseeing stuff in Acapulco, which is how he rose up in the Beltran-Leyva cartel and ended up leading his own faction. This guy needs his own episode, I feel like.

There's a really good Rolling Stone article about it. I think there's movies that were in discussion, but we'll get there. So Hector takes his faction and calls it the South Pacific Cartel. And LaBarbie takes his faction and they just go to war with each other as the state is also going to war against them. LaBarbie tries to name a successor because he knows things are not going that well. His cartel splinters anyway. One faction calls itself the Independent Cartel of Acapulco, but that group factors itself and another faction calls itself La Baradora.

LaBarbie leads his group until late in 2010 when he too is arrested. And then it just devolves into more and more factions splitting. Every few months, there's a different leader getting arrested or killed. There's Guerrero Unidos, Los Rojos, et cetera, et cetera. The point is that there's no more one dominant group or even a handful of dominant groups after all this. There's just dozens of factions fighting for control and money. I'm guessing this is like dropping way more bodies as well, right?

Yeah, yeah. Every six months, there's another leader killed or captured. Some of the factions are getting to shoot out to the military. You know, it's just really hard to keep track. And here's how Insight Crime described Acapulco in 2011. Quote, breakdowns in the coherence of the hegemonic networks in Mexico have transformed Acapulco from the site of battle between two competing gangs to an anarchic mess of newer groups.

Much of the recent surge in violence stems from battles between the independent cartel of Acapulco, which is made up of the remains of the network won by LaBarbie until his arrest in September 2010, and the South Pacific cartel, a newly emerging gang that is loosely affiliated with the Beltran Levas.

Other smaller gangs, such as the Baradora, are also carving out a toehold. The increase in petty crimes like armed robbery and car theft also suggests a rise in smaller groups capitalizing on the climate of insecurity, though they are less active in the international cocaine trade. At the same time, the larger groups like the Zetas, the Sinaloa Cartel, and the Familia Michoacana continue to compete for space in the city of some 700,000 residents. So I mean, yeah, yeah.

Things are just going absolutely haywire as all these gangs realize they could do more than just sell drugs.

kidnapping, extortion, robbery, thievery all start shooting up as do killings. The murders per month jump from like 10 to the 70s. It's a free-for-all. And the army and the police, they're capturing and killing all these leaders, but there's no security on the streets and that doesn't do much to help the situation. You start having these grisly milestones. 29 killed in a 24-hour period in 2010. 2011, 15 bodies found decapitated near a shopping center of men aged 15 to 24.

And like I said, murder rate 2008, 10 a month, 2011, 72 a month. From 2013 through 2017, Acapulco had the highest murder rate for any city in Mexico.

And the brutality just keeps getting worse. The Wall Street Journal did a video piece from there in 2017, and they interviewed a coroner who describes it like, first it was firearms, then decapitation, then dismembering, then burned with gasoline and tires, electrocuted, poisoned, drowned, intoxicated with carbon dioxide. I mean, just gnarly stuff. I

I mean, the last one sounds like the least brutal, actually. I don't even know what it involves, but that tire one is I think it's called necklacing. That's like that was a popular execution method in like apartheid South Africa is gross. Like there's loads and loads of stuff online about that stuff. Yeah, it's a pretty brutal, brutal way to go. So who are these gangs?

Mostly they're just young men in the surrounding slums who have grown up surrounded by the violence and have no hopes or opportunities. I mean, that's really all I can say about it. Like we interviewed that gang member and he basically ended up in a gang life because he was a drug addict, ended up owing money to one of the gangs and had to join.

He spoke about Acapulco as if there was just zero hope there. Nothing for him to do but joining the gang and how politicians and police were in on everything and didn't care. I mean, it's like there's a real level of hopelessness there that I haven't seen in many other places. Yeah, it's dark.

And it's not just the gangs that pose a problem. The police and politicians are hopelessly corrupt. When we were reporting, there'd be a situation where like we meet someone of importance and they'd speak about tackling the corruption and the gangs and you kind of have a little bit of hope. And then later in that day, we'd go meet another person and they'd be like, yeah, don't listen to that guy. He is corrupt. And the next day we'd go meet a third person and he'd be like, that other guy you spoke to, the second guy, he's in bed with the gangs too. So it's just, you know, it's,

It's not good, man. And from a New York Times article, Alfredo Alvarez Valenzuela, who oversaw the Acapulco police for five months until May 2014, said,

told the Mexican newspaper Reforma last year, the municipal police don't work for organized crime. The municipal police are organized crime. In 2018, they actually had to disarm the entire local police force to be investigated due to gang links and soldiers, Marines, and state police took over. Isn't that literally a line like Sicario ripped in full, the Reforma quote? Yeah.

I swear it's something Josh Brolin character says. I love that movie. I feel like the chances are that Sicario took it from this Mexican police officer, not the other way around. I don't know, man. I don't know. I don't want to rule it out.

Those that don't cooperate with the gangs, I mean, they have a different fate. In 2014, the head of the city's tourist police was murdered. 2015, a commander of the community police nearby was executed while sitting in his car. I mean, the list just goes on and on. In 2016, gunmen attacked federal police who were staying in a hotel and had a lengthy shootout right in the tourist area. That's the shootout I mentioned earlier. Hmm.

And that's when the two soldiers were kidnapped and their bodies turned up shortly after. I mean, we're talking just a level of lawlessness that you rarely see. And of course, with all these stories and incidents, tourism is affected, especially international tourism.

And the whole city is basically dependent on those tourist dollars. So of course, local industry takes a hit, more people turn to crime, more people get desperate, and it just starts this insane cycle. And the city, every mayor who takes over is just desperately trying to clean things up enough to be able to portray the city as safe for tourists.

I say this one thing in the PBS report about how it's not just a war against the gangs the city is waging. It's a war of perception. And I kind of say, like, as the wheel on the body is out behind me, I mean, it's just, it's TV gold.

So at that point, I was, you know, I was reporting out one of the scenes we went to following our fixer where the police had tried to keep us away. It was up in the hills, some recently killed bodies buried in shallow graves that had just been found. And they were killed by a local gang known as the Virus, one of the premier local kidnapping extortion gangs. All right. Yeah. Evil sounding name. Tick. Better than the Hollywood gang. Jesus. Yeah, they earn it.

We were actually able to meet a 20-year-old who had been kidnapped and held with the victims. He was literally just grabbed and yoked up into a car trunk after a day at work. And he wasn't some businessman, right? This is a guy who worked, I think, in a supermarket or a warehouse. And he gets brought to a house full of other kidnapped victims. That's how bad the kidnapping is. I mean, when does it turn into terrorism? This just sounds like straight up terror now.

Well, I mean, that was the debate in El Salvador, right? I think there's no political ideology, right? They're not doing this to make a point. And that's an overused word in general. But the real moneymaker is extortion. So if you listen to the MS-13 episode, it's very similar. Every business, every bus driver, every taxi driver, every street vendor is taxed by the gangs that control the territory. From Flannery, again, a quote,

Now, instead of fighting for control of smuggling routes, local gangsters are preying on and killing taxi drivers and store owners, squeezing the struggling legal economy for whatever it can offer. There's a story from 2019 about the gangs even extorting tortilla makers, which I mean, come on, like that's that's like the mob shaping down McDonald's, you know? I mean, shake down Ronald. He's swimming in cash. Just don't just stay away from the guys making the chicken nuggets.

It's like, remember that Sopranos episode when they go try to extort Sopranos? When they go try to extort Starbucks and it just doesn't work out. That's awesome, man. I've been watching so many old Sopranos clips on YouTube. I'm obsessed now. Such a good scene in the show. Yeah.

Extortion is so bad in 2016 that local business leaders campaigned for a peace pact between them, the gangs, and the government. We spoke to a local business organization leader down there who told us between 2014 and 2017 that

2,000 local businesses closed. She also said there's absolutely no one you can turn to when it comes to extortion. The police won't do anything. There's total impunity. And I actually interviewed the new police chief a few days later, and he just completely denied extortion was an issue. He said the business is closed because of lack of tourism, not extortion. And this is a highly decorated police and military vet who was brought in to clean it up. And he promised the police force was changing. And of course, you know, 2018, police completely disbanded.

I mean, serious question on TV stuff. When you get a guy who's talking BS like that, like super disingenuous and stuff, like what do you do? Cause you've got, you've kind of got to televise the quotes on one side, right? I mean me, I could just like run around and speak to a bunch of random people and then print it. But with TV, it's like, I don't know. It must be different. You got to press them, man. Like I, I brought up the fact that this woman told us this and he was still in denial. So you kind of hope that like,

You know, you just give them enough line. They'll hang themselves out to dry. And then you also have the voiceover afterwards. You can be like, oh, this guy said this, but statistics actually show it's the exact opposite. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool.

Taxi drivers actually bear the brunt of it, the extortion. Apparently when a new gang wants to take over a neighborhood, they kill the taxi drivers first so the word doesn't spread. 130 taxi drivers were killed in Acapulco in 2016. It's just fucked up, man. It's always taxi drivers or bus drivers just getting absolutely hammered in these countries where gangs take over. And they're just these poor bastards trying to earn probably below minimum wage. Yeah.

In 2018, the U.S. State Department issued a travel warning for Acapulco that is the same level of the issue that's on par with war zones. Wow, guys, you're moving so quickly. Well done. The good news, though, is that murders have dropped considerably in 2020 in Acapulco, and it fell out of the top 10 most dangerous cities. But it remains to be seen how this year is actually going to shape up. And, you know, it's just sad because, like,

I love these places and I want them to succeed. And you kind of have to go there and do this story on how, well, here's why tourism has stopped. People are getting murdered all the time. But I think, you know, I try to be clear on the fact that it really doesn't affect the tourist areas. Still kind of a hard sell when you're like, everyone gets murdered there all the time. Highest murder rate in the world. That's not a good one for the leaflet.

That would, I mean, that would be my dream though, right? To just talk about that, but also be like, I just got ceviche here for $1.99 and it's fucking incredible. And there's a mariachi band and they're amazing. And Corona's cost 35 cents. Man, you've just found your post COVID, like you've just found a post COVID TV series there. I'm trying, man. I'm trying. But yeah, that is our...

That is our story on Acapulco and how it became one of the most dangerous cities in the world. And, you know, eventually I want to try to get some of these guys that like the fixture that I talked about on the show. And it'll be tough because they don't speak English, but I think they'd have some really interesting things to talk about. And they really are like the unsung heroes of journalism across the world, you know?

Oh, man. Yeah, I want to commemorate those guys as much as we can because they are absolutely amazing. Yeah. I've got some great stories about these kind of guys all over the world.

Maybe we'll do an episode or a bonus episode on them. But yeah, we got the new merch store up. It's on our podcast one page, I think. I don't have it now because we're recording this weeks earlier. I'm sure it'll be all figured out by then. Patreon.com slash The Underworld Podcast for bonus episodes and interviews. There's good stuff there. Thanks so much for tuning in again, especially to all the new audience members that are coming on. We really appreciate it.

Hit us up if you have anything you want to ask, anything you want to say, theunderworldpodcast at gmail.com. And I'm starting to get emails from people who are like, hey, I do crime and I want to hang out with you guys and talk about what I do. So I fully encourage that. I might have to hop on a flight somewhere overseas and do one of those really soon. And hopefully I'll survive to tell about it. But yeah, if you're criminals out there, let's chat. We'll be friends. We'll be friends.

The 2020 presidential campaign in the United States was a pretty wild spectacle to watch, no matter what your political perspective may be. But there was one particular bit of rhetoric that jumped out at me. It was a criticism of Donald Trump leveled by Bernie Sanders that made use of a well-known historical tidbit. Here's what Sanders had to say.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump golfs. Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump golfs. The senator was riffing on one of the best known stories from the history of ancient Rome.

That is that during a great fire that consumed the Roman capital in the year 64 AD, the self-absorbed Emperor Nero not only did nothing to help, but laughed and played the fiddle while his city burned. It's the kind of story that many people know, even if they know absolutely nothing else about Roman history.

For a whole lot of people, the history of Rome is basically just Julius Caesar, beware the Ides of March, and Nero fiddled as Rome burned. So in a way, it's not surprising that this story has proved so enduring. It's just too perfectly symbolic.

If you need a historical example of the ruling elite being hopelessly and heartlessly out of touch, I mean, this is it. Nothing quite says, I could care less, like playing a jaunty little tune on the fiddle. But we really should ask, is any of this true?

Did the emperor of Rome really sit back and put on an impromptu hoedown as his city crumbled beneath his feet? Well, here's the thing. If he did, there was no way he played the fiddle. In 64 AD, the violin hadn't even been invented yet. The instrument as we know it today wouldn't come into being for another 1400 years at least.

To give you some historical context, Nero playing the fiddle is basically the same as Charlemagne shredding the electric guitar. In 64 AD, the violin was an impossibly futuristic instrument. But we do know that Nero was an amateur musician and was particularly fond of an instrument known as the lyre, which was a small Greek harp.

He was known to put on long recitals for his advisors where attendance was mandatory. So the original story was that Nero actually played the lyre and sang as the great fire ravaged Rome. But there's good reason to doubt that story too.

The most trustworthy Roman sources inform us that the Emperor Nero wasn't even in Rome when the great fire broke out. In fact, we're told that the Emperor rushed back to the city as soon as he was informed so he could personally oversee the relief effort.

So Nero didn't fiddle as Rome burned, and he didn't play the liar. He didn't sing. He didn't sit back all smug and laugh as his people suffered. He learned about the fire through messengers and did his best to respond. Now, that doesn't mean that Nero was somehow a good emperor or even a good guy. In fact, he was probably one of the worst messengers.

But the fiddle, well, that just wasn't a thing. Nero fiddling as Rome burned is a perfect example of what I call a historical myth, a little legend that got wrapped up in the transmission of our history and often gets repeated as a historical fact.

My name is Sebastian Major, and on the podcast Our Fake History, we explore these historical myths and try to determine what's fact, what's fiction, and what is such a good story that it simply must be told. The podcast is one part storytelling and one part historical detective work.

I do my best to bring these weird stories from our past to life while also asking probing questions about whether or not we should believe them and how these misunderstandings took root in the first place. On Our Fake History, the goal is to celebrate everything that's weird and wonderful about the past while also thinking critically and trying to grab on to the slippery concept known as the truth.

If our fake history sounds like it's for you, then subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.