Bonus: How Cartels Took Over Mexico
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So, cartels are now terrorist organizations, but what the hell does that even mean in the first place? Hello my friends, Dakuya here, and welcome back to the History of Everything Podcast YouTube channel. I know that at the time that I'm making this, I am definitely late to the party because at this point, it is the end of March, and everything that I am talking about was set in motion by Trump at the beginning of his presidency at the beginning of 2025. And oh boy has 2025 been a wild year so far from the start. For those that are uninitiated or just somehow unaware, the U.S. State Department

would recently classify the major Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations. But of course, me saying that brings up a series of important questions. What does that really mean? Does it actually change anything when it comes to how cartels operate or how the U.S. operates in the first place when treating them? What even is a cartel in the first place? And at the same time, could being labeled as a terrorist group actually be beneficial or is it something that is just going to straight up hurt the cartels?

Well, my friends, answers to these questions and more are going to be coming up right after it is that I talk about my sponsor. All right, now, since we are on a bit of a roll when talking about gangs, it seems so far on this channel from the very beginning, we're going to need to talk about some context.

Because the story of Mexican cartels is significantly larger than any of the stories that we've talked about so far when mentioning what we did previously about the Caribbean. This is a story that is filled with violence and outlaws, which I hope at this point should probably be obvious. We are literally talking about cartels.

From the early days, so you understand what it is that I'm talking about, with Mexican farmers rebelling against strongman rulers such as Porfirio Diaz, the seat of power in Mexico has always been situated in or around Mexico City. But if one goes and takes a look at the map of Mexico, you're going to realize this is not only a very large place, but it is a very long country in the first place.

And all those farmers that are in the more western and remote provinces of the country have always had a rather, how do I put this, tenuous relationship with authorities, we should say. For a good frame of reference, I want you to basically imagine American bootleggers during the Prohibition era. These guys would in all likelihood have kept farming or tending their own land, but it proved to be just worthless.

way more beneficial to them to start smuggling booze. The same thing pretty much goes for Mexican farmers that would eventually form the first cartels. So, how did the Mexican cartels really begin then? Well, actually, I already mentioned the beginning of it. It...

did start with prohibition. You see, it's kind of unnecessary to go too far back in history because everything when talking about the cartels really does begin with the prohibition era. This is something that brought a need for finding those who could get a hold of substances like alcohol in the states along the U.S.-Mexico border. And it ended up being way easier to just get booze smuggled across that border than to run it across several state borders and then through various different law enforcement jurisdictions.

Go figure, it was just way harder to actually control anything during this time. The connections that were established during this time with the Americans who had the cash to pay for such services ended up proving to be the foothold that would allow these Mexican farmers to have access to a market that was much larger than that of their homeland.

The entire United States. Of course, I'm sure that already a bunch of people in the comment section are going to be stating, but wait, Stack, the Prohibition era ended, and with that, alcohol came back legally. You would think that at this point, these guys would be out of customers, right?

Well, maybe that might have been the case, except for one of history's greatest coincidences. You see, at the time that I'm talking about here, there existed a man by the name of William Randolph Hearst, who was a newspaper publisher extraordinaire, and he dealt with a lot of papers.

Now, Hearst had heard that a new technological development would allow industrial hemp to be used as a kind of cheaper alternative to wood pulp in paper production. So it is that he threw his very considerable influence behind legislation to highly tax marijuana. And Mexico just happens to be one of the world's best climates in which you can grow marijuana, and it was already one of the world's largest producers of that and hemp in the world.

As you can probably imagine, this would piss off a country that was largely agricultural. And so, Mexican President, Lazaro Cardenas, would go and respond in 1938 by attempting to place production of narcotics in Mexico under state control. Which, yeah, that's...

kind of an it's not exactly a new one but that is that is a very big thing to just do i mean i already talked about syria and its own drug production here either way the u.s would then shoot back with an embargo against all medicinal products that came from mexico of course this is not necessarily something that was going to last very long as world war ii would occur which would block or at least interfere with normal turkish and european supplies of products such as opium marijuana and

and heroin, which were needed for the production of morphine, specifically for the war front.

So it was then that during the war, the U.S. had to increasingly rely on Mexico in order to be able to shore up its supplies of these substances for non-recreational uses. And again, I need to stress this, for non-recreational uses. We are talking about medicinal substances specifically being utilized for the armed forces. Throughout this time, Mexico, as a result, would ramp up its production of both poppy as well as hemp.

Fast forward a little bit of time, and in the 1960s, the American Cultural Revolution was in full swing. And suddenly, these smugglers had rebelled.

way more demand than they could even supply. Hippies were traveling throughout the country and many of them would partake in herbal remedies, we will say. By the end of the decade, many of these smugglers had become rich. In 1968, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs would be formed by the US government and five years later, the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Agency, would then be founded.

At this point, the United States war on drugs had begun. Now, of course, when I go and explain all this, that is skipping over quite a bit of detail, but that builds up the general frame so you understand the background of what it is that we are talking about. It's also something that is kind of relevant for today's day and age because considering what is going on down at the U.S.-Mexican border, one of the arguments down south has been specifically to beef up border security in order to be able to go and stop the transmission of illicit drugs.

For historical reference, one of the first things that was done to fight drugs was to tighten up the border. In fact, in 1969, U.S. Customs Department Commissioner Miles Ambrose would order that every single vehicle crossing the Mexican border be subjected to a three-minute inspection, which was a pretty strong step. But what happened as a result?

Well, the whole thing was a kind of unmitigated disaster. It took pretty much less than two weeks for this policy to destroy enough cross-border trade and business that it was very quickly changed back before significant portions of the local economies would utterly collapse. Now, that's not to say that security went away entirely. No. In fact, they had heightened security on the border ever since then, and especially after 9-11.

but they've never gone back to the point of inspecting every single vehicle with such a high level of scrutiny. Either way, back to the smugglers. At this point in history, you need to understand that Mexican farmers had basically discovered that by growing marijuana and other substances, that they could bring in up to 40 times as much income as they could from growing, well, pretty much any other legitimate crop. If you were a dirt poor farmer, you'd probably consider it yourself.

And so, as the 1970s rolled in, so did heavy demand for illicit substances such as marijuana, but then also simultaneously cocaine. And this substance, my friends, that is one of the true beginnings of the origin of cartels.

Now, originally, cocaine had been transported primarily by planes flying from Colombia or Peru, and then they would stop off typically in the Bahamas before heading north to Florida. When the U.S. cracked down on this avenue of smuggling, smugglers would approach Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo and the Guadalajara cartel. Hailing from Culiacan, Sinaloa, Gallardo had started his adult life as a Mexican federal judicial police agent. He

He was originally one of the federales. He even was a bodyguard for the governor of the state of Sinaloa. He was, in fact, by this logic, so close to this official that he was made the godfather of the governor's son. And so, due to being so trusted by this man, when the governor got involved in corruption, Gallardo was his right-hand man.

Some years passed, and his level of involvement with corruption and smuggling would reach such heights that he just basically switched over to being a smuggler full-time and abandoned all pretenses of an honest life altogether. And from there, he'd made a few powerful friends. As an example of this, we have Rafael Caro Quintero and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, who had been former associates of Gallardo when he first started criminal activities as part of the...

Aviles, this being a criminal organization when they were all young. He remembered their loyalty and decided to bring them in on the ground floor of a new criminal organization that would pretty much dwarf anything that Mexico had ever seen before. They would become known as the Guadalajara Cartel because that was the primary city that they would operate out of.

Now, as I previously explained to the whole thing about cocaine, by this point in time, they had made some crucial connections with the Colombians, whose smuggling routes for flights across the Caribbean had just been shut down. Santiago Ocampo was their primary connection to the Cali cartel. The Mexicans would take their payment for transporting and distributing the cocaine throughout North America by being paid in, well, cocaine. Whatever they transported, they got a 50% cut of.

And that's just how the Guadalajara cartel came into prominence. Just from their transport and distribution of Colombian cocaine, the Guadalajara cartel is estimated to have brought in more than $5 billion annually. And that figure has not even been adjusted for inflation. That's just straight up what it was before.

decades ago. That doesn't even include all the marijuana that they never stopped smuggling and selling that is literally just from this one substance. But then, of course, the DEA was going to get involved.

Special Agent Kiki Camarena was assigned to Guadalajara to gain information about the cartel and their connections. He spent four years exposing drug operations in conjunction with the Mexican government, and together they would burn down the fields at a ranch in Zacatecas that brought in over $8 billion in profit yearly. Camarena was also a member of the Mexican government,

Camarena would then at that point start to expose the cartel's connections with prominent individuals in the local police, politicians, the PRI ruling political party, and parts of the federal government. Essentially, to sum it up very bluntly, many officials in the Mexican government straight up knew about these plantations growing marijuana and poppies, but they had just done nothing about it.

This was happening since the Prohibition-era smugglers, and it is something that is still happening to this very day. Gallardo realized just how big of a threat Camarena was becoming to their operations, and so he would end up ordering his kidnapping. The cartel had police officers that they paid off from the city of Jalisco on their payroll, and so on February 7th, 1985...

They caught Camarena just after he left the U.S. consulate in Guadalajara. They also would kidnap his helicopter pilot, Alfredo Zavala Avelar, and the two men were then taken home on the west side of Guadalajara that was owned by Rafael Caro Quintero, and from there they were interrogated and tortured for over 30 hours.

The cartel brought in a doctor and the other two men were given adrenaline and other drugs to keep them conscious as they were being tortured. I'm not going to go into necessarily excruciating detail about this, but Camarena's skull, his jaw, his nose, his cheekbones, his

his windpipe, and his ribs were all broken. As for how any of this was done, well, part of Camarena's cause of death was listed as being due to a power drill being used to make a hole in his skull. Both Camarena and Zavala's bodies were then wrapped in plastic and dumped a month later in a roadside ditch on a ranch in the state of Michoacan.

Considering how valuable an asset this was, this murder, as you can imagine, would royally piss off the Americans and set off the largest DEA operation ever conducted, Operation Leyenda. Leyenda being Spanish for the word legend, and this would prove to be a legendary manhunt.

Gallardo would spend the next four years becoming one of, if not the most, powerful and dangerous man in Mexico. He's referred to as El Padrino, the Godfather. But his more popular name was just El Jefe de Jefes, the Chief of Chief or the Boss of Bosses. But then the work put into Operation Leyenda began to pay off. His two closest men, Ernesto Carrillo and Rafael Quintero, were both apprehended by the government.

In 1987, Gallardo and his family would move to Guadalajara, where he laid low for two years until the government itself would finally manage to catch up with him. And it was this arrest, my friends, that finally shed light on just how much corruption and bribery was happening in the Mexican government, and still, to this day, is happening. Everything that I'm talking about is relevant for today.

For instance, numerous police chiefs in town throughout Mexico were arrested in connection with having taken bribes from their cartel, and over 90 officers deserted as soon as Gallardo was arrested and his connections began to be exposed.

There were also numerous politicians on the cartels payroll as well. The PRI was the main political party in power in Mexico for over 50 years, starting after world war two and ending in the year 2000. It turns out that for most of that time, the cartels had been paying off politicians and police to just simply look the other way while it was that they conducted business and

And as I said, this turns out to be a nearly ever-present problem even to this day. Someone is always getting paid to look the other way in Mexico. The other huge result following El Jefe's arrest was the fracturing of his criminal empire. And this is a very crucial point that needs to be mentioned because for anyone who has seen any of my other videos when talking about criminal

empires and what happens when they fracture, this is where things get really messy. This was partially done on purpose as he figured that it would be harder to bring down multiple separate organizations and that if they were broken up regionally, then they could be more efficient at smuggling. He was still running the Guadalajara cartel by cell phone from his prison cell, but he knew that it wouldn't last long without him.

So he ordered his lawyer to gather together the top people from each region of his organization for a meeting. And at a resort in Acapulco in 1989, his orders would be handed out to those present

at the meeting. Tijuana and its surrounding territory would go to his nephews, the Arellano Felix brothers. Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, this would be administered by the Carrillo Fuentes family. Miguel Caro Quintero would be given control of the Sonora smuggling routes. And El Jefe's top lieutenants, Hector Luis Palma Salazar and Joaquin Guzman Loera, were all given control of everything along the Pacific coast.

Eventually, Guzman would become known as El Chapo. This new organization would develop into the Sinaloa Cartel, a completely new organization that was not beholden to El Jefe de Jefe or anyone in the former Guadalajara Cartel. From here then, things would only get worse.

But by that logic, when I say that, my friends, it gets very insidious. Because it's at this point that we really need to take a second and pause and realize that what we're talking about here is not just criminal organizations. We need to explain what it is that these criminals mean to portions of the Mexican population. For those hardworking poor farmers in the remote regions like Sinaloa or Tijuana, these narcos, as they came to be called, were just the latest continuation of basically folk heroes.

These men would be idolized for their bravery and how they pulled themselves up out of poverty and made something of themselves by whatever means necessary. These remote states of Mexico always, as I said, from the very get-go, had a very contentious relationship with the government, and it's places like these where past Mexican heroes such as Pancho Villa came from. A whole culture grew around their lives and deaths through the creation of narco-corredos. These were like mythologies.

like musical retellings of the exploits of these drug lords, and the songs themselves would detail who took down who, and what guy killed which competitor to his business. To the poor and isolated, these were basically local heroes, or if not heroes, they were powerful figures to be respected.

When I talk about this, my friends, some of the variants of what you'd see would be fascinating, because this would even develop into another offshoot genre that was essentially like a significantly more violent gangster rap called Narco Gore, where...

I'm not even kidding. The goal is to, as descriptively as possible, describe how someone tortured and murdered their rivals. Like, this was a music. This is a music that people would listen to, and that's what they would look up to. As an example of a legend of the genre, we have the story of Chalino Sanchez, a young singer born to a dirt poor family in Sinaloa who started off selling cassettes from the trunk of his car.

Eventually, Sanchez would find himself working baptisms and quinceañeras, yet selling hundreds of cassettes at his shows. He then got connected to an actual recording studio, and his career from there took off.

For a while, he'd take money from pretty much any narco to write him a narco corrido, commemorating his courage and exploits. Halfway between a bark and a long whine, even Sanchez knew that his voice wasn't conventionally great, but often he would sing out of tune specifically to express the sadness or hopelessness that the subjects of his song were facing.

But, then again, he was speaking the language of the local people, and he blew up in popularity because of it in the early 1990s. Basically, a whole genre developed trying to emulate Sanchez and other artists. Sanchez himself would survive a near-fatal shooting at a show in Coachella, California in January of 1992, which, mind you, had sold out six hours before he had arrived.

On May 16th of that same year, Sanchez would be playing a show in Culiacan, the capital of the state of Sinaloa. At one point, someone from the crowd handed him a note. As he read it, visible concern and stress would spread across his fate, and for a few terrifying moments, he began visibly sweating during it.

It is commonly believed that this note was given to Sanchez to inform him that someone was on their way to kill him. So what did he do? He put the note in his pocket, and he kept on singing. He wouldn't let down his fans just because of a random scrap of paper, but Sanchez knew his time was coming. He'd recently given away most of his guns and sold the rights to his music in order to buy his wife a new house.

That night, a group of black suburbans would pull him and his friends over. They claimed to be state police and said their commander wanted to speak with him. Jolino would agree and got into one of the vehicles. The next morning, his body was found in a ditch next to the highway just outside of Culiacan. So it was then, my friends, that just like Buddy Holly, John Lennon, and Kurt Cobain, another singer was lost at a young age before it is that we could even see what they were truly capable of. But that, my friends, is just an example of one of the things that was happening with cartels.

For around a decade, beginning in the 1980s, the Tijuana cartel ran the majority of cocaine smuggling and distribution into the United States. Located in the westernmost Mexican state of Baja, California, the cartel ran loads of Colombian marching powder into the U.S. And as El Chapo began to build his empire in the 1990s, it began to take over more and more cocaine distribution from the Colombians.

This would only piss off the Tijuana cartel even more. When they saw the up-and-coming Sinaloa cartel rapidly growing under El Chapo, they tried to put an end to its expansion early by murdering two of El Chapo's top traffickers, kicking off a war between the two cartels. What you need to understand is that Sinaloa cartel during this time was making some serious moves.

Under the leadership of El Chapo, they would smuggle tons of drugs, and the cartel became a massive serious player in drug trafficking. El Chapo ran his organizations with strict control, and they were very effective in this regard. The only real problem that they had...

was a bit of a geography issue. We're going to have it up here on the screen right now, but if you go and take a look at a map of Mexico, you can see that the state of Sinaloa is situated on the Pacific coast, roughly parallel to the tip of Baja California. It's entirely on the opposite side of Mexico from the border with the United States. In response to the deaths of his two top men, El Chapo would call upon some favors from some old friends from his days back in the Guadalajara cartel, this being Ismael Zambada Garcia, more commonly referred to as Elchapo.

Juan Jose Esparangosa Moreno, also known as El Azul, and Ignacio Nacho Coronel, and each of these men would be part of the Juarez cartel and had a particular set of skills that would prove very beneficial to El Chapo's business. Even more importantly, El Chapo knew these men and that he could trust them.

You see, Nacho Coronel was a smuggler with a lot of experience transporting drugs via fishing vessels between Colombia, Mexico, and Texas. He ran the operations for the Juarez Cartel in the state of Nayarit, which lays on the Pacific coast and borders Sinaloa in its northwest side. At one point, he ran most of the production and transportation of crystal meth out of Mexico.

This would basically earn him the nickname, the King of Crystal. Coronel was such an effective trafficker that the U.S. government put a $5 million bounty on his head at one point. Another thing to note here is that El Chapo would end up marrying his niece, Emma Coronel, and after this, Nacho Coronel would stay loyal to the Sinaloa cartel to the end. They were his family now. As for the others, El Mayo was a logistical mastermind. He had a reputation for working well with other associates and coordinating each phase of the smuggling process.

More of his product hit American streets than almost any other high-level trafficker at this point because he paid attention to all of the smallest details and was always planning ahead. He had worked with the Juarez cartel and the Carillo Fuentes family for years, yet he retained his own autonomy and ties to cocaine suppliers from Colombia that he brought over with him when he joined El Chapo.

Something to note about El Mayo is that really up until the year 2024, he had never been apprehended by either Mexican or American authorities. The man was a ghost and actually in the end only ended up getting caught because he was tricked and

and betrayed, but we're going to be getting into that later. The last guy, El Azul, on the other hand, he was something of a people person, if you could call a murderous scumbag such a thing. El Azul's role in the Juarez cartel was that of a negotiator, and he was responsible for forging alliances with Peruvian and Colombian drug suppliers. He was also a dispute arbitrator within the cartel and was credited for organizing a peace agreement with the Gulf cartel in northern Mexico. He was the closest thing to a diplomat that you could find in a world of, well,

Well, drug lords. He learned directly from Amado Carrillo Fuentes, leader of the Juarez Cartel, who was his mentor in his younger years. Eventually, he would actually become Carrillo's second-in-command. On that note, Carrillo was known for his use of disguises to evade law enforcement. In 1997, Carrillo would, in an attempt to throw off both the U.S. and Mexican authorities, actually undergo plastic surgery in Mexico City. After that, he was planning to relocate out of Mexico.

But unfortunately, he actually ended up dying of a heart attack on the operating table that was caused either by a faulty respirator or perhaps an overdose of tranquilizer. We don't really know. Either way, of course, the death of a boss would create a power vacuum and several different parties would vie for power. Because there were two brothers and a nephew of Carillo in line ahead of him to take over as boss, El Azul realized that at this point, it was time to relocate.

And it just so happened at that point that El Chapo came calling for his assistance at that same time. Here then, both Nacho Coronel and El Mayo would both switch teams as well and join the Sinaloa cartel under El Chapo, creating the organization that became absolutely infamous.

After his tenure at Juarez Cartel, El Azul traditionally held leadership positions as a number two figure, given his preference to maintain a low-profile status and avoid getting arrested or killed, as the top kingpins usually did. El Azul would eventually help broker the alliance between the Sinaloa, Sonora, and Juarez Cartels in the 2000s, and that is something that would eventually become known as the Federation. But that hadn't happened yet at this point in our story. Right now, the Sinaloa and Tijuana Cartels were about to go to war with each other.

You need to understand here, my friends, the brutal fighting between the Sinaloa and Tijuana cartels was at its worst from 1992 to the year 2000, with family members of some of the cartel's leaders living in fear or every day like it was their last, as stated by Elmayo's wife at the time. Highlights from the early part of the conflict include that on May 24th, 1993, when hitmen from the Tijuana cartel tried to assassinate El Chapo at the Guadalajara airport.

And so, in one of history's worst incidents of wrong place, wrong time, they just so happened to shoot up the wrong white Mercury Grand Marquis. The car that they ended up Swiss-cheesing with gunfire was actually carrying Roman Catholic Cardinal and Archbishop of Guadalajara, Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo. The hitmen would kill six civilians that day, and none of them were El Chapo.

It sounds brutal, and it really is, but what makes this whole case even worse is that El Chapo really looks nothing like the Archbishop, and he was shot and killed from about two feet away. How these hitmen did not realize that the person in front of them was a priest and not a drug cartel leader is, well, anyone's guess. Like, this guy was even wearing a cardinal's robes with a large cross on his chest. That

That incident is something that brought a lot of unwanted attention and heat on both organizations. Like, even though they were trying to kill El Chapo at this time, like he was the victim here, many people specifically blamed him for the hit even happening in the first place. Another interesting development for El Chapo would also occur around this time. He came into contact with a Chinese businessman by the name of Zhenli Ye Gong.

Now, Genly owned Unimed Farm Chem Mexico, which happened to be one of the only companies allowed to import pseudoephedrine and ephedrine precursor chemicals into Mexico by the government itself. At this point in time, those chemicals were the primary way in which criminal organizations were able to make meth.

In fact, there were rumors that Jen Lee was the guy that the Sinaloa cartel got their meth precursor chemicals from during the late 90s and early 2000s. Those rumors would eventually be confirmed when Jen Lee would travel to the U.S. on numerous occasions and would be seen losing several million dollars gambling, yet would be rewarded with parts of his losses back in the form of cars and other high-cost items.

This was his way of money laundering, basically. He'd take millions of dollars with him, convert them into chips at casinos, and then cash out millions of dollars poorer. But somehow, the casinos always seemed to feel bad for him and either give him back part of his losses or these expensive consolation prizes.

Because of his suspected involvement, Jin Lee was wanted by numerous countries as well as Interpol. Now sure, for those of you watching here right now, you're probably thinking, Stack, there's no way it's that bad, right? No, it can't be.

Yes, it was. On one of these trips that I'm talking about, Jin Lee allegedly lost $110 million. Yet, he received nearly 60% of his losses back in the form of chips, vouchers, and gifts like new vehicles. In March of 2007, the Mexican government would decide to raid his home, and they found over $200 million in cash that was just, and I'm not even kidding when I say this,

stacked up around all of his house. They also found millions of dollars in pesos and some other currencies as well. It was really the largest drug bust of all time if measured by just how much money was seized.

But the real surprise here? El Chapo would laugh when being told about how much they had found in Genly's home. Because according to him, the government, and perhaps even the soldiers who conducted the raid, took large portions of the money for themselves. Why would he think this? Well, because the news had reported over $200 million in cash being seized. But he happened to know that there was actually more than $300 million in cash in Genly's home at the time.

He laughed because he knew the government would take some of the money for themselves and said that they were getting sloppy because they only took around $100 million. Again, Mexican government and corruption, hand in hand.

Of course, at this point, one may be wondering how exactly it is they were transporting these drugs in the first place. Well, there was another discovery. Back in 1989, the Sinaloa cartel would dig its first drug tunnel between a house in Agua Prieta, Sonora, to a warehouse located in Douglas, Arizona. The 300-foot tunnel was discovered in May of 1989.

On May 31st, 1993, Mexican federal agents would search for the gunmen who had failed to kill El Chapo at the airport, and they found a partially completed 1,500-foot tunnel adjacent to the Tijuana airport crossing just under the U.S.-Mexican border to a warehouse on Ote Mesa in San Diego.

That tunnel was described by the DEA in San Diego as the Taj Mahal of drug tunnels along the U.S.-Mexican border and was linked to El Chapo. In 2006, a drug super tunnel was found going across the border in Tijuana. This tunnel was also traced back to the Sinaloa cartel and built under the orders of El Chapo.

In 2011, at the westerly end of the Tijuana airport, an 1,800-foot drug supertunnel was discovered that was dug under the airport's 1028 runway from a warehouse located 980 feet away from Mexico's 12th

military, air base, and 330 feet from a Mexican federal police station. As with prior super tunnels, it was equipped with an elevator and electronic rail cars to efficiently ferry narcotics across the U.S.-Mexico border. It is that advanced.

In December of 2016, two drug supertunnels being built by the Sinaloa cartel would be discovered near the airport. El Chapo's organization was becoming the most effective at moving drugs into the U.S. But the violence between the cartels and the government, well, that was just getting started. You see, in the year 2006, the administration of Mexican President Felipe Calderon came into power, and Calderon was elected president.

on one promise. He was going to bring the cartels back under control. Calderon was going to launch an all-out war on the Mexican drug cartels. His soldiers would focus much of their early efforts on the Tijuana Cartel, which was the largest cartel at the time and easily the most sophisticated. Seeing that this was happening, the Sinaloa Cartel would decide to basically kill two birds with one stone by going and pushing hard into Tijuana Cartel territory and struck some serious blows to the organization.

This was payback for El Chapo since they'd killed his men nearly a decade ago, but it enabled his own faction to grow and take over much of the Tijuana cartel's territory in Baja, California. This would coincide with the five Adelano Felix brothers all getting tracked down and arrested by the Mexican and U.S. authorities in just about a 10-year span.

Really, by now, the Tijuana Cartel only holds sway in the city of Tijuana itself. They are mostly ineffective outside of the city, as Sinaloa would take over much of their turf. Though we are going to come back to El Chapo and the Sinaloa Cartel here in a bit. First, we have to head northeast, just across the border from the southern tip of Texas. Because there, Matamoros was the seat of power for the Gulf Cartel.

You see, my friends, as the Sinaloa and the Tijuana cartels were at war throughout the 1990s, the Gulf cartel was reaching its peak in terms of size, power, and influence. You need to understand that this cartel had existed since way back in the Prohibition days, but it hadn't really started trafficking hard drugs until going into the 1970s when Juan Garcia Abrego would take charge of the organization. By the 80s, they were moving cocaine by the busload.

I mean literally, like by the busload. And these buses just so happened to belong to the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service. See, Garcia had figured that since these buses never got stopped at the border, that they would be the perfect vehicles to smuggle drugs right across the border. And he was right. All it took was bribing someone at the INS who drove the buses.

For five years, he trafficked coke into the country just like this. At the same time this was going down, he would build a series of warehouses along the northern Mexican border, so that way his product would be able to be stored until the right time to get into the U.S. In these warehouses, he stored hundreds of tons of cocaine. He would even pay members of the Texas National Guard to move tons of marijuana and cocaine from southern Texas up

up to Houston. Because of things like this, Garcia was placed on the FBI's top 10 wanted list of 1995. And Garcia was the very first drug trafficker to make the list, and he wasn't going to be the last.

Through these efforts, Garcia was able to help the Colombians launder millions of dollars. For a brief period, the Gulf Cartel moved so much cocaine into the U.S. that it was estimated in 1994 that they were handling a third of all cocaine shipments into the United States. Mexican Attorney General's office estimated that at its peak, the Gulf Cartel was worth around $10 billion or more.

Everything was going right for the Gulf Cartel. That is, until January 14th, 1996, when Juan Garcia Abrego was arrested in Monterrey, Mexico. He was almost immediately extradited to the United States, and from there would stay in trial eight months later.

It was found that he'd escaped apprehension for so long, specifically because he'd been paying bribes to politicians and officials on both sides of the border. In fact, he paid so much in bribes, the Mexican deputy attorney general, who was also in charge of the federal police, had made more than $9 million by himself from money paid in bribes by Garcia and the Gulf cartel. Garcia ended up being convicted on 22 counts of money laundering, drug possession, and drug trafficking.

At this point, he is currently serving 11 life sentences at USP Hazleton, a high security prison in Preston County, West Virginia. Until something changes, that is where his story likely ends.

And so, after the arrest of Juan Garcia Abrego, there was a power vacuum left in the Gulf Cartel. After the arrest of Juan Garcia Abrego, there was a power vacuum that was left in the Gulf Cartel. This proved to be a metaphorical ticking time bomb, as over the next three years, no less than half a dozen different men would be placed at the top of the organization, only to then either be arrested or killed shortly after taking control. This cycle would continue for three years, until eventually it would end with Osil Cardenas Guillén

who would take control in 1999 by assassinating Salvador Gomez Herrera, also known as El Chava, who was the current leader of the cartel at that point. El Chava also happened to be one of his best friends, and even was the godfather of his daughter. So yeah, that's how things go in the cartel. Killing El Chava gave Cardenas one of the wildest nicknames in all of history, Mata Amigos, the Friend Killer.

Now, Cardenas was not playing around when it came to fighting against other criminal organizations in the military. He also had seen how many times leaders of cartels got arrested or assassinated recently, with, you know, one of those being him who literally just did that. And he must have said at that point, well, I may have done it, but it's not going to be me, because he would then go and contact Arturo Guzman de Sena, an army lieutenant that was friendly to the cartel, whom Cardenas ordered to find the best men possible.

Their job was going to be to serve as his personal guard, as well as the armed paramilitary wing of the cartel. Guzman deserted the army and brought 30 men with him, most of them Mexican Special Forces soldiers. Now, how do they convince Special Forces soldiers to switch sides and join the cartels? Well, it's very simple. They offered to pay them over 10 times as much as they would have made in the military. Seems pretty reasonable.

Now, Guzman had gone by the radio call sign Z1 when he was in the Mexican Federal Judicial Police, also known as the Federales. In Spanish, the letter Z is pronounced Zeta, and so they named the new group, Los Zetas, in his honor, for anyone who's curious as to how the name of that organization came into being.

At first, the plan that Cardenas had hatched really did work. Los Zetas grew in strength. They kept the military away from him and took out enemy gang members in great numbers. Los Zetas grew in size as well as importance to the overall organization. They began to organize kidnappings, impose taxes, collect debts, and operate protection rackets.

They also controlled the extortion business and secured cocaine supply and trafficking routes known as plazas, or zones. Everything at this point seemed to be going great for Cardenas and the Gulf cartel. That is, of course, until on November 9th, 1999, when Cardenas and his group of men held two USDA agents at gunpoint and threatened to kill them. He very nearly did kill them.

But the agents made sense when they said that if he killed them, it would bring so much heat down on them from the United States and Mexican governments that he let them go, telling them that he was going to kill them if he saw them again. What happened after that, you may wonder? Well, they didn't go away.

In fact, so much heat came down on them from the U.S. and Mexican governments anyway. What's really kind of funny and entirely ironic when I talk about this is that before the incident, Cardenas wasn't really considered a very big player in the eyes of the U.S. or Mexican governments. But suddenly, this incident launched both his reputation and his notoriety into orbit. Shortly after this incident, both the FBI and the DEA would put charges against Cardenas, and they would put a $2 million bounty on his head.

It's around this time period then, near the turn of the century, that the violence amongst Mexican drug cartels began to get really horrific. I already had been describing some of the actions of Los Zetas, and they began the tradition among the cartels of executing members of other gangs, or perhaps the local police, and then leaving notes on them for the public and the government.

These notes became known as the narco banners. Their executions would include sadistic torture, and when people mention cartel execution videos online, these are the first guys that were making such videos.

Like they really ratcheted up the level of violence and how gruesome the violence itself was to the point that I'm concerned about the monetization of this video on YouTube here right now with everything that I've already been describing. I don't know if anything that I am saying now is allowed to be said. As such, this whole thing was kind of like an

arms race, with other gangs and cartels following suit and leaving their own messages attached to bodies in the street or hanging from bridges. Some even tried to replicate the success of Los Zetas, and in response to the rising power of the Gulf Cartel, the rival Sinaloa Cartel established a heavily armed, well-trained enforcer group

known as Los Negros. Yes, I know what the comment section is going to say here. The literal translation is the blacks. But this wasn't a racial thing. Despite the goal of establishing a rival military organization, which was technically something that was done, these individuals were not trained military special forces soldiers, and so they had less success than the Los Zetas ever did.

Again, when I go describe this, everything was still going great for the overall organization, which was referred to internally as La Compania, the company. But then, their luck changed.

It started in November of 2002, when Arturo Guzman de Sena, founder of Los Zetas, was killed by Mexican special forces during a wild shootout in the streets of Matamoros. To make matters worse, after a three-year-long investigation and being placed on the FBI's top ten most wanted list, the military found Cardenas in Matamoros, just across the border from Brownsville, Texas.

The conditions were right, and they let loose an operation they'd been planning for over six months. Cardenas was put in a Mexican prison, but from there was still able to run the Gulf cartel while he was locked up. Through handwritten notes passed to his lawyers, Cardenas gave orders on the movement of drugs along Mexico to the United States.

He would go and approve executions. He would sign forms to allow the purchase of police forces. He would do pretty much everything that he already had been doing, just behind bars. His brother, Antonio, ran the Gulf Cartel while it was that he was in jail. When this was discovered, the Mexican government had him extradited to the U.S., where he was then sentenced to 25 years in a Houston, Texas prison for money laundering, drug trafficking, and death threats to U.S. federal agents.

Technically speaking, things could have still continued to operate, but the cracks were beginning to show in the organization. In 2004, Los Zetas and Los Negros would fight a brutal series of conflicts on the streets of the Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo. Now, some considered this to be the actual beginning of the Mexican drug war.

but the traditional starting point for it has typically been considered to be the year 2006, which, as I explained before, was the election of Felipe Calderón, whose administration officially declared war on the cartels. Either way, over the rest of the decade, Los Zetas would continue to grow by basically every metric.

They brought in more revenue, had a higher membership count, and had more influence than the Gulf Cartel, even though they were technically both a part of the same company. This would spark jealousy and division from the Gulf Cartel, which eventually would explode into an all-out war by the year 2010.

Eventually, it would get to the point that they were straight up partnering with each other's enemies. And you had the Gulf Cartel siding with the Sinaloa Cartel and La Familia Michoacana against Los Zetas, the Juarez Cartel, and Tijuana Cartel. And our next subject, the Beltran-Levia Organization.

To explain that, founded as part of the Sinaloa Cartel, the Beltran-Levia Cartel was responsible for transportation and wholesaling of cocaine, heroin, and marijuana, and the production of the last two. It controlled numerous drug trafficking corridors and engaged in human smuggling, money laundering, extortion, kidnapping, murder, and gun running. The Beltran-Levia brothers were Arturo, Carlos, Alfredo, Mario, and Hector.

And they were actually cousins of El Chapo. When they sensed the power vacuum in the Gulf Cartel after Cardenas was extradited, they started to push into northeast Mexico in an attempt to take over turf formerly held by the Gulf Cartel. This would result in the deaths of hundreds of people, many of them innocent bystanders that were just caught in the crossfire.

In 2004 and 2005, Arturo Betranlevia would lead groups of assassins known as sicarios through northeastern Mexico, waging war against the Gulf Cartel. They intimidated or paid off members of Mexico's political, judicial, and police institutions,

to both feed them classified info about anti-drug operations, or to look the other way while they operated in that specific area. In fact, the government even cordoned off certain streets in certain parts of town when the cartels were attacking each other in order to just minimize the loss of civilian lives. The Beltran-Livia organization proved to be so effective in infiltrating portions of the government that they even had a paid informant in

in Mexico's Interpol office. However, that all being said, in January of 2008, Alfredo Beltran-Levía, leader of the cartel, was arrested.

This was a massive blow to the organization as he was the best of the brothers when it came to managing large-scale operations as well as laundering money. His brother Arturo would take over the organization at this point, but he was hissed about his brother getting arrested. He ordered the assassination of the commissioner of the federal police as well as other top officials in the country. The commissioner was successfully assassinated.

but one of the teams of hitmen was caught before they could carry out their mission to kill another official, and the weaponry that they had with them was insane. We're talking dozens of fully automatic rifles, pistols, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, over 30 hand grenades...

and custom bulletproof vests that read FEDA on them. This was a Spanish acronym meaning Special Forces of Arturo, which doesn't exactly instill fear just upon hearing it actually, but they had their own custom outfits. Something broke within the Beltran Levia organization when Alfredo was captured and sent to prison.

The Beltran-Levier brothers blamed El Chapo for his arrest, claiming that he had prior knowledge that the government was going to go after Alfredo and that he did nothing. So what do they do? They order the death of his 22-year-old son, Edgar Guzman Lopez. And the team sent to kill him did not get caught before they could carry out their mission. As you

As you can probably expect from this, El Chapo did not take this lightly, and a war was started between the Sinaloa Cartel and the Beltran Levy Organization, who had allied themselves with Los Zetas. And because they were also allied with the Juarez Cartel, this meant that El Chapo was able to get some revenge on their organization as well. This would be the cause behind the rivers of blood shed in Mexico's most violent city, Ciudad Juarez.

At this point, my friends, Arturo was now the brother in charge of the Beltran Levy organization. And for nearly two decades, he would lead them on a bloody campaign of revenge. Then, in December of 2009, Mexican Marines would track him down to a posh high-rise apartment building where he engaged in a shootout with them. Unfortunately for him, no matter who it is that he called out to come and assist him, they weren't able to reach him. At least not this time. Because of the war, Arturo was forced to leave the country.

Because this time, the Mexican government hadn't just sent a couple dozen guys. No, they sent over 200 Marines to capture him. After a standoff lasting a couple of hours, Arturo Beltran-Levia would be taken down by a hail of gunfire like a true narco of legend.

The rest of the Beltran-Levier brothers didn't exactly respond well to their brother dying. They found the identity of one of the Marines involved in the shootout that had killed Arturo. They then sent hitmen to his funeral, who then followed his family back home to his mother's house before taking out his mother, siblings, and his aunt just hours after the Marines' burial. It was revenge at its most base level.

In February of 2010, the violence would explode, and Los Zetas and Beltran Levia would take on the alliance of the Gulf, Sinaloa, and La Familia cartels in the streets of Reynosa in the state of Tamaulipas. You remember Los Negros, the special paramilitary wing of the Sinaloa cartel that was created to compete with Los Zetas? Well, they happened to be just under the control of the Beltran Levia brothers, and when they splintered off from the Sinaloa cartel, they took Los Negros with them.

But this ended up not actually being so much of a problem because they had done all of this during the hardest crackdown of Calderon's presidency, and the organization brought a ton of heat down upon themselves when they murdered the Marines' family. Within two years, most of the Beltran-Levier organization was utterly shattered, and it

and its members apprehended. In 2014, authorities would apprehend Hector Beltran-Olivia, but by that point, the cartel was so weak that it basically had zero influence and very little power. It completely fractured into multiple smaller gangs, all with much less reach, authority, and revenue-making capabilities.

So it was then that the early 2000s was a nightmare for the Beltran-Levia folks. But how were Los Zetas doing, you may wonder? Well, they were the strongest and largest gang in Mexico during this period. They were the most violent, most sadistic, and just incredibly capable.

They carried out multiple massacres, including one incident where they walked into a disco club and threw eight severed heads onto the dance floor. During the late 2000s and the early 2010s, they were busy. They controlled about 40% of Mexico's oil market at one point. They were that involved in just about every aspect of Mexican society.

On that note, when I talk about this, just listen to this quick list of their varying different works. In 2010, San Fernando Massacre, 72 migrants found dead. 2011, San Fernando Massacre, another one, 193 people killed. 2011, in Guatemala, 27 farmers killed. 2011, Monterey Casino attack, 52 people killed. 2012, Altamira Prison Brawl, killing 31 Gulf Cartel inmates.

2012, Apodaca Prison Riot, 44 cartel inmates killed and 37 Zetas escaped.

This was obviously terrible, but the biggest one among everything that I'm describing, and remember, this is only over a period of just a couple years, was the 2011 massacre at Allende, where an estimated 300 to 500 civilians were killed after the Zetas accused two local men of betraying the organization. What is so crazy about this is that some cartels did their best to lay low, but the Zetas were something that were more akin to the Mongol hordes. They were like a plague of locusts that would sweep across the country, leaving bloodshed in their wake.

They would popularize cartel execution and torture videos. Some of these newer tortures and hyper-violent execution styles included practices such as flaying and castrating people, as well as public displays of their victims. If you've seen any of these videos, or even clips of them, you'll know what it is that I am talking about.

The thing is, though, the problem with Los Zetas was that out of the original 34 Zetas that they had, all but 10 of them ended up being arrested or killed by the mid-2010s. The Mexican government brought the hammer down extra hard on Los Zetas, and it was very effective. Every time a new leader took over the group, the government had them arrested or killed within a couple of months. They were losing men faster than could be trained, and

and none of them were as good as the original Zetas that came from the Mexican military. They simply could not replace their numbers quick enough.

This, in turn, led to the shrinking of their territory and influence and the fragmentation of the organization. Just like the Beltran-Levia organization, they would end up fracturing into a number of smaller gangs. Now, when I talk about this, my friends, it should be noted that the Northeast Cartel in Mexico is one of these smaller gangs who operate in and around the area of Nuevo Laredo. They formed in 2015 as one of these splinter offshoots that came out of Los Zetas falling apart.

They are essentially a less violent rebrand of Los Zetas, but the difference is that their founder was a part of Los Zetas, not as a former military operative, but as a drug courier. He became a lieutenant due to his fluent English and vast connections in the United States, and though their territory is vastly smaller than that of Los Zetas at its peak, the Northeast Cartel still wields a large deal of control in the area surrounding New

Nuevo Laredo. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Nuevo Laredo is the busiest corridor crossing in terms of truck crossing, with over 1.7 million trucks per year, more than double that of any other crossing on the Mexico-United States border. Also, it

Nuevo Laredo is the fourth busiest border crossing in terms of passenger vehicles. As a result of this, in June of 2011, the U.S. government would arrest 127 U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents who were collaborating with and being paid by Mexican drug cartels.

A month later, the Mexican army would discover the largest marijuana plantation ever found in the country, 320 kilometers or 200 miles south of San Diego, in the state of Baja, California, consisting of 120 hectares.

or 300 acres that would have yielded around 120 tons and was worth about $160 million. This was a huge bust, and it seemed like President Calderon's plan had worked, sort of. But after four years, the additional efforts, though they had results, did not seem to actually slow down the flow of drugs or the killings that were tied to the drug war. In 2012, a new president would take office and things would change.

But not for the better. Enrique Pena Nieto was the first candidate elected by the PRI since the year 2000. If you remember that from earlier, this was the same party that allowed the cartels to operate under their nose and sometimes quite literally with their blessing throughout the 20th century. Pena Nieto came in on a platform of de-escalating the drug

war, and the general public saw him as just being way too weak on the cartels. This would cause the formation of numerous different paramilitary militias, known as self-defense groups. These were local farmers and ranchers that armed themselves and patrolled their own land and neighborhoods to defend themselves against the cartel violence. Now, initially, these groups operated in coordination with the government and with its blessing, but eventually, many of them ended up suffering from internal struggles, and

disagreements with the government, or even worse, sometimes the self-defense groups themselves would end up turning into cartels. Pena Nieto would go on to badly mishandle the 2014 Iguala mass kidnappings in the state of Guerrero, in which 43 male students at a rural teacher's college were forcibly abducted and disappeared. This was done by local police working under the direction of the cartels. Maybe. I mean, it's one possible explanation.

Look, when I go and talk about this, that entire incident could be a video in and of itself on its own. It's like a mystery and crazy historical thing that happened. So trust me when I say that I haven't even mentioned the numerous other theories as to what happened to these men, but they were never seen from again. And Pena Nieto and his administration mismanaged the hell out of the government reaction to it, drawing international criticism. Either way, you may wonder what the hell was going on with El Chapo in this time.

Well, if we go back in time, in 2001, El Chapo Guzman was in prison in Mexico. And he had paid the guards $2.5 million at that point to sneak him out in a laundry cart.

What's crazy is that all the staff knew that he was going to escape, and even the prison's warden knew about it and was paid off. We know that because that guy is now in prison for aiding the escape, by the way. Chapo would then spend the next 13 years fighting the other cartels for control of access to the border smuggling routes, and he consistently avoided authorities that entire time.

But in February of 2014, through a joint effort including the Mexican Navy, the DEA, and the U.S. Marshal Service, El Chapo was finally apprehended at a beachfront resort in Mazatlan. He was then taken to a Mexican prison. The Mexicans decided to charge him first instead of extraditing him to the U.S., and this would prove to be a mistake.

A year and a half later, in July of 2015, Guzman would escape from prison again in Mexico. He did this by ordering his men to build a tunnel that led from a nearby warehouse to underneath his prison cell. Because he knew that the shower was the only part of his cell not under video surveillance, he pretended to go take a shower. Then, he pulled out the shower itself, away from the shower stall, as it had been decocked and loosened from the shower stall. Underneath was

with the hole leading 10 meters, or 33 feet, down to the tunnel, which also sported lighting, train tracks, and a waiting motorcycle rigged to run on tracks, which carried him quickly to the warehouse, and his men waiting to rush him to freedom. Like, this story, like, that is insane. And one of the craziest details about this here is that the tunnel was exactly 5 foot 7 inches tall, specifically because...

Get this, El Chapo is 5 foot 6 inches tall. Therefore, it would be impossible for him to hit his head on the way out of the tunnel. They were that specific. The escape, as you can imagine, was hugely embarrassing for the Pena Nieto administration and essentially ruined Pena Nieto's chances of getting re-elected.

El Chapo remained on the run, never staying anywhere for more than a couple of days at a time, and mostly traveling throughout the Sierra Madre Mountains. But, weirdly enough, through random chance, he happened to come to communication with Mexican telenovela actress Kate Middleton.

Del Castillo, who he invited to come visit him. American actor Sean Penn heard about this meeting and asked if he himself could come along and interview El Chapo. So it was that on October 2nd, 2015, Del Castillo and Penn visited Guzman for seven hours at his hideout in the mountains, with Penn interviewing the fugitive for Rolling Stones magazine. Guzman, who never before acknowledged his drug trafficking to a journalist, told Penn that he had a fleet of narco submarines stationed

airplanes, trucks, and boats, and that he supplied more heroin, meth, cocaine, and marijuana than anyone else in the world. This meeting with Penn and Del Castillo would almost prove to get him caught as the Mexican government used information from the two actors to narrow down where El Chapo was hiding. They conducted a raid on the ranch, but faced heavy gunfire from El Chapo's men, giving him time to escape. A military helicopter spotted him running from the scene with two women and a small child in his arms. It

It turns out that the two women were his personal chefs who he took with him wherever he traveled, and the child was one of the woman's daughter. The military decided at that point not to shoot El Chapo because he was carrying the girl in his arms. It's undetermined if he simply was helping the mother out of kindness or if he was using the little girl as a human shield, but either way, he managed to escape that night.

Three months later, in January of 2016, the authorities would track down El Chapo in the city of Los Mochis in the state of Sinaloa. Dozens of Mexican Marines, soldiers, and federal police would attack the home that he was staying in. Was the game up at this point, you may wonder? Well, no. The master of tunnels would manage to escape capture again by using a tunnel that he had ordered built under the garden tub in his master bathroom.

He and a lieutenant would use this tunnel to escape, and it led them 1.5 kilometers to safety, where they emerged onto the street and stole a vehicle at gunpoint. Ultimately, he would make it around 20 kilometers away in the few hours since his escape, and when the officers found him, he would try to bribe them, but it didn't work this time. This time, the Mexicans would decide to extradite him to the United States. From there, he would plead not guilty to a 17-count indictment in the U.S. District Court of New York,

And prosecutors stated that juror anonymity and an armed escort were necessary even if Guzman was in isolation due to his history of having jurors and witnesses murdered. After a two-year-long court case in July of 2019, he was sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years and was ordered to hand over $12.6 billion to...

which I'm pretty sure the government just never got a dime of. At this point, he is currently imprisoned in ADX Florence, the most secure supermax prison in the United States, which is located in Colorado.

But it is also, ironically enough, the place where his old buddy, Alfredo Beltran Levia, is incarcerated, although none of the prisoners at ADX are ever allowed to interact with the other prisoners. Even after Guzman's arrest, the Sinaloa cartel remained the primary drug distributor in 2018 in the U.S. among Mexican cartels, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

Still, though, there was going to be an effect. El Chapo's arrest was going to lead to a seismic shift in the power dynamics within the Sinaloa cartel. This is partially the case, of course, when cartel bosses get arrested and imprisoned due to the nature of how cartels are set up. In our video about the Japanese economy, we mentioned how Japanese companies are either vertically integrated or horizontally integrated, and Mexican drug cartels are the ultimate example of horizontally

horizontal integration. Their hierarchy starts with the boss, and then below him is typically a handful of trusted lieutenants that are tasked with managing certain aspects of the cartel's business. One lieutenant might be in charge of trucking and shipping, another might be in charge of the military wing, another might be in charge of handling money and finding financial backing, another one might be in charge of the actual drug production, managing farms or harvesting or something like that, and

And then these lieutenants are generally given vast amounts of leeway and are essentially like vassal lords running their own little kingdoms under the broader leadership of their bosses. So, because of all the high-level decisions getting made by the big boss of the cartel and his lieutenants, all it takes for most cartels to collapse is to just...

take out the boss, and a couple of the lieutenants, all in a short period of time, which then typically leads to the fragmentation of the cartel. That is the danger of being a horizontally integrated organization. Take out a few key pieces, and the whole house of cards starts to fall apart.

Now, while Los Zetas and Beltran-Levia Organization were crumbling into pieces, somewhere around 2009, our last player in the story comes into existence. Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion is a group that formed out of the ashes of Mileno Cartel. Nacho Coronel, who we already mentioned as one of El Chapo's right-hand men, was killed in a shootout with the Mexican army in Jalisco on July 29th, 2010. Remember what I talked about with fragmentation just now?

His death left a massive power vacuum in the state of Jalisco, which Nacho Coronel had controlled with an iron fist. Known by the acronym of CJNG, this new organization was led by Nemicio Osegura Cervantes, who would just go by the nickname El Mencho. In spring of 2011, the CJNG declared war on both Los Zetas and the Gulf cartel.

That put them back in the same side as the Sinaloa cartel, and they went and allied themselves against their common enemy. Over the course of the years, from 2011 to 2012, the CJNG would carry out numerous massacres, with most of their victims being actual members of rebel cartels, but their bodies being left in display with narco banners explaining that unless you were allied with the CJNG, you were going to be next.

As El Mencho and his men built up their organization's strength during the 2010s, the Sinaloa cartel was going to go through some pretty extreme drama. Initially, after El Chapo had been arrested, leadership would pass to El Mayo, his right-hand man. And for five years, he kept the organization running pretty smoothly. But over time, El Chapo's son became a bit of a problem. They wanted more control over the organization, and

and a rift eventually formed in El Chapo's absence between his sons, known collectively as Los Tapitos, the little El Chapos. And El Mayo and his men referred to as Los Mayitos. Of course, El Chapo's sons had been trained to succeed him, but El

But El Mayo had been one of El Chapo's top lieutenants for over 40 years, and those men under his part of the organization were fiercely loyal to him. This would in turn lead to brutal infighting amongst these two factions of the Sinaloa Cartel. When I talk about this, my friends, this lasted all the way until late 2022. That being when they put aside their differences to address the threat that the CJNG posed to them. Then the cartel would take a series of significant blows.

First was the January 5th, 2023 arrest of Olvido Guzman, one of El Chapo's sons who was in charge of the Los Chapitos faction at the time. Then, in July 25th, 2024, the cartel suffered its worst hit since El Chapo got arrested when El Mayo was arrested.

Not only was El Mayor arrested, he was tricked by Joaquin Guzman Lopez, another one of El Chapo's sons, to come check out a local airstrip and give his opinion about it. The two men got on a plane, and soon, El Mayor was placed in zip-tie handcuffs and held at gunpoint for the duration of the flight.

The plane would land in El Paso, Texas, and both men were arrested by American authorities to await trial. Like, it's seriously hard to fully explain just how big of a violation it was that Joaquin Guzman Lopez betrayed El Mayo in this way. In the cartel world, loyalty is everything. It's almost unthinkable for one member of a cartel to do this to another member of the same cartel. And so when they heard the news, Los Mayitos were pissed.

This would in turn ignite another war amongst those in the Sinaloa cartel. And at this point in time that I'm describing this, and this is why I've had to describe this entire story, that is still something that remains ongoing to this day. We don't know at this point who is going to emerge on top and who is in control of the cartel at this time.

And in the meantime, the CJNG is causing problems for everyone in various parts of the country. Unlike what you would see with the Sinaloa Cartel, the CJNG has no problem extorting the people that live and work in the areas they operate in. Under El Chapo, if you were caught extorting the locals of the areas controlled by the cartel, you would be killed pretty easily. Some people even sought out El Chapo to ask them to serve justice against, you know, a rival cartel, and he would oblige many of these requests. But the

But the CJNG just doesn't follow any rules like that. They extort people wherever it is that they go, and things didn't get any better when Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador would take office as the new president of Mexico in 2018. His policy towards the cartels? Do nothing. I'm not even kidding. Like, do nothing. His press campaign slogan regarding his stance on the drug cartels was, and I quote, hugs, not bullets. This

This meant he concentrated on social programs to attack the sources of criminality rather than direct confrontation with the criminals. And while Lopez Obrador's approval rating never did drop below 60%, which that's very high for a politician, this didn't really have anything to do with his stance on cartels and how he treated them. Mostly, it was due to his labor reforms and efforts at poverty and inequality reduction. He doubled the country's minimum wage, and the working class loved him for it.

but he was super weak when it came to dealing with any of the cartels. In fact, when I talk about this, my friends, there's also a persistent claim that Lopez Obrador was actually funded by the cartels to pay for his presidential campaign with the promise that when he reached the presidency, he would go easy on them. This

This claim comes from DEA agents who captured a former campaign operative for Lopez Obrador in 2010. And in exchange for a lesser sentence, this former employee spilled the beans saying the cartel members had funneled around $2 million into his first presidential campaign with a promise that he would remember them and return the favor. He even once went and described drug traffickers as well,

well-behaved, respectful people who, quote, respect the citizenry. I'm not even kidding. That's, from everything I've described here today, I need you to understand the gravity of that statement. So when I say this, my friends, it is very possible that the most recent former president of Mexico, the guy in charge of the entire country, was bought and paid for by the cartel at some point in the past, though I have to stress that these are allegations. These have not been confirmed.

That being said, the cartels have worked hand-in-hand with the government in the past. There's not really a reason as to why they wouldn't do it again. Towards the end of his presidency, López Obrador would handpick Mexico City Mayor Claudia Shinbom as his successor.

and she would win the presidency in 2024, in no small part thanks to his constant endorsements. The CJNG now saw how weak Lopez Obrador was, and they even tried to push into Mexico City with a serious effort in 2020. But they were actually stopped by the leadership of Mexico City Chief of Police at the time, Omar Garcia Harfuch. Before they gave up their efforts in the nation's capital, the CJNG made sure to find Garcia in public,

and using bullets, they very quickly ventilated his vehicle by adding speed holes to it over 500 times over the course of a minute. Now, while two members of his security team and a passerby were killed in the attack, Garcia, somehow, was only shot three times and did manage to live to see another day. This is relevant because guess who Claudia Shinbaum would choose as her Secretary of Security and Civilian Protection?

That's right. Omar Garcia Harfush. And so for Garcia, as you can imagine, it's pretty personal at this point. So even though Oisinbaum is from the party that Lopez Obrador is from and may be soft in the cartels...

she might actually be compelled to do something about them. Or she could end up following in the steps of her mentor and basically do nothing. Really, at this point in time when I'm talking about this, that still is yet to be seen. Also, remember when I mentioned those 43 college students that disappeared? Well, that happened in the state of Guerrero back in 2014. Can you take a guess who was chief of police for the federal police in Guerrero back in 2014? That's right. Omar Garcia Harfush. It is known that he...

his men ambushed the buses that the 43 students were on, but not what happened afterwards, whether or not they were doing it on Garcia's orders or not. Things are complicated. Even the good guys in Mexico have some skeletons in their closet that we don't really know much about.

Nothing is really simple in an environment like this where corruption is rooted so deeply. The way it looks on the ground in Mexico, you have the Sinaloa cartel still barely holding onto power but deeply troubled and likely to fracture further, and the CJNG pissing people off everywhere they go but really unable to really hold onto any territory outside of the states of Jalisco,

Now you're it, and Michoacan in the south. They haven't been able to secure any border smuggling routes, and still have to pay the other cartels to move things through their turf. They will likely not give up until they control at least one border crossing, so the violence isn't likely to stop anytime soon. And that, of

of course, is a big problem for the Mexican people. A 2024 poll by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography found that more than 73% of Mexican citizens report feeling insecure, with nearly 22% of them saying that there were homicides in the area where they lived.

And so for most of the last years, Mexico has seen no less than an average of 30,000 homicides related to drug cartel activity every single year. So all of this then leads us to a question that we started off with. What does it really matter if the United States labeled these cartels as terrorist organizations? I mean, after all, they sure do seem to be doing things to evoke terror in the population, right?

Well, that's where there's a little bit of a problem. For one thing, terrorism is defined as using violence or threats of violence to achieve political or ideological goals. But the cartels and their members don't necessarily have political ambitions. I mean, sure, they'll pay the president to go easy on them, but they're never really going to see a cartel party pushing its candidate into an election. Or at least...

Maybe not yet. Maybe there will be some kind of organized crime where they put forward candidates that are backed by but still separate from the cartel. They pretty much just want to be permitted to do business without interruption and operate their own kind of drug-feudal states.

So, what does labeling them as terrorists actually do? The American public typically thinks of those who fight the terrorists as being in the military. So if the method the government uses to fight the cartels is the military, and it's not limited to just special ops teams, you could very easily run into a situation where the military is being used to police a country that isn't the American public's own. Could that still be necessary? Maybe.

Honestly, in the end, it is the Mexican government's responsibility to get a hold of its own corruption problem, yes. But whether or not that will be possible, who can really say? And ultimately, there will be negative effects no matter what direction things go in.

Right.

Really, the designation of cartels as terrorist organizations could have enormous implications for U.S. businesses, given the high volume of trade between the U.S. and Mexico, Central and South America. Mexico is, after all, the United States' largest trading partner, representing over 15% of total trade. The U.S. imported more than $475 billion of Mexican products in 2023 alone.

It's just an example of what I'm talking about, of something that takes place in another country. In the year 2022, the French cement maker Lafarge would plead guilty in U.S. courts and agreed to pay $778 million in forfeiture and fines over its Syrian subsidiaries' $5.92 million in payments in 2013 and 2014 through intermediaries to the Islamic State and al-Nusra Front after the civil conflict broke out.

out. Lafarge's payments to the groups designated terrorists by the U.S. were meant to allow the company's employees, customers, and suppliers to pass through checkpoints.

Ultimately, enabling it to earn $70 million in sales revenue from a plant that operated in northern Syria. Considering that that has happened, there is a very real risk that that exact same situation could be seen here. Really, in the end, it remains to be seen exactly what the American government intends to do with the cartels now that they have this new designation and status.

Really, in the end, it remains to be seen exactly what the American government intends to do with the cartels now that they have this new designation and status. One can only hope that it doesn't involve American lives being lost just because another country can't seem to get itself together and solve its own problems. That has already happened one too many times here in the past, and it is likely to happen many more times here in the future.

Like, yes, the Trump administration has already labeled many of the Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations, but at this point, there hasn't really been an explanation of what exactly that entails to the American people. Like, we at this channel have figured that you should know this. It's your turn at this point to take about what it is that we've talked here today and decide what it is that you think. Feel

Feel free to let us know your opinions about it in the comments section below. Which, on that note, make sure to like and subscribe, and also check out our Patreon, where we are actually wrapping up a series on the Vietnam War. We only got like two episodes left, so if you want to check that out and get some free podcast content, or at least bonus podcast content, definitely go and see that, my friends. Either way, that is the end of this very long episode, and I appreciate all of you for watching. Thank you all, and I'll see you next time, my friends.

As a longtime foreign correspondent, I've worked in lots of places, but nowhere as important to the world as China. I'm Jane Perlez, former Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times. On Face Off, the US versus China, we'll explore what's critical to this important global relationship. Trump and Xi Jinping, AI, TikTok, and even Hollywood. New episodes of Face Off are available now, wherever you get your podcasts.