Ed Calderon on Surviving the Mexican Drug Cartels | Joe Rogan

Well, I love your Instagram. It's very informational and tell everybody what you do. So people get a handle on this first. I'm a non-permissive environment specialist. Basically I teach people how to live, move, and travel in places where they probably shouldn't be traveling. You know, how to get out of handcuffs, how to get out of zip ties. And you know, I show people how to survive in such environments. My background is in law enforcement in Mexico. So you know, I spend a lot of time down there. And over the years that's kind of led me into teaching myself how to survive in that environment. And apparently after a while that made me kind of sought after as far as teaching other people how to survive in such environments. So I've been doing that for a while here in the U.S. military, law enforcement, civilians. You started working in law enforcement what year? It's 2004. 2004. So you started before everything got really crazy in Mexico. Yes. So you can kind of trace back where it officially kicked off by the start of the Felipe Calderon's presidency, which is the second to last president we had. He basically said, you know, full-on war against the cartels. And by that time I was kind of just getting done with my training in northern Mexico as a police officer. And what I thought was going to be, you know, community policing and stuff like that turned into a full-on. You know, here's a assault rifle and just go climb up on that tumby with those military guys and let's go arrest cartel members. Oh, Jesus Christ. So you thought you were just getting a regular law enforcement gig. Yeah. I mean, realistically, there was no such sort of kind of job description. This was post-9-11. I was actually in med school and that the economy and all over the border with the Titan security and stuff like that kind of went down, you know, down the drain. And most of the money that I was using for med school, you know, went away. And you know, that in the newspaper, young unmarried individuals that don't have any kids, you're welcome to join type thing. Wow. Young unmarried individuals with no kids. They want that specifically. Yeah. That was probably a big alarm middle shoot of something in my head. But the, you know, there weren't a lot of opportunities for somebody my age there that didn't have a career. And I thought it would be, you know, everybody said, don't go, you know. Yeah. I always said that. I was your friend though. I was like, yeah. To me it was a challenge. And a lot of people said I couldn't do it and I did it. And then it turned into something that wasn't what most people expected when they went into it. You know, it was a full on urban warfare type situation. Wow. So post-9-11, the borders get tightened up and the economy gets very bad in the border towns. Is that what happens? Because people can't get through as easily? It's, yeah, it's heightened security. So commerce isn't, it's freely done on both sides. Border rates that used to take an hour now would take three hours or four hours depending on the time of day. So, you know, things got affected. Also, you know, a worldwide recession situation kind of happened. So everything kind of went down to it. You know, I have a lot of family in the border region and all like most of our family businesses that we had, you know, basically kind of tanked during that time. So from 9-11 to here we are 18 years later, it's been a pretty radical change. Yes. Is that safe to say? Yes. A hundred percent change? Like what, if you had to like try to describe it. So I mean, basically the part of the country that I had most of my experience is the Baja, Sonora, Juarez type region, Northern Mexico basically. What happened is that all the cartels started fighting for the most rich drug routes on the planet. One of them of course being the city of Tijuana. So the city of Tijuana is, that's the corner of Latin America. It's the most, it's the most cross border on the planet. And with that, you know, there's a lot of commerce that goes on in that region. A lot of things get shipped to Tijuana and then drove it up into San Diego. And a lot of people have businesses on both sides. And among all of this movement, you know, there's a giant organized crime war going on. And it used to be overt like on the streets. At the middle of the day, you would see these cartel convoys arriving at a restaurant and all the cartel guys outside with their AKs and stuff like that. This was 2004, 2005 era. What is the military or the law enforcement attitude towards that? Like how do they handle that? So we go back to 2004 when I first got it started and it was looked the other way. Really? Yes. Look the other way. Look the other way. That was specific in instruction that you got? It was one of those things where I went there and I got a firearm. Here you go. Here's your Glock 17. Here are your YouTube magazines. Here's your Mossberg 500. And you see all those cars over there. We don't ask them for anything. Let them pass. We don't do anything of that nature. And then we would see members of the military as well kind of go the other way type of situation. This is 2004. Do you think that this was just to avoid conflict or was it because of corruption? It's always corruption. I mean, at all those types of levels down there during this time, there was a lot of corruption. Things changed, but things in a way in some levels are always the same. There's definitely some sort of pact going on, some sort of fear-based pact during that time. And when Felipe Calderon finally said enough is enough, we're going to declare war, he basically militarized a lot of the counter narcotic efforts in Mexico. So the military went from being in their bases or manning stations out there to actually actively going out and looking for cartel cells and trying to eliminate them. So basically army on the street type situation. And another thing he did was basically all of the police chief, a lot of the police chiefs around the country were being traded out for former military officials or military guys, officers. One of them was Lieutenant Colonel Laysaola. I don't know if your audience could look him up. He's a very famous Lieutenant Colonel from Mexico. Actually has a documentary on him called Mexico's Most Bravest Man. Very pretty interesting guy. He was the one that headed us up. He directed us at the start of these operations against the cartels. And he basically said, this is in a policing problem, this is a counterinsurgency problem. So we're going to militarize it basically. And after he kind of took control, everything changed. The cartels weren't as overt as they were, so they started going underground. So when you joined, you expected it to be regular law enforcement. When it became this counterinsurgency, militarized effort against the cartels, was there every time where you were like, I got to get the fuck out of this job. This is too dangerous. Yeah. I mean, my generation, I was part of the seventh generation of officers going through this program, policing. And out of my generation, the first year we had two of them in jail for corruption charges and three dead. Out of how many? Out of 23 guys. So out of 23 guys, five gone. Five gone. Two of them, very dramatic. That's two of them were kind of the origins of how I got into the whole counter abduction type thing. Two of my guys got picked up outside of a hotel in the downtown Tijuana. And by cartel members dressed as federal police officers, the whole nine jars, uniforms, the car, everything cloned. They got asked for their papers outside and got put into a van. They found them a day later, horribly mutilated and all this type of stuff. Tortured. Tortured. And that kind of, that was the, this. This is real. This is real and I should probably have a escape plan. Yeah. But it wasn't, I didn't know anything else basically. So it wasn't like I had something to fall back on. And it was good pay for what it was. And yeah, but fear, that's when fear got, you know. This dress must be insane. Yeah. The wall was on. Yeah. There's a, you know, we always had this thing on the meeting wall that said there's no vacation even when there's vacation, you know. You would go on vacation and you would get your gun to go on vacation. Of course. You know, it was pretty insane. Now have you ever been confronted? Yeah. Yes. Yeah, of course. I mean, there's no, there's no, there's no, it's not, you know, I have a lot of friends that are in military up here in the US and it's not like, it's not like them. They go off overseas and they do something in a different country with different people with, don't speak the same language. I was doing all of this in the place I grew up. Ooh. Right. So I knew some of these people at times, you know, I, we, every now and then I would say, hey, I know that guy from when I was a kid or we were in school together and now he has a plate carrier with an AK-47 and a gold gun on his pants, right? And it's like, whoa.