Joe Rogan | Mexico Cartel Power Goes Beyond Drugs w/Ed Calderon

What could be done to radically curb this? You know, like if you were the king of the world, said, Ed, what are we going to do? First off, legalizing some of the substances would probably help. That would help a lot. That's a pretty good question. But even some substances that are legal, like fentanyl is essentially legal because you can get a prescription for it. But you're never going to have like fentanyl just over the counter. It's just too deadly. You know, another thing that I think about, and that's a very good question I wish I could answer. I think everybody wishes they could answer it. Everyone just sort of like shrugs. So the cartels aren't just a drug fueled business. They also have money that is in property and legitimize businesses. They work in human trafficking. Like they actually, it used to be you can cross that border and go to the desert and cross it yourself. But now you have to be a toll. Protection rackets across the, on both sides of the border. Sex trafficking, piracy, like you name it. They have hands in it, right? So they just essentially took that drug money and just created a crime business. They diversified. They've been diversified for a long time. Like there was recently two, three cartel members from Sinaloa in Malaysia released out of all places. So you just think about that. Two Sinaloa cartel guys somewhere in Malaysia got caught somewhere and now they've been released and they got like a hero's welcome in Mexico. They got a hero's welcome? Oh yeah. Really? Sinaloa, that, you know, again, Sinaloa is a pretty, that's a, I have this nickname for Mexico. I call it the upside down, you know, because everything's basically upside down now. And yeah, these guys got, funny thing is that the Mexican government was involved in their release and then they, you know, send them back and hero's welcome. What were they doing all the way over there in that part of the world? I don't know, diversifying. Diversifying. So no one has a real plan. Here goes Malaysia pardons, three Mexicans on death row. Oh, they were on death row. Damn. You want to talk about a kick ass Corrido and like a folk song song about you. Those guys are probably going to get an amazing folk song, you know? So there's a lot of romanticism connected to the cartel. I mean, it's, it's romanticism. It's religion. There's definitely some, some occultism involved in a lot of the higher ups into these cartels. I can remember when I found out about the narco music, these, what are those songs called? Corridos. Yeah. The folk songs. There's a lot of them, you know, there's a, and all of them have a secret language in them sometimes or they're all a history of something that happened and you pay somebody to, to, to, to, to make one for you or somebody makes it for you. And then if you do a good Corrido song for somebody and the rivals will send somebody to kill you, you know? Really? So like even, even the musicians are on either side of the cartel kind of groupings as well, which is pretty weird. I know, but it's wow. So if you're, if you're for the wrong cartel, if you make a song, you kind of have to like go into hiding or, or not play any, in any places where the rival cartels, you know, territories are. Oh, Jesus Christ. Will they come to your territory to come get you if you like? Yeah. There's been a few, been a few high level singers, Mexican folk singers that got there, you know, killed for messing with the girlfriends of cartel members or for singing the wrong song in the wrong place. So that's in the culture and, and, and the religious occultism the cartels have as well. You know, it's a pretty interesting thing. Things like Santa Marte, the death cult that is kind of in different parts of Mexico. It's like a, think of a very dark freemasonry type thing, right? Certain levels you have people that are part of the, part of that cult from the cops to the military to the cartels. It's kind of two prostitutes, the drug dealers. It's interesting how, how that kind of also has an influence on, on, on the way some people go into very risky businesses like being cops or, or cartel guys and how they wear or empower themselves by some of these occult iconographies, you know, like a, or, or there's the, the, the Trinity is Jesus Malverde, which is a, it was a folk hero from turn of the centuries in the law, basically a bandit that got caught and killed and he turned into a saint. And now there's a giant church to him in Tino Loa with a bunch of money stuck to the walls and pictures of guys in the U S with like a F one 50 truck or a Hummer. Like thank you, Malverde. I'm, I'm living the dream now because of you. Wow. And two roadside alters with a, with a statue of the Virgin Mary and then you look behind her and there's a Reaper behind it because it's a hidden Santa Marta shrine and they do that to, so the military doesn't destroy them because they have standing orders to destroy these things, which shouldn't be, but you know, kind of religious persecution, but they actually do that. It's so, it's so different than the United States. In a lot of ways it is. I mean, I don't think we understand like all this stuff. I think the average person has no idea about the songs, no idea about the culture of it all. They have no idea the depth and how deeply it's connected to society down there. I mean, the death, the death cult worship is, I think you could probably trace it back to the Aztec days. All right. So there's definitely, when you see all these highly graph, highly violent, bloody cartel executions and things like that, I don't know. I mean, yeah, I think there's some sort of genetic memory from those times that it's not abnormal physically for some of these people to do that type of thing. Ripping somebody's heart next to a tree is like there's videos of that stuff out there. I remember getting contacted by people that I knew on this side of the border in the US that were very curious why all these people from the Middle East were looking at all these cartel execution videos. And then a few years later you had ISIS doing some high production execution videos that were inspired by the cartels. Wow. Isn't it interesting that we don't think about that? We think about, oh my God, look at ISIS. They're cutting people's heads off. What have they learned from Mexico, which is connected to us by lamps? Right down there. You could fucking walk there. You don't have to fly to Afghanistan. You could walk there. It's not in Libya. It's near La Jolla. You go to La Jolla, you see these fucking multimillion dollar estates with this gorgeous view and everyone's driving Ferraris and Porsches. Twenty minutes drive here in Tijuana. Yeah, the most violent city on the planet right now. That's so crazy. Yeah. And when I go to San Diego, that's one of the first things I think is how, what a juxtaposition. How crazy it is that this is the border to Mexico and it's all military. San Diego is filled with fucking seals and rangers and Marines and bases. It's just all military down there. It's so military influenced and it's right next to the most violent, dangerous city on planet Earth. More than Karachi, more than Pakistan. We were insured by MetLife and the MetLife agent said something along those lines like, you're better off going to Afghanistan or Iraq than working here basically, number-wise. And I was like, thank you for that. That felt like a good pat on the back. It seems like they're getting cartel on cartel crime, confused with regular person crime. But that's how it always starts. It usually starts off, and again, this goes back to everything cyclical down there, that snake eating its tail. So you get cartel on cartel crime and then they finish each other off and then they realize, well, now what do we do? So they started abducting people. Exhaustion. Just for money. Exhaustion comes into play, protection rackets. Cross-ass guy, now they're very bold that now they're at the party somewhere and somebody looks at something funny, so they come back and they shoot up the whole party. I like your daughter. She's pretty hot. I'm going to steal her. And if you do something, I'll kill you and you're never going to see your daughter again. That's how it starts. That's how it starts growing. Just bold, brazen, and cruel. That's how you get it. Sociopathic. That's how you get to that point. And again, I experienced it back in 2006 era and I saw it get into all the way to when the whole of the municipal police were... Basically the army surrounded the municipal police office of the police at Tijuana and they took all their guns. And a few of them were taking on a plane ride to Mexico City. And for a few weeks, there was no armed police in Tijuana, no municipal armed police. Imagine somebody disarming all of the LAPD and just having the army in there instead. So you would see these events and then things calming down. The only success story as far as the city coming back from the brink was Tijuana, when all that raging drug war went down. Lieutenant Colonel Lisa, all of the guys that I used to work with, he took numbers down. Everybody down in Mexico, he got hired then on to go to Juarez to try and replicate his success. The only successes were there because he basically treated the problem as a counterinsurgency problem, not a policing problem. And he got nine attempts on his life. The last one took the use of his legs. And he's currently running for mayor of Tijuana, believe it or not. And he's in a wheelchair, but he's still... I wouldn't want to mess with that guy. Wow. Yeah, we're... Myself and some members of my family are actually helping out with his campaign, but he's, you know, he's... He got to his... One of his campaign offices got shut up recently. So is there any plans or is there any push to try to treat the entire problem as a counterinsurgency problem to replicate the success that they had in Tijuana? No. That was a solution brought in by the right side of the political spectrum in Mexico. So it's a no-go right now because everything's to the left. This guy just got in office? He's... He has a few months in. So, yeah, he just got into office. So you got five and a half more years of this dude. We're in for a ride. That's all I can say. Yeah. Kindness doesn't seem to work when you're dealing with cartels. It seems like... No, you give him a hand and it'll take your feet. That was that Mexican saying. Man, for you to have been in that business and to sort of be connected to it but outside of it now, did it seem like... Does it seem... I mean, it must be incredibly frustrating, but it also must feel futile. Like you've wasted time almost because there's no progress that's ever going to be made. I have a weird experience that I had. I burned about two acres of pot somewhere in Baja, right, towards the end of my career. And then things happened politically. A bunch of shakeups over the office. I got called in and the director of the institution that I was in at that time was a shady character. And I decided to say, you know what? My mom had just passed away and that kind of affected me a little bit, a lot of it. And starting a family and stuff like that and it said, you know what? This is not worth it. So I left, quit my job, handed everything in. People were suspicious about why I did it. Like you probably found a million dollars somewhere and you're running or shit like that. So I had to leave in a hurry. You got a few threats. Luckily I had some great people on the side of the border, friendships that I developed for a long while. And they helped me out, you know.