Narco Journalist Details Mexican Drug Cartel History | Joe Rogan

How did you wind up living in Mexico City? So I came to Mexico, or went to Mexico in the year 2000, and I kind of messed around for a few years in the UK. I wanted to get into journalism, so I found one way to get into it was to start working in a foreign country, rather than going to my local newspaper and working, go to a foreign country and start working. And I had a romantic idea about Latin America, thinking I'd be like, I saw the movie Salvador, you know, Oliver Stone's movie from the 80s, I kind of had a romantic idea about running around with grillas, fighting military data ships. So I arrived in Mexico in 2000 and got a job at an English language newspaper. How old were you? I was 27 when I first left the UK, yeah. 28 when I messed around for a bit in Mexico as well, then got the job when I was 28. Mexico City's a wild place. Yeah, yeah. It's so packed. It's hard to, I've only been there twice for UFC events. Yeah. But every time I'm there, I'm just shaking my head like I can't believe how this traffic works. It's crazy. Yeah, 18 years and I've spent a lot of time in that traffic. Nobody cares about red lights, green lights. They don't care. It's stressful. Everyone wants to cut you up all the time. Yeah. People shout at you a lot. You have to get used to people calling you like, Pendejo, Certo. I try different tactics, not just try and relax and not get angry. Did you know how to speak Spanish before you went there? Yeah, yeah. So I spent one year in Spain, living in Spain before I went there. I spent a year in the Middle East as well. But yeah, I started off when I arrived. I spoke more to Spanish, which is like, Ollie, tío con yo, tío. And then I changed more to the Mexican Spanish, which is like, oí, oí, que paso, oí. Right, right, right. Yeah. So when did you start getting into narco journalism? So like I arrived to say with a romantic idea about what I might cover in Mexico or Latin America. And right away, I realized all that idea of guerrillas and military dictatorships that had gone. That was the last century. Che Guevara, all that stuff had gone. But right away, when I arrived, my very first, first back in the UK, I grew up around a lot of drugs in the UK. So going back to the 80s, I grew up with a lot of people taking drugs. I had a few friends who died from heron overdoses back then. Four people I knew died of heron overdoses. I had a sister who went who became schizophrenic, smoking a lot of, a lot of, well, no, she became schizophrenic. And there'd be a lot of drugs being smoked around that time as well. Was it pot? Yeah. Back then it was Moroccan hashish. There is a connection, you know, and we've been exploring that a lot lately. We went into this marijuana debate between Alex Berenstein and Dr. Mike Hart from Canada. And we talked about it. And I know people that have had that happen to them, where they've had schizophrenic or psychotic breaks because of just massive doses of marijuana, and especially people that don't do it, or people that do it too much for too long. It does happen. I heard that debate. That's one of the reasons why it came to mind. I mean, I don't know. A lot of people smoke weeds, smoke hash. Yeah. A lot of people, it's fine. Now, when my sister had a breakdown when she was 18 and I was 16 at the time, and when that came out, it turned out also my grandmother had an issue with schizophrenia. And I think, I don't know if it was a time bomb waiting to go off, or if it was how much the hash was involved in that. There's other issues as well. So I don't really know the science of it. But anyway, going back. So I've been around a lot of drugs before. So when I arrived in Mexico, actually, one of the first arriving in Mexico, I ended up hanging around with some people, and they were smoking a lot of crack in Mexico. It's one of the first people I met. Wow. I went down to the beach, like backpacking down to the beach, and these people were smoking crack. And I was like, this is kind of strange. I didn't know there were people smoking crack down here. So when I got a job at the local newspaper in English, and I just started looking at the crime thing, one of the first stores I did was on the issue of crack being sold locally and how that linked to cartels. And then very soon, just very, very quickly, I just fell in right away. Like I said, look, these things happened by accident. I just fell into covering the crime beat. And this is going back to 2001. So 2001, it was the same year that Chapo was man escaped from prison. Then I was calling a lot then to a great journalist from Tijuana, Jesus Blanco Nellas, a real legend from Tijuana, who survived the shooting by cartels. And phoning him up all the time, just getting him to give me information, give me tips. And that is how I really started. And our big story I did back in those days was the court martial of some generals for drug trafficking. And that was really where it began back then. Generals for drug trafficking. How much of an issue is that? I mean, corruption must be unbelievably rampant. So I mean, corruption even isn't a strong enough word for it. Sometimes I call it state capture. I mean, so this is the real beginning. And this has been a whole crazy 18 years of covering this stuff. And this is just the very beginning back then. I've seen a whole lot of very crazy stuff in that time. But like just to get a sense of how bad the corruption is or what it really means on the ground level there. Like there's policemen, like you interview policemen, you get to know the policemen in a certain town, certain city. And it's hard to know, you know, how or military guys or politicians and you want to believe these are good people. You want to believe there's good policemen out there who really want to stop crime. So there's one policeman. His nickname was Tyson, like Mike Tyson. His nickname was Tyson. A well built bloke, well built guy. And he was friendly with the press, a guy from Michoacán, friendly with the press. And then it came out that he was actually a drug cartel member, a ranking member in the drug cartel. And he actually confessed. They used to have a thing where the police, the federal police, when they got him, got him to confess on camera. And he confessed not only was he turning a blind eye, not only was he carrying out murders, he was training the young kids how to decapitate people, how to cut people up. And he was explaining in graphic detail how he'd like, you know, how they managed to cut limbs off, how he gets young people to train them to cut limbs off, to get them to lose their fear. So that's the level of corruption that could be a policeman you're dealing with and that's really who they are. So that's one of the crazy things about a corruption down there. Did you have any hesitancy in getting involved in narco journalism, knowing this? I mean, I would imagine that's one of the most dangerous avenues to pursue in journalism. So this was little by little, I got involved in covering this. So like going back to 2000, this hadn't happened. This war hadn't happened. It was still like a crime issue at that moment. So I began to cover these things and then around 2004, I got a job for the Houston Chronicle out of Houston, Texas. I was covering, I was a string covering Mexico for them. And I flew up to a lot to Nuevo Laredo and there was a turf war beginning there, which is really the beginning of the drug war, which has torn Mexico apart. I began on the border with Texas in this city called Nuevo Laredo over the bridge from Laredo, Texas, back in 2004. So there was a lot of interest from the Texas newspapers, what was going on. There's a whole bunch of bodies piling up there. But again, this is going back to these days and this is kind of innocent looking back, innocent looking at myself, then an innocent looking at what Mexico was like then. They would simply say, go to the place, I'll drive up to Monterey, rent a car and just drive the car to Nuevo Laredo. But I was by myself and now people just don't do that. There's just too much crazy stuff going on. But back then it was still like, oh, you can just do that. So there was... When you say crazy stuff, like what kind of crazy stuff? I mean, now you can get stopped by an armed group driving on those roads. You could just drive along and there could be a group of guys with guns, could stop the car, get someone out, take you away. And there's a whole people a lot more careful about where you... Now when you move around the roads, you could be very careful how you move and how you plan this stuff. You don't just wander by yourself, drive around these places. So back then when this was happening and there was these bodies turning up and I was trying to figure out why. And there was one guy interviewed who was the head of Chamber of Commerce. And I talked to him, a very interesting guy. About a couple of weeks later, he became the chief of police for the city. And they asked him, they said, are you scared? You know, are you scared about being killed? He said, no, I'm not scared. It's only the corrupt people who get killed. And he was shot dead six hours after he gave that statement. They shot him dead. And that was one of the real markers of something really strange is going on in Mexico. Something is like going to erupt in Mexico. And then from there it kind of just escalated and escalated. And I started working by the other media, Time Magazine, New York Times, different people. And after a while I said, I can't do this. I can't just write news stories about this. I've got to write books about this because this stuff is big and it's complicated. It must be immensely complicated. For the people that live there, it seems like there's no escape. I mean, if you can't turn to the police, the police are the cartel. There's the cartel, the police, all of the politicians, most likely, if they're alive, have to be compromised. Yeah. I mean, there's been some very desperate people. I mean, there's been some inspirational people as well fighting this. There's been heroes. There are heroes. Just to get more of a sense of what that means on the ground as well, and some of the things you see, some of the things that stay with me. For a while it was quite romantic covering this. It was like, wow, I'm covering, I'm going to these places where Chapo Guzman is from. I got to the village and meet his mother and meet his family. I'm writing about these crazy people. But then you start seeing the human pain in all of this. One of many stories that stick with me was a mother in Monterey, a schoolteacher. When you have armed guys moving around, they're also really affecting the civil population, attacking the civil population. One mother, she was in her home with her two children in Monterey. It was like in the night just chilling in the house, and then the door broke down. About 15 guys in bulletproof jackets all came in long arms, just taking stuff from the house, held the family, pinned them down. They said to the mother, which of your children is the oldest? She was like, didn't know how to reply. Which of your children are the oldest? How do I reply to that? She just couldn't speak. The eldest, she had two sons, one 18, one 15. The 18-year-old was a philosophy student. He said, I'm the oldest. She said, you're coming with us. And took him away. The next day she got a phone call saying, we've got your son, give us this amount of money, we'll give him back. She was around, relatives just got the money. She wanted to get the money right away. She turned up with the money, gave some money, and then they just cut off the call. She hadn't heard from him since. And I had been seeing her face, the devastation, the pain. She said, I just couldn't go on with life after that, just not knowing, not having the closure. And I met her when I went to report on one of the worst atrocities, which was 49 bodies who had all been decapitated, all had their hands and feet cut off, and all being dumped on a road. And they were taken to the Morgan Monterey, and I arrived at the morgue. I was inside the morgue just smelling the smell of the dead bodies, this kind of weird smell you get from like decaying flesh, kind of like a sweet smell. You get from when you're around those places where you can smell the bodies decaying. And I was inside the morgue and I came out, and she was outside the morgue. And she was trying to see if her son might be among those people, among those bodies. Wow. But, you know, it's so insane that this is right next door to America, and there's so little effort put on doing something about it, including doing something to mitigate the influence of illegal drugs by making drugs legal. I mean, that would be one gigantic step. You're not going to stop people from doing drugs. I mean, this is an illogical, ridiculous approach. I don't think people should do most of those drugs. But when you make drugs illegal, only criminals are going to sell those drugs. And this is exactly what you have right next door to America. I mean, it's just unbelievably insane that there's this amount of crime, a drive away from San Antonio.