Stefano Ritondale
Appearances
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
And what was funny is I wasn't branch detail. So branch detail is like you have an MOS when you're a lieutenant, but then when you're a captain, your captain career course is a separate branch. It's like MI. And a lot of times, because the MI world, how it works is you have little lieutenants, not many lieutenants, and then captain, it grows the amount of captains in the MI.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
So a lot of them are branch detail, similar to signal. So they sent me to the MP battalion and I was talking to my XO there who was there and I was kind of like interviewing for him. And I, you know, he said, okay, so your branch detail, your armor branch detail. I was like, no, sir, I'm not branch. I'm like pure armor. I'm a 19 alpha. And for him, he was like, I'm an MP.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
I want to incorporate myself in combat, like with the combat arms. you're telling me that in my MTO and my list of people I'm gonna have in my bill is that I'm never authorized in 19 alpha. I'm like, so technically you would. And he's like, I'm keeping you. I want an armor officer in my staff. I think it's cool. It's great. And I did that for two years.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
And in the position where I was doing that for two years, I did kind of a lot of overseas training missions, like, you know, one month here, one month here. And so one of the ones- J-sets, if you will, yeah. Yeah. And so what I did was went to Mexico under our North, Army North. It was a training mission about, I think it was four weeks. One of the best Army experience I've ever had.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
I mean, you want to talk about- I think a lot of people who went to the Middle East, one of the things you kind of hear is kind of the lack of professionalism in the military. And you're kind of like pulling your hair and you're like, they just don't get it. You're talking about dealing with the local nationals or the local forces, yeah. Correct. Not with the Mexicans.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
I mean, these guys were amazing. And even so, when I went, what we realized was, which was a brush of fresh air, because I did other missions with other countries where you realize they send always their officers to train with the Americans in like a classroom environment, you know, because they want that certificate. U.S. military gives them kind of that prestige.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
The Mexicans, when we did it, they had one officer and I think it was like 30 NCOs. They sent you the E-5 Mafia. E-5, E-6, and so we were two officers and two NCOs for the Army side. They had one captain, like 30 NCOs, and I think like four soldiers being ready to get promoted. we had to completely change everything because we're like, wow, these guys get it.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
They understand the importance of the NCO. They still have a ways to go. There's some for it. But there's like, OK, wow, they understand the NCOs matter. And so we really wanted to push more to the NCOs to kind of give a lot of the classes to show, hey, you're on the right path. And training them, these guys were very professional.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
I mean, they've been fighting the Mexican cartels for, at that point when I was there, over 10 years. This was 2018, so 12 years since 2006. They understood. They kind of got it. And they were interested, actually, in a lot of the things that we learned from Iraq, Afghanistan, specifically like IEDs, react to an ambush in an urban environment. Those were the things they were wanting.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
And other of the things that we had originally planned to train them on, like riot control and all that. I mean, these guys were experts. They could teach us. And we're like, all right, we're going to remove that from the curriculum. Let's focus on what you guys want. And so I had that.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
And then in 2018, when President Trump and during his first administration ordered the deployment to the border, I went to the border. So I was in San Diego under an actually an SP Magtaf. We fell under a Marine SP Magtaf. We were like, I think it's the ground component on the threat. I think there's like a ground. logistics and engineers. I think that's our air component.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
I think that's kind of the basic constructs in SP MagTef. Sorry to my Marines if I get it wrong, but we were kind of the ground, the MPs, and we were there to provide protection to the Marines who were the engineers who were reinforcing the border.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
No, literally like Imperial Beach. Okay. Straight down. I mean, that was our area. So those ports of entries in that area was our responsibility. And this was during the first caravan. So we tracked them because... You know, they sent the military kind of across the border because there was this one specific caravan that they were monitoring.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
And then the caravan took the western route and went to San Diego. So it was, you know, we were the ones that that were there when that happened. So between my deployment to Mexico, my time at the border. and having an understanding of like OSINT and open source intelligence and doing it how the military leveraged it, how we did it and it kind of became a professional passion of mine.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
That's kind of how I ended up than doing what I do now, which is kind of the Mexican cartels. Because since then, I did DOD contracting, and now I'm part of a company called Artorias. I'm the chief intelligence officer, and we are an intelligence company that does AI and LLM analysis and large data aggregation. And we provide summaries. And about a month from now, we're going to launch an app
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
for the regular consumer, you know, $10 a month. And our plan is to give you all the open source intelligence on, you know, any country in the world, any conflict in the world, any data stream you want. It could be economic, it can be health, et cetera. We'll build all the streams. And basically your ability through your phone
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
You know, you've probably seen it like the open source intelligence reporting when you're deployed and it's like, oh, this is everything that posted open source. We want to do the same. But now on an app and you control it, you can see it and you're able to see that. So that's something we're hoping to launch fairly soon for everybody.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
We want to make sure that people understand we provide intelligence in the open source. And honestly, I think when you've seen it, let's look at Russia, Ukraine, right? As example, the moment the Russian tanks crossed the border, we all went to Twitter, to social media. right? Because it's quicker than traditional, even in the government, even the government does this, right?
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
You have your capabilities to collect and to classify, but the moment the tanks cross, everybody's looking, what's social media saying?
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
And then that's the goal is to now feed that to the user to give that open source intelligence information so that you're able to see it how you want to see it. You don't have to go through wait on, you know, X news organization or something. It's straight to you direct. And that's something we want to do. And, you know, it was a bunch of friends of mine.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
We created this company and we're all very in tune to the open source intelligence community on X, formerly known as Twitter. And that's kind of, I got brought on board because of just my experience in doing a lot of the Intel. And then my, where I focus in Mexican cartels, that's kind of where, um,
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
I was brought in and I even use our data stream for Mexico from our company that we have right now on our website because it's a lot for one person. It's the complexity of the nature, the amount of events that happens. I need that type of information as well.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
So when I was in 2018, it was crystal clear. No question about it. Posit commentatus. Here's a funny story. We had a couple of guys in the border. They were there providing protection. I think they were doing some engineering work. And so they were in one area. And they noticed a couple of migrants jumped the fence, the wall. And the migrants kind of stopped.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
And they're like, oh, God, they got us. The military got us.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
Yeah. And then the military, because of positive commentators, we cannot touch migrants. Cannot even touch them. Can't. Title 10. If you're Title 32 National Guard, like Texas under Operation Little Star, different ballgame.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
And so the military guys just kind of stood there and they picked up the radio and they told Border Patrol, hey, we got two migrants that jumped the wall and the migrants bolted and ran away. And they said, yep, they're going east heading down this road. Yeah. So what I would say, you know, and one of my roles. What about if they were shot at during that time period?
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
So one of the roles I had was the interesting aspect when we were doing kind of the threat briefs was there was never really a clear indication that there was necessarily a threat against us from the cartels. But like Amber Ferraro said, I mean, you have the right to defend yourself.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
You know, service members, especially the, that's why the military police was there because their job was to guard the Marines. Hey, you have the right to defend yourself. So standard ROEs still apply? Standard ROEs. If you're getting shot at, standard ROEs. Inherent right to self-defense. You have an inherent right to self-defense.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
You know, I would probably assume, you know, maybe that's a decision on the ground. Hey, do we shoot back? Do we take cover? Do we call for a backup?
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
Yep. So this latest incident that happened, I mean, there was a border patrol agent. I would say I think border patrol, they do get probably shot at more than it's actually picked up in the press. I would not be surprised. Yeah, talking to kind of my coverage and all that and one of the areas where I focus on, they do get shot at more regularly. That specific incident, it was near Fronton, Texas.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
You know, I had conversations with kind of a lot of the cartel community that monitors them on Twitter. And one of the things that we were trying to debate was, OK, there was probably like there's three possibilities of who did this. And there's like one more likely who was responsible and two less likely.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
The more likely one, based on the location where it happened and across the border, it's a cartel called CDN, Cartel del Noreste, the Northeast Cartel. The Northeast Cartel is a successor of the Zetas Cartels, the very infamous and famous Zetas Cartels, because they're based out of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Laredo, Texas, the border city. And they operate all the way up.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
Actually, that's almost kind of the border of the areas that they control. If you kind of look at Tamaulipas in Texas, and you kind of go southeast from Laredo, Texas, and you go down, where that shooting occurred in that specific area, that's kind of like the front line. But that's generally considered CDN territory. The second group is their rivals, a rival cartel.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
It's called the Metros, the Metros. They're a faction of the Gulf Cartel. So the Gulf Cartel is in a civil war. There's two different ones. They're one of the main ones. They're based out of Reynosa, Tamaulipas, which borders McAllen. That's the second possibility, but more distinct.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
And then the third possibility is human smuggling networks that are just not affiliated with any cartels, because a lot of times I think people think migrants crossing the border inherently cartels. That's not generally the case, actually. There's dozens, if not hundreds, of unaffiliated human smuggling networks that either pay a fee to operate in those plazas, but they run their own operations.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
Like the tunnel that was discovered in El Paso recently, that wasn't necessarily tied to a specific cartel that we know of, at least publicly, but more than like it was also just human smuggling networks. And a lot of times those human smuggling networks fight each other kind of outside of the scope of the cartels.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
But in the specific example with Border Patrol, I'm leaning towards CDN because they're one of them that are more probably aggressive in how they operate. And- I think that if there was going to be kind of that threat, and US military personnel are getting shot at by them, my understanding is like, well, at that point, standard ROEs. You get shot at, you shoot back.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
You have the right to defend yourself. Border Patrol responded. They shot back. Luckily, no US Border Patrol agents had suffered any casualties. I'm not tracking any reporting that even the cartel members, if they were cartel members, suffered any casualties. But standard rules of engagements would definitely apply in those situations.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
It's really hard to specifically say. The only thing I can really pinpoint directly that an FTO designation would make a difference is the penalties to support a cartel. Right. I think it would enable the Treasury Department in specific. I mean, the Treasury Department, I mean, especially if you look at the previous administration, the Biden administration, I mean, they have been very aggressive.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
The Treasury Department of announcing sanctions against businesses involved in drug trafficking, specifically fentanyl, extremely aggressive at targeting these Mexican businesses. One of the interesting aspects, though, now is that let's say you're an American citizen. and you're doing money laundering for an FTO-designated cartel.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
Well, now you can get charged with not only a cartel, now there's a more hefty penalty for it, prison time, because now you're doing it for a foreign terrorist organization.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
Exactly. Weapon smuggling, right? Around 70% of the guns that Mexican military personnel seize from cartels are traced back to the United States, gun stores, all that. Well, now you get caught, now you're aiding and, you know, arming, not only financing, but now arming a foreign terrorist organization. Right. Besides that, I mean, there's not an AUMF, right?
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
I will say, I mean, I think ever since this FTO designation, you know, I've been flooded now with like flooded. There's probably people with a few questions, you know, myself. Yeah. So, you know, here I had it, you know, with the Rolling Stones and I don't even think I'm, so I'm, I didn't even say this in the beginning. I'm all source news on Twitter.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
And so, you know, I did an interview for the Rolling Stones to kind of help them kind of that. And that was some of the specific areas we're talking about. What I would say is, I mean, this is such a convoluted, I mean, I can go on and on.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
Break it down for us. Yeah. So let me start big to then small. And actually, this is what I probably mentioned when we were walking in before we recorded was, so I think when most people talk about Mexican cartels, there's two specific ones that I think get the name recognition that probably most people know about. It's the Sinaloa cartel and CJNG, the Jalisco New Generation cartel.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
Right now, under the United States, the Treasury Department recognizes two specific Mexican cartels as transnational criminal organizations. That is the Sinaloa cartel and CJNG. Every other of the cartels are drug trafficking organizations, right? Right. So there's kind of, you know, anything can change. We'll have to wait.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
When the executive order was signed, the State Department now under Marco Rubio has, you know, 14 day from it was signing to list specifically which Mexican cartels would fall under the FTO designation. The other two were Tren de Aragua, which is a Venezuelan prison gang who has been very aggressive in its expansion.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
Specifically, I know we talk a lot about in the United States, but in South America, you know.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
So TDA, the first time I saw them was back in 2023. I actually sent a tweet because people were still talking about MS-13, which is the other group that's going to get the FTO designation, which is ironic because MS-13 has been severely weakened. TDA, it was the one.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
I mean, this was the one that was like, you know, even for a country like Chile, let's say, to have an increased level of violence and for security, for the people in Chile, the population of Chile to say, we are concerned about security. That's a big deal because Chile is generally a very safe country. That was TDA, Trenada Agua. And so... You know, those two were kind of getting it.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
Going back to the Mexican cartels, because of that TCO designation, Transnational Criminal Organization, this being just the Sinaloa cartel and CG&G, my initial thought process, and this is kind of talking also to sources, is those two will probably get the FTO designation, the Foreign Terrorist Organization, meaning not only the cartel, but their affiliates and subgroups.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
Because cartels, how they operate, It is a pyramid, but it's the leader and then more importantly, the factions underneath the cartels, right? And so when you're looking, let's look at Sinaloa. The problem right now for the Sinaloa cartels are an active civil war. There's an active civil war within the Sinaloa cartel between the two main factions.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
It's Los Chapitos, who are the sons of El Chapo, who is in US prison, the sons of El Chapo. And then it used to be called the Mayo Zambada faction. Now they're called the Mayito Flacos, which is the son of Mayo Zambada. Why? Mayo Zambada last year was detained, was captured and extradited to the United States. For those who don't know, I mean, this is like literally a Hollywood movie scene, right?
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
No, no, no, no. Even crazier. Not even gunfights, just the idea of how they did it. So just to paint the picture, Mayo Zambada has been doing drug trafficking for 40 years. He's been El Chapo's right-hand man. And you can even talk to cartel observers and experts. A lot of them would say Mayo Zambada was more powerful than El Chapo. Mayo Zambada was never even close to getting captured. Never.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
Never had there been any report that he was disclosed, that the Mexican military was after him, all that. Like this guy was the most powerful drug lord. I would argue probably in many ways, if equally, if not more powerful than El Chapo. Definitely after El Chapo was captured, he was the most influential one and the more powerful one. And he was untouchable. I mean, he was basically untouchable.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
What happened was, The FBI, from what I'm told, and from my sources, but specifically, I mean, the operations, but I'm being told that this was led by the FBI, managed to turn one of El Chapo's sons, so Los Chapitos is kind of, the brothers are Ivan Archivaldo, he's probably the main one, Ovidio Guzman, who was captured in 2024, the beginning of 2024, 2023, Ovidio Guzman was captured.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
Jesus Alfredo, and then Joaquin Guzman, right? Those are the Chapitos brothers. Joaquin Guzman is probably like the less influential, but he was still part of the leadership of Los Chapitos. Apparently what happened, and this is, they managed to turn Joaquin Guzman into an informant to the FBI or to the DEA.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
And so what they did was they managed to convince, because Ovidio Guzman, the one that was captured, he's in the US. He's in prison in the United States. Joaquin Guzman convinced Mayo Zambada to board a private jet with him because he said... He said, I'm going to fly you to see a property somewhere, you know, somewhere in Mexico, close, you know, somewhat close.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
I think it was in Chihuahua they were going to try to send him or somewhere around there, somewhere close to the border. So he can show some property or an airship or something along those lines to show him that. But the plane, instead of going to Mexico, flew into basically right outside of El Paso, where when the ramps lowered, there was U.S.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
federal law enforcement, captured him by the eye and took him.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
That's how they did it. Not a shot was fired. It- When I saw- Yeah, there's going to be repercussions for that. When I saw, I remember when the news broke, somebody sent me a tip and said, hey, they got Miles Zambada. I was like, there's no way. How? And they said, no, he's in an airport in El Paso. Man, get out of here. There's no way. And then like, oh my God, they, how?
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
And somehow, you know, I got to give kudos to Merrick Garland. I mean, that's the, you know, the Department of Justice under him. Under, you know, they got him that way. This guy who was the most powerful drug lord, untouchable for 40 years, put him on a plane, flew him.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
You know, there was probably, you know, I know during like some areas, like there was some, you know, I think there was some, an agent was killed at like the chapel back then a little bit. There were some shots and it's all very convoluted. But for the most part, it wasn't like this Ovidio Guzman, the other son who was captured in Culiacan in Sinaloa, the capital of Sinaloa.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
I mean, that's like the famous Culiacanazo when the city just went. terrible violence, smokes, the Mexican military cartels, remember, battling out. That didn't happen with Miles. Yeah, they just captured him, flew him in a plane, and now he's in the United States. The last reporting we got, he's in negotiations with the U.S. to get into a plea deal, and the U.S.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
is going to want, to your point earlier, hey, What do you know about corruption in Mexico and how it's tied in?
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
So what happened was after Maya Zambada was captured, you had Mayito Flaco, the son, took over. And quickly, because I track a lot of the cartel social media and their messaging groups and all that.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
Why is a cartel using social media? I think people misunderstand cartels. They think there's a secret. They're not. They go on. If you know where to look, you can find them.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
Michael, prepare yourself. Shall we fire up Twitter or X? Well, you can maybe do Instagram. Oh, yes. I mean, I can try to see, because I have a burner one, I can see. So one of the ways you can identify them.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
There is an actual, one of the ways you can track them, I'm not kidding, is emojis. Are you serious? So there's this account on Twitter who did a great thread with two other accounts. I was actually, I did a short interview.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
I was interviewed for a major Mexican radio show about it because I did a post about it, like I think all the way back in 2022, they did an upward and one of the ways you can track them and see who's posting one and who they're affiliated with is emojis. So Mayo Zambada, Mayo Zambada is very famous because of the cowboy hat. If you see a cowboy hat, That's how you know he's the Mayo Zambada.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
Los chapitos, they go also by chapiza, pizza. So the pizza emoji. Come on. Swear to God. Actually, that's their calling cards. So what they'll do is when they do an execution and they leave the bodies, like they'll leave the cowboy hat and that's how you know, oh, okay. Or they'll leave a decapitated head inside of a pizza box.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
They just leave it open and then they put it there with the sliced pizza.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
Another one is like one of the flower emojis. That, for example, is the guy's name is a jardinero. He's one of the lieutenants of El Mencho, one of the key leaders of El Mencho, of CG&G. So El Mencho is the overall leader. His nickname is Jardinero. In English, that's the gardener. So he has a very specific type of flower emoji that they use to identify themselves with.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
They don't care. I think that's the point. The cartels don't care. These guys are in Mexico. I mean, I've tracked American cartel members Like, easily geolocated, like, dude, that's, like, I think one of them was in Columbus, Ohio. Like, dude, I can clearly see that's Columbus, Ohio. Openly posted he's there. In Phoenix, Arizona, I've seen some of these guys.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
Now, again, there's not many, and I think I don't want people to freak out, but they don't care. It's just this idea of almost like this bravado. Like, what are you going to do about it?
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
You would hope. So to that earlier conversation, you know, what about the Sinaloa Cartel Civil War? The capture of the father hit the son was like, one of your brothers, you know, Los Chapitos, betrayed us? This is war. It took a little bit. It didn't happen immediately, but there was buildup and buildup and buildup. And then one day, boom.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
And so now most of the violence in the Sinaloa Cartel, within the Sinaloa Cartel Civil War, is in Sinaloa, in the western part. It's not a border state. Southwest Sonora, Durango, that's most of the areas kind of in the western part were the heartland of the Sinaloa Cartel. And so that's kind of how the Civil War happened.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
And even though, you know, the Justice Department, right, and the Treasury Department, they still, they say Sinaloa Cartel, but they know how to differentiate between Los Chapitos and like the Mayito Flaco and Mayo Zambada, right, that faction. They differentiate it, but they still kind of put that banner.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
And those are probably going to be the two that have that FTO designation because of the reach they have. Now, the Sinaloa Cartel, the Civil War has been very, has weakened them a lot. And so clearly, I think right now, because of that situation, you can maybe make the argument that now CG&G is kind of gaining strength.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
But what I would say, Mayito Flaco, the son of Mayo Zambada, who's really pushing a lot, I mean, he's been very aggressive inside Mexico. Like he has gone on the warpath, not only against Los Chapitos, he's gone on the warpath against CG&G. In Zacatecas, in Chiapas, all these other states. I mean, he, Nayarit, which is also like a very, you know, Jardinero, he's based out of Nayarit.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
So they're fighting everybody. But they all fight each other. So there's rumors, probably more than rumors. There's some alliances that happen at a convenience. So there's rumors that Chapitos have allied themselves with CG&G because now they're fighting a common enemy, which is Mayito Flaco.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
So Mayito Flaco, for example, his call sign emoji is the horse, like the horse head. That's what he uses. He uses the horse head. So that's how you can kind of identify. That and it's kind of like a magician hat as well. Those are the two that we see him. I have no idea the magician hat. I am not going to lie.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
I mean, you have the mountain. Is yours an eggplant? I'm like, what are we?
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
Yeah, I mean, that's literally how you track them. And they'll put it out there. That's how they know.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
And my suspicion is the reason why they do that is because they understand that if you put like Sinaloa cartel, the algorithm will take it down.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
Yeah, so I think a lot of people, and I think that's an excellent point, misunderstand that cartels are involved just with drug trafficking.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
So one of the things that we know they traffic is lime and avocados. So Michoacan, specifically, excuse me, Michoacán specifically, there's a huge fighting going on between two cartels, but mainly two cartels. There's more, but I'm just going to focus on here. There's one group called Carteles Unidos, the United Cartels, and then CGNG.
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And historically, a lot of the fighting that occurs is actually in very remote areas of Michoacan. And the New York Times did a very great reporting on this years ago that highlighted that one of the reasons why they're fighting is because of the avocado farmers in that region, the lime farmers and all that, right, in that specific region. To the point where it got so bad that the U.S.
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had to temporarily suspend all avocado shipments to the United States because USDA inspectors were getting threatened. Yeah. And so they halted that because they fight for that because they want that. Oil, absolutely. They try to smuggle oil. They'll try to sell them on their own. They'll try to tap into the oil pipelines or steal that, et cetera.
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That was actually a huge program of the previous Mexican president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, AMLO. He was very much, and I would say probably more effectively, he did manage to try to at least clamp down a lot harder on kind of people stealing Mexican oil in the pipelines.
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The vehicle specifically going to the border, crossing the border, they're equivalent of a tax. Yeah. The cartels. You call it whatever you want to.
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So I graduated from the Merchant Marine Academy, one of the service academies, like the least known of them.
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Absolutely. It's an extortion. I would pay that tax. Everybody does. And that kind of, that's, that's how they do it. But they do that. Used cars. That's another example. Yeah. So there, and I tell that to people who would argue like, oh, well, if we legalize drugs, that would weaken the cartels and, or that would, I mean, cartels would go away because now you've legalized drugs.
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And kind of my counter to that would be, one, well, they're in much more businesses that are legal. They just find a way to get in there. But the second piece would be also, I mean, they'll find a way, even if it's legalized, to still try to make a profit, right?
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The California marijuana farms, and even in Oklahoma, et cetera, there's a lot of organized crime groups that tap into the marijuana business that is legal in many states in the United States to make a profit. It almost as if the marijuana, what the legalization did is the illegal marijuana, instead of coming from Mexico to the United States, shipped north.
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And now it's all done in the United States. That's what happened. And so I'm not trying to make an argument one way or another, drugs should be treated more as mental health or harsh crime. That is not my argument. I don't want people to misconstrue it, but- You know, I think we have a tendency in the United States to analyze the Mexican cartels from a U.S.
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And so it's based out of Kings Point, New York. We're there in Long Island. Merchant Marine Academy, there's a lot of the mariners, the guys who kind of sail, and it's a military academy. But you have like two choices when you graduate. You can either sail as a merchant marine, you know, mariner, you know, third.
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domestic politics point of view, and I think that's the wrong way of doing it.
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So the Treasury Department actually, I think, sanctioned specifically one of the Mexican call centers because of that, because they were tied to CG&G. They sanctioned them specifically for that.
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But Americans have been scammed in a lot of these. A lot of it is an elderly population. Exactly. Timeshares is another perfect, as you said, that has been also, I believe even the Treasury Department sanctioned the timeshares. But One of the cartels I'd mentioned is called the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel. They're based out of Guanajuato, which is kind of like in central Mexico.
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I would say, you know, if you're looking at drug trafficking organization, obviously they're one, but they're not one of the largest one. They're not one of the biggest one, but I will tell you this, those guys are very extremely violent.
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So when you see, for example, in the news, you know, there's a mass shooting in a bar in Mexico, which unfortunately doesn't make international news like it would in the United States. Your safest bet, especially if it happens in Guanajuato, nine times out of 10, that was the Santa Rosa Lima Cardo.
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Like I've seen the videos where they'll burst in a bar open and they record the whole thing and they'll just spray.
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Well, they target nightclubs, bars, businesses that either don't pay them the extortion fee or are serving as either paying the extortion fee to their rivals or serving as a front for money laundering to their rival. Because the Santa Rosa Limit Cartel is a very territorial centric organization that leverages specifically extortion. for money laundering.
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And their symbol, here's their emoji, is the hammer, like the two hammers that are kind of crossed, and then a red triangle. Because that's their symbol. It was a triangle with two hammers in the back. So their emoji is that, like the hammer and the red triangle. That's what they use. Very territorial. I mean, and these guys are another one that are very violent.
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Okay. Yeah, like containers, row, row, whatever you want. Interesting. So you do that. So I had to like, part of my... College degree, I had to go like almost a year out at sea. So I went to like on civilian and MSC, you know, military sea lift command.
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Last year, there was a couple of car bombings in Guanajuato that more than likely it was them. They have no problem actively targeting Mexican police. Like Guanajuato is one of the most violent states. I think it's the most violent state right now in Mexico. And where the highest number of Mexican police officers are assassinated, the vast majority of that can be directly tied to this cartel.
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that almost became defunct a while ago. In 2021, 2020, they almost became defunct and they revert back and they're very, very aggressive. But to the point of other legitimate businesses, I mean, yeah, of course they probably do drug trafficking, but they are very territorial. And I want to leverage this to make a point about Mexican cartels. There's a famous great author.
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I've talked to him a lot. His name is Nathan Jones. He's on Twitter. I think it's Nathan P. Jones. And he wrote a book. This was, I think, in 2016 he wrote it. And it kind of really helped me frame my understanding of Mexican cartels. And so even it's like almost 10 years old, I highly recommend people to buy it and read it.
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Because what he realized during his studies of the Mexican cartels is that there was basically two types of cartels. There was the territorial cartels and the transactional cartels, right? So territorial focused on territorial control, transactional, let's just ship product. Historically in Mexico, all the cartels were basically transactional. There was some territorial.
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And what he realized in his study is that the territorial cartels were a lot more violent because they needed to hold the territory either against their rivals or against the Mexican government. If they couldn't achieve territorial control through corruption, they're gonna do it through violence. The Zetas cartels is a perfect example of a very territorial cartel.
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What I've noticed, and I've had conversations with a lot of people and specifically with him, is that basically all the cartels are now territorial. They've all transitioned. Yes, they send products, But they require the territorial control first and foremost over everything else.
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And that's the problem that we're running into, that they become a territorial-centric organization and they fight each other. And the weaker sometimes the cartel gets, that's when the split happens and the violence increases, because that's the focus. So like the Sinaloa Cartel, I spoke of one split, which was the Chapitos and the Mayito Flaco, right? The Mayo Zapata.
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So I sailed, you know, in the fifth fleet area, Europe, Asia, you name it. Did that for, you know, a year. And then obviously the actual degree is four years. So when you graduate, you graduate with your degree plus a Coast Guard license. Okay. So you have a choice. You can either sail with the Merchant Marine, the U.S.
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Well, before that, there was another split within Los Chapitos. There was a split that affected Sonora, which, as I mentioned in the beginning of the podcast, kind of you have the cartels and then their factions. Mm-hmm. There was a couple of factions that were used to be very close to the Chapitos, and they were, I'm gonna name two just for argument's sakes.
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Los Fantasmas, kind of like the ghost, and Los Salazars. Those were kind of two main ones, and there's more. They were very active in Sonora. And this is one of the few areas that you can directly point into Mexico where the violence happening probably was triggered because of the human smuggling routes and they wanted to control that.
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In 2023, 2024, no, 2023, the Salazars and Los Cazadores, well, Fantasma, they're called Fantasma Cazadores. They broke off from Los Chapitos and formed their own thing. They're kind of lumped under this umbrella term called the Independent Cartel of Sonora. And they've been battling it out in Sonora, right, which is borders Arizona.
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And the reason why is they want that territorial control because of the human smuggling. That's one of the main reasons they really want that control. And this has been, prior to this other civil war, this has been a civil war within Los Chapitos that has been extremely violent in Sonora.
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And you can directly tie that to not only the drugs and all other, but also to the human smuggling because they want that control. And the areas of violence, you can kind of tie it to the human smuggling networks and the routes that leverage it. And that's why they're fighting. Because they're all going to territorial.
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And that's something that when we look at, let's say, Narcos Mexico, we see the businessman and that still exists. But they're like, oh, well, you pay me this and we'll do money. Maybe we don't get an agreement. I'll kill you. But, you know, hey, let's just move product and make money. That's changed. It's territory, territory, territory, territory. That's what they care about.
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flag vessels, and be kind of like in the Navy Reserve Program, for the most part, or you can go active duty. And so, you know, after sailing, I was like, this is not the life I want. Don't get me wrong, you know. And I said, you know what, I'm going to go Army, and I picked like the most landing possible armor, like I was.
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So I think people think, I have an issue with this, when people say, oh, the cartels are like, there's this Cato study that argued that somehow the cartels are like, have very similar capabilities to US SOF. I'm like, all right, no.
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So very select units within the cartels, very few have that.
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Right. So, for example, the one of the, before he was captured under Los Chapitos, the head of security, he was called El Nini. He had like a very select group of people specifically that were, okay, these guys are very well trained, very well armed. And one specific, you know, they can cause pain. And don't get me wrong, you know, the Mexican government, you know, there are instances where...
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They suffer casualties, obviously, even their tier one, the Mexican special forces tier one have been in battles where they suffer high levels of casualties. And you might get some reports here and there of like Mexican police and getting ambushed and suffering high levels of casualties.
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But overall, as a whole, when you're analyzing this, the Mexican government and the Mexican military is a superior fighting organization than the cartels. The cartels might outgun the Mexican military. That, I think, is undisputable. From a volume perspective, you mean? From an armament perspective. Oh, they have them outmatched, perhaps. Correct. OK. So they might outgun them.
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But the Mexican military makes up with that from training. And generally, most of the times when the Mexican military and police are engaged in combat or clashes with Mexican cartels, regardless of who they are, generally the Mexican government and military come out on top and the police. They're just better trained.
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That makes sense. Yeah, and what I would say is there's also kind of a deliberate position within the Mexican government of not utilizing the tools they have to protect the soldier, and here's why. So the Mexican government has APCs, obviously. Armored personnel carriers. Armored personnel carriers. I got to get us out with the anchor.
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I'll hop in when needed. I got you. But the problem that they, but it's an image perspective from the Mexican government. Like, do they want their citizens to see Mexican tanks and armored personnel carriers in the cities that are at high levels of violence? So they generally will travel in pickup trucks. You know the famous scene of Sicario, like the bridge scene where you've seen the Federales?
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That's their number one, 99.9% of the times when you see the Mexican military police, National Guard on patrol, that's what they have. They don't use their armored personnel carriers.
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So how I found out is, because I think all the academies but the Coast Guard, if I'm not mistaken, you need a congressional or senator's recommendation.
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I love the, what was that? Who are they honoring in this? Oh, I don't know. It was the Delta. Oh my God. What's that guy's name? The guy with the glasses, the Delta force operator.
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Yes. It was, it was, it was, oh my God. I can't remember. The comments are going to kill me.
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Right. So the Merchant Marine is one of them. So I did the interview back then with my congressman, you know, did the whole thing. And then, you know, they recommended that I go to the Merchant Marine Academy. I didn't even know about it. No idea. No clue. When I looked into it, I was like, oh, my God, this is actually a really good deal.
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Isn't, that's a guy. Yeah. Is it, is it, is it, I think that's the guy that they were trying to.
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So to that point, though, about the kind of the tactics. Yeah. If you may, I mean, go, I mean, if you want to go to mine, because I have a video, I want to show this to point to your issues about doctrine and tactics and what the problem is. So if you want to go, you know, all source news, All sorts of news. Yeah. There it is. The guy with the tape, the tank. Okay.
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If you scroll down, scroll down, scroll down a little bit more, a little bit more. Okay. Okay. Click on that top one, the 52nd, that video. I don't know if I can stand up.
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And you've seen the tracers flying through. You see that?
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What they're doing. Because those up-armored vehicles are just civilian vehicles that they put metal.
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The tracers is basically an M82 that they put on top and it's a 50 count and they fire it and they use that instead of like, let's say, you know, they do have machine guns like your M1919s or something like that. But for the most part, that's all they do. So they use these M82s or anti-material rifles.
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They put them on top of the vehicle and they use it almost like the direct action weapon to fire directly at close range targets.
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to defeat um uh enemy vehicles if you i mean i don't know if you can scroll up there's this is night if you scroll up michael can scroll up and you go and you search on my tweets i don't know if maybe is that if you is that if you scroll all the way up oh yeah go yeah right there the the hourglass and you put try to put drone just do drone and uh go to latest Let me see.
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Scroll down, scroll down, scroll down, scroll down. Let me see if I have it. I don't remember when I posted it. Wait, grow up a little bit, I'm sorry. A little bit. Nope, keep on going. I don't know.
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Oh yeah, they have that all the time. Keep on going. No, man, where is it? So what you'll see is- That's a crazy video right there. Yeah, that's the CDN. So that's a Cartel de Noreste drone footage. Maybe instead of drone put, up armor.
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Because you can either sail or when you commission, pick any branch you want. You want to go Air Force, Navy, Marine, whatever. Army, Coast Guard.
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Up armor? Armored, sorry, ED, yeah, and just search. I'm trying to see if I can find, scroll down.
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Yeah, that's exactly it. Not, you know, oh, you know what? Do the, it's up line armored because there's this really good video and I just, because that's night and you can really see, no, no, no, sorry. Like a dash. Like a dash and all together, yeah. There you go.
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Go up. They're going to shock you what they're showing. Holy shit. So you can put it, you can even, if you want to put the, see right there, you see how they're shooting directly at it. That's at a distance. I'm going to call that seven yards.
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So you see that, if I'm not mistaken, this was the first part and then there's a second part. But you see how in the front it has like a battering ram? Yeah. They rammed that vehicle, turned around and just started. So you can see that single, that's the M82. They use it almost as an anti-tank capability because they don't necessarily have RPGs as a large quantity.
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Exactly. And so generally, I think on average, you have about a third of the graduating class commission active duty. I picked Army. We were about, I think we were 13. Obviously, the number one is generally either the Navy or the Coast Guard. The career path. A lot of people go flight. It's a, you know, you have a very good chance of picking flight and aviation from our academy.
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If you go back, if you just exit out, and I can probably read you. I'm trying to think. If you zoom up, maybe. I mean, I obviously put it in the text. Scroll right there. So, video showing CDN clashing with metros and Frontera Chica area in Tamaulipas. You can observe how the CDN up-armor vehicle uses an AMR to destroy the metro vehicle. So, this is a cartel de noreste fighting against the metros.
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So, if you look at McAllen, Texas... Reynosa, and then if you go all the way to Laredo, that's the CDN Metro fight, that area of Mexico, and that's what they do.
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So another, so for example, almost, yes. And so there's another one, for example, so the Sinaloa cartel civil war is daily. That's a daily thing in Sinaloa. So the Gulf cartel is split. Just as I said, there was a civil war. The Gulf cartel is split between Grupo Scorpion and the metros. They kind of split. Metros are basically allied with CGNG. Grupo Scorpion is their own thing.
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They're out of Matamoros, which borders Brownsville, Texas. Metros and Grupo Scorpio, it's like every day, specifically in an area in Tamaulipas called Rio Bravo. It's between Reynosa and Matamoros. Like every night, every day, nonstop. And it's right at the border, like nonstop. That's where if you see like sometimes the Texas DPS has like drone footage that show these guys battling. Yeah.
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So this specific area, that's one. So other areas I see almost daily fighting, Zacatecas, another state. And these guys also fight in remote areas. But you have Mayito Flaco against CG&G. That's almost daily in Zacatecas. Chiapas, which borders Guatemala down in southern Mexico. That is Mayito Flaco versus CG&G, specifically a front of CG&G called the Cartel de Chiapas en Guatemala.
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So the Chiapas en Guatemala cartel is a front of CG&G. They fight in Chiapas. I mean, I can go on. Michoacan, you have Carteles Unidos and CG&G. Actually, CG&G, and I swear to God, these guys exist, the Viagra cartel. You stop it right now. I swear to God. Is their emoji a blue pill? And you know, I would have to look into that, maybe. That would be an interesting thing.
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It's a really wasted opportunity if it's not. But they're actually, CG&G and Viagra cartel launched a massive offensive in Michoacan this weekend.
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I haven't seen these guys in a while. I think they're defunct, but there used to be a Taliban cartel.
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And there's another, a faction of the Mayito Flaco is called the Russians. No affiliation with Putin. It's because the guy's nickname, their leader's nickname is El Russo, the Russian. So how do you track them? They use the Russian emoji flag. And they love communist emojis as, you know, USSR, Russian propaganda. They don't care about Russia. They don't, but they heavily use it just because it...
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Sometimes it's a joke. There's other guys called Los Alemanes, the Germans. The head of El Chapito, his name is Perris. That's his nickname, Perris, which sounds very similar to Paris, Paris. So he uses the French flag because of that. So I'm telling you, that's- This is insane.
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And, you know, I chose Army, did that, was an armor officer. What does that even mean?
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So I think what they're running into is a lack of resources, both in the military and a lack of resources and desires in the judiciary. Now, here's the problem that when we're talking about the Mexican cartels. From a Mexican, this is where I was talking about the U.S. perspective.
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The Mexican cartels, I mean, the Mexican government's probably number one interest is security and stability for its citizens.
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Sometimes that means you got to go to after a specific cartel. Like the Zetas historically, okay, these guys have gotten out of control. We got to go after them. Enough is enough. Okay. And sometimes it's, Well, if we go after them and we weaken them, violence goes up. Because I can tell you right now, the Mexican government is not happy that the U.S.
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extradited Maya Zambada because they knew exactly the violence in Sinaloa was going to skyrocket as a result.
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It depends who you ask. And I know that's a cop out. I'm sorry.
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So that's the interest. So obviously, the U.S. government is the weakening of the cartel. That's our national security interest. We made that abundantly clear. But that doesn't sometimes overlap with the Mexicans. Now, I can make an easy argument. From a U.S. perspective, a national security perspective, the Sinaloa cartel is the weakest it's ever been since its inception.
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And the loss of their leadership and because of the infighting. Yes, absolutely. But from a US national security point of view, we've, I mean, they've, you know, even those Chapitos, right? They've lost Joaquin Guzman. They've lost one of the brothers. They lost Ovidio Guzman, one of the brothers. Oh, funny story. You know Pixie and Dixie the Mouse? The cartoon?
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But no, that was not, you know, you know, my first duty, I mean, my first duty station was El Paso, um, Cav squadron, the, the platoon leader. And then I have spurs. No, I don't. Funny enough. Funny enough. Uh, I, the requirement to get a spur, uh, Was there was a certain exercise I had to do. And so by the time I did it and I was eligible to do my spur ride, I got picked to be an aide-de-camp.
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You don't? How old is your daughter? I mean, this was a long time ago. Yeah, actually, Google, I think it's called Pixie and Dixie the Mouse.
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No, it's a cartoon. Look at those. Those mouses right there. You see them in the right? You've never seen that show when you were a kid? Wait a minute.
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So the reason why I say that, Ovidio Guzman, his call sign was one of those mouses because they called him El Raton, the rat. But not like because he was a rat, like the mouse, El Raton. I swear to you, there's an image of like a police badge and on top of the police badge is that mouse. That mouse, because that's his call sign. And so his emoji is sometimes like a mouse emoji.
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So that was Ovidio Guzman. So he was detained. El Nini, the head of security of Los Chapitos was detained. And then, okay, now you had prior to this civil war, the other civil war I was talking about in Sonora. So they were definitely getting weaker and weaker and weaker and weaker. So from a U.S. point, why were they targeting Los Chapitos? Because they were key in the fentanyl trade.
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And it was funny, the Sinaloa cartel did this whole like, oh, we're banning fentanyl trafficking and we're going to kill people who do it. We're no longer trafficking. They did target independent fentanyl traffickers, but they still pushed. Anybody who took that at face value was lying.
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So they used it as a proper, exactly. And that's what they, because while he was doing that, I was talking to a good friend of mine who's a journalist and he's like, and because we were like, dude, this is absolute BS. Nobody's going to believe this.
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And he's like, no, he's pushing a huge load of fentanyl to the US right now because he needs the money because he had this pet, Ivan Archivaldo, the head of Los Chapitos, you can argue, had this pet project of his key and security aspect that he wanted and he needed the money now.
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So he's pushing fentanyl while they were killing independent fentanyl traffickers saying, oh, we're not going to traffic fentanyl. That was a lie.
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So I think it's both. But for the most part, what I've seen is they get the precursors from China and then they do the drug laboratories are in Mexico. And these are not. I mean, I think people think about drug laboratories like this, you know, like Breaking Bad.
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Vast majority of drug labs that are seized by the Mexican government. Oh, they upload that also on Instagram. I have a ton of videos of drug labs. And these are the most rudimentary, basic things you can ever think of. I mean, I don't know if you can find it in mine. Like if you go to all sorts and you put like drug laboratory and maybe you see a... These are basic.
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Yeah, this is not sophisticated, high class level. And again, they upload this on their social medias. They're like, oh, look, we're making drugs. That's what you see them doing. If you know where to look, it's not that hard to either buy guns or drugs just using an Instagram account. It is not hard. If you know where to look, you can- Well, I wish it was just that. I mean, I don't know.
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Okay. And so I became an aide-de-camp, deployed as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, did that for a year.
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There's a work. I mean, he has gloves. I'll give him that. I think maybe he has a face mask. But yeah, that's how they do it. That's it. Like a little fan right there. No mask, no mask. He did not have a mask.
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I mean... What a risk, man. It's a risk, yeah. But, you know, either addiction or just you want to party and have fun. But, yeah, I mean, that's... I like to party and have fun.
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Actually, my wedding photos, I have that because I got it. I said I had the little gold stripe. And then you have like a weird insignia because you don't wear your branch anymore. You wear the aide-de-camp kind of one that indicates. Like I think you wear it and then it's like an eagle and it almost looks like the AG one, but it's a little bit different.
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I will say 2024, there's been a lot of countries announcing, at least cocaine-wise, record seizures of cocaine as well. I mean, we've seen a mass increase of cocaine. Yeah.
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But I think we're kind of going here and here, but to your point earlier about the Mexican government and what they can do, you had the resources availability, you have the judiciary, but again, it goes back to the priorities that sometimes... weakening a cartel might not be in their national interest, because right now Mexico is- For Mexico.
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Right, because they have a huge problem with Sinaloa right now, the violence there. And so you can make an argument, I can make an easy argument, that if Trump demands Mexico, you will secure the border. And so Mexico, let's say, complies. So they deploy military forces to the border. Well, now you don't have military forces to secure- Sinaloa. Chiapas, Guanajuato, all these other regions.
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And guess who fills the vacuum? The cartels. And so that goes to the lack of resources. Now, if you're analyzing this from the US, I mean, you can make an argument. Again, cartels are not near peer to the Mexican military. Sometimes they outgun them. We have tactics. The Mexican military has tactics. And yes, again, if the US military goes in, yeah, are we going to suffer casualties?
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Probably, yeah. I think it would be absurd to say not to. But this idea that the US military can't handle them, I think, is laughable.
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How many videos do you want to see before I convince you otherwise of cartel members fighting? I will. We can.
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So what I would say, one of the things we're noticing that the cartels are doing is, I mean, they are training, but you see the training videos and they're like, okay, like, come on, man, that's not.
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And, you know, again, are there certain units, like I said earlier, yes, that can be, okay, if you're a tier one operator, again, they're not near peer to you, but are you like, okay, guys, like this is, I mean, any engagement.
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Now the question is, are you in a civilly and highly densely civilized area?
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And that could be a tactic, right? That could be a legitimate tactic. And if I were, and I said this in other podcasts and episodes and conversations, where it's like, if I'm a DOD planner, right, and I'm advising the SECTAV and an OPLAN, or maybe NORTHCOM, Right. Okay. Because Mexico is under the U.S. Northern Command, NORTHCOM. Let's say I'm advising, I'm a planner.
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You know, my priority targeting would be these, not only the leadership, but kind of the faction leadership, these key guys that I mentioned earlier. That's who I would- Heads of the snake, if you will. Or even a little bit below. Neck up. Yeah. So because that's like the head of the snake is El Mencho, right? I'd be looking at, let's get El Mencho and all that. But I was like, Jardinero, right?
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And are you just at that point literally an aide to a flag officer? I did that for actually two generals. I did one general deployed. Then when we came back, I had a separate general that kind of like a little bit in the transition. And then, you know, I decided, you know, just had my daughter kind of missed the whole means of my deployment. I missed it.
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In Nayari. Doble R, the double R. I think he's in Guanajuato, right? Some of those guys. There's another guy called Commander 88 in Tabasco. Like those are the guys like, okay, because those are the guys that really in a lot of ways control the men. Now those guys can be replaced, but okay, now we're losing capability, degradation, leadership, et cetera. That's kind of what I would be looking at.
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I think the best solution, and I think the US government can handle it. The question then becomes mission creep. You know, now we're kind of chewing off more than we, you know, biting more than we can chew. Are we going to declare all cartels, foreign terrorist organization? Okay, now that's a, Okay.
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I mean, the Mexican government has been doing this almost for 20 years, and I don't think anybody's going to make an argument that it's getting better. If anything, violence is getting worse and it's spreading. A third of Mexico, the last U.S. intelligence assessment was that a third of Mexico was directly under cartel control. A third of their country. Now, a lot of them is in remote areas.
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Right. Exactly. I mean, I haven't even touched that. And that's your point. And Mexicans are very proud of their country as they should be. And they're very national. And they have a lot of respect to the military. Yeah. And I, again, I train them. These guys know what they're doing. Yeah.
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There's instances where something happened or maybe, but, you know, for the most part, compared to what I've seen in the Middle East, I was like, dude, I'll take a Mexican soldier any day. And these guys can teach, are very good at urban warfare and guerrilla tactics, et cetera, and all that, and trying to find out, because they deal with it in an everyday.
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The issue that they're running into is that cartels are, for example, the State Department, I think this weekend or a couple of days ago, put a level four do not travel notice for- I just saw that, yes. In Tamaulipas, and one of the things they said is because of increased use of IEDs, which we've seen, they're increasing IEDs.
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And we're also seeing an increased use of kind of like Russia-Ukraine drones dropping explosives. And one of the interesting aspects is, not across the board. I mean, it's not complicated, right? I mean, any cartel can get it. Like the Familia Michoacana, that's another cartel out of Guerrero. They're in a conflict in Guerrero against Los Talacos, they're called, another gang.
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The Familia Muchacana is notorious for just drones after drone. And the problem you're running into is a lot of it doesn't get reported because it happens in remote areas you don't know until way after the fact. But they are, you know, it's still very rudimentary, right? It's not like what we see in Iraq or Israel, right?
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Where they have like an FPGV drone or like a group two, three UAS going straight. No, it's just, here's a drone dropping a grenade. But one of the interesting aspects, because people will say, well, these guys are trained by special forces. The cartels will say, oh, you know, and there's all these reports. Yeah, got it.
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So I said, you know what, I can't do active duty, you know, long term and joined the reserves and then a contract and did that.
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But it's not nowhere close because one of the things we see is Colombian, for example, Colombians are highly recruited by Mexican cartels for Colombian veterans in the military, highly recruited. We actually see them a lot in Michoacan.
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Some of these guys I've tracked, probably there's some accounts that we've tracked that maybe I can think of specifically maybe three instances of a Colombian soldier who fought for the Ukrainians against Russians that then went to Mexico and just was bought off by the Mexican cartels to fight for them or to train them.
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Yeah. So you track their- Soldier for hire. Yeah, I get it. Then that's what they do, right?
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And so you see that and you are, I think one of the aspects when people criticize the war on drugs and like, oh, we're militarizing, we're militarizing. My counter to that and why I say all this is the cartels are militarizing. Like you can say we shouldn't militarize the war on drugs. The cartels already are. And they don't really care what you think. They're seizing territory.
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You know, they have a heart and mind strategy and a terror campaign. I mean, we haven't even talked about some of the decapitation videos and the terror campaign and the hearts and messaging. Like every... You know, in Mexico, they celebrate the day of the kid and the other dos niños. Every year, you see the cartels releasing videos across social media saying, look at the gifts we're giving.
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Mother's Day, look at the gifts we're giving. They have all the kids come and all the mothers run and they give them gifts and money and cash. CG&G in Michoacán was very effective of trying to. As we mentioned about the avocado farmers and the lime farmers that were targeted, they were like, look, look at this violent cartel, Carteles Unidos, they're targeting. And CG&G wasn't wrong in this.
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CG&G said, oh, Carteles Unidos are extorting you and your farms and your limes. And the Mexican government, the Mexican military is supporting Carteles Unidos, fighting CG&G protests. Because I have videos of Carteles Unidos and the Mexican soldiers or policemen fighting side by side against CG&G. So CG&G would then go to the farmers and say, see, look, even the Mexican government is against you.
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And they're helping these extortionists, taking your crops, taking your money. Help us and we'll protect you. Very effective campaign.
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That I don't, you know, I don't post that. Those get edited out. I don't post that because it's... Some things are probably best to let people use their imagination.
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So it's interesting, the execution videos. Yeah. One of the interesting aspects, I'm going to kind of guesstimate, but 90% of execution videos that I've seen, generally, they're actually very hyper local focused, the messaging. So they'll get a guy, they'll, you know, detain him, he has hands up and say, and then the guy's record is like, say your name. I don't know. Jesus, blah, blah, blah.
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Who do you work for? I work for this guy in this cartel. Who supports you? Well, this local says the name police commander, right? And his deputy and the deputy mayor that unless you're from that region, you have no idea who those people are. Nobody's like, oh, who are these people? But very hyper focus.
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And they kind of frame it in a way where it's almost like a lot of times they even say like, oh, like one cartel will tell another cartel like, oh, you're the extortionist. You're the one who's robbing the people and we're killing you. to, you know, as a form of justice because Mexico like 90 plus percent of homicide cases don't even get investigated, right? Or crimes don't even get reported.
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There's a huge problem in that. And so the cartels vary, most of the times are very hyper-focused and local in their messaging for the local population. Most of the times the decapitation videos are very crude. They're very just basic brunt, right? Axe, chop off the legs, chop off the head, chop off the body, whatever. Burning somebody alive or just shooting them, very basic.
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But there are some, one specific group that reminds me I mean, because you can almost look at all these execution videos. I mean, they're just violent. I mean, I think it's a fair comparison, like ISIS.
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And they'll hang the bodies, and they'll leave the dismembered bodies, or an ice cooler, so you open it with a message. And they're all, again, local. But there's one specific, that I haven't seen in a while, but these guys were different. These guys, so CDN, who I talked about, they actually called themselves, if I'm not mistaken, Operativo Texas, so Texas operative of CDN. I had the video.
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I'm not gonna explain it. I will spare your listeners even a audio description or a visual description of that. If you wanna see it, feel free. But the way they did it was horribly, like the most gruesome execution video I've ever seen, but it was almost like this medical precision how they did it. Really drew it out? And like, you just don't do that. Like if I were to tell you,
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To do the things they did, you wouldn't know how to do it. I'll give a broad overview. Basically, they removed the skin from the person's face, so you can see the skull.
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He was alive. Hold on, I'm not done. They opened the chest, took out the heart, and you can see the heart beating in the video. and it was a CDN execution video. Explain to me, how do you do that without some medical training? Like perfectly removing everything, the scalp, the face, the- What do you even get that idea from? Because it's a terror campaign, right?
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That serves two purpose, either to instill terror or more importantly, normalize it. So that when these events happen, people don't care. They're not gonna demand a change. That's what they do. It's become part of society that now nobody's gonna be held accountable for it.
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But that specific execution video, I think it was, they wanted to send a message of their power and their strength and their brutality. And trust me, the message was received. That was one of the few times where I was like, okay, I need a break. I need to step out. I need to take a break because it's just... It was a level of precision and it wasn't brute force that caught my attention.
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And I haven't seen them recently. So I don't know if they were targeted, they were captured, maybe they were rounded up by coincidence and they never tied them up. They've been dormant, they've been quiet for a while, but that was one. But the execution and decapitation videos, it just is so normalized.
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So actually the first time I ever served my general coffee, I did that. He was like, oh, I'm going to be the aid. Like, hey, sir, you know, made some coffee. He grabbed it and he looked at me and he said, if you ever serve me coffee again, I'm firing you. I was like, got it. I already like this guy. Very well. He was Ranger. Yeah. Yeah, he did.
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Now in Mexico that, like I literally, unless the app, the data stream with Artorias I was mentioning picks it up, I would have to look for it because we have our apps scouring a lot of sources everywhere. Sometimes it's like a fourth page back in the newspaper or the website. Oh, yeah, there is three bodies were left hanging in this bridge somewhere.
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Yeah. Not only the violence, but the missing. I think there's like way over 100,000 people missing, declared missing in Mexico. Are we talking annually? No, total, total. Okay. Total, total, total, total.
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No, no, no, total. So like when they track just people missing in Mexico that they have no idea. And mass graves. I think last week, I think a mass grave, they found 50 bodies.
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You know, funny enough, a lot of, oh, my God, I don't know if it was Mitchell's son. I had to look it up. He was, I think they faked his death. He went north to the border to be with his girlfriend, and that's how they caught him, because he wanted to be with his girlfriend.
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Oh, trust me. You want to capture a cartel leader, don't look for the cartel leader. Look for his girlfriend or his wife or his mistress, mistresses on Instagram. They do. Stop it.
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A rose? Dude, they are everywhere. Like, I don't need to track the guy. Just if you find out the girlfriend, you're 99% there to catching this guy. So north of the border. Yeah, now again, cartels generally do business, and how they do it is with local gangs, because then they get the drugs. And yeah, there's people in this cartel.
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His career path was, you know, active duty, infantry, and then he bounced infantry, you know, Ranger platoon leader, Ranger company commander, Ranger battalion commander. I think he was the brigade commander for 82nd, was wounded, you know, and so he was a very down-to-earth, very, like... No, nothing difficult, straightforward, very easily approachable, which was great. And to your point, yes.
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It's not, I don't think, a large, large, very large numbers, because a lot of them is now, OK, they sell to a specific gang.
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So what I would say is one of the funny things is, I talked about this in space because the conversation was, if the US attacks Mexico cartels, what is kind of the repercussions in the United States? And I would say, yes. Do we might see some level attacks in the U.S.? Do we might see Border Patrol agents now being more targeted?
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Do we see maybe some border communities more targets and stuff like that? Okay, you know what? I think that's within the realm of possibility. But this idea of like this mass insurgency, massive terrorist attacks, like no, that's not how they operate. North of the border, like south of the border, I said territorial, north of the border, transactional. Transactional.
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I think they would have to be to survive. And the typical cartel person north of the border is not like this macho, military-age male. It's a businessman. It's a car dealership that does money laundering for the cartels. It's a lawyer.
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Yeah. And maybe there are certain aspects of certain guys who might be hit managers. Yeah, of course. But it's not the large number. It's the infrastructure and pace to handle a multi-billion dollar industry, both in the US and Mexico. The financial aspects in the US, a lot of it Yeah, again, are there specific members? Of course. And sometimes can violence cross over? Of course.
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But that's not really the image north. It's a lot of businesses that are necessary for them to launder money or to even traffic and do human smuggling or drug trafficking or whatever it may be. And that's really what is north of the border. For the U.S., I wouldn't analyze the threat necessarily north of the border. That will increase.
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I think that it would be unwise of me to say there's no increase. It will. But if I'm an American, again, NorthCon planner, my concern isn't necessarily inside the U.S. No, no. My concern is the American citizens living in Mexico. Because now the cartel says, that's fair game. You're targeting our leadership. You're conducting airstrikes inside Mexico. We're going to target you.
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We're going to target your American citizens. Because now you've done two things. There's like 1.6 million American citizens living in Mexico. So they start targeting them as a retaliation. And then two, which I think more conversations should we have about this. We did a podcast. We have our own podcast called Bluff Artorias.
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And one of the hosts, Matthew, we were talking about the Mexican cartels. And he made a distinction between grievance and greed in kind of like an insurgency aspect for motivation. Are they driven by grievance, like a political motivation? Or are they driven by greed, which is a money? Obviously, most people would say Mexican cartels fall under the greed. If U.S.
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military start conducting operations into Mexico, let's say unilateral, Do you now give them that grievance aspect that changes them into a, at least to have on paper up front, which hasn't existed really, but a political motivation now?
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And do they then, the terror tactics we've seen directed against Mexican citizens inside Mexico, do they then leverage that against American citizens inside of Mexico? Because one thing is like you're driving down the highway and you get accidentally targeted or people think, oh, the cartel kills Americans. And most of the times it's just a guy who just wants some money.
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I mean, when we were deployed for Operation Inherent Resolve, I was a fly on the wall. And there's moments when you kind of stop and you're like, I'm a lieutenant. But you're grasping and listening to all these conversations that kind of like... open your mind, a lot of things.
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It's just a simple robber or something, right? It's not this guy. Most of the times, even cartels have a general understanding, hey, don't mess with Americans, right? Do not mess with Americans. I think if you remember a couple years ago, the two Americans that were killed and two were kidnapped when they crossed the border.
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So the cartel, it was Grupo Scorpion. Grupo Scorpion era Matamoros. They went for plastic surgery to the Americans. They thought they were Haitian smugglers, I believe. They thought they were Haitian smugglers, so they attacked them. So they killed two and they kidnapped two. When they realized they were Americans... They were like, oh, shit. We messed up.
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What they did is not only did they tell the Mexican government, go here. You will find the Americans here. Go get them. But then everybody who was involved in the operation that killed those Americans, they lined them up, handcuffed them, and then they put a note basically saying, hey, America, our bad. We had no idea they were Americans. These guys were responsible for them. They're yours.
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So can Americans get targeted? Of course. We saw it in the case with the Mormons where they were targeted. Again, but from a general rule of thumb, they even understand, okay, be careful. If you're going to target an American, you better have a valid reason or be careful. Be very, very, very careful. If the U.S. starts conducting operations inside Mexico-
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that deterrence is gone because that's the thought process, right? Like, oh, we don't want to target Americans because the Americans are looking after us. Well, if you're already targeting us, the deterrence is gone. So is that a threat? And that's what I would be more concerned about. I'm not saying it's a given, it's a fact, but...
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Do they start targeting Americans and Mexico and then tying it with even a political nationalistic message? I'm not saying it's a given it's going to happen for sure, but that's something I would seriously analyze and consider.
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I mean, yeah, I would, you know, it's probably, I mean, I think you can, I think it's possible. Where you at least empower the Mexican government to have full territorial control of their country and maybe reform as best as possible their judiciary and their political process to really clamp down on corruption. Because again, a lot of this is also because of the Mexican state.
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I think that's a possible scenario, but you would have to put a lot of effort for that. In the short term, no. But, you know... there would have to be a lot of focus. And I think the military aspect of it really misses out on everything else.
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And I don't think there's a political will in this country, in the United States, to really address this at the root, which is not only empowering the Mexican government. And maybe we can, maybe we get into agreement with Mexico in bilateral aspects, right? We, maybe an SFAB, a security forces assistant brigade, I think is the acronym, right? The army guys who goes and do advises and assist.
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That's within the realm of possibility. There's a lot of things that we can do, but you know, You know, there's a lot more than just the military dynamic of this that I don't think we're going to have a really serious conversation to really address it in the United States.
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I mean, I think, you know, I mean, that's a very good question. That's a really good question. I've never really thought about that. What I would say is, I think first, knowledge is power, obviously.
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Like I would say, you know, the first thing I'd say, you know, I understand. I mean, we said it cartels, but that's not like it's not a singular organization. It's a very complex. There's multiple and they all fight.
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I mean, it's insane because you do bring up a point, you know, I've had, you know, where it's and it's interesting when they're in a conference room when there's a bunch of general officers and they have like the four star, let's say, you know, the COCOM commander, the SUNCOM commander, right? For Operation Hammer Resolve.
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But if you're really at least from an American, you know, American citizen point of view and you're like, well, how can I impact or maybe have a change is something that this concerning and maybe areas that you can is something we kind of talked about a little bit briefly. You were talking about addiction. Right. I mean, look, we talked about how drugs is not the only thing they traffic.
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It's not a legalizing drug or whatever is going to solve the Mexican cartel problem set, but it'll help address it. I think if we have a serious conversation, and I think that has to be pushed by the American people, of acknowledging, number one, that we have a drug addiction problem. We have a drug consumption problem. And that's fueling the violence.
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It's not the only thing, but it's definitely a huge part of it. Yeah, you can't just focus on the supply. You have to focus on the demand. Yeah. And the demand is not going to solve it, but it will address... And I think it's net positive regardless. We don't want American citizens dying because of fentanyl overdose or cocaine overdose or heroin overdose. And the thing is, like...
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it impacts everybody. It doesn't matter, red, blue state, Republican, Democrat, Independent, it doesn't matter. Heroin addictions really impacted the Rust Belt, rural America, a lot of the industrial heartland areas. And then just like crack cocaine impacted urban America during the 80s and 90s. And so I think as an American citizen,
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that may be areas that you can have an impact is how can we address the drug addiction, both because of pharmaceutical pushing, drugs that are highly addictive that got people hooked to heroin and stuff like that, right?
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But also just that aspect and really demand that when we're talking about military operations against the cartels saying, wait, wait a minute, there's something we can do here in America for our citizens that for whatever reasons are suffering a drug addiction, and is it the best policy to throw them in jail? Or is there something else we can do? Whatever the solution is, demand that, right?
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Because in the end of the day for you, the Mexican cartels, TDA, MS-13, like the United States is a pretty strong country. We have a very strong law enforcement, strong capabilities. Like I said earlier, I'm not concerned about a TDA drive-by shooting, killing people. I'm not concerned. not saying it's impossible, but we have very robust capabilities to really address that, right?
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And then you have the OIR commander, the SOJITIF OIR commander, and then all the kind of the subordinate commanding general. And they're going back and forth. I mean, I've seen times where, yeah, there's generally an agreement and I've seen time where it's like, no, like they are going.
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And when we see them kind of happen, maybe it's crazy and hey, go after them, shut them down, do whatever you need. But really for an American citizen, that's what I would say. Like don't necessarily focus on the Mexican cartels per se. Yeah, I'm all here to educate you and help you, but demand change and find ways that maybe you can help the consumption demand side in this country.
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They would find a way. They would maybe legitimate. They would find something. They are a very adept organization. You don't become... I mean, if these guys were... These guys would easily be a fortune... Wait, man, then probably even the Fortune 100, not even 500.
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Both of that, but my concern would be, because I had this conversation about, it was kind of, I remember a while back, I was having this conversation about this idea of legalization of drugs. And I made the argument that that what they would probably try to do is, if they were already territorial now, they would focus more on the territorial aspect.
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And so that's why it has to be kind of this two-pronged approach in a lot of aspects, even the demand. But that's why I also believe the Mexican cartels are becoming more territorial because they realize and understand that if they're transactional in and of itself, If their logistics is disrupted in the pushing of drugs, they're screwed. They have a problem.
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I mean, I don't know if you saw there was in Colombia, in the border region of Colombia, there is the Ejército Liberal Nacional, Liberación Nacional, an ELN terrorist organization, and a FARC dissident group in a border area of Colombia, Venezuela. We're in a huge fight right now. They're fighting very heavily along the Colombian-Venezuelan border. I did not see that. Yeah.
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And then the commander, like the overall general might get to a point like, all right, all right, let's continue planning. But there is a lot of back and forth. And to your point, I like that.
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So that's a huge problem right now for Colombia, the President Petro. which I think got drowned out because of this, just the migrant deportation, which is just, again, it's frustrating that people focus more on that. It's like, no, there's actually like an actual conflict.
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And the reason why I say that, it's not 100% confirmed, but there's this belief and there's some reporting to back it up, but the reason why the fighting skyrocketed is, I believe specifically the French Navy seized nine tons of cocaine in the Caribbean Sea, nine tons. It's a massive seizure. That's a hell of a party.
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There's a belief that that loss of the drugs caused the violence to happen between the FARC dissidents and ELN because they're who... Now there's that territorial aspect because the transactional dropped. Now we need to focus on the territorial. I think that would happen in Mexico. So again, it's this two-pronged approach in the United States. Actually, it should be a multiple-pronged approach, but
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Empowering the Mexican government, the resources and everything to ensure that they can prevent that territorial aspect of the Mexican cartels.
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Have you seen, have you, have you tracked anything in Haiti? The dilemmas in Haiti? Yeah.
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I'm terrified of the opposite of that. Correct. Correct. For my experience, it was a lot. I've even, you know, had to, you know, because, you know, generals call, they're calling another general about operations and they're screaming each other phones. Yeah. Let's close the door, you know. But it was great. But to your point, it really provided me a perspective.
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Just the gangs, the gang violence and how they kind of- Oh, it's insane. What I tell people is like, hey, if you don't- I think one of the interesting aspects of the Western hemisphere is we're seeing gangs, organized crimes, cartels, mafia. It's international, by the way. It's not just Mexican- The Mexican cartels- spread their violence to Ecuador, like Ecuador gang violence.
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In a lot of ways, you can tie it directly to Mexican cartels exporting their violence into Ecuador. And you saw that a lot in 2023 and 2024 specifically, a lot of that violence. because of Mexican cartels expanding their operations south and exporting the violence everywhere. But you also see like the Albanian mafia, the Russian mafia, et cetera, right? So you see that.
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But in the Western hemisphere as a whole, you're seeing gangs and all these groups really challenging state authority without a political motivation, which is kind of interesting when you're analyzing this from a foreign policy and kind of like national security aspect. It's not a political, it's a greed aspect. That grievance, greed, this is greed.
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Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, I mean, the favela violence there is insane. I would keep an eye out for the Brazilian gangs, just as the Mexican cartels replaced the Colombians. If the Mexican cartels drop in power, the one place I would be looking at, Brazil. Really? Brazilian gangs.
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But why did I bring up Haiti is I think Haiti is like the worst case scenario that if you don't take this problem seriously, what can happen? Because Haiti basically is there's no functioning government and you have gangs in many aspects being the power players of the country. And Kenya deployed, you know, UN backed peacekeeping force. They have police and all that and they're fighting, but...
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You know, they can't even achieve stability and security within their own country. And how can you have a political conversation, a political solution to a country who don't even control their own capital? I'm not so sure you can. And so that's why I said the Haiti aspect is, you know, that's the worst case scenario.
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But if the Mexican cartels get weakened seriously, look at 10 years from now, we might be having a similar conversation, but about Brazilian gangs.
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So they are, I think that's where I said the militarization, because you're right. People think, oh, it's street violence or maybe just homicides or we just hang a body. You saw the video.
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That is not street violence. That's in a rudimentary way. That's force on force. These guys are battling it out for territorial control using military tactics that ISIS used in Syria. And that's what I said. Like, that's a lot of the violence we see is tied to that. You know, there was this very famous, I mean, I'm not going to say that's smart, but we have- Sophisticated, perhaps. Sophisticated.
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I mean, they tried to develop an indigenous, like, it was like an artillery system. To like launch it across the border? Well, not across the border. No, no, no. Like actual artillery, like rounds against an enemy. Okay. Yeah. So you see them do that. You're seeing the drones. I think it's pretty smart.
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And then also, you know, you have general officers and then they're kind of the staff level, the staff principals, the OICs that are generally colonels or lieutenant colonels, you know, same. And it was a lot of teaching and mentoring because they see a lieutenant and, you know, I'm lost. Let's be real. I mean, you know, you have no idea what's going on. Lieutenants are made to be lost. Exactly.
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And I think the reason why the cartels use, I've criticized it heavily, but I think the reason why they use like the M82s is because they don't, it's very hard for them to have access to RPGs and anti-tank weapon capability. They have them, but not in large quantities. And I've talked to other open source intelligence accounts.
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One of the things they find interesting is like the M82, you see it very much so in the Western hemisphere, but you don't see it in the Sahel, you don't see it in Iraq, Syria. And they say that as well, that's because it's coming from the US and it's very hard for them to ship it over internationally. That's why you see them here.
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I think that's a smart way saying, look, we don't have that many RPG capabilities. Yeah, maybe we have an M1919 or maybe a 50 cal, But it's very easy for me to get this M82, just put it on top, 50 cal, maybe I try to get the, you know, an anti-tank round capability, put it in there, shoot.
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And then, and that weapon system, the M82 also, almost every, it's almost like, I'm not gonna say standard, but it's very universally accessible. Like almost every kind of cartel platoon, for the most part, at least one of them has that. You just see them walking around with that easily. Almost like in an infantry platoon, you have like an M249. That's what they have. So that's what I would say.
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But they are becoming, I think, more and more and more sophisticated. And we're seeing that with the drones and the dropping of explosives.
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I mean, I think that's the question that everybody's asking.
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I think drones are kind of like an evolutionary prospect of warfare. And that's something that we're all going to have to have a conversation and really have to delve deep in both. And I can tell you, you know, a lot of the conversations that are happening within the U.S. military and the U.S.
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Exactly. But they coach and mentor you. I mean, I was a lieutenant and I was learning the difference between Title 10, Title 32, and Title 50. Yeah. As a lieutenant. Because the general, because they would say, oh, you know, that's Title 50. And I was like.
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Army, you know, when even I was in, I mean, that was a kind of an interesting aspect of the development of warfare. But I think one of the, how we should analyze it is it enables... Now you don't need a multimillion dollar javelin system.
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I love the javelin. I think it's a phenomenal weapon system.
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But it kind of provides those lower equipped trained forces to have at least a capability that maybe, not going to mirror our match, but okay, now you can provide a counter punch.
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Yeah. It's like the ATGM. I think that what I would kind of tie back is the from the tank would kind of change a lot of the tank warfare that we had to adapt was. you know, back in the 70s, 60s, 70s, it specifically was the introduction of anti-ting guided missiles. And I think the drones is the similar concept, but now it's cheaper. Oh, yeah. So that's the aspect.
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That's an interesting conversation. It goes back to even when everything we're talking about, even if we're dying, like the Mexico, what's your end state? What's your goal? And what are the capabilities you're looking for? And what's kind of the political objective you want to achieve? And then that frames kind of military development.
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And I think, you know, all the way back from Sun Tzu, like strategy to tactics, strategy, operational warfare, tactical level warfare. You know, in my time as an aide, you know, I got to see that and it all, that's how it all ties together. But the technology is rapidly changing. Our company leverages AI. We have mentioned that earlier. And that's the future aspect of it.
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And I think it's the same with warfare. Because we haven't even talked about a development The ability, you know, we see it, right, with our system, our AI able to gather information at rapidly speed, and then more importantly, synthesize it, do an analysis for you. Like, I can give you a threat assessment that you were to read it about Russia, Ukraine, that our AI does. You would read it.
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He's like, you don't know? Here you go. This is Title 50. I was like, oh, my God.
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It looks like an intelligence report because how we use the AI and the assessment and all that. And it literally will write it, like, high confidence, medium confidence, low confidence, percentage, likely, very likely, unlikely. These are the reasons they're going to be targeted next. What's the next course? Here's the courses of action. All that done by AI.
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And imagine you're an intelligent professional. Instead of you having just, you have an AI, boop, just pops it for you and you just have to review it. Do you concur or not? If you concur, go ahead.
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We would like, so again, really for the average person, right? Because we have, obviously, for more private clients, corporate and all that. But really, what we think is you don't have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to have access to intelligence and information. It literally should just be $10.
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Here's all the sources from around the, you know, from, you know, because again, like social media, social media is really driving either Twitter, Facebook. Like here's an interesting aspect, right? Like if you're really analyzing a lot of countries outside of the US, you know, what's their primary news source? Facebook still. Yeah. Facebook, Telegram.
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Title let's go. And then another thing was like going to embassies, right? We would have to go a lot to the embassies. And that's a whole different world. But even like the military component within the embassies, within the state departments and how they operate and how they work, it was a breadth of knowledge that was...
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WhatsApp. Strategery. WhatsApp. That is a, like South America, you wanna talk, if you live or you're Hispanic, you need WhatsApp, period. Nothing else matters, WhatsApp is the way to go. That's how everybody talks in South America. What we think as a company is,
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That you should be able to gather information and intelligence that you're interested in on the regions, no different than let's say a nation state or a government or even these corporations that pay tens of thousands of dollars. You should be able to access it at the palm of your hand for $10 a month. How do you ensure- Cheaper than the New York Times subscription, for example.
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We're not trying to say they're like our competitors or anything like that, because it's just different. No, it highlights people. So our AI, how it addresses it, it will say, for example, we have a Russia-Ukraine feed, right? It will say... Russian Ministry of Defense states A, B, C, D, E. Ukrainian Ministry of Defense states one, two, three, four, five, right?
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Because that's how intelligence works. When you're doing open source intelligence and you're trying to gather information as it happens, as accurately as possible, you're picking up all these different types of information stream, intelligence reporting, all that, and it will highlight. We had it for Israel, Gaza, the situation in Israel, Gaza. It would report Israeli media reports.
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It would do like a summary. Israel claims this, Hamas claims this, Western media claims this, Russian media claims this, Chinese, like anybody who's reporting on that, it will give you a summary. And then that's the key aspect, right?
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So you get the information just as an intelligence, because I would say like, I think people need to understand if you're really interested in conflict and wars and even just, or political crisis or development, et cetera, I think it's important to understand, because again, this is the intelligence aspect. What is Hamas claiming, for example? That matters.
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Because if it's misinformation or lie, there's an interesting aspect of that when you're doing intelligence work. Why are they stating these things? Or it's important for them because look at how Hamas has kind of transitioned and changed post ceasefire from, and now what they're trying to portray to the international community is this image of strength, victory, how they do the hostages, right?
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That is a key tenant of their messaging campaign that requires analysis to understand and how it is. You might agree or disagree with it, but if you're analyzing from an intelligence point of view, you want to understand that. And that's what we're trying to provide. And our AI will identify the actors who are saying it.
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It clears up, it knows when whoever's claiming what, what bias they have, and it will report it, again, from the absolute totality of the reporting. And so our goal is to really provide that from a global aspect in each individual country and how you can access that information.
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What I would recommend any lieutenant, they generally, the army has a career path for you, platoon leader, XO, staff, captain career course, and then you move on. I say, look, if you've got an opportunity to do something different, you're gonna make captain. Unless you're major screw up, you're gonna make captain.
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And that's where we really want to say, like, for example, like I said, I use the Mexico feed, right, that our company provides and I analyze. It will say, chapitos state that I want to know that. It could be a lie. It could be an absolute lie. I don't care. I want to know what they're claiming because it matters to specifically how you understand the overall situation. And that's the thing.
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It's the raw data, the information. And it also will maybe, you know, it gets, you know, actual reporting and all that, and it will say it out loud. And I think, you know... For people who, because look, like I mentioned, for example, when we were talking earlier, the New York Times did a phenomenal report about Michoacan, about a specific, like I, that was 100% the New York Times.
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And I think, you know, you can, people can agree or disagree about how news is and all that is done. And I think that's a legitimate fair in a First Amendment country and democracy. You might love it, hate it, and criticize or do it. They provide absolute news. But it's to your point, what we're trying to focus in is that intelligence raw data. Straight to you.
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And so when, you know, one of the things we're building, for example, that I think nobody is talking about, which kind of blows my mind, is what's going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo with the region of Goma and their war with the M23 rebels that are Rwanda-backed. That's a huge crisis that's going on that nobody is talking about.
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If an opportunity comes, even if you don't deploy, even if you're an aid to camp garrison, which I did, It's great because you also learn a lot of the roles and responsibilities of how they deploy forces.
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And an interesting fact is the most violent war since World War II. was the Congo wars, the first and second Congo wars that happened between 1996 to 2004. I think over 8 million people died. It was the most violent war since World War II.
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In the Congo. And right now there's a concern is, are we entering the third Congo war right now? Because of the situation of the M23 rebels in Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And we're building that feed. And so it's not, it's again, because it's, Because the US, we focus on America, right? And maybe our interests.
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And so that's not a problem. I'm not going to criticize that. But maybe you're somebody who's like, huh, wait a minute. You know, Arturia's app saying, huh, there's a crisis going on. What? Let me check that. And then that's what we want to give you that information. Because you might miss it.
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But that is a conflict and a crisis that I think, just as we're talking about Mexican cartels and the complexity of it, I mean, I'm in group chats in the ocean community. They're like, are we about to enter in the third Congo war? And if you understand the history of that region, you're like, and the Congo war happened because of the Rwanda genocide.
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It's Rwanda genocide, first Congo war, second Congo war. You know, there's always been crisis in the Congo center. And now we're in a moment, it's like, is this a repeat? And what does that look like with the advancement of warfare and everything? And I think that's a concern, and that's what we're trying to fill a vacuum in a lot of people who might not know and might not understand.
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But at the G staff level, at the division level, and things that you would think about as a platoon leader when you would look up and you'd be like, oh, my God, you know, battalion or brigade or division is screwing us over. When you serve at that, then you understand the nuances, kind of the approach and all that. And it was a fascinating experience. And I really loved it and enjoyed it.
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I mean, what are your thoughts on the advancement of AI? I think how we look at it and how we are analyzing, it's a force multiplier. It's a force multiplier for dissemination and collection of information.
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Or is it even possible? Yeah, no, I don't think it's like this sentient being that can come out and... Yet, yet.
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But I think that's where the traditional media would kind of come in. Because we're seeing that, where, and you can disagree, or even just, maybe not traditional media, but the human behind the screen is like, hey, this video that, now again, it's the tale of all this time, you know, a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts it- Gets out of bed, yeah.
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Yeah, you know, it's like- But that has always existed in human history, right? So just the AI is a different component, but that's the human element.
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I mean, look, it's like, so for example, you know, it's like anything, right? And it's all about how you analyze it, the parameters you do for AI, but this, it's all, you know, and this is something we realize and we think is very important to highlight, you know, trash in, trash out. That's how AI works. So if you give it- Input informs output. So that's where we really focus on the AI.
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And that's kind of my role is ensuring that the input for the information it collects on It could be a Russian state media, but I want that information to be collected because if I don't, now I'm running into an issue as well. Am I actually getting a clear picture of the situation? There's bias and not including it as well. You need, exactly.
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You need to have, because again, it's raw data and intelligence. That's what we're doing. Because when I was doing S2 work, right? We would get OSINT roll-ups and God, you want to talk about authorities? an OSINT collector to have that level of authority to actually do OSINT collect. Stands for open source intelligence. Open source intelligence. I gotta get, I gotta get that. That's all right.
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Open source intelligence collect is higher than SIGINT, like signal intelligence. It is ridiculous because of intelligence oversight and all this and like people, like if you have an OSINT, you know, open source intelligence collection authorities, Dude, you're one of the few because they are extremely strict on who can do that. They just don't want anybody to go on, even on your Twitter.
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Like if you're an intelligence person, I can't go and say, oh, look what I saw on Twitter. Nope, you're not allowed to do that. If you're an MI personnel, if you're filling in an S2 billet, an intelligence section billet or a G2 billet, You cannot go on Twitter and say, oh, look what I saw on Twitter. Nope. Not allowed because of intelligence oversight. And we want that.
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I'm not arguing to get rid of it. But that's where, you know, so we had to get all that open source intelligence information and reporting from higher or maybe a different section and all that. But it really helped inform us. And it's like, yeah, I want to see what are the Hamas? What are the Houthis? What is Iran? What is Russia? What is North Korea? What are they talking about?
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Because that helps frame, because that's a form of intelligence that then we would cooperate with others and cross and compare. But if I'm not tracking what the Russians are claiming, I'm giving you a disservice as an intelligence officer. Because if they might be saying the truth or a lie, and if they lie all the time, that's an interesting aspect of oil. Does that show desperation?
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Does that show that maybe the situation is worse where they are if they're claiming every time it went? And we saw that during, especially in the beginning, everything is going great, we're winning. And then we saw the videos like, why are they lying? Like what's going on? And because of the nation of the nation state of Russia and how they operate. That type of information matters.
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And I think a lot of the people who would benefit from that is that's what they want. They want that and they want that access to information intelligence that, you know, we all probably been exposed in one way or another in our military careers.
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So what I would say, I'm an avid reader. I love reading. It's something I got to pick up. Favorite genre? Nonfiction. You ever throw a vampire book in there from time to time?
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Well, I will say I'm kind of a sucker for Tom Clancy. You know, one of the times. Or some of those types of kind of like fictional books about, you know, especially modern day. But one of the ones that I would say, even though it's nonfiction, the one that I like, I think the book is called, oh my God, it's been a while. I think it's called Nine Lives.
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So there's a couple of books that I've read like in a day. We're like 200 pages. I can just read it. And there's like two specific books of, you know, people that been Al-Qaeda operatives that were like turned over by either the CIA or MI6. So they tell their story of how they did that. Oh my God, like that type of book.
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Like if I can get something like that, especially if it's not fiction, these are the guys telling it from their personal, I'll give it to me. I'll read it because I think it's a very fascinating aspect of trade craft and all that. You know, I started also, you know, I got medically separated from the army.
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So I have a lot of medical issues, but one of the things I really like enjoying at my own pace, obviously, is boxing. I think it's a very good way. I like it. I have a personal trainer.
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Well, thank you, but I wish my body would agree with you. But yeah, I like boxing a lot. That's something that I do. And travel. I mean, me and my family, we just traveling.
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You're like, what the fuck's going on here? Man, you got me. I mean, I would say one of the trips that I think was from a kind of a holistic approach from beauty Tourists, food, we did Capri and the Amalfi Coast in Italy. I mean, just the nature, you know, just the touristic, the beauty, the beaches, everything, but the food. And people think Italian is like, oh, pizza.
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No, I mean, for me, like what I think- It's a portion of Italian.
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But for me, it was like the tomatoes and the cheese. I was just like, oh my God. So I would probably say, you know, Capri and the Amalfi Coast was one of my tops. And one place that I was very surprised by, and I think the country that surprised me the most, that I enjoyed the most, is I was in Singapore.
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blue like I it's wild I've been there many times yeah it's just one thing you see it on the TV but then when you're actually there it's like oh my like it just never stops and it's just this this rich there's always something to do there's so many places to go there's so many to have fun or to just take pictures or whatever you want I would say Singapore but I mean every country sorry one special mention besides Mexico because I obviously love Mexico anywhere in Mexico even and I tell this to the people here like don't
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Yeah. When you're working in a joint command, what branch? Sorry, sir. What branch? Oh, Navy? Oh, okay. That's definitely to the general. Oh, you're an O3? I can push you on to co-ops. Like, okay.
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I know we talked a lot about scares. Mexico is safe to travel. Always listen to the embassy. If you want to go to Mexico, just follow the embassy. The embassy will tell you. Anywhere you go around the world, the first place you go, State Department travel advisory.
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Yeah. That's their job. And they take that thing serious. They are very serious. And if there's a terrorist threat, they don't care at what classification level it is, they will find a way to make sure Americans are warned at an unclassified setting. And if they say something, listen to them. Absolutely listen.
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Just follow the State Department's travel guidance on travel to Mexico, because I love it. I love going to Mexico, the food, the culture, the music, tequila. I'm a huge tequila mezcal. Now I'm going more mezcal than tequila, funny enough. Controversial. I know. I might get canceled. But one country that to me also that just for me is magical is Colombia. Have you ever been to Colombia?
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I've been to Cartagena and Medellin. Loved both of them. Like just magical, magical experience. I loved it. So I would also say that Colombia as well has a very special place because I just truly enjoyed it.
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Yes, I would say I would thoroughly like to go to somewhere either like the Maldives. I think that's something always that caught my attention. French Polynesia or that area in the Pacific, that's something. But I think those are more very classical examples. What I do would love to do, it would be kind of a safari in Tanzania. I think that's something that would also be in my bucket list.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
I know, I agree with you. So the issue is I lived in Spain a long time when I was a teenager. I lived in Spain, so a lot of that aspect in Europe was very... Never been to Ireland, which is, you're true, but... It was really cool. Yeah, I would love to do that.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
Because I had that exposure to a lot of it, and I traveled a lot around Europe, and I lived there, it's kind of like, oh, I mean, it's like if you're an American and you lived in California, it's like in my bucket list, not to sound...
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
arrogant or anything, but it's kind of like how I would, when you live in the European Union, it's really like the kind of like living in America, like California to New York is like Spain, you know, Madrid to Berlin, it's the same, it's that same concept. And so it's so easy to travel around that traveling in Europe, you know, living in Europe is almost like living in America.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
And no, so how, after my aid, kind of funny, weird career path, I ended up being an S2 in an MP battalion.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
And a lot of Europeans, the reason why they travel around Europe is like the Americans traveling inside the United States. And there's so much, but that just becomes like second nature to you that for you, like I've been to South Korea and I would love to go to Japan. I've never been there.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
This is my first time, for example, Montana. Yeah. Thoroughly enjoying it. So it was a short trip, but thoroughly enjoying it. It's just, you know, especially kind of seeing the mountains and all that and the green. I mean, I remember just like landing on like just absolute white snow, forest mountains. It's like, oh my God, this is so beautiful. Today is completely foggy.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
Closing thoughts. You know, I think, first of all, thank you very much.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
This was a great conversation. Loved having it. I think, you know, it's kind of crazy for the last, I've been doing this for the cartel aspect for three years, and I've been like banging my hand against the table saying, focus more on Latin America, focus more on cartels. And now kind of like my wish came true, and I'm like... dang it, shit.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
Because now it's the misinformation, just like in any conflict. You guys like wild takes on Twitter and I'm just, or X, and I'm just like, no, okay, like let's, no, let's stop. And so it's kind of that. Sometimes I did kind of find it a little bit frustrating. I feel like I'm fighting more misinformation on Twitter or X. This morning is actually a good example of this.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
So I did that for two years. I was a battalionist too with an MP battalion.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
That's a problem I think of. And that's the kind of where I've run into it because people, I'm the same and, you know, and I think we all saw it, unfortunately, and our heart goes out and hearts and thoughts and prayers. to the victims of that tragic accident. But it's like, Hey, we have a strategy. Like, yes, there's, there should be experts commenting.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
We want to make sure that this doesn't happen again, but you're not one of them. So how about you take a backseat? Like, I'm not going to talk about that on my, just take a breath, take a knee.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
Yeah. So that's where, for me, the, the, I'm kind of battling a little bit that about the kind of from the cartel piece. Yeah. But, you know, I think, I think it's, it's also given me an opportunity to now, you know, like I said, because of the focus now I've been with the Rolling Stones, I've been, I've helped, I, you know, some of them I can't name because I helped them in the background.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
I'm hoping, you know, maybe I can go, but also major news organizations as well that I love, you know, hey, you know, if you're If you're a small YouTube, big YouTube journalist, citizen journalist, investigative, I don't care. It could be anybody. DM me. I'm more than happy to have a conversation, give you my opinion, try to back it up with evidence. Love it. I think it's great.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
I love that people are thinking about it and conversating about it. And so, you know, that's something that I find it very interesting, and I'm glad the opportunity here, and I'm glad the opportunity of talking also about our company and AI, and we had a good segment of that because that's something we really want to push forward. And that would just be my closing comments.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
So again, thank you very much. And I appreciate our common friend who introduced us virtually.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
Yeah, so if you go, I'll show it. We're, you know, we just created a Instagram. And maybe when this comes up, we could, you know, tag it.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
So we just have a YouTube. We just created an Instagram. But if you go to Artorias.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
A-R-T, so Artorias, A-R-T-O-R-I-I-S. And then you could put tag because there's, I mean, you can even go to.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
I had a, before I was supposed to go to captain career course, before I decided to leave active duty, because after active duty, I went reserves. What happened was my plan was I wanted to do a functional area called strategic intelligence. Okay. And there's generally a rule of thumb that if you're an aide-de-camp, you kind of get to pick your next position. I've heard this. Yes.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
No, no, no, no. So the bottom one, but remove, so if you go on- Artorias.com, side solutions, there you go. Yeah, there you go. Bam. Wow, that's a little bit too big. I don't know what happened there. But that's our page. We're on Twitter. Artorias Tech is our Twitter handle. On Instagram, we're Artorias YouTube.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
And so if you go to our Instagram and our YouTube, we are uploading a lot of our Bluff podcast. We call it the Bluff.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
So we have a lot of people from, because we have a lot of experience in the open source intelligence world, we bring a lot of those people because it's just like me. You would be surprised. And I would tell people, don't ever underestimate a college kid or a high school kid, their ability and their knowledge about world topics and what they can cover.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
A lot of the guys who got really famous in open source intelligence started out in high school. For example, me, myself, we did... A lot of cartels, they volunteer work for Borderland Beat. They do awesome reporting on cartels. A lot of them are in college, and they are phenomenal.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
These guys are rock stars. There's so many like, like geo pernicious propaganda. There's so many out there and they are just dedicated. They don't do it for the money. They don't do it for the fame. They just found a passion and that's what they do. And I mean, they're great, but yeah, that's, that's us. We'll make sure to share all our socials with this, but yeah, that would be great.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
Correct. And so- I became kind of like, they put me under the G2, the 1AD G2, because I was in Fort Bliss, El Paso. I was in the collection cell with the G2. And so I did, I believe, it's been such a long time ago, I believe it was one of the CPXs, the command post exercises prior to a war fighter. And so they put me in into the G2 because my long-term objective was to do strategic intelligence.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
And since I was an aid to camp, a lot of the people that kind of decide, the people are like, oh yeah, I know exactly where to put you. I know who you need to be under to get the best training and opportunity for your long-term goal. So I did that. And when I decided to get out, because, you know, I just like, I miss a year of my daughter's life who was just born.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
I was like, I can't, you know, I just started my military career. It was a lot. And I said, you know, I can't do this long-term. They decided what happened was one AD deployed, but since I just came back from deployment, obviously I wasn't gonna go. And they said, hey, there's a battalion S2 positioning open up. Why don't you take it since you're getting out? You've been in the G2. It's crazy.
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Episode 373 -Stefano Ritondale
And even sometimes to the previous point of aid to camp, especially in a deployed environment, because you're following the general everywhere, just by exposure, you learn a lot of staff processes. Oh, I bet. You learn a lot of how everything kind of works. And so they said, hey, why don't we just send you to the MP battalion, the 93rd MP battalion. They're in... for Bliss, and you'll be the S2.