Shawn Ryan Show
Peak Points | "I Was Covered in Blood" - Terrifying Moments as a Police Officer
Fri, 31 Jan 2025
We’re revisiting Episode #07 with Ed Calderon, a former police officer in Mexico who dedicated his career to combating cartels and organized crime. This recap highlights Ed's extraordinary insights into survival, security, and the challenges faced on the frontlines of law enforcement in one of the world's most dangerous environments. Shawn Ryan Links: Spotify - Full Episode Apple Podcasts - Full Episode Ed Calderon Links: Website - https://www.edsmanifesto.com Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/edsmanifesto Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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How do you cope? So we just got in a, you know, Mexican standoff with them. And I was covered in blood. My clothing was covered in blood. Why do you think there were no shots fired? We were being hunted. Well, the older guy said, the body's a gift. Kind of being recruited by the cartel. That's when I realized that there's no winning here. Not like this. I resigned that day.
She said, there's no such thing as going back home, man. Either you change on your way back to home, or the home you left changes when you're gone, and you don't recognize it when you come back.
How long into your career, into your law enforcement career in Tijuana did it take for it to become real? Where you're like, this isn't a fucking game.
As soon as I got out, probably the second day on the job, we were kind of spread out in Baja State. And I got to see... It was immediately the no fucks given by the cartels. So I remember me and probably eight other guys moving through downtown Tijuana in full kit, driving around in some marked vehicles, and getting the order to stop from the lead car that was in front of us.
And we parked aside, and everybody... ran out of the cars and adopted defensive positions. And a convoy of probably, I'd say probably somewhere around 15 vehicles just passed right next to us. All of them, a few of them armored. All of them with AK-47s. Some of them had federal police uniforms. Some of them had army uniforms. We didn't know who they were.
We were getting calls from the 911 service they have down there from the municipal police that they were municipal cops, but they clearly weren't municipal cops. So we just got in a Mexican standoff with them. Nobody shot around, but they just passed by us. We called for support from the local police and nobody showed up. How many of you guys were there? Probably nine. Nine? What's that, two cars?
That's two cars, yeah.
And they had 15 fucking vehicles.
Yeah, so that's when I realized that there's no winning here. Not like this. Fuck, man. There's no winning, not like this.
Why do you think there were no shots fired?
They didn't feel threatened by us. They didn't have any fear. So they just passed by and they actually went to a local little restaurant there and adapted positions around it, had dinner, and then went back to their cars and left. No support came on our end. So it's one of those, that's when you realize how fucked you are and how no support and how there's just no backing there.
This was before the Felipe Calderon administration. slowly but surely things change. We started getting more support, started getting more vehicles, more people coming in. We started working directly with the military and directly with some federal operational police forces. Eventually getting fear put into the opponent, the enemy, the cartel guys. It took some time.
At the start of it, it was just hopeless. Just hopeless.
Yeah.
Going through the motions, I think it took about... Year into it that a few of my friends were killed they used to they used to rent out hotels for us to stay in and We had this buddy system going on So if you wanted to go outside you have to have one of your one of the buddy system, right?
But you would have to inform that you were going out They didn't inform they went to the store thought it was easy. So they cross the street went to this convenience store and they got picked up by Some cartel guys dressed as federal agents. They had the blue uniforms and everything with the patches, everything, like down to every detail. And they were, you know, they were taken.
Zip-dyed and put into a van. They were found 24 hours later. One of them had his ID screwed to his forehead. We're being hunted.
Yeah.
Yeah. That's when, like, paranoia.
Less than a year.
That's less than a year. I came out of there in a generation of 32 people. And a lot of them are gone. Uh, but those were the first really close ones to me that I saw sleep, but just leave in a horrible way. Um, they're all young, you know, like I knew, I knew the, like I just been to a, to a party with the girl, and I met the girlfriend of one of them.
It was a thing that I told them, don't marry, don't get girlfriends, because you don't want to leave widows. Just for perspective, it's a thing to be ashamed of or to hide if your profession is a cop, or at least it was back then.
Damn.
So because we're not the... depending on where you were, cops are despised.
Yeah. So kind of wrapping up your career, you talk about kind of being recruited by the cartel. And I kind of wanted to go a little deeper into that. And I would imagine that you were recruited several times or had friends, you had already said that you had friends that had been recruited out of the police or maybe the military and into the cartel.
I mean, the offer was, it was an offer, you know, it was always, they were always, you would always get intermediaries approaching, you know, like, Hey, Ed, like, this is, this is, this is much money. All it takes is for you to work with us, you know, but you, it's, it was obvious to anybody, you know, as soon as you take an offer like that, you're, you're owned, you're theirs. If you fuck up,
If you're not useful or if somebody finds out you're working for somebody that they're not a part of, you'll either get arrested or get killed by the rival group that you're working against or your career ends. So I got a lot of offers, a lot of them. I never took any of them. A lot of my friends and a lot of the people that I used to work with did.
Or eventually we'll put it into a position where there was no choice. Plata or plomo, silver or lead. Colombian term, but it's popular in Mexico. Another code for it was one finger up and one finger down. What do you want? You want plata or plomo? You want to be on the ground or you want to stay up here in the world of the living? I wasn't greedy.
There's a lot of people that went into policing in Mexico that wanted to find a million dollars and bury it in a wall or something or just be on the payroll of somebody. I remember going to some of the meetings at the office and seeing some new Hummers outside and some of the guys owned. It was kind of scratching my head at it. A lot of us went through a certification process called CALEA.
It's an American certification process. And with that, you know, a lot of confidence exams, polygraph testing, all this type of stuff, all of us went through it. A lot of people got kicked out or fired after they went through that process, which to us, to me, you know, I passed, so I stayed on. So I figured that all the people that had passed stayed on. They were on the up and up.
But people can be corrupted, like, from one day to another, right? So we were careful about everything, but I felt a bit better that everybody was going through it. Administration ends, another administration comes in, and a landmark case declares everybody that was fired based on the polygraph exam or the confidence exams as unconstitutional.
And all of a sudden you have six years' worth of people that were kicked out of the job coming back into the job, their wages being paid forward, and you had people that were suspected of seeing a lower cartel participation in the office now back at the office. So it got really bad. And, you know, basically brought into the office all the work that I was doing ended.
I got an offer to work for a single side of it, basically. They told us, hey, remember you're working here? Yeah. Well, we're going to work against these guys over here only. And we want you to come in. Okay, let me think about it. Basically, we want us to work against one side, which means you want us to work for this side.
Yeah.
I resigned that day. There was just no getting out of it or squirming out of it or going somewhere else. I didn't have any. All the people that I knew within high-level government were gone because the administration changed. All the people that I knew in leadership in the office were moved around, and I just had no choice.
So I went outside, got my resignation printed out, signed it, handed everything in, in a duffel bag, handed in my MP5, my gun, my badge, everything, radio. I got myself into a car, called some of my friends, my American friends. Actually, two of them went down there, kind of helped me out to get out of there. Marines. God bless the United States Marine Corps. And they helped me cross the border.
Family in tow by this point, which was probably the hardest part.
I know everybody out there has to be just as frustrated as I am when it comes to the BS and the rhetoric that the mainstream media continuously tries to force feed us. And I also know how frustrating it can be to try to find some type of a reliable news source. It's getting really hard to find the truth in what's going on in the country and in the world.
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I had choices in the U.S. that I didn't have in Mexico.
It sounds like China's taken a major interest in the cartels in Mexico. And I've operated around China overseas several times. And those motherfuckers are just as ruthless, if not more, than some of the cartels. Why is China's interest in Mexico becoming so strong?
It's your Achilles heel as a country. It's your number two largest consumer of American products in the world. It's a very destable place that's getting destabilized even more. So there's this whole weird thought process that Americans have that the cartels are getting their fentanyl from China from some sort of criminal element within China. Let's be clear.
Nothing comes out of China, nothing happens in China without Chinese state being involved or knowing about it. This is a place where Big Brother is the real thing, right? Everybody's monitored. You saw it during the COVID shutdown. You saw it with the way they're handling the Uyghur population. So nothing coming out of China is coming out of China without them knowing so.
So all that fentanyl being brought out of China into Mexico that's being put into heroin or some of these fentanyl fabrication sites that are being found in Mexico now with clear instruction by Chinese laboratory specialists, that's not a private entity. That's not... The triads, or that's not a criminal activity. That's a state, Chinese state sponsored activity.
It's clear state to anybody that kind of looks into this. One thing is regional destabilization. That usually happens when they want something from that country. So one thing happened politically within the US and Mexico relationship, the Trump phenomenon, right? Trump came into office and said, we're going to take a lot of our business out of Mexico. I'm going to bring it back.
That was one of the things that he said that was going to happen and did happen. A lot of businesses took their plants, American business took their plants and companies out of Mexico. Instead of it affecting Mexico in a negative way, Chinese plants and Chinese companies supplanted them immediately.
No shit.
So something happened. in that interval where somebody on their side figured out that's probably a mistake. And things started balancing out.
Interesting thing to note, we currently have in Mexico a leftist president that is open chavista, that's open Maduro supporter, but somehow there's an open and very friendly relationship with the US when it comes to the president and Trump and the president down there.
I think Trump is very much aware of the danger that Mexico is in with the Chinese influence and the foreign influence within the country. Another factor that doesn't get talked a lot about is that Mexico has probably the largest mineable deposits of lithium right on the border.
And China, through a Canadian company, actually won the rights to mine that a few years back, and their mining rights got canceled. And I'm not going to go into Alex Jones territory, right? I mean, the conspiracy part of it. Right where that mining discovery was made, that's where the Mormon massacre happened. So it's a key place and things happen there.
It's a very strange kind of environment for all the influences and all the pushing and pulling that's happening in that area. Some of the people that I've talked to...
the security field some of the people that i've talked to in security field outside of the friendly neighbors of the us like uh in mexico there's a lot of cuban uh intelligence uh services uh service operations going on all over the place just like places like venezuela you can see a clear partnership and influence with china there right it's in their best interest to gain ownership and control over a place like mexico which is going currently going through a
through a lot of bad stuff, a lot of crime, a lot of destabilization. There's whole swaths of Mexico that are controlled by cartels. The new generation cartel, I think, in a way, is a product of that outside influence. It's the only cartel that grew during the COVID epidemic shutdown. That tells me that there's some sort of outside influence from China there.
Are you seeing a lot of Chinese... coming into Mexico and kind of setting up shop?
The largest, one of the largest cash seizures was done on a guy, Jen Lee Saigon, a Chinese-Mexican national, somewhere in the vicinity of $100 million cash found at his house. He was trafficking fentanyl legally and meth precursors into the country. There's some sort of paperwork legality, so there's some shady stuff going on there.
How long has this shit been going on with China?
As soon as the U.S. got a taste for meth, I think that's probably the start of it.
When was that, 10 years ago?
Probably a bit more further back than probably 15 years ago.
15 years?
Yeah, and then this has just been exponentially growing.
Is it weird? How do I phrase this? Are you seeing more and more Chinese people? Is it becoming like a common thing to see?
One of the largest communities of Chinese nationals are growing all along the border.
Wow.
Right. So, I mean, again, this is, I mean, this is not something, it's not something in the realm of conspiracy. Like if you can, this is clearly happening out in the open in a lot of regards. And people can research this and see it for themselves.
To deny that the largest cartel in Mexico has grew during the COVID epidemic because they clearly had a supply chain from China is to deny what's right in front of your face. To deny that more and more Norinco-made military-grade stuff is popping up in print places in Mexico is also missing something that's in front of your face.
And to deny that, so how many people die from fentanyl related issues here in the U.S.?
Tons.
If you want to confront a military, the U.S. is a superior military force. How can you corrode that?
It makes perfect sense. Generationally. And the thing with China is they're fucking extremely effective. No way. At whatever they do. No way.
They have a lifetime president.
Yeah. One being they don't fucking play by rules either.
Yeah.
And China will come in and they'll open a whorehouse immediately to start gathering intelligence because- People are going to go to the fucking whorehouse. They're going to fuck a Chinese hooker. The hooker is going to milk them for information. The information gets to where it needs to go. It happens like that.
It's the Cuban intelligence services that are operating all over Central America and specifically Venezuela. That's how they act. People are playing checkers with these guys that are playing chess. And they play the long game. That's something I think the U.S. doesn't get. Example, China has a lifetime president. Cuba has a lifetime regime with the Castros.
They're playing a really long game against a country that has elections. in politics change every four, eight years. And they see the clear line and divide. So, I mean, there's blood in the water. And I think they can smell that.
Everybody's taking advantage of it.
Yeah. And again, foreign eyes. I'm new here. I'm trying to earn my way into becoming an American. But I still have that outside perspective. People getting offended by the whole Chinese virus wording or China isn't the villain and the country and people kind of coming into the defense of that.
People within the NBA wanting to speak up about China because the Chinese are one of their best clients as far as buying some of the rights to watching some of these NBA games. Disney. Disney. I mean, you can't say anything wrong, but how surreal is it that you can't speak critically about China if you work for the NBA? I mean, that is outside of the realm of what I thought being an American was.
Yeah.
Right? So I don't know. It's a weird time. But I think that's... they're clearly waging some sort of long-term war campaign against the U.S., and Mexico is being utilized as a tool for that.
How do you cope with all the shit that you've seen? We talked about some of the stuff you've seen. We've talked about the disposing of bodies and some of the gruesome stuff that you've seen the cartel do down there. We covered the fact that you've gone on 2,700 fucking hits.
There's no numbers. It's just a blur of years of blurs. I don't know how many of those
Well, you know, nine years.
That whole experience. Humor. Yeah. A big part of it, I think. One of the things I always recognize with all the people that I meet that have, you know, people like you that have an experience base. Other people like that that had kind of went through their own thing. There's certain commonalities that I see in people like that. Humor is one of them.
Usually I can tell a lot about somebody if they're They don't have a sense of humor. They take themselves too seriously. There's something amiss there. Yeah. Humor is one of those big things that has helped me out. It's a good mask.
Yeah.
It's a good cloaking device, humor.
It helps get through the misery when you're in the middle of it, too.
I had this one of my closest friends when I was working. His name was Haramiyo. very infamous name. I've kind of made him famous. Um, it's my way of keeping him alive. Uh, he was one of the older guys that I worked with. He was a mess. I mean, he was a dumpster fire inside of a dumpster fire of a person, but he was very loyal and it was a very good guy.
It gave me some of the biggest laughs in my life, usually unintentional, you know? Um, He, uh, he, he, he'd always kind of basically, you know, keep me laughing. Um, he, he would push me into going into weird places and kind of getting out of my comfort zone and just, just taking every day as if it's the last one. Um,
We went on some weird adventures, including one that included a donkey show, which we won't get into. And we would always get shit-faced drunk every time we would come back from something. There was a... There's a word that I discovered or learned about up here in the U.S. called PTSD. It's not a word that we know down there in Mexico.
There's no concept of a veteran or a support network for people that go through the experiences that I went through. There were a lot of people that go through those experiences down there. There's no talk about that. There's a sense of machismo. You just take it. It's fine. Just don't go crazy. So you'd get a few days off. You get to leave and you would go get drunk.
and come back and he would get asked if you were okay and he would lie your ass off and say yes and just go through with it, go through the motions. I'm into history and I like reading about other warrior cultures and people that did things that they had to do. You know, PTSD has always been with us. It's been, this is what you talked about, your experience, what I'm talking about.
We're not talking about anything new. This is the history of the world. But I think there's something happened culturally that separated us from how people used to handle some of these things or how some people would talk about some of these things.
uh from uh you know spirit quest as they used to kill them or finding yourself or going off on these pilgrimages or you know whatever form they took uh ceremony um you know a ceremony is simply
uh and performing an act with a symbology just to convince your subconscious mind of something so from going to mass and eating a cracker that's supposed to be the body of jesus and drinking wine that's supposed to be the blood of jesus there's a symbology there um
To getting handed a silver coin at the start of a leadership position and getting told that you're going to get another one because you go into it knowing it's going to end. Yeah.
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I think some of those things are missing in some of our kind of modern way of approaching some of these things. Some of these things have been amputated from us. We're suffering from a phantom limb syndrome when it comes to some of these things and what happens after. Like I grew up having parties at the cemetery during Day of the Dead.
I get a weird feeling every time I travel up here and I see empty cemeteries with no people there. It's like a forgotten space. There's no relationship there. I don't know. I think that whole culture of suck it up, be a man, go through it. I get that. It worked.
It worked. It fucking worked. It works when you're in. It works when you're in it. And it makes you effective. But when you're off the bus. When you're out, you're fucked.
Yeah. Yeah, my mom used to say that. I'll give that quote again. I went through a horrible, a few bad situations, but I think one of the first ones, the war that I fought was at home. with an enemy that spoke the same language that I did. Every now and then we would share funerary homes with the enemy.
The counter guys were being mourned over on that side of the street and we were having our services for our guys over here. It was different in that way. They had a very horrible thing happen. Very traumatic. I lost a few people. And I was covered in blood. My clothing was covered in blood. My sneakers, my socks, feel in my toes. And blood has a tendency to kind of dry out and crust a little bit.
I remember I wrote the reports that I had to write and talked to the people that I had to talk and I was told to go to the hotel and wash up and come back the second day. I got in the car and drove straight home, like unconsciously, just drove to my parents' house. I drove probably three hours in the night straight there. I showed up sometime in the early mornings and my mom opened the door.
She didn't say anything. She sat me down, took my clothing off, put in the washer, and made me some coffee. She didn't ask anything. The next morning, I passed out for a bit. And she asked me, what do you want to do? I said, I want to go home. She said, there's no such thing as going back home, Ed.
Either you change on your way back to home or the home you left changes when you're gone and you don't recognize it when you come back. So she told me going back home is that trains left the station. There's no going back home. So you have to figure out what that looks like for you next. That was very mind-altering. Yeah. She lived through a lot herself, so she was very wise. Sounds like it.
She... In her own way, she told me to suck it up. I stood up and I remember smelling my clothes. They were like downy fresh, you know. She bagged me a lunch, got in the car. I saw all the missed phone calls on my cell phone. People were angry. I went back and faced the music. Told me, why don't you go? I said, I just need it. I just need it in a moment. I got reprimanded for leaving.
Damn.
But you know, it, it was, uh, I realized that, um, there was no going back home. So that gave me focus on going straight, uh, surviving, figuring out what that, uh, where that road would lead me. That was aimless.
It fucking changes you.
Yeah.
How long did it take for you to realize your mom was fucking right on the money?
probably a few days after she passed away. She struggled for a long time with a few issues. And before she went, she told me to leave that job. leave that thankless job. And that's not, that's no longer the war you should fight. That's not your war anymore. Uh, she passed away and, uh, I did a lot of self-reflection. Again, I got two days off to mourn my mom. Yeah.
Um, she got to meet my kid, which I think was, that was very soothing to my, uh, mourning process. And, uh, Everything kind of aligned after that. She passed away, and a few things kind of shifted politically down there, and I had to leave. She gave me that push at the end, I think. I remember thinking back to that moment, and I wrote it down. I've shared that openly a few times.
Every time I smell that morning coffee, I remember that moment. It kind of brings me back to that. weird moment where there's no more innocence. You know, you're facing your mom and you're not, you're not what you were. Yeah.
Yeah. I know that feeling. Sorry to hear that, but you know, sounds like she was looking out for you, man. Yeah. You know, but, and sounds like she still is after she passed.
She's always here. Everything I do, she's always been a big inspiration. She's one of those teachers that you don't recognize as a teacher until they're not there anymore. One of the things she used to do and push me to was volunteer work. We would go and feed some of the Some of the people at the Tijuana Canal, heroin addicts, she gave me the eyes to see humanity, even at the lowest levels.
I remember one of the first self-defense classes I gave was through a church group that would work with some of the prostitutes in Tijuana. And that was my mom pushing me to do that. You know, all this cool shit. You think you're some expert and stuff like that. Go teach them. They need it. She gave me eyes.
Instead of dehumanizing people, I think that's one of the biggest things she gave me was the human factor so I can I could relate to people and talk to people, despite that they were trying to kill me.
Only a few moments later, I could sit them down, give them a phone, have them phone maybe a family member, tell them they're okay, give them a cigarette, give them a swig of tequila, and talk to people. That's a powerful armor that she gave me with that. And it's something that I've been using to try and process that whole, that whole life that I left behind.
Again, the world has ended for me a few times over.
Yeah.
So part of my process to kind of, there is no getting better. There is no healing. There's There's learning how to live with things. There's learning how to find a new normal, how to find a new center or a new base. That's what I think I'm kind of looking towards.
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