Confessions of Mexico's Most Violent Cartels (Part 1) | Ioan Grillo Ep. 700

Ioan Grillo is a contributing writer at The New York Times specializing in crime and drugs. He is the author of El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency; Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America; and Blood Gun Money: How America Arms Gangs and Cartels. (This is part 1 of a 2 part episode)

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Full show notes can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/700

What We Discuss with Ioan:
0:00 - Intro
0:06 - Why Ioan left the UK to report on the west
2:17 - Covering the violence of the cartel
9:27 - Ioan tells some stories about the cartels
19:01 - Finding 49 bodies
31:32 - Why the cartel hasn't gotten Ioan
36:28 - The Sicario kids
43:53 - Scarily cheap hitmen
48:41 - Why you can't just eliminate kingpins
56:04 - 16x more cop fatalities in Mexico than the US
1:01:22 - What is the solution

Mexican cartels are infamous for their ruthlessness in carving out whatever piece of the $300 billion annual illicit drug trade they can. This means waging war against one another, as well as terrorizing the populace unlucky enough to call a contested town home. The police can’t be trusted to serve and protect them because, if they’re not on the take from the cartels, they’re certainly outgunned by them. Thousands of innocent people disappear every year as pawns in whatever games the cartels decide to play — children often recruited to carry out the bloodiest, most gruesome work while their parents and relatives wind up in mass graves.

For 20 years, journalist Ioan Grillo has been immersed in this world of nonstop cruelty and chaos, resulting in two books: El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency and Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America (we’ll get more into his third and most recent, Blood Gun Money: How America Arms Gangs and Cartels, in the second part of this two-part episode later this week). Here, Ioan shares the horrors he’s witnessed over the past two decades and tries to make sense of it all while retaining his own humanity.

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