Confessions of Mexico's Most Violent Cartels (Part 2) | Ioan Grillo Ep. 701

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 2 of a 2 part episode)

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Full show notes can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/701

What We Discuss with Ioan:
0:00 - Intro
0:06 - Ioan needs Jordan's lawyer skills
10:13 - The Iron River: Firearms in the US moved to Mexico
19:11 - Are all firearms used by cartels?
28:04 - The firearms trade isn't strategic
33:32 - Why we can't digitally trace firearms
39:21 - Operation Fast and Furious (not the movie)
44:22 - Firearms vs police: checks and balances
48:47 - How El Chapo beat the government
56:22 - The journey of an illegal firearm
1:02:41 - Why it's so difficult to regulate firearms
1:07:51 - 3D printed firearms

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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