EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,032 words- 0:02 – 1:43
Name pronunciation, background, and moving to Mexico City
- JRJoe Rogan
Here we go. Five, four, three, two, one. (hand thuds) First of all, how many people get your name wrong when they try to pronounce it?
- IGIoan Grillo
Well, so many people, I don't even care anymore.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- NANarrator
(laughs)
- IGIoan Grillo
I just, I just... However it comes out an- 'Cause I live in... It's a funny name where I come from.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- IGIoan Grillo
From England, well, growing up, it was a funny name. But in Mexico, it's even stranger name. So I just normally make it Ian. And my second name, Grillo, which in Spanish is Grillo.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- IGIoan Grillo
So everyone I n-
- JRJoe Rogan
They mess that up, too, if they see it spelled?
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Pull this, uh, microphone about a fist from your face, right there.
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
There we go. Um, Ioan, I don't think I've ever heard that name before.
- IGIoan Grillo
There's an actor called Ioan Gruffudd.
- JRJoe Rogan
What's he in?
- IGIoan Grillo
He's in Fantastic Four.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, really?
- IGIoan Grillo
He's the stretchy guy-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, no shit.
- IGIoan Grillo
... in Fantastic Four. So yeah, he kind of... He's made that name a little bit more.
- JRJoe Rogan
A little bit more acceptable? (laughs)
- IGIoan Grillo
(laughs)
- NANarrator
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Um, how did you wind up living in Mexico City?
- IGIoan Grillo
So I, I came to Mexico, or went to Mexico, uh, in the year 2000. And, uh, I kind of messed around for a few years in the UK. Wanted to get into journalism. So I found one way to get into it was to start working in a foreign country, rather than going to my local newspaper and work, and go to a foreign country and start working. And I had a romantic idea about Latin America, thinking I'd be like... I saw the movie Salvador.
- JRJoe Rogan
Ah.
- IGIoan Grillo
You know, Oliver Stone's movie from-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- IGIoan Grillo
... the '80s. I kind of had a, had a, had a romantic idea about running around with guerillas, um, fighting military dictatorships. Um, so I arrived in Mexico in 2000, and got a job at an English language newspaper.
- 1:43 – 2:31
Learning Mexican Spanish and adapting to daily life in Mexico City
- JRJoe Rogan
Mexico City's a wild place.
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's so packed, it's, it's hard to b- I've only been there twice for, uh, UFC events.
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
But every time I'm there, I'm just shaking my head, like, "I can't believe how this traffic works." It's crazy.
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah. 18 years, and I've spent a lot of time in that traffic.
- JRJoe Rogan
Nobody cares about red lights, green lights. They don't care.
- IGIoan Grillo
It's stressful. Everyone cut- wants to cut you up all the time.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- IGIoan Grillo
People shout at you a lot. You have to get used to people calling you, like, pendejo.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- IGIoan Grillo
Cerdo. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- IGIoan Grillo
I tried different tactics, and I just try and relax and not get angry.
- JRJoe Rogan
Did you know how to speak Spanish before you went there?
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah, yeah. So I spent one year in Spain, living in Spain before I went there. I spent a year in the Middle East as well. Um, and, uh... But yeah, I started off, when I arrived, I spoke more the Spanish-Spanish, which is like, "Oye, tio. Coño, tio." And then I-
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- IGIoan Grillo
... changed more to, like, the Mexican-Spanish, which is like, "Oye, guey. Que paso, guey?" (laughs)
- 2:31 – 2:52
How Ioan fell into the crime beat and early narco reporting (2001 era)
- JRJoe Rogan
Right, right, right. Yeah. So when did you start getting into narco journalism?
- IGIoan Grillo
So, look, I arrived, as I say, with a romantic idea about what I might cover in, in, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- IGIoan Grillo
... in Mexico, um, or Latin America. And right away, I realized all that idea of guerillas and military dictatorships, that had, that had gone. That was the last century.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- 2:52 – 5:53
Personal history with drugs: overdose deaths and mental health risks
- IGIoan Grillo
Che Guevara, all that stuff, that had gone. But right away when I arrived, my very first time... First, uh, back in the UK, I grew up around a lot of drugs in the UK. So going back to the, the '80s, I grew up with a lot of people taking drugs. I had a few friends who died from heroin overdoses. Back then, four people I knew died of heroin overdoses. I had a sister who went... who became, uh, schizophrenic, smoking a lot of, a lot of... Well, no. She was... Became schizophrenic, and there'd been a lot of drugs being smoked around that time as well. Uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
Was it pot?
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah. Back then, it was, uh, Moroccan hashish. There's no-
- JRJoe Rogan
There's, there, there is a connection, you know? And we've been exploring that a lot lately. Uh-
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... we, we went into this, uh, marijuana debate between, um, uh, Alex Berenstein and, um, Dr. Mike Hart from Canada, and we talked about it. And I know people that have had that happen to them, where they've had schizophrenic or psychotic breaks because of, uh, just m- massive doses of marijuana. And es- especially people that don't do it, or people that do it too much for too long. It does happen.
- IGIoan Grillo
I, I heard that debate. That's-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- IGIoan Grillo
... one of, one of the reasons why it came to mind. Uh, I mean, I don't know. Uh, a lot of people smoke weed, smoke hash.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- IGIoan Grillo
Uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
A lot of people, it's fine.
- IGIoan Grillo
Uh, now, when, when my sister had her breakdown when she was 18, and I was 16 at the time, and when that came out, it turned out also my, my, my grandmother had an issue with schizophrenia.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- IGIoan Grillo
And I think... I don't know if it was a time bomb waiting to go off-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm, yeah.
- IGIoan Grillo
... or if it was how much the, the, the hash was involved in that. There's other issues as well. So I don't really know the science of it, but... But anyway, going back. So, so I, I've been around a lot of drugs before. Um, so when I arrived in Mexico, (laughs) actually, one of the first... Uh, first arriving in Mexico, I ended up hanging around with some, some people, and they were smoking a lot of crack in, in Mexico. It's one of... some of the first people I met.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- IGIoan Grillo
Um, I was... I went down to the beach, like, backpacking down to the beach, and these people were smoking, smoking crack. And I was like, "This is kind of strange." I didn't know there was people smoking crack down here. So when I got a, a job at the local newspaper, in English, and I just started looking at the crime thing, one of the first stories I did was on the issue of crack being sold locally, and how that linked to, to cartels. And then very soon, just very, very quickly, I just fell in right away. Like I said, a lot of these things happen by accident. I just fell into covering the crime beat. And this is going back to 2001. So 2001 was the same year that Chapo Guzman escaped from prison. Uh, then I was calling a lot then to a great journalist from Tijuana, Jesus Plan Conellas, y- a real legend from Tijuana, who survived a shooting by, by cartels. And, you know, phoning him up all the time, just getting him, you know, to give me information, give me tips. And that was how I really started. One of the... And our big story I did back in those days was, uh, the court-martial of some generals for drug trafficking. Uh, and that was really where it began, back then.
- 5:53 – 7:55
Corruption as 'state capture': police, cartels, and brutality
- JRJoe Rogan
Generals for drug trafficking. How much of an issue is that? Uh, I mean, corruption must be unbelievably rampant.
- IGIoan Grillo
So, I mean, corruption even isn't a strong enough word for it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- IGIoan Grillo
Um, sometimes I call it state capture. I mean, so this is the real beginning, and, and this has been a whole crazy 18 years of covering this stuff. I mean, this is just the very beginning back then. I've seen a whole lot of very crazy stuff in that time. But, like, just to get a sense of how bad the corruption is, or, or what it really means on, on, on the ground level there. Like, there's, uh, policemen. Like, you interview policemen, and you get to know the policemen in a certain town, certain city. Um, and it's hard to know, you know, h- or, or, or military guys or politicians, and, and you wanna believe these are good people. You wanna believe there's good policemen out there who really wanna stop crime. So, there was one policeman, his nickname was Tyso- uh, Tyson. Like Mike Tyson, his nickname was Tyson, 'cause he was a r- a well-built bloke. Well-built guy. And, uh, he was friendly with the press. The guy from Michoacán, friendly with the press. Um, and then it came out that he was actually a drug cartel member, a ranking member in the drug cartel. And he actually confessed, they, they used to have a thing where the police, the, the federal police when they got him, got him to confess on camera. And he confessed not only was he turning a blind eye, not only was he carrying out murders, he was training the young kids how to decapitate people, how to cut people up. And he was explaining in graphic detail how he'd like, you know, how they managed to cut limbs off, how he gets young people to train them to cut limbs off to get them to lose their fear. So, that's the level of corruption, that could be a policeman you're dealing with, and that's really who they are.
- JRJoe Rogan
(sighs)
- IGIoan Grillo
Um, so that's one of the, the crazy things about the corruption down there.
- JRJoe Rogan
Did you have any hesitancy in getting involved in narco-journalism knowing this? I mean, I would imagine that's one of the most dangerous avenues to pursue in journalism.
- 7:55 – 10:49
The drug war ignites: Nuevo Laredo, early warning signs, and escalation
- IGIoan Grillo
So, this was little by little I got involved in covering this. So, like, it, like, going back to 2000 th- this hadn't happened. This war hadn't happened. It was still like a crime issue at that moment. So, I began to cover these things, and then around 2004 I got a job for the Houston Chronicle, outta Houston, Texas. I was covering, I was a stringer covering Mexico for them. And I flew up to, a lot to Nuevo Laredo, and there was a turf war beginning there which is really the beginning of the drug war which has torn Mexico apart. Began on the border with Texas in this city called Nuevo Laredo over the bridge from Laredo, Texas back in 2004. So, there was a lot of interest from the, the, the Texas newspapers what was going on, there was a whole bunch of bodies piling up there. But again, this is going back to these days, and this is kind of innocent looking back, innocent looking at myself then, and innocent looking at what Mexico was like then. They would simply say, "Go to the place," I'd drive up to Monterrey, rent a car, and just drive the car to Nuevo Laredo with, by, by myself. And now people just don't do that, there's just too much crazy stuff going on. But back then it was still like, oh, you can just do that. So, there was this-
- JRJoe Rogan
When you say crazy stuff, like what kind of crazy stuff?
- IGIoan Grillo
I mean, now you can get stopped by an armed group driving on those roads that could, you could just drive along and there could be a, you know, group of guys with guns who could stop the car, get someone out, take s- take you away. I mean, there's a whole... People are a lot more careful about, you know, where you... Now, now when I'm, when you move around the roads you gotta be very careful how you move and how you plan this stuff.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- IGIoan Grillo
You don't just wander by yourself, drive around these places. So, so back then w- when this was happening and, um, there was, uh, these bodies turning up and I was trying to figure out why, and, and I, uh, there was one, uh, guy I interviewed who was the head of Chamber of Commerce. Um, and I talked to him, you know, very interesting guy. About a w- couple of weeks later he became the Chief of Police for the city. And they asked him, they said, "Are you scared?" Um, "You know, are you scared about being killed?" He said, "No, I'm not scared. It's only the corrupt people who get killed." And he was shot dead six hours after he gave that statement. They shot him dead. And that was one of the real markers of something really strange is going on in Mexico. Something is, like, gonna erupt in Mexico. Uh, and then from there it kind of just escalated and escalated, and, uh, um, I started working for other media, Time Magazine, New York Times, different people. And after a while I said, "I can't do this, I can't just write news stories about it, I've gotta write books about this."
- JRJoe Rogan
Hm.
- IGIoan Grillo
Because this stuff is big and it's complicated.
- JRJoe Rogan
It must be immensely complicated. For the v- the people that live there, it seems like there's no escape. I mean, if you, you can't turn to the police, the police are the cartel.
- IGIoan Grillo
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
There's the cartel, the police, all of the politicians most likely if they're alive have to be compromised.
- 10:49 – 14:23
Human cost: kidnappings, mass atrocities, and life around horror
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah. I mean, th- there's been some very, very desperate people, and I mean, there's been some very, there's been some inspirational people as well fighting this. There's been heroes. There are heroes. Um, just to get more of a sense of what that means on the ground as well, uh, uh, you know, and some of the things you see, uh, you know, some of the things that stay with me. You know, for, for a while it was quite romantic covering this. It was like, wow, I'm covering, I'm going to these places where Chapo Guzmán is from. You know, I got up to the village and meet his mother and meet his family. Um, I'm, I'm writing about these, these crazy people. But then you start seeing the, the human pain in all of this. Um, one of many stories that, that, that stick with me was a mother in Monterrey, a schoolteacher. You know, when you have armed guys moving around, they're also, like, uh, really affecting the civil population, attacking the civil population. And one mother, um, she was in her home with her two children in Monterrey, and a, it was, like, in the night just chilling in their house, and then the door broke down, and about 15 guys in bulletproof jackets all came in, f- long arms, just taking stuff from the house. Held the family, you know, pinned them down. And they said to the mother, "Which of your children is the oldest?"... and she was like, she didn't know how to reply. I mean, which of your children are the oldest? How do I re- how do I reply to that? She just couldn't speak. And the eldest son ... She had two sons, one 18, one 15. The 18-year-old w- old was a philosophy student, and he said, um, "I'm, I'm the oldest." She said, "Okay, you're coming with us." And took him away. And the next day, she got a phone call saying, like, uh, "We've got your son. Give us this amount of money, we'll give him back." So she went round to, like, relatives, just got the money. She wanted to get the money right away. She turned up with the money, gave some money, and then they just cut off the call. S- she hadn't heard from him since. And, uh, I had, I mean, seeing her face, the devastation, um, the pain. She said, like, you know, "Just couldn't, couldn't go on with life after that, and just not knowing, not having the closure." And I met her when I went to report on one of the worst atrocities, which was 49 bodies who'd all been decapitated, all had their hands and feet cut off, and all been dumped on a road, and they were taken to the morgue in Monterrey. And I arrived at the, the morgue. I s- I was inside the morgue just smelling the smell of the dead bodies. This kind of weird smell you get from, like, decaying flesh, kind of, like, a sweet smell you get from when you're around those places where you can smell the, the bodies decaying. And I was inside the morgue, and I came out, and she was outside the morgue, and she was trying to see if, if her son might be among those people, among those bodies.
- JRJoe Rogan
(sighs) Wow. Uh, you know, it's, it's so insane that this is right next door to America-
- IGIoan Grillo
(clicks tongue)
- JRJoe Rogan
... and there's so little effort put on doing something about it. Including doing something to mitigate the influence of illegal drugs by making drugs legal.
- IGIoan Grillo
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
I mean, that would be one gigantic step. You're, you're not gonna stop people from doing drugs. I mean, this is an illogical, ridiculous approach. I don't think people should do most of those drugs, but when you make drugs illegal, only criminals are gonna sell those drugs. And this is exactly what you have right next door to America. I mean, it's just unbelievably insane-
- IGIoan Grillo
S-
- JRJoe Rogan
... that there's this amount of crime a drive away from San Antonio.
- 14:23 – 16:04
Economics and history of trafficking: from 1915 to fentanyl and oil theft
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah, and, and talking about that issue of the money and the economics of this.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- IGIoan Grillo
So, I mean, you look at cocaine. So you got ... So you got the ... There was four main drugs. Now it's you've got fentanyl coming in as well, and the dr- and the cartels are making fentanyl.
- JRJoe Rogan
They're making it?
- IGIoan Grillo
Making it, yeah. They're ma- they're making it. Bringing in precursors, making it. There was a lab, one lab ... I was in Nogales, uh, about a year and a half ago. They've, they bust a lab in Nogales, right on the border. They were making it, had the lab there, making the fen- fentanyl and bringing it up here. But as well as that, you've got the other four main drugs historically. Uh, marijuana, uh, heroin, cocaine, and crystal meth. And this goes back 100 years. Like, so Sinaloa, which is the cradle of Mexican drug trafficking. Sinaloa is a bit like Sicily is to the mafia, like Sinaloa is to the Mexican drug cartels, where it began. And it began right ... So you go back to 1914, you had in the US the Harrison's Narcotics Tax Act, when they made, uh, they restricted opium and cocaine in the United States. And from 1915, they began a cross-border trade from Mexico to the United States.
- JRJoe Rogan
So that's when it started?
- IGIoan Grillo
All the way back then. It's over a hundred years ago.
- JRJoe Rogan
(sighs)
- IGIoan Grillo
Some of the very first people doing it were actually Chinese Mexicans. They were Chinese immigrants who'd arrived in Mexico, and they began doing this. They bought opium, um, from, from China, planted it in, in Mexico. And some of the first people receiving it were Chinese Americans. Some of these very early cases. A case from 1916 investigated. There's documents about this case, where there was Chinese Mexicans trafficking to Chinese Americans here in California, and at that time, there was a governor of Baja California involved, um, right back then.
- 16:04 – 28:59
What could actually help: drug policy reform, social work, and policing capacity
- JRJoe Rogan
What is the solution? Is there any solutions to this?
- IGIoan Grillo
Well, (sighs) I mean, it ... I get, you know, I think a lot of people covering this, you get very weary. You wanna see solutions.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- IGIoan Grillo
Um, you wanna find solutions, and you wanna come with that optimism of finding solutions, and, and you wanna justify why you're doing this. Um, what you're doing this for. Not just to tell the stories, but to look for solutions to this. Um, and it gets weary, but, uh, there is three areas I believe there are solutions. First, I do agree with you on the idea of drug policy reform. Again, it is tough uphill battle. I mean, uh, going back to 2012, I wrote editorials about, you know, one of the reasons you should legalize marijuana is because of the marijuana come from Mexico, which goes to cartels, which pays for killers, which pays for corruption. But at the same time, marijuana, a lot of, you know, a lot was legalized in the United States, and the violence actually just got worse in Mexico. So you've also got the issue of heroin, uh, cocaine, um, crystal meth, fentanyl, and you've got the cartels who've gone into a bunch of other rackets now. They steal crude oil. This is a big deal. They steal billions of dollars worth of crude oil, criminals down there, from pipelines. You can-
- JRJoe Rogan
Just tap into a pipeline or something?
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah, you go to a pipeline. You have ... You normally put in two taps. You drill two holes in the pipeline. You drill a hole to, uh, put ... to take the oil out, and you drill a hole to put water in, to try and keep it equa- uh, the, the pressure the same.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh.
- IGIoan Grillo
Don't know if you saw this. A crazy video recently of, uh ... (clicking sound) in a, in a small town in Mexico where a bunch of ... There was a tap open, a really, a really bad tap which the, the oil was just spraying out, and a bunch of people were lining up just to pick up the oil from the pipeline, and it exploded, and just... It was just, like, crazy death toll from-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, I did see that.
- IGIoan Grillo
... from, from, from that, uh... But, uh, but anyway, the ... I do believe in, in, uh, in drug policy reform. We have to talk about this. Has to be on the table. I mean, Americans, there's ... You know, no one knows really what Americans spend on drugs, but there's this survey, uh, which you can find online if you just, you know, tap in, "What do Americans spend on illegal drugs?" And it ... There's an estimate of $100 billion a year.So, you know, that amount of money, I mean, that's an estimate. I mean, it could be right. You know, it's hard to know. It's a very round number-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- IGIoan Grillo
... but like $100 billion a year. Now if you think about that pumping into these cartels year after year, I mean, decades, you know how much of that... You know, if it's 30 billion of that going down to Mexico, then over 10 years, 300 billion, over 30 years close to a trillion dollars-
- JRJoe Rogan
(sighs)
- IGIoan Grillo
... that really creates this, this monster. But in a secondary... So I, and I believe in drug policy reform. I mean, I don't know how... I mean, rehab for everyone who needs it because heroin addicts buy a lot of heroin. So everyone you save from that, you can, uh, you know, you can stop a lot of heroin and a lot of that money which does... Money goes to these people who are doing this stuff. But a second area I believe is, is social work, uh, in the neighborhoods. Uh, like I've talked... I've done a lot of interviews with... particularly with the assassins, with the killers, um, in cartels in Mexico and, and also around Latin America. I've been traveling around Jamaica, um, Brazil, Central America, Colombia talking to a lot of the killers especially. And when I sit down with them, I, I try and get their life story. Like how did they first get into this? 'Cause you're not born doing this stuff. And often... I mean, in some cases th- there's different profiles. There's some of them, uh, you know, there's one, one guy... This is down in Honduras which is also a crazy situation. There's a guy there. I, I'd actually met him before. I'd met him when I was doing some reporting down there back in 2015, and he was driving for us, and he was also carrying a, a gun to help protect us. He was with a journalist who had a, who'd had... who'd been hit before, who'd been actually shot before. And, uh, then I met him again afterwards and got him to tell his story, which is kind of typical of a lot of these guys. And he described how he'd been abandoned as a kid by his parents and had this real hate that he had with the world, like, you know, just fuck the world. Um, and he described the first time that he carried out murders. Um, and it... This was actually the... I mean, he carried out... Later on, he, he doc-... he documented a- all these hits he'd done and decapitations he'd done and this kind of crazy stuff. But the first time he carried out a murder was probably the, the, the freakiest when he was, I think, 14. And they got a, a family. They went into a house 'cause they got, they got a family and they butchered a family. And he described... When he described that and then described later on, you know, how he became a, a hired killer. And the thing about him... Like some of these people you think they're psychopaths. They just... They really, um, don't care. But some of them really do have these conflicts inside their heart. I think he was someone I, I listed back to that interview. And he had... And it's hard to, to balance that, someone who does evil but also has been a victim as well, a victim and a victimizer, and you feel that pain. Since, since then he's himself been, been murdered. Um, but, uh, yeah, he's, uh... He was, you know, one... So how, how do you get social work to reach people from a very young age? Because often they're recruited into organized crime when they're 12, 13 years old.
- JRJoe Rogan
So he butchered this family when he was 14. What... Was he stealing money from them? Was he-
- IGIoan Grillo
So the story with that was he, he said that he was hanging around with these basically street kids and one of the other kids said, "I know where there's some money in a house. We can get some money in a house." So they went in there and killed this family, and it turned out there was no money there. And the reason the other kid had said go there was 'cause he'd actually been living with this family and he said they'd been abusive to him, so he wanted to, like, rev- have revenge on this family. But what was so really sick about this de-... when he was describing it was they had this family and they would... To stop them defending themselves, they would, like, take them one by one, like pin them in a, in a room and take them one by one, like take them out and butcher them, how the other ones didn't really know what was going on. And think... I mean, the action itself, but how, like, teenage kids can think about that stuff. And then later on when he was talking about the, uh, decapitations, he was talking about they get contracts with decapitation inside the co-... Like they say that, "We want this killing. We want you to decapitate a guy. We want this. Doc-... We want to see video of the guy being decapitated. We want that. We want the guy to suffer." And when he hacks the heads off, there'll sometimes still be a moment when... like when the life goes out of them and when the body is still, like, twitching. Like, he says they can still see, like... There's a bit like nerves, almost like a chicken, like a headless chicken. There's a bit... There's a part when they're still, like, twitching a bit even after they, uh, you know, they've lost the kind of se- their connections there.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oof. Now when you're interviewing these people, how nervous are you? I mean, this seems like if you're putting all this stuff down, you could implicate them in some crimes and it seems like it would be very convenient for them to try to get rid of you.
- IGIoan Grillo
So it is... There's a whole bunch of different situations around interviews. Uh, sometimes I've interviewed people in prisons, a lot of time in prisons. Um, you know, this took me years to, to get to a lot of these people. First of all, you know, and I wa-... It wasn't like a... Uh, when I first started doing this I was like, "Well, now how do I get... How do I reach them?" And start going 'round to drug rehab places and talking to people in drug rehab. Um, going into prisons in, in Ciudad Juarez I did a lot of, uh, interviews in a... and in one prison I got to know a lot of prisoners. In the prison in Ciudad Juarez in a Christian evangelical wing there and they were going through this weird Christian, you know, like Christian, uh, um, you know, discovery of God there. And then through the str-... on the street often, like, through contact... I mean, well, all the time through contacts on the street.Um, in, in Honduras, a lot of great contacts with a, a friend who's a, who's a journalist who grew up in these neighborhoods with all these guys. He just knows loads of these guys from growing up. Now, there's different, different things. You know, there have been bad situations. I think anybody covering this has had some bad situations sometime. People get angry, people threaten them, and so forth. But a lot of the time when I, when you talk to people... And one thing is you have to be very... A lot of the time you have to be very stringent about protecting their identity, and really serious about that. Because there's been cases where, various cases, where other people have interviewed killers and shown their identity, either through them showing their face or through like some dumb thing being shown. And they have been themselves murdered, you know, butchered after these... They've given these interviews or, like, other things have happened. They've been threatened or something of their family, or arrested or so forth. So you've really got to protect peoples' identities. S- in a way, in terms of when they talk and stuff, and I don't really feel nervous when I interview a lot of these people. I probably (laughs) feel more nervous here talking to you.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) Why is that?
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah. (laughs) That's just probably 'cause it's like on a, on a, on a big show. It's a diff- a different thing when, when you're like talking to... First, you know, you start with easy questions. Like anything, you start talking about how, you know, how you, you know... People are human, they're human beings and people have got... and people are complicated. And I haven't just interviewed them, I've also got drunk with some of these people and hung around with some of these people, um, for times trying to get closer like, uh, you know, I spent time to try and understand their world a bit more.
- JRJoe Rogan
What's the most time you've ever spent with these people?
- IGIoan Grillo
I mean, several days, uh, several days, yeah. Like, uh, you know, like I mean I'll see them, see them again, hang out, you know, hang out with them, uh, in different places. Not all the time. Sometimes just, you know, sit down and do interviews and, and just leave. Uh, but it's, it's this complicated world. For them it's, it's their normality and as, for them it's normal. Uh, it's, it's what they've, what they've lived, what they've been through, what's happening around them. I mean, this level of murder that's happened in a lot of parts of Latin America now, it's crazy, but in these areas is... And as well you talk to other people who are just on the edge of this or they have family members involved in this and it's just... They're living this. I mean, these are levels of violence, and it's interesting to compare historically these levels of violence, um, because you look at some of the worst cities like San Pedro Sula, Honduras, Caracas, um, Ciudad Juarez, and these are places which have levels of violence which are like way worse than Medieval Europe. A lot of places in Medieval Europe.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oof.
- IGIoan Grillo
I mean, look at the figures per 100,000, because some of them have, you know, over 100 per 100,000, 150 per 100,000. And Medieval Europe a lot of these cities were like 20 per 100,000. So they're way worse now, way worse than the Wild West and like... Now there are some places in the United States that they... like, I mean, I did, I've done some research recently in Baltimore, Maryland, and I was kind of... It's interesting to compare that to Latin America, and that's a high level. That's 40 per 100,000, so that's, that's not as the same level but it's significant.
- JRJoe Rogan
Still more than Medieval Europe?
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow. Baltimore is worse than Medieval Europe?
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah, I mean, I think it's you have to, have to... Some professors them, they might, you know, like you get like, you know, they might be, they might say, "Well, Jerusalem in this time or you know, line..." Look, you got to try and f- you know, it's hard to know, get really deep down exactly and that there was outbreaks of violence and killing in certain places, but-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. But the overall average?
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah, overall average, yeah.
- 28:59 – 51:21
Mexican politics and strategy: Calderón’s crackdown, beheadings, mass graves, and AMLO’s approach
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah. Yeah, so there was f- first this really big escalation happened in 2008. It was the first big escalation.
- JRJoe Rogan
What was the cause of that?
- IGIoan Grillo
So you had... There was a steady build-up that was happening, um, and then in 2006 you had the President, Felipe Calderon declared a military crackdown on drug cartels and after that when there was this big response and things started really getting out of hand. We'd already seen violence escalating before and inc- you know, my idea, my kind of theory behind this is that, um, you had in Mexico back in the 20th century more of a, a top-down, um, centralized government controlling everything. You had the PRI in power and they were, um, basically they were h- controlling it through corruption. So back then they'd have the drug cartels working for them, and an interesting story going back then to the 19- late 1970s, a story in a book called Drug Lord by Terrence Popper who interviewed a, a drug trafficker in the '80s. When he got the, his job as the he- Jefe de Plaza, which is the head of a certain territory, when he got the job, he went with the state police at the time and said, "I want to become the, uh, the head of the plaza." And they took him in and tortured him for two days and like, you know, beat the crap out of him.... put electric shocks on his nuts. (smoke puffs) Kind of one of the- the big torture they do in Mexico. Put water laced with chili in his nose, so kind of like one of these big, so your whole face burns. These are, like, torture techniques they have. And after two days of torturing, he said, "Yeah. Well done." You know, "You survived well. You've got the job." So (smoke puffs) we- you know, what it shows is that the police had the upper hand, the police controlled this. They were like, "Okay. We control this racket and, you know, we can fuck around and torture and kill drug traffickers when we like." Uh, you know, and all up to the presidency. I mean, there was, uh, an- in that time, Carlos Salinas became president in '94. His brother, Raul Salinas, they- they're the Swiss investigated his bank accounts and said he had $500 million in bank accounts, which they, you know, they- they believed it was drug money. So right up to the presidency, this was- was being run.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oof.
- IGIoan Grillo
When Mexico changed to democracy... So when I arrived in Mexico, it was changing to democracy and it was like, "Wow, great. Democracy's gonna happen. Free market's gonna happen," you know, we're in the good days of the 21st century now. But what happened was you lo- political control shifted, so you had a bunch of different political parties, and they were fighting over the drug trade. And, you know, I was one time in Nuevo Laredo when the federal police had a shootout with the municipal police. They were fighting each other probably because they worked for different drug cartels.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- IGIoan Grillo
So that's what started, but then you had the techniques, like the technique of beheading wasn't really a big deal. It was very, very rarely used up until around 2006, and one of the first incidents was in Acapulco in 2006, in about June 2006. Now, it might've been after, inspired by the Al-Qaeda, Zarqawi, you know, video which was shown in full on Mexican TV. Remember when that came out? When they decapitated the guy in Iraq. And they decapitated... At first, it was two policemen they decapitated. Later that year, in September 2006, there was five heads they rolled onto a disco dance floor. And then this thing just became just escalating, just became this kind of, like, using this terror, public terror. So 2006 wi- 2008 was a big escalation, and then 2011, '12 were, like, crazy, and then it subsided a bit and the pub- the violence got a bit less public, and it was more, like, hidden, like, mass grave stuff. Now, the worst mass grave that's been discovered so far, um, was in Veracruz. Now, I've been to the site of it, and it was 250 bodies were found in this mass grave in one place. And it was right next to a housing estate, and there's families... It was so- one of the saddest things was you see- you'll see there kids' bicycles, and basketball hoops, and stuff right next to this. And the field next to that, they'd dug up 250 bodies, and the smell was, like, emanating to this housing estate. (Joe sighs) And it's, like, you know, middle class, the dream of becoming middle class that was the- the kind of something, this housing estate, and right next to it, this violence. But when I say a lot of these stories and (laughs) , I mean, these are crazy stories, but a lot of Me- the weird thing is a lot of Mexico lives a normality around this. It's not what you s- this is not what you see every day. This is, this happens, but there's also just a normality that could just be like you're outside here in- in LA and normal people living normal lives around this as well.
- JRJoe Rogan
What is the response in Mexico? Like, what i- what i- w- w- I mean, after they wanted to have this military action against the cartels, obviously that hasn't really put a dent in it. What i- what i- what's the- the current thought process behind dealing with this?
- IGIoan Grillo
So there- there's been a- there was a bunch of, like, citizen, um, protest movements various times, um, during these recent years, and one of them was a- was a very interesting guy called Xavier Cecilia who's a poet and a writer whose son was murdered. And he, when it first happened, his son was murdered and he just came out and says... The press were there. He's like, "Well, I can't... This is just, like, this is just, you know, Mexico's gone. I can't, I can't deal with this. My son's been killed." And then he began talking in very, you know, and then he, he went to the streets and people were coming out publicly, um, crying. And it was one of the first times there was a realization a lot of innocent people are dying with this. And people come out and, you know, I went to some of these things. People come out crying, family members and sh- actually a sense, "We- we're victims here." Because there was a- for a long time, the sense was simply bad guys killing bad guys, and that wasn't the case. Now, the current president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who just won the election last year and he just took power on December the 1st, so he's got two mixed things. So one of them is this idea of, "The war's over. I'm gonna create peace. We can have forgiveness, reconciliation." And, but it's hard to know what that really means. And his second thing is, "We need to have, um, more of a unified state police." So, like, what I described before about you had local police fighting the federal police. So we gotta have... So he's got this idea now of a National Guard, which is a kind of hybrid between military and police thing around, and that's basically his- his- these kind of two thrusts he's in now. He's only been in power a couple of months. January was still a bad month in terms of murders, uh, in terms of bodies. Last year was thir- more than 33,000 dead last year (Joe scoffs) which is the size of Mexico, so the equivalent of the United States having close to 100,000. You know, imagine what that would mean in, you know, in the United States if you had that many people dying in a year. Um-
- JRJoe Rogan
A month.
- IGIoan Grillo
N- uh, e- e-
- JRJoe Rogan
Or the whole year.
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah. In the year, 100,000 a year.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. 2013.
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Now, when these people are... Wha- when they're being recruited by the cartels, when the police officers are being recruited, the- the big issue must be... Well, there must be two issues, right? Safety, like, if they don't join the cartel they- they'll probably get murdered. And two, the amount of money the cartel would give them would be far more than the government would give them to be a legitimate police officer.
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah, sure. And that- that's like, uh, known famously plata o plomo, like silver or lead. Do you wanna have the silver of the- of the bribe-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- IGIoan Grillo
... or the lead of the bullet?But, but even beyond that, for a long time a lot of these people who join the police, u- uh, like from the beginning they're, you know (laughs) I've talked... I've got, I've got on video, uh... Made a video back in 2010 in Ciudad Juárez of a bunch of, uh, of rappers just hanging around in the middle of all this and one of their friends was saying... and they were talking and these people were saying, you know, some had been done for taking drugs over the border, they had been in gangs and stuff. And one of them was like, "I wanna be a policeman." And, and he was like, "I wanna be a policeman and make some money," you know, basically through corruption, so... (laughs) So there is like... that is the mentality of some of these people joining the police from early on. Another guy, a guy I open- opened the first book with is, is this guy, uh, who, who became a policeman, um, when he was 18. He was basically a hard... a tough guy, played American football, from Durango, became a policeman when he was 18, and in the police, learned to torture and learned to murder. He said, "That's what I," you know, "I learned in the police."
- JRJoe Rogan
(exhales) .
- IGIoan Grillo
And, uh, just at 20, after two years, just left the police and went full-time into crime. It was like... So, you know, you've got a situation where, you know, it's not... (laughs) you know, it's, it's even... it, it was worse even, it's beyond bad, the, the bad that a lot of people might imagine of corruption.
- JRJoe Rogan
God. So all this essentially has escalated from the time you came to Mexico. So when you came to Mexico, it's almost like you got in... I mean, if it was a story, you got in at almost the perfect time.
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
In a horrible way.
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's... I mean, like... (sighs) You know, you d- you don't do these things on purpose. Uh, you know, you don't think... Um, if I'd looked back 20 years ago. I mean, it's 18 years I've been in Mexico now. I had whole... you know (laughs) I, I'd grown up in Mexico in th- in that sense. Uh, you know, you'd never look back and, and think that. And now, in terms of myself seeing this, I mean, it's... I mean, I think for anybody it's, it's p- it's painful, uh, I mean, how you process that level of death, that level of murder, that level of suffering. Uh, it's, it's, uh, it's, it's, it's horrible stuff to see and, and, and it's... You can still have a lot of people, um, separated from that, you know, families, people who are bringing up children and, you know, you wanna separate, you know, kids from that, and so of- often, like, middle class kids in Mexico are quite sheltered 'cause families wanna shelter them as much as they can from, from, from that violence and just, you know, not let them see that side of things.
- JRJoe Rogan
How much of that do you have to deal with in Mexico City?
- IGIoan Grillo
So Mexico City, uh, you know, is about the same murder rate as Houston. So Mexico City's not super violent. Now it's still not super safe, but it's not super violent. So Mexico City is kind of... A- a- and there are parts of Mexico which are f- which are fairly safe. Now, um, Y- the state of Yucatán, you know, where Mérida is, is the same murder level as Belgium. So you've got-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh.
- IGIoan Grillo
... oasis within Mexico where you don't have this level of violence. So Mexico City is... I- it is a great city, Mexico City's a great city to, to live in, in many ways apart from the traffic and the pollution and various things. I mean, there's a bunch of things that are... And I lo- and I love all of Mexico and I love all of, you know, Latin America. I love... Even, even the bad places I still love. I enjoy going to these places, I enjoy meeting people there, you know, hanging out in those areas. There's a lot of good things about them still.
- JRJoe Rogan
But d- dealing with all the horrific tragedies that you, uh, report about and r- experience, do you look for an escape route? I mean, are you, are you looking to get the fuck out of Dodge?
- 51:21 – 1:17:59
Border politics: Trump, the wall, and how drugs actually move
- JRJoe Rogan
What is the attitude in Mexico, uh, uh, especially amongst people who, uh, are studying the narco wars, with all this, uh, build that wall stuff, all this, uh, what's going on in America? There's this- this is w-... very strange right-versus-left polarization over here about whether or not there should be a wall between-
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... the United States and Mexico.
- IGIoan Grillo
Sure. I mean... well, I mean, the thing w-... Mexicans are obviously very anti-Trump in Mexico is- is-... you know, Trump... you know, Trump is very unpopular from the very beginning, you know, when he said, you know, they are rapists. Uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
And murderers, yeah.
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Someone's doing the raping, yeah.
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah. I mean, he's kind of... you know, if you look at surveys, the, the, the level is very low. S-
- JRJoe Rogan
Does anybody like Me-... Trump in Mexico? Is there, like-
- IGIoan Grillo
I've never-
- JRJoe Rogan
There's always contrarians somewhere.
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah. I mean, I've, I've seen numbers like it's... you know, people say, like, I don't know, 80% or something think he's terrible, so it means there must be a 20% somewhere who don't. I haven't met a Mexican who's been, like, pro-Trump.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- IGIoan Grillo
I never... I never have. I met a Salvadoran who was pro-Trump one time in, in... he'd, he'd a guy being deported, and he was like, "I think you'll get... you know, this guy Trump is gonna turn out to be a great president." So, so I- I see that. But, you know, Me- Mexico is very, very anti-Trump. In terms of the wall, I mean, there's... you know, there's... in terms of what, uh... in terms of the smugglers, I remember I was talking to a smuggler in Nogales about this, w-... and he was describing he- he'd smu-... he was from Nogales, from, uh, a neighborhood called Buenos Aires which is right on the border with, uh, the United States. You know, there's Nogales, Sonora, Nogales, uh, Arizona. So, Nogales, um, Sonora, yeah, Nogales, Arizona. And he was from the neighborhood right on the border there. And he described that he first took people over the border to the United States back in the 1980s when he was at school. He was at high school. And the reason was there w-... that time, it was just an old fence, and there was a hole in the fence they used to go through into the United States and go back into Mexico, just an old wire fence. And the first time he took people through, people would arrive from southern Mexico, and say, you know, "How do we get into the US?" And he'd say, "Oh, you know, this way," and they give him a tip. He said the first time, he got the equivalent of about 50 cents was what he made to take people to the United States, 50 cents. Nowadays, the cost of going into the US is $5,000. That's what you pay to go illegally into the United States, 5,000 bucks. So, he was saying, "Wow, look at that increase." Every time that the US puts more security, it means it's more expensive. When it's more expensive, that means more money going to criminals which means there's n-... an industry doing it. So, now, the cartels make a big percentage of that money of human smuggling into the US. Um, but, like, in terms of the wall, I mean, the, uh... when, when Tr-... Trump first came in, he had the line that Mexico's gonna pay for it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- IGIoan Grillo
Uh, and, and then there was this, kind of, line, you know, right at the beginning, he c-... you know, he threatened the Mexican president saying, "If you- if you don't agree to the... pay for the wall, then why are you gonna come and meet me?" And then, it was like, wow, he's really gonna try and shake down Mexico for, like, billions of dollars. He's really gonna try and do that. Uh, and that was kind of scary moment then, I think from the point of view of Mexico. When he first got to power, it was like he's gonna do that, and then he's gonna deport three million, and he's gonna, you know, he's gonna, um, kill NAFTA. Actually, those things haven't really come to pass. Actually, if you look over the last couple of years of Trump, he hasn't really hit Mexico very hard.
- JRJoe Rogan
So, the concern was that he was going to take money that should be allocated to other ways it's gonna help Mexico, and he was gonna try to take that and use it to build the wall?
- IGIoan Grillo
I, uh, f- I mean, no one really knew. When he first came in, he was like, "I, uh, Mexico's gonna pay for this wall."
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. The wall just got 10 foot higher, remember that? Yeah.
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah, and he was like, he was like, you know, "How are you gonna do that? You're gonna, you're gonna start threatening Mexico militarily and say, 'Give us money?'" I mean, it was kind of like a, like a sh- is it, is it a shakedown? You gonna do a shakedown?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- IGIoan Grillo
It was kind of, it was kind of a crazy diplomatic thing when he first got in, so that was kind of scary for a moment from the point of view of Mexico. But I think, after you look at the last couple of years, he hasn't really hit Mexico with that. Now, if he wants to build the wall, now obviously, there's a, there's the big fuss in, in terms of the spending here. But if he wants to build it, uh, or extend it, 'cause there is wall in sections of the border already. If he wants to extend it, you know, it won't stop a lot of the hard drugs. Uh, I mean, if you look at heroine, cocaine, crystal meth, high value drugs, they normally go through the ports of entry.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- IGIoan Grillo
So-
- JRJoe Rogan
Shipping?
- IGIoan Grillo
Yeah. I mean they go-
- JRJoe Rogan
Boats?
- IGIoan Grillo
Oh, oh, oh, or through the, through the ports of entry, through like, uh, I mean you have, uh, through in cars.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- IGIoan Grillo
Cars, trucks. I mean, you, you go through... If you look at, um, the Laredos, Laredo ............................ One of the reasons that was a big fight and war started there in Mexico is because that's a very valuable territory. There's something like 8,000 trucks go over that border every day. Now, if you have 8,000 trucks, how many of those can you search in a day? And also, the way they can hide this stuff in trucks, they can hide drugs in like, a metal... They can put them in, in, in some kind of metal container, seal it up, solder it up, put a bunch of stuff so it doesn't smell. So, somebody has to say, "I'm gonna open that with a blowtorch." I'm not just searching. I have to rip that vehicle apart-
Episode duration: 2:06:28
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Transcript of episode edZR_nPp1l8
