Ben Rhodes

And it was a split from the Sinaloa cartel, which a lot of your listeners probably have heard of as one of the largest cartels.

And when people think about a cartel and a drug cartel in Latin America, they think about

Pablo Escobar or like the movies, right, what we saw in Narcos Mexico or something like that.

And that has changed quite a bit.

These are much more sort of fragmented organizations.

They have a lot of different like verticals that operate.

They operate like a corporation and they are multinational.

This one was as well.

Mencho operated a massive empire that reached down deep into South America and competed with Sinaloa and other criminal organizations for control of ports as far away as Ecuador.

And they had global relationships.

This guy was – for all the kind of – the image of this guy is –

sort of somebody who hides in the shadows, he had a sprawling network.

And he was very powerful.

These organizations, by the way, earn typically the GDP of a small country per year.

These are not small.

These are in the billions, multi-billion dollar organizations.

Yeah, like Nueva Generacion, the new generation, had a – their approach was – I mean basically their business model was to be more violent than any other organization, to terrorize their competitors and to get immediate attention.

acquiescence by local authorities and civilians alike.

And so absolutely.

And they wanted that broadcast.