Ben Rhodes

regions in Iran with ethnic minorities, the country itself could fracture.

If you talk to people in the region, one of the things that you hear in terms of concerns is what we're seeing is that Iran will create chaos in the region and its responses as they've done.

But you also hear concern about a potential fracturing of Iran that leads to significant refugee flows into Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, up into Europe.

So there are lots of things that could go wrong here.

And it's not clear what the best case scenario is that they're even pointing towards.

Thanks, Rachel.

So he was the head of the cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación, CJNG.

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.