The Jordan Harbinger Show
1302: Mariana van Zeller | The Drug Cartels Running Small-Town America
24 Mar 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.
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Today on the show, cartels in small-town America, gangland executions in places with one stoplight and a Dairy Queen. Today's guest is one of those people whose job makes some of us envious and the rest of us grateful for our little cubicles.
My friend Mariana VanZeller is a journalist and the host of Trafficked on National Geographic, a show where she just casually hangs out with cartel members, human traffickers, armed robbers, people who would... absolutely murder most of us within five minutes.
She's been embedded, if you can call it that, with drug cartels in Mexico, followed human trafficking routes from Vietnam into China, investigated rehab scams that literally kidnap Native Americans and lock them up in houses, and filmed armed heist crews in South Africa who blow up cars like it's Fast and Furious, but without the CGI. Oh, and that's just season five of the show.
And somehow through all of that, she's still empathetic, curious, shockingly calm, and even when the people she's interviewing are wearing skull masks, carrying automatic rifles, or just casually describing crimes that make your skin crawl.
We're gonna explore why cartels are operating in small town America, why commercial airlines are actually some of the biggest drug traffickers, how journalists stay alive in places where they routinely get murdered, and why some of the most disturbing crimes happening right now aren't happening in dark alleys. They're happening in strip malls and rehab centers.
Also, she hosts the Hidden Third podcast, which you should absolutely be listening to if you like this show, but wish it involved even more international crime and moral ambiguity. This episode gets dark, it gets uncomfortable, and it's one of the most fascinating conversations I've had in a long time. I really like Mariana, and I know you will as well. Here we go with Mariana Van Zeller.
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Chapter 2: Why are drug cartels operating in small-town America?
Yeah, yeah.
And they've got their helicopter on standby, and yours is in Washington, D.C., if they understand why you're calling— Who gave you authority? No, no, no, I followed the cartel here. Okay, I suggest you leave.
Yeah. You know what was so interesting about that story is that in order to get access to the cartel in the U.S., we actually had to go down to Mexico and gain permission and have them say yes. And so we spent quite some time in Sinaloa and met a lieutenant and all these other people. people involved.
And eventually it was another member of the cartel that had given us access to an operation in Washington state. And there was some sort of arrests and that fell through. And so then it moved to the lieutenant. Basically, when you go down to Mexico, you have to meet several people, particularly if you're trying to get access to something in the United States and hoping that something will happen.
So we met all these people and there was all these possible options, but then nothing worked out. And then the last one we met was this Lieutenant, you could see in the episode, he's like all jittery and it was like one of the craziest scenes meeting him. But we had like 15 minutes with him and then the Marines were coming and they all got nervous and wanted to leave.
But the last minute asked him, can we get access to your operation in the United States? Because a lot of these groups have people that work for them in the U.S. Obviously, the U.S. is the end goals where they're sending their drugs. And so eventually he said, OK, we've got you. And it was all set up and we were supposed to meet them in Minnesota. And so we traveled to Minnesota.
We're like, we're not a huge team, but we are six people and you've got lots of gear. And I'm shooting 10 episodes every year. We get there and then we waited and waited and waited for days. I'm like, I never showed up. And then finally we get a call and he's like, actually. That was a decoy. And we are in another state that you're not allowed to disclose, but come and meet us here.
So then we had to do like a company move to this next place and just hope that they'd be there.
You think they were watching you in that place the whole time to see if you were meeting with the cops like they didn't show up?
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Chapter 3: How does Mariana Van Zeller gain trust with dangerous sources?
And they're wearing like a skull mask. And I'm like... Are these guys picking this out? I was like, no, the crew must pick these out because they're not like, yeah, hold on. We got to go to Walmart, Mariana, and get some masks and we want cool ones. They didn't have any in the local targets. You got to bring them.
However, there was one guy who was like a cook in the United States and he had a ski mask on that said, yes, daddy. And I'm like, who bought that?
What was this one?
It was the one about the Trank Dope.
The Trank Dope.
And there's a guy with a ski mask that says, yes, daddy, embroidered on the front.
Okay, so that was his.
That had to be.
That was his mask. So a lot of the times we do bring disguises, but a lot of the time, because there are situations in which they say yes, they agree to be filmed and then we get there and they don't have disguises and then they decide not to do it. So we started bringing our own stuff. We even bring long sleeve t-shirts, disguised tattoos and glasses and gloves and all of it.
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Chapter 4: What challenges do journalists face when covering cartel activities?
It got worse. He's sitting down in front of me and telling me how the LGBTQ community, everyone is disgusting and they're eating the poo-poo. This is what he says gay people do is they eat the poo-poo.
I saw that and I was like, this man is mentally ill and an aggressive piece of crap. And he does it all under the guise of, I'm not religious, but like, it's really gross and simplistic. He's increasing the harm for these kids who are getting shot or beat up because they're gay in...
Africa it's infuriating it's not an issue that personally affects me but you can't help but be like why are you making things worse for people that already have it hard why are you doing that
And I think actually it personally affects us all, right? Because right now it's that group, but it could one day be, you know, Portuguese people or podcasters. Of course. Yeah. And part of that story was actually to show how it's a lot of the legislation being passed here that is influencing what's happening in Africa. So it actually impacts all of us. But yeah, that was a really hard time.
I also interviewed an assassin here. We did an episode on assassins. In L.A., most of the episode was filmed in South Africa, which has the highest number of assassinations and one of some of the highest numbers in the world. But we started that episode interviewing an assassin in L.A. And that was a really interesting one because that's not season five. That was season four.
OK, I got to rewatch that.
Yeah, that was an interesting one.
Yeah. Did you lose your cool during that one? Is that why you bring it up?
Yeah, because the whole point of the show is also to humanize people behind the mask and try to understand why they do what they do. And in that case, as soon as we arrived, we met him downtown at night. I connected with him through another contact that I have here in the U.S., a guy that I really like that has given me access to a lot of underworlds in the U.S.
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Chapter 5: What are the dangers of Trank Dope and its effects on users?
Now, back to Mariana Van Zeller. The dope thing is disgusting, by the way. So dope mixed with xylosine, which I think is a veterinary tranquilizer.
Yeah, that's right, an animal tranquilizer.
So the whole, I mean, forget, just say no to drugs, like that whole campaign. Just show that lady's arm from the harm reduction clinic. This looked like someone took hamburger meat, shoved it into a bag of human skin, and then soaked it in a sink for three days, and then just stabbed like a hundred little holes in it with a needle. It was one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen on TV.
And I can imagine, it must have smelled disgusting. terrible because it looked like she just had a rotten arm. It was like zombie.
Yeah. So we were there in a small clinic in Kensington, Pennsylvania, which is ground zero for Trankto. Trankto, what it does is it's fentanyl mixed with the animal tranquilizer. And what it does is the fentanyl gives you a really high, but unlike heroin, the high goes away very fast.
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Chapter 6: How does Mariana Van Zeller build trust with dangerous sources?
So they figured out a new drug that they could mix there, which is a tranquilizer that allows that high to stay high longer, which is ultimately what every user, drug user usually is after. And so they started using it, and they didn't even know there was tranquilizer in it. They just realized, oh, this is a good high, let's keep using this, right?
But what they didn't know, most people didn't, it's a new sort of medical phenomenon. Nobody has studied this because it's so new and it's never shown up anywhere because nobody is willingly using horse tranquilizer on themselves, is that it creates these horrible wounds that look like leprosy.
Essentially, I don't know if you've seen films of, like, leprosy back in the day when it was still big in India. It looks like that. It's like big open wounds with like pus coming out. And it's just one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen. In this case, we were in this clinic run by these sort of volunteers, amazing people who are dressing the wounds and unwrapping.
And we were seeing them doing this to dozens of people and asking if we could film. This woman agreed to be filmed. And we see this amazing guy. who is doing, again, volunteering his time and opening up this wound. He's not, no medical training, but he's learned himself how to do it.
Chapter 7: What is the significance of empathy in understanding drug users?
And he's treating this woman's arm. And the moment he unwraps the gauze, the smell is everything you can imagine. It's super powerful. But yet this is a human being who's being treated. The worst thing I could do is start talking about how much this smelled, right?
And what that taught me, and the guy said so well, as somebody who's been covering the drug epidemic for so long, is that we're approaching it all wrong. This is a public health crisis that's happening in America. We essentially have thousands of people on the streets of America nowadays hooked on this drug.
You might think that they're there because they want and they're doing the drugs because they want to. Nobody wants to be out there like this. Nobody willingly do this. It's a public health crisis. It's like leprosy. It's so many other diseases that we've been able to combat and fight against. And here, for some reason, because we think that they have a choice, we allow it to happen.
Chapter 8: How can we humanize the stories behind drug trafficking?
And the reason also why they're being treated in this like roadside clinic instead of going to hospitals, we spoke to a lot of these users and they were all saying, we go to the hospitals, there's so much stereotyping and they're immediately, they're stigmatized and they're treated as junkies, not treated as human beings.
And that's what with our episode we try to do is really humanize these people and try to show this other side that they're human beings just like us and need help.
It's a scary path, right? Because I had a friend who had a back injury, so he got Oxycontin. and then he got hooked on Oxycontin, and then he couldn't get it anymore, so he started doing heroin. But now you can't get heroin, so you do fentanyl. Now you can't get fentanyl, you're doing Trank Dope. So it's like you end up with a guy who's like a construction worker. This guy was an MMA fighter.
You get a back injury, and it's like dot, dot, dot. Five years later, they're in an alley covered in open sores, and it's like disgusting.
Every conversation, every time I bring up the opiate epidemic, somebody has a story like that. And the vast majority of them starts with an injury. I had an EP, I'm not going to name him, but I had an executive producer on television that worked with me for some time who had seen my coverage on the opiate epidemic and called me one day and says, hey. you have no idea what just happened to me.
I went in for like a tooth surgery and they gave me opiates and I had no idea. Some people have the brain chemistry that makes them more hooked. He never had an addictive personality or anything. And he was like, I spent two months doing these opiates. Weaning off those opiates was the hardest thing I've ever done in my entire life. And he said, I was on the verge of a mental breakdown.
Just talking about how this normal person goes and in two months is super hooked. He doesn't know still how he managed to get off the other way. But for a lot of people, they don't. And so that's what I mean when I say it's not a choice. Yeah, it isn't a choice.
I'm curious. You're clearly careful not to touch any of this stuff. If you go to a drug lab, I don't know, what kind of precautions do you take? Because that stuff is in the air and it's on the bag and it's on the table. You put your elbow down and now you've got, I don't know, xylosine on your elbow.
As long as you don't put it on your mouth or your eyes or you ingest it. We were in Miami where they had bags and bags of Trank dope and they were mixing the fentanyl with the xylosine. And we used gloves, which is the appropriate thing to do. And they were using gloves too. But When I was in a lab in Mexico and saw them making fentanyl, this was for season one of Fentanyl. That was insane.
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