[tense music]
♪♪
- All right.
[sighs]
- It's recording. - Speeding.
[indistinct chatter]
♪♪
-[speaking Spanish]
- We're getting tough on drugs, and we mean business.
For those who are thinking of using drugs, we say stop.
And to those who are pushing drugs, we say beware.
- Searches at the border crossing points
were the main method used in keeping drugs
and other unwanted materials out of the United States.
- For all of the big amount of drug busts,
there's barely a dent in the multi billion dollar flow
of cocaine and heroin into the United States.
- If you're offered drugs,
you'll know what to do.
You'll have the courage to stand up for what you believe
and say "no."
[sombre music]
♪♪
- I grew up along the border.
I knew how to talk the game.
I knew, you know, how the game was played.
The town where I grew up,
it was a natural staging ground for the Juarez Cartel,
for the drugs that crossed.
At that time, a vast majority of the cocaine
that was coming into the country
was going through that neighborhood.
[buzzing]
I remember going to a party during high school.
It must have been my sophomore, junior year.
We went to these brothers' house
that we used to hang out with.
One of the brothers says,
"Hey, you guys want to see something cool?"
I'm like, "Yeah."
We go into the garage, and he opens up one of the coolers,
and it was full of bricks of cocaine.
I mean up to the top.
There's always a lot of temptation where there is
a lot of poverty and a lot of struggle.
A lot of us fell into that temptation.
It was only natural.
-[speaking Spanish]
♪ Ciento cuatro punto uno ♪
- ♪ Norteño y mas ♪
[upbeat Latin music]
♪♪
- You can't even describe Texas without including Mexico.
That's what a lot of people fail to realize.
It's everything, from the way we speak, the food we eat.
It's just part of the culture here,
part of the fabric of this country.
I personally was not a big-time dealer.
Most of the time, the loads I smuggled
were in the 200-pound range.
I did buy from some small-time growers
up in the mountains of Mexico.
And I also bought from very big, powerful organizations
that primarily operated on the border.
I was caught up in it.
I was a willful participant, and I jumped into it headfirst.
- In 2008 and 2009, we started hearing
from local organizations in Mexico
that people were being taken,
sometimes by police or soldiers,
sometimes just by armed groups.
The patterns that we eventually realized
made up the worst crisis in disappearance
that we had seen in the region in decades.
The only other precedence we had
for disappearances on a mass scale
were under the dictatorships of Pinochet
and also in the dictatorship in Argentina.
One of the places that we were getting the most reports
was Monterrey, and those reports were coming to us
in large part from a small organization run by a nun.
The nun was Consuelo.
And they were the ones that were with the families
when they were going to report the cases
at a time when reporting cases could get you disappeared.
[phone ringing]
- My life has been impacted by the narco
ever since I can remember.
For me, it was just a way of life.
It wasn't anything out of the ordinary.
People in Socorro had just immigrated
into the United States.
We really didn't have any established roots.
The Juarez Cartel used that as an advantage where they could
reach out to a family member in Mexico and say,
"Hey, you know, we want to use your cousin's house
as a staging ground."
Your friends that decided to get into illegal activity
to try to make ends meet,
you would see them from one year to the next,
actually from one month to the next,
have all sons of money
and all sorts of cars and vehicles.
At the time that I was growing up as a teenager,
we didn't believe that there was
a lot of opportunity outside, you know, in the outside world.
Socorro was it, and if somebody was offering you money,
you know, why not?
He's doing it. Why shouldn't I do it?
[gentle music]
♪♪
What are the totals so far?
- There's over 1,000 pounds of marijuana seized.
They'll probably indict, like, about ten people later.
- I'm the Assistant Special Agent in Charge
for Homeland Security here in El Paso.
I run the Narcotics divisions,
and I also run the Intelligence.
Can you come to my office for a second?
I was involved in some high-profile cases that,
had it not been for us
being able to infiltrate a certain organization,
we would never be able to really dismantle entire cells.
Yeah, we could do two or three arrests
and take a couple of middle individuals off,
but if you truly wanted to know how the cartels operate
and-and who was running, who was, you know-
how the... the cartels were being shapen up,
both in Mexico and here,
you really needed an undercover in there.
What was appealing was the fact that not everybody can do it.
Not everybody is effective.
In undercover work, it's just you and your mind.
You really have to rely on your smarts.
You have to rely on thinking on your feet.
When you're dealing with these individuals, you know,
you would know that, hey, this guy is Juarez Cartel
or this guy is Sinaloa Cartel,
and this guy is responsible for murders in Mexico.
You're walking a thin line 'cause you're trying
to convince that guy that you're as heavy as he is.
And so its almost like a dance that, you know,
he's telling you how badass he is,
and he means it because he's done it,
and you're countering right back at him like,
"Hey, you're not impressing me, man.
This is not my first job."
- From about two, three weeks ago,
we were trying to do the 15 pounds of meth.
That confidential source told us that Delgado
is looking to sell 5 keys of meth,
up to 15 pounds, but obviously that won't happen.
We're going to take him down today.
- What's our preferred scenario?
As soon as you guys get flashed with the drugs,
you guys are gonna give the bust signal?
- As soon as I get the merchandise,
I'm gonna give it to Juan, and I'm gonna tell him,
"Cut it to see if it's the real dope," right?
As soon as that's it, bro, that's gonna be the signal.
- There's always the potential for the rip,
especially if they're not really asking for a flash.
You know what I mean?
And by the same token,
they might be thinking the same thing.
You know, that you guys are going to rip them off,
so they might be, you know-
Hey, you guys know what you're doing,
so just be careful.
Did I ever dream that I would be running a division? No.
I felt like, you know, I'll be able to make a difference,
catch a few loads of marijuana, cocaine,
and be a successful law enforcement agent.
I just kind of fell into the covertness
of federal law enforcement, into the undercover of it.
And a lot of it has to do with the fact
that I was from Socorro.
[upbeat Latin music]
♪♪
[dog barking]
- I'm being slow.
- Yeah, I gotta clean this cloth too.
I first met Don,
he was kind of skinny at that point.
He's kind of ruggedly handsome, I think.
You didn't eat those potatoes.
When we started going out,
I learned he was a marijuana smuggler,
planeloads of it.
He was pretty forthcoming about the different methods
that they used to bring stuff back and forth.
He was an outlaw back then.
' [grunts]
I had struggled trying to make a living in agriculture.
Not here to hurt you.
There is virtually no farmer that owns land
through conventional means that isn't in debt
to the bank and slave to 'em.
I owed the production credit association $800,000
at 14% interest.
It was a struggle.
So I decided to try to go to Mexico and buy some marijuana.
I walked across the river
and loaded it into the back of a Suburban,
and I successfully smuggled my first load.
It was terribly amateurish, but I got away with it.
I took that load to a man in Plainview, Texas,
and I sold all of it in a matter of hours.
One big sack, about 600 a pound.
To me at the time, that was a lot of money.
So it just became part of the routine.
About every two weeks do a load.
I would get up, go down to the river real early.
There was less surveillance,
and most people are about halfway asleep at that time.
You know, they don't notice things.
That's when I would come out
and then drive to the city, drop stuff off,
pick up money from the previous load,
and head home and go back to work.
I was not an employee of anybody down there.
I dealt with rival factions,
and that's very much against the norm of what goes on today.
You would not be allowed to do that today.
I'd been buried down into the organization so far
that I didn't even have a clue where I...
You know, where I fit in this thing.
And there was a multinational, international business going on,
and I was just a little cog in the wheel.
- Rough justice in the Mexican City of Monterrey.
The two corpses found hanging were, according to local media,
members of 21 drugs cartel.
- I actually spent some time in the Middle East.
You get danger pay.
You get armored vehicles.
You would get escorts.
You know, and it's considered a danger post,
but I actually felt safer in the Middle East
than I did in Monterrey.
I was assigned
to the U.S. consulate in Monterrey.
We were investigating
high-level members of the Gulf Cartel
and high-level members of the Zetas.
The difference between the Zetas
and your traditional cartels
is that the Zetas,
they don't follow any sort of rules.
The majority of the high-ranking cartel members,
they grew up in the drug game.
Their father was a cartel member.
Their grandfather was a cartel member.
All these individuals know the rules.
You don't kill anybody unless you're absolutely sure
that they're either a source, a snitch,
or they're a rival cartel that needs to be taken care of.
You would never see just mass killings of innocent people.
It was targeted.
- I've called it a game changer
when the Zetas got into the dope game.
The Zetas were a group of military
that were specially trained to go after the cartels,
ultimately as a group defected from the military
and offered their services to the Gulf Cartel.
You give them a little bit of power,
you know, you give them unlimited weapons,
and they're military.
If you hit the military, what do they do?
They strike back, and so a lot of these guys,
they have that mentality where, you know,
we don't care who you are.
You know, we're gonna go after you.
These guys don't have that-
those unwritten rules engraved in their head.
[gunfire]
- Move!
- We could almost feel the tension building.
They would try to intimidate us, you know.
They would follow us.
They would do surveillance on the consulate
to the point where they shot at the consulate
and threw a grenade.
[gunfire]
Back in the day, that was unheard of.
[exhales deeply]
- When I first involved in the marijuana business,
nobody used weapons.
You loaned somebody a product,
and they came back and paid you.
There was no fear that these guys were going to shoot you
or come steal your stuff.
And all of a sudden, everybody is carrying a gun,
and you couldn't trust anybody.
The drug trade changed.
- This is you as a young man? - Yeah, that's me.
- Man, I wouldn't have recognized you.
You used to wear tejano too, huh?
- Yeah. Used to wear...
- You don't do that any more. You gave up the-
- When my dad-l was gonna go visit him in Big Spring.
- Man, he looks young there, doesn't he?
- I first remember seeing Don in Piedritas.
He stood out because this is Mexico,
and all of a sudden you hear- you see a gringo.
This is towards the end. - Yeah.
- One of his last pictures.
When you're in the drug business,
you can't trust anyone.
That's one of the main reasons why you bring in family,
because you assume that you can trust family.
My dad found that trust in Don.
It's something that's beyond friendship.
- One day, he decided to come look me up.
His name was Oscar Cabello.
He told me that he could supply my needs.
[laughter]
- He was like a brother to me.
You look at somebody occasionally,
and you just see somebody
that you connect with right away.
He was not violent.
Didn't have to worry that he was gonna come threaten me
or something like that.
And that was the beginning
of a fairly long relationship that we shared.
- Oscar, he usually had some really potent marijuana.
It was all packaged the same.
It was all high quality.
This stuff was major production.
Oscar pretty much controlled the river
in the state of Coahuila.
He was a big player.
I talked to Oscar about arranging a meeting
with his supplier,
and it turned out that man was Amado Carrillo.
I asked Oscar, I said, "Well, who's his boss?"
And Oscar said, "He doesn't have a boss.
He is the boss."
I had a hard time believing that, you know?
He was a young man, a whole lot like myself,
kind of a rural background.
I learned later that he is probably
the largest drug dealer that ever lived.
At one time, he controlled the majority of all the cocaine
coming into the United States.
We snorted some coke together and bullshitted,
and then Amado and Oscar left.
A few hours later, there was a real loud knock on the door.
They slammed it open, and there was a group of commandos
with sub-machine guns.
Amado was probably testing us to make sure we weren't agents.
And then they disappeared as fast as they had come.
- Back in the day,
Amado Carrillo Fuentes was in Juarez
right across the border.
The Juarez Cartel was at its heyday.
[tense music]
There was times that we knew that El Señor was in Socorro.
They would throw lavish parties out in ranch houses
in the outskirts of Socorro.
And, you know, I remember going to a couple of them,
not knowing that we were probably in close vicinity
to the top levels of the cartel.
♪♪
- I guess what we heard is what ended up being true,
that this guy was going to be the biggest drug baron.
He went on to become one of the biggest in the history,
if not the biggest.
He brought the Mexican cartels
and the Mexican drug lords into the forefront.
Before they were just used as mules
from the cocaine that was coming in from Colombia,
when the Colombians were really the strong cartels
in the world.
♪♪
It's really hard to smuggle anything from South America
if it doesn't go through Mexico.
He established that no Colombian cocaine
was gonna pass through Mexico for a certain amount of time,
and instead of just being mules,
they actually became the gatekeepers.
They became the powerful cartel.
There was a famous saying that he would say,
it was that, "Todos estamos comiendo."
Everybody's eating.
There's no sense in us warring against each other.
We're all making money. We're all being stable.
So there was no need for fighting.
♪♪
The community knew who the plaza boss was.
They knew that their government was corrupt,
but they were willing to put up with that
because everything was peaceful.
♪♪
I really feel that the Mexican community,
they long for the days when there was one strong cartel.
- When my parents first arrived in El Paso,
I can't even imagine
just the sacrifice that they went through.
They had left their ranch where they had been working
in the family ranch in Sonora,
and they wanted to make a better life
for their children.
- My dad crossed the river.
He folded up his pants,
took off his shoes and his socks,
holding them in his hand, and he crossed the river,
got into the United States, and as he's sitting down
putting on his- his pants and shoes
to-to wait for somebody to pick him up,
you know, outcomes a Border Patrol agent.
In that split second,
he made a decision that ultimately changed our lives,
because he said, "If I allow this guy to arrest me,
"I'm gonna be detained, I'm not gonna have a job,
my children aren't gonna be able to immigrate."
So he took off running.
Male announcer: In the twilight hours
when most of the country is sleeping,
we're out there, guarding our borders,
protecting the homeland.
[indistinct radio chatter]
- 10-4, air support and ground units are on the way.
Announcer The Border Patrol,
we protect America.
Are you up to the challenge?
[applause]
- It took a lot for me to decide
to really join the Border Patrol.
It took a lot for me to tell my dad.
Quite frankly, I had rehearsed my speech over and over,
saying this is how I'm gonna convince him.
You know, "Dad, you know, it's a good opportunity for me, Dad."
To my astonishment, he sat back for a few seconds,
and then he just told me, "You know what?
"They need people like you.
"The people that are coming here just to make a living,
"just like we did, the only thing I can tell you
is treat them with respect, and I know you will."
Now, you know, and this is his words, like,
"Now the drug dealers and, yeah, those guys,
go after them 110%."
[gentle music]
♪♪
What really kicked off my undercover career
in federal law enforcement was picking up phones
from loads that we had intercepted at the border.
Rather than just let the phone sit there, you know,
they would start calling and say, "Hey, did you make it?
And I would actually talk
to the individual we had just arrested,
and I would just talk to him to see how he would talk,
and I would try to mimic how he would talk.
I would ask him like, "Hey, you know, where you from?
Where you going? What-—" And this is all within,
you know, five minutes of us taking-taking-
you know, taking the load down.
The guy would call. I'd be like, "Dónde estás?"
And they'd be like, "Well, where are you?"
And I'd hit him back like,
"Well, you know, I got nervous.
"You know, the Border Patrol was behind me,
but I was able to get away. But where are you guys at?"
So I would show up, and then I would start calling,
and I'd see who was the ones that are answering the phone,
and we would arrest that load,
and then we would play with those phones.
At that time, Border Patrol had what they called
the anti-smuggling unit.
It was special agents within the Border Patrol.
After, like, six or seven successful cases
where they said, "Hey, it was this guy that started
getting on the phone that led us to"-
They were like, "You know, hey,
you wanna come on a detail and work with us?"
And I was like, "Of course." I was still a trainee,
and that was unheard of at that time.
From that point on, that's basically what my career was,
just working undercover.
[whistle blowing, soldiers chanting]
- [speaking Spanish]
[speaking Spanish]
[gunfire]
- [speaking Spanish] [gunfire]
-[speaking Spanish]
- It's very common in Mexico for elected officials
to make a major part of their platform
overhauling their police force, and with good reason,
because the police forces that they inherit are corrupt.
The missing piece is that you can train police force
and give them all the resources that they need
and look for the best people,
but if you don't hold them accountable
when they commit crimes or they're corrupt
or they commit abuses,
you're never gonna build a trustworthy police force.
There are many cases where we have been able to document
very strong evidence that shows that these disappearances
were carried out by security forces, by soldiers and police.
Even in those cases, they don't do anything.
The most that will happen to you
is that you might lose your job, you know?
If you disappear someone or you kill someone,
you're not gonna be prosecuted.
[elevator bell dings]
[all chanting in Spanish]
[chanting continues]
- The drug business can't be looked at through a microscope.
You need to look at it as a picture of a larger puzzle.
The real underlying cause is poverty.
Fact is, you can't make money subsistence farming in Mexico.
They're born into a certain station in life,
and they can't get out of it.
And if they're born poor, they're gonna die poor.
That's just the way it is.
Oscar Cabello was the guy in charge,
but in all honesty, everybody was involved.
The whole town derived an income from him
and from the business.
They helped him.
- There was a sense of pride that I heard, you know.
"Your father was this," "Your father was that."
And naturally, I wanted to follow in his footsteps.
I started at the age of 15.
You know of the dangers, the risks,
but it's not something
that you're constantly thinking about.
- There wasn't such a thing as quitting from my station.
It was very, very difficult to get out of it.
Dead or prison.
That was the only two exits for me.
- The airplane has become the major vehicle
used by smugglers to bring contraband into the U.S.
- Oscar fronted me about 200 pounds of marijuana.
We loaded the plane,
and we took off for the United States.
As we broke out of the cloud cover,
we encountered a plane coming directly towards us,
almost like driving by the freeway.
They would pull up and fly up,
right up in front of our prop.
- The Customs Bureau
has set up an aerial interdiction program
using military type aircraft, searching the sky
for any aircraft not on a regular flight plan.
- The prop wash would propel us up into the air,
and then when you hit that down-burst, the plane would fall.
It would fall a lot.
And it was extremely scary.
These guys began to motion for us to go down
or for us to pick up the radio.
As we stopped, people with arms
appeared from all over the place.
Even the security guard at the airport
came outwith his shotgun.
And I still had a seat-belt on,
and there was a guy with a 12-gauge shotgun
pointed at my face.
And he could not see what I was doing with my hands.
Every time that I would go to lower my hands
to undo the seat-belt,
I'd see this guy tightening up on that trigger.
Finally I yelled loud enough to these guys.
And as I came across the pilot's seat,
they grabbed me, and my first step back
onto American soil was face first into the tarmac of-
of an airport.
I barely got in before the minimum mandatory sentencing
were issued to the judges that took away their discretion.
It was after I got into the jail,
and they began to describe this stuff
that I realized how fortunate I was,
because some of the people
that were busted right after me,
they would have been facing a 20-year sentence
without any possibility of them-you know, mitigation.
I was lucky to have been caught when I was caught.
I ended up getting paroled
for having completed five years.
, Okay-
Okay.
A lot of the undercover work that we did along here
was transportation.
I had a commercial driver's license.
I was able to infiltrate a lot of organizations
that used tractor trailers to transport the narcotics
from the supplier in Mexico.
[radio chirps]
It's not like when you see in the movies,
you know, that they find out you're a federal agent
and they're going to kill you.
The danger is where you've sold
that role that you're trying to play,
that you've sold it so good
that this guy has no inclination that you're a cop.
And it could be that they try to rip you off.
- The individuals that are picking up
want to keep both the money and the product,
and they'll just kill you.
They're going to wait until you're not looking
and then shoot you in the head.
- Do you work tomorrow? - Yes.
- It never really crossed my mind,
me thinking I'm living a dangerous lifestyle
or if anything could happen.
I thought it would never come to our family.
I thought we were always protected.
Me not realizing how dangerous his job really is,
I guess I just put a blind side to it.
I didn't want to know what would go on.
When I was pregnant, there was a list that came out.
There was just a bunch of threats,
and Oscar was mentioned in it.
You don't wanna eat your chicken?
The government sent some security armor system
for our house, and they actually issued
Oscar a couple more guns and an automatic weapon
for the family to keep in the house.
He's actually taught me how to shoot the gun,
how to shoot in the dark,
so I can help to protect the family.
- Okay, well, then take this one.
- Here, let me have it. - Trade.
- Where did you do most of your time?
- In Three Rivers.
- Three Rivers.
That's a medium also, isn't it?
- That's a medium. - Yeah.
- I reached out to Don when I was incarcerated.
It was a sense of joy hearing of Don.
That he was doing well. He was out.
At the time of sentencing, you get sentenced to months.
Sol hear 150 months, and it didn't seem like much.
But I go back to my cell
and I start breaking it down into years.
It's 14 1/2 years.
Because of marijuana being illegal,
I lost all my 20s.
- All that stuff is so old and gone,
but the way these idiots are down there now,
it's almost as though you fear retribution
just so they can say, you know,
"I - I killed so-and-so and that makes me achingon."
What Auden got is just absolutely unreasonable.
14 years for marijuana.
That's just absolutely insane.
Our law is unjust.
It's not effective.
Yes, it is a path I took.
Yes, it did result in me going to prison.
I think my children paid a heavy price for my actions.
I was young. I had a lot of kids.
I started having kids very early.
I thought, "I'm providing money and a place for them,"
but there was always some selfishness involved.
I bear some shame for that, but I can't change any of it now.
- The biggest thing was to see him
brought in by guards, handcuffed.
He had raised his hand to ask to go to the restroom.
Just the process of going through door after door
of locked door behind you to go see your father,
that was really strange for me as a child.
We always kind of would try to hide it,
that my father was a drug dealer,
but it would get out.
Principals find out, teachers find out.
It makes its way through school.
Some people were almost intrigued by it
to the point that they idolized that,
and then some people really looked down at you.
- I'm gonna live with my share
for having committed a crime,
but it grows from the bottom up.
There's always somebody else
just ready to take the place in line.
I don't think they stop one damn joint, to be honest.
I mean they catch some of it,
but there's always surplus created to deal with that.
- We're still seeing the traditional drugs
that we always saw: cocaine, marijuana.
What's troubling to us as U.S. law enforcement
is the fact that we're seeing more and more meth.
Marijuana still continues to be a heavy profit earner
for the Mexican cartels, but the laws are shifting
to where more and more places are legalizing it.
They're businessmen, they're gonna adapt.
If they're not getting a profit from smuggling marijuana,
then they're gonna move into something else
that is profitable.
Meth is more addictive than any drug
and it's more destructive.
So they're trying to push more and more meth.
There's been some historical marks
where the drug game changes.
One of them was the death of Amado Carrillo Fuentes.
He died during a botched plastic surgery attempt
in 1997.
After his death, there wasn't one true cartel leader.
That's when people started scrambling
to take territories, take plazas.
That's when you saw the violence spike up
both in the United States and Mexico.
The reason that I do a lot of media now
is that I'm not going to remember everybody
that I encountered doing undercover work,
and to me, putting my face out there,
it's, in my way, it's my sense of protection.
The more people to know that I was a federal agent,
so that they know that if they go after me
they're going after somebody that has backing,
that has some sort of protection.
[Taps plays]
♪♪
A lot of people ask me, "You've had a good career.
"You've made a positive name for yourself.
You'll be able to help your son follow in your footsteps."
And, you know, I really hope that he doesn't.
When you're working against the cartels,
you see the worst of the worst. You see the worst in people.
I saw stuff that I wouldn't wish my worst enemy to see.
I wouldn't want my son to be exposed to that.
[playing drums]
- Consuelo!
- I used to kid myself thinking that-
that I could be more and more effective
in going after drug traffickers.
But the more and more that I look at it is,
we're all a pawn in a game.
We as Americans, you know, tend to look at Mexico as,
"Oh, you know, those guys are flooding our streets with drugs
and they're flooding our economy with illicit money."
But, you know, you really wouldn't have that problem
if there wasn't demand.
We're the country with the highest consumption
of illegal narcotics in the world.
And so we have a lot to do with that, too.
- We're all trapped in these things to a certain extent.
And that's what the real catalyst was
that drove me into the business.
The fact that it was illegal made it profitable,
and that's what fueled the whole business
and that's what fuels it now.
I just don't want to be involved any more.
I don't want to grow it, don't want to be around it.
I don't want any part of it.
It's an excuse now to prosecute people
that are undesirable for other reasons.
It's a convenient tool to put anybody they want behind bars.
[gentle music]
♪♪
[Latin music]
♪♪
-[singing in Spanish]
♪♪