Speaker 1: We know what Mexico looks like through our eyes. What's
going on down there? If you have friends down there,
you probably feel some things close to what I feel.
But what does it look like through the eyes of
a global security professional and former Special Forces operative. Michael
Rourke joins us courtesy of Bulwark Capital Management, Milliar's podcast
dot com and God Almighty.
Speaker 2: But Todd Herman shows disapproved but big pharma technocrats in
tyrone Cebrian ware from the high Mountains of Free America.
Here's the Emerald City, Xie Todd Herman.
Speaker 1: Today is the day the Lord has made and these
are the time so which God is to estabriaged to live.
Michael Ark joins me. He is the chief over at
Advanced Operational Concepts and a retired Special Forces operative. Mike,
Welcome back to the show. Appreciate you taking the time.
Speaker 3: Thanks to good being with you again.
Speaker 1: If you posted a video I'm going to play here,
you won't be able to see it, but folks watching
them able to see it, and it is dang It
is very dramatic footage out of Mexico and shows the
damage that has been done. We'll talk about loss of
lives and what the cartels are doing down there, but
a million views on this on Instagram. And as you
watch this, what's it look like through your eyes as
a guy who's seen just about every form of warfare
there is.
Speaker 3: Well, I think what you're seeing now is the true
reach of the cartel. You have all these American tourists
that go down there, you have all these spring breakers
that are probably still planning to head down there quite soon,
and they think nothing ever happens here. Well, all of
a sudden, it started happening here, and so it kind
of takes that denial away from people, which is one
of the key parts of the situational awareness is vanquishing denial,
and you're really seeing the true reach of the cartel.
At any point, they can impact pretty much any area
in the country. Corto Arrita, one of the main tourist area,
is a place you're familiar with. Yeah, was severely impacted.
Even over in u could Ten Peninsula. You had roadblocks
going up, cars being burned, and tourists being told to
shelter in place. So the reach of the cartel is
actually a lot more pervasive than people realize.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean they've set up supply chains into our country.
They run fence and all into our country. They run
people into our country, they run cash out of our country,
they run supplies into our country. They're I mean, you
could call them paramilitary. I've been looking at some of
their gear. I can't look at it the way you do,
but I looked at a footage and this is propaganda
from them. But Mike, it was a half a mile
of to my eyes up armored trucks looked military grade
to me, machine guns, I could tell that, turrets on top,
and a half mile of those trucks filled with ten
to fifteen guys in each truck. And that was shot
with an on ground camera and a couple of drones
doing their reach. I've also seen what they call their
Delta Force, and I'm going to take a wild guest
that you would say they don't compare it to the
actual Delta force. But this is this reach what you're
talking about vanquishing denial. That's a great point. And as
you're looking at this in terms of, you know, vanquishing
our denial, are we going to have to send troops
down there to clean this up?
Speaker 3: Well, ideally not, but it certainly it can certainly happen.
I've heard estimates of cartel numbers as high as north
of forty thousand people within the cartels in Mexico. That
doesn't count the cartel members here in the United States.
Right now, we have seventh Special Forces Group, which specializes
in Central and South America. There are elements of Seventh
Group that trains with the Mexican military trying to improve
their capabilities. To the best of my knowledge, they're not
going out on targets. We had no boots on the
ground participating in the raid yesterday that killed the cartel leader.
In fact, the president of Mexico came out today and
stated that as a fact that there were no American
boots on the ground, but we did participate by sharing intelligence.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there was rumors that people were putting out that
Seals did the hit. And before you and I went
on the show, I went on the air of the day,
I asked you if you thought the Seals had done
the hit, and you were pretty quick to say no,
you didn't think there was a real chance that that
that happened.
Speaker 3: I know, not at all. That's a level of involvement
that were I don't think we're at yet, and if
it started, If it began happening, it wouldn't be secret
very long.
Speaker 1: Yeah, your words constantly echoed my mind when I'm down
a place like this. I told your story last time
I was in Porto Arta, that I woke up to
the sounds of explosions and the oodoloup hit me. Orient
observe orient or orient observe, decide, act And I was
at the point of acting, of starting to go over
to my daughter's room. She was standing next to me
to say, Okay, here's what we're gonna do, when I
realized these were fireworks going on to the beach that
were celebrating a wedding. It wasn't in fact this day,
but that was about six months ago that I was
down there. So I had water and food. I always
go get a couple days worth of water. I always
pack up a bunch of food in the room. And
I'm just thinking about Tsunamis. I'm not thinking about the revolution,
but I want to have that stuff on hand for
international travelers who have to go to places like Mexico,
not necessarily for spring Baker talking about or for vacation.
What do you do if you go into a place
that can kind of explode this way.
Speaker 3: You need to start thinking about it before you go,
you know, decide, you know that, Okay, we're going to
have a plan. We're going to have ways to communicate
when we get down there. We're going to set up
rally points to where if we're off doing different activities
and all of a sudden, the fe's hiss, the oscillator,
you know, where, where are we going to link up?
And then you know, and how are we going to
get our family back together, our group at together?
Speaker 2: Yep?
Speaker 3: And then now then we're going to move on to
the next part of our plan, which is making sure
we either stand somewhere safe or we figure out how
to get to somewhere safe.
Speaker 1: What defines safety at a point like that, I mean,
in your pre planning. I guess if you don't have
that plan, this stuff hits. Safety is isolated, people can't
see you. You have some form of uh, you know, water
and food and warmth, you would hope. But prior to
an event like this, let's say you're consulting some rich
people whose kids are going down or they're going down
h for a state and a place that can blow up,
How do you define a place of safety.
Speaker 3: Well, it's a in an immediate situation. You think about
in terms of cover and concealment. Okay, concealment is where
you can't be seen by bad actors. Cover is where
bullets can't penetrate. So where uh, concealment may not necessarily
be covered. So you want you want to get away
from the areas like the military. You're not going to
run to the sound of the guns.
Speaker 1: You know, You're going to go the other way.
Speaker 3: You don't want windows facing streets, you know, if you're
getting a hotel or a resort, you know, forget the
beach view. You want to be facing the courtyard, you know,
which is away from any potential blast or you know,
bullets coming through windows. Yeah, put put some obstacles between
you and any any direct fire, and then safety is
just gonna You need to have some situational awareness. You
didn't tune in to uh to local social media, local reports.
If you don't speak the language, you got to figure
how to get it translated. Depend on the people who
work at the resorts. If all of a sudden, everyone
at your resort hotel is gone, that's a you know
that works there is gone. That's a very bad sign
one either they couldn't get to work or they were
or they say, Okay, this is going to get real
bad right here, and we're out. So you talked about
paying attition to your surroundings.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you talked about an escalation scenario here, because I
want to talk about where we're at. But you mentioned
an escalation scenario that you just reminded of. We will
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coffee Crush giveaway. So, Mike, you mentioned where we're at today.
Let's go through the numbers. And before we do that,
let's remember we're talking about dads who didn't make it home,
likely dads. There might be some others in here. Twenty
five I'm reading twenty five National guardsmen have been killed.
I've read that there are three prison guards who have
been killed that they went and engineered apparently a prison escape,
and one officer now has been killed. This is the
numbers I have as if today. We don't know about
the amount of damage done yet. But you were talking
about an escalation scenario, talking about the tourist areas that
you could affect that industry and even affect a tourists
without necessarily killing them by just cutting off their supply chain.
Speaker 3: Exactly right. If you look at what happened yesterday. You know,
the cartels were allegedly retaliating against the government for for
killing their leader, but they lashed out against everyday businesses.
They lashed out against convenience stores, pharmacies, the the parking
lot for a Costco and Porta of Arta was set
a blaze. I'm not sure if they burned the store
itself and if they really want and you know, there
were roadblocks and around tourist areas. Airports were cut off.
All they have to do if they really want to
impact the tourist areas is tell the workers you're no
longer going to work until we tell you can go
to work again. That that that cuts off, you know,
the ability to operate the facility. You've cut off the
food supply. You've impacted the tourists without actually laying a
hand on a single tourist.
Speaker 1: There's been a rule for many years now. This is
this is it was the cartel in in that area
that has said, look, you don't hit tourists, you don't
kill them, you don't kidnap them. They didn't want they
didn't want fetanyl sales in the tourist areas. And this
was cartel enforced and those were some pretty hardcore rules
and they did I understand and force that. But that
also speaks to this level then of knowledge. These guys
look at the tourist thing as a big business for them.
They don't want people dying from fetanol gets a bad reputation.
But then I've also heard people refer to the tourist
industry as a laundering enterprise, cash laundering enterprise for the
cartels that have you observed the same thing.
Speaker 3: I'm not so sure about the money laundering that could
certainly happen. But the cartels run a lot of the clubs,
I know, like in the Cancoon area and the Ramaya. Yeah,
well the clubs they do sell drugs to the tourists,
and you know so, and there has been some spillover
where tourists get caught up in the violence, usually as
you know, wrong place, wrong time, Yeah, you know thing.
But it's it's very if the US government really starts
ramping up what we're doing down there, even if it's
just more in a support role, it's easy enough for
the cartels to decide they want to retaliate by going
after Americans down there, and you know, yes, and in
a lot of ways they haven't been doing that yet.
But it's also working on the assumption that every member
of the cartel is a rational actor, and that that
is not necessarily case. Some of these guys are absolutely
you know Batguanoh crazy.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so the new leader of this cartel, the new generation,
apparently the air parent we think, is this guy named
el Yoger Yogurt. He's already put out a video at
one point talking about he was in Europe. They're in
the banks in Europe, and he was breaking about that. Hey,
we're already in the banks over here, so he's breaking
about taking that territory and mention I listened to this
audio of Elmentche, and this is going to bridge into
discussion with the United States here in a sac at Mike.
But I was listening to audio Elmente. It's in Spanish,
so there's not a lot of point in playing it.
It had been translated. He got on the phone with
a local police chief and Almenche said, you are going
to back off, You're going to chill out.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 1: This is me. It's Elmente. And first the chief didn't
understand he and then he said, shut up and listen
to me. This is Elmente. And he said, I will
spell blood at a moment's notice. I will kill your family,
I will kill your pets, I will kill your friends.
You are going to back off, And then the officer
got it, yes sir, yes sir, and he started to
say I know you, I know where you live, I
know your family. He said, you're plenty happy to take
my money. You all take my money. And then the guy,
the police chief, said, wait, you know me. I'm on
your side. I'm on your side. I have nothing but
respect for you. Will you better because you take all
my money? And it was so weird because then the
phone call ended up with the office saying, look, I'm sorry,
I'm already putting messages out. I'm using a different device
and the men, she said, do not turn your phone off.
They'll take that as a sign of disrespect, because no,
I will call you back on this number. And I
she said, no, you don't call me. I call you
when I want to. And then Elmanche said, I'm sorry
for the language, I'm sorry for being angry. With you.
I'm glad we've got this worked out, and yes, sir, yes, sir,
we've got this completely worked out. So that level of
ownership over police chief I have to wonder, Mike, to
what degree would you be looking internally now within police
forces the National Guards for people who are taking money
from the cartel to help go out and set out
attacks like I sent you this video of what looks
like maybe an ied truly improvised, But would you be
looking for internal actors that way that people who are
spying within their agencies?
Speaker 3: Well, you have to the decades long phrase in Spanish
that the cartels have used is plata oplomo silver or lead,
take our money or take our bullet. And you see,
when you have a politician or a police chief, they
try to stand up to the car till they're often
assassinated within hours of taking office. And that that's been
happening for decades. So plata or plomo, you know, so
they don't necessarily have that much of a choice, But yeah,
you will have to look internally more so and maintain
an operational security. You have to find those elements within
the Mexican government and the military that are less corrupt
I think I think the Mexican Marines have a pretty
good reputation the So yeah, it's a pervasive problem, you know,
both politically, militarily and within law enforcement.
Speaker 1: I'll put this video on the show notes we just
found this morning, than ascot should pull it. But it
looks it's shot from a deck and someone who's making
a video of what looks like a freeway. It looks
like a pretty rural area. But this, this explosion goes off,
and I didn't know what to make of it. Just
to me, hey, something went boom, But you had an
interesting analysis of the thing that went boom, and the
angle which was shot looked to me like at least
the person who was shooting it knew it was going
to happen, because why would you be shooting video of
a you know, a remote highway, et cetera. But you
looked at that and thought that looked like a you know,
truly improvised explosive device. But tell me what you told
or tell everybody what you told me about how you
could tell that's not military grade?
Speaker 3: Sure? The well, first of all, the video look a
lot like what you see over in the Middle East,
like in Iraq and Syria, where someone is set up
a safe distance away, they know something's going to happen,
and then sure enough a boom goes off. Yeah, and
what you saw an explosion was white smoke, which to
me in the case and improvised explosive device or the like,
a homemade type explosive, whereas military grade whether artillery shells
like when we were hit by I D's in Iraq
using buried artillery shells that were set off by cell
phones or command wire, those explodes that those explosions resulted
in black smoke. Okay, and it's one thing like I
remember back several years during the Boston Marathon bombing and
I saw those explosions again, white smoke. I knew instantly
it was some sort of improvised device, not using military
grade explosives.
Speaker 1: It is alex Is running this video and yeah, it
looks like a pretty rural area at least somewhat industrial.
There's a farm complex, market there, there's the there's the
thing going boom. That's what Mike saw was the white
smoke popping off of that.
Speaker 2: Mike.
Speaker 1: President Trump had put pressure on the president of Mexico.
He wanted these cartels shut down he's tired of fetnal
coming into our country. I'm tired of it. I'm tired
of watching cartel's own parts of cities. And they do
own parts of cities. And you are willfully ignorant. If
you don't notice that there's there's any cop in Seattle,
will tell you, yeah, this is where the Hon Durans operate.
This is where the Mexicans operate. Here's where the Russians operate.
This is a Chinese grow house. They know I've been
taking to those locations. So he wants this stuff to stop.
There was a fifteen million dollar bounty on this guy's heads.
I'm tired of us as world cop mic. That's just me.
I've never served you guys go do the dangerous stuff.
I'm just tired of it. But this could spread here.
If the cartels want to, they can come across our border.
They can make hits here. This is big business. And
now the cartels could be fighting for their lives. If
we have to go down and we have to end this,
what does that look like from I mean, we've got
the capabilities to end it, but we've got two thirds
of our navy outside of Iran. Now, so what does
that look like if we the United States have to
say to Mexico, Okay, we're coming, We're going to clean
this up. But when we end it, we end it
for real.
Speaker 3: First, it's going to take a lot of strong army politically,
Because President Claudia Scheinbaum has come out yesterday and today
saying she's not going to restart the war against the cartels.
I think she yeah, we've got that uphill battle.
Speaker 1: Wait wait, wait, does she actually not notice that they
have perceived this as an active war? Does she fail
to notice that?
Speaker 3: Well, all I know is what you know? What is
what she's saying publicly? Now what cooperations you know is
happening with us behind the scenes? I don't know. But
if we decide we have to do something, it's I
think primarily going to be a special operations fight, which
will be you know, small teams. We spent a lot
of time, especially after Trump took office, flying reconstant flights
along our border. Yeah, and from over Mexico with Mexico's permission.
And that's you know, intel collection. You're you're mapping out networks,
You're you're collecting signals, You're you're listening to phone calls
and you're you're identifying the players, and then it's a
matter of keeping track where these people are and then
going and hitting the key players. Yeah, and if you
go hit your average pipe swinger at your average cicario,
it's really not going to have much of an impact.
But it's going to be intel driven and a lot
of quick, decisive actions trying to go after the leadership
as high level as possible. Basically, you're breaking into the network,
you're attacking the network.
Speaker 1: Okay, then you're destabilizing their network because it might be
that Al Yogurt now is running the thing, but it
might not be because last time I checked cartels, they'll
tell you their businessmen. I mean, I've talked to people
who lived in Mexico their whole lives. They've met cartel
bosses who will say, look, we are businessmen, our product
is illegal. We're forced to act this way. We don't
want to have to act this way, but this is
how we do things. But when you're working in that
world where hey, we'll spill blood at a moment's notice,
take our money or take our lead, and I imagine
that if you kill enough of the leadership, now you've
got you know, third, second, and third and fourth lieutenants
were they're going to want to battle to own the thing.
Now they're busy kind of fighting each other, right.
Speaker 3: Correct, Yeah, they're going to battle for what they call
the plazas, the the areas where things happen. Okay, you've
got control of you know, border access. I think cartel
probably makes more money moving people than they do moving drugs.
Stealing oil in Mexico is a very big business for
the cartels. So all this, yeah, you're gonna have just
people trying to fight for new territories, fight for dominance
and that that's of and that's going to cause a
lot of spillover violence as well. And that's where you
could also get more tourist impacts, you know, even if
it's unintended as far as hurting, uh, you know, actually
physically harming tourists who were visiting the normally safe areas.
Speaker 1: And you know, I'll just say this because people everybody
knows have been to Port of Art like four times,
maybe five I have to count. I've never experienced any
fear there. I did at a time when my daughter
came down. We went to a remote area act we
meant to go to a resort. We ended up going
to a town that's the same name. And I've shared this.
I don't know Mike if I told you this, but
we walked out into this little town. Our driver, great guy,
he stayed right on us, and I had a bad
feeling about the place when we got there and we
walked a little bit. We walked past a kind of
pseudo military installation with sandbags and rocks and a couple
of great, big, huge automatic weapons, and they had a
homemade sign of a Patriates de Mehicano and the Mexican Patriots.
And I looked at that and said, that's not military,
that's not governments. And I realized, my gosh, that's a cartel.
And they were guarding a dock, and sure enough, there
were some actual government people out there inspecting boats, but
they had overwatched from a cartel. And the looks I
got from the guys as we were walking out there,
the looks in the eyes. I said to my daughter,
we're leaving, really, we're leaving. We're done. And we walk
back and our driver had never really let us out
of a sight that so one time I've felt afraid.
So I just want to tell everybody this. I've checked
in with the team at Renew where I go right now.
They're safe. No one has been harmed, Praise God. I
immediately texted Steve and Hector and Caesar and the people
I know there. So I would just ask you to pray,
obviously for old, innocent people in Mexico, but for the
Renew team right now. They've not been impacted and nothing's
happened near the resorts according to them, and my friends
are safe down there. It's not lost to me that
this is a place I go a lot. And instantly
people are saying, are you gonna stop going? No, I'm
gonna wait for this to cool down, because Mike, this
is the thing where I'm at. I'm a little right now.
I feel a little huffy for some of my fellow
Americans because a lot of people are saying, Oh, Mexico
needs to get his garbage together. They can't even control
their country. They need to learn from the States. And
I'm thinking, did you watch the Summer of Love? Did
you see six blocks of downtown Seattle taken over? Did
you see the shoot and move battles in Lexington, in
Kentucky and in Saint Louis between domestic terrorists and our cops.
Have you watched otherwise rational soccer moms becoming people who
go accost officers as they're trying to make arrests? Do
you not see that we're not having cartels go blow
up costcos? But Mike, honestly, goodness, are we that far
behind given the advance of the Color Revolution in this
country and the tactics being employed.
Speaker 3: Not necessarily, I mean, right now, most of the violence
here in the US is by the most unstable members
of that side, where you know, they're pretty much going out,
you know, in mostly as single actors, but occasionally you
have that small cell like in Texas. Yeah, but the
calls for violence or within the United States are increasing
from the radical left, and eventually more and more people
are going to take them up on that.
Speaker 1: Okay, because this is what I'm looking at. People are
saying to me, well, are you going to stop going
to Portavars? Have I stopped going to Seattle? Am I
not going to go to Portland's?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: My daughter went to Portland's a few months ago. I said,
please don't go downtown, you know, just just steer away
from downtown. I know you live downtown Portland, but antifas
occupied there, am I going to not, you know, go
to Minneapolis. Probably not, to be honest with you, I
don't have any reason to, but I might like our
country just maybe stop lecturing a little bit. Yes, it's
worse in Mexico, but we don't have a firm control
over cartels operating up here. And this also bothered me.
I'm listening to that conversation between Elmentche and this police chief,
and I'm thinking back to the conversation between Keith Ellison
and the leaders of the small fraud faction, who were saying,
we got you elected, but we're going to need some things.
They weren't threatening to kill people, you know, there's a
difference there. But we were saying to him, we need
you to do some things for us if you're going
to keep our support. And I'm sorry, Mike, I failed
to believe that the cartels haven't taught these techniques to
the Somalians. I fail to believe that cartels aren't in
our country paying off officers and beguilding to build up
the same system. Would they not do that here?
Speaker 3: They certainly would. And some of the stuffs, like folks
from Somalia might have learned this from their own country.
You know where the you know where the level of
corruption is just you know, off the charts. So whether
there's a collusion between the cartels and folks in Minneapolis,
don't know. But there's plenty of cartel activity throughout the country.
Every city now is a border city because of the
drug activity and the impact of the cartels.
Speaker 1: So when you talk about situational awareness with people and
you talk about this vanquishing denial, I think we better
have a societal vanquishing of denial.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: I look at this mic from a godly perspective, from
a Christian perspective, we're fallen species with a sin issue.
God warned us about time such as these, so I
take my optimism from that. But that doesn't mean that
we shouldn't be prepared. So maybe we need to have
a national baycushing of denial. These cartels operate here, They're
just not ready to take this form of kinetic action
here yet. Is that a rational assumption?
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're definitely already here. And you have a like
consider kind of a low level insurgency taking place with
a lot of the far left radicals and which are
seeking to stabilize and delegitimize the government of the United States.
I've seen videos where you know, they think they're the
only ones talking amongst themselves calling for the overthrow the
United States. They are linked up with the pro Hamas factions,
all calling for the same thing, even though that you know,
if on a level playing field, if they're the only
players left, they would be going against each other.
Speaker 1: Right, And what I'm watching here in our country, and
there's this vanquishing of denial. What I'm asking people to understand,
and there is when this stuff is going on and
we can't stop it or won't stop it, and this
stuff is going on, we had better also begin to
think about situational awareness for families and friends and businesses.
So let's start with this, this this assumption you operate
or live in one of these cities where there's cartel ownership,
And let's start at a business or an organizational level
and work out from there being prepared and being situation
where and protecting yourself. Let's start at an organizational level
in a city like Portland or Seattle, or Los Angeles
or New York, any of these things that are surrounded
by these cartels.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you got to map out your human terrain, you know,
build your own intelligence networks, you know, within your business,
and it spills over not just with you know, like
fighting insertaencies, fighting cartels. This is even like workplace violence prevention. Now,
if you build a culture within your business where one
of your employees feel safe enough and confident enough to say, hey,
I've got this problem with a relationship outside of work,
but there's a chance they could spill over here. So
that's building that trust, building that community within your organization,
and then that will have a cascading effect of making
everyone safer.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And then once you have that human terrain build,
you know, and you're making everyone feel safe, they can
come and talk to you about things. I want to
talk about some next steps here, because people step back
and they watch what goes on in Mexico and see,
I see that the armshare quarterbacking. Oh, well, you know
the armies better are the cartels a better armed than
the police? Okay, armshare quarterback that's obvious. We see this,
But what are you doing in your backyard? So we'll
talk with Michael Rourke about this. The impact economically is
we're looking at this, there's no doubt that this is
gonna have an impact on tourism. I mean, there's no doubts.
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not going to go back, No, it doesn't mean that
at all. I'm gonna wait till this cools down and
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can ripple up into here. It's more destabilization. We've got
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So you talked about building this human terrain mic. You
talked about that. Next steps wise, if you're an organization
operating these areas around the cartels, are the other things
you should recommend? Physical infrastructure, physical security.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think you need like a holistic physical security
survey Okay, find out and find out what your weaknesses are.
You know, if you don't have any policies and procedures
in place, you need to start getting those established. If
you know, if you have folks within the organization that
can handle that, that's great. If not, you probably need
to seek some outside professional guidance. But you need to
look at look at your parameters. Start from the outside
and work your way in. Okay, Now you want to
figure out how to how to harden the place, not
necessarily making it a fortress, but you want to look
at you know, how do you deter bad actors, how
do you deny their access? And then how do you
defend if you have to come down to that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, going back to Mexico, you said you'd heard estimates
of up to forty thousand car TILE members. You mentioned
some of those people are gonna be pike swingers or
just thugs, not necessarily trained operatives. But what you've seen
in some of the some of the weaponry they do have.
You said that they've got rocker prone, rocket propelled grenades,
some other weaponry. So, if it comes down to a
police force action and national guard action based on what
you know, now, if the President of Mexico is pushed
into actually, you know, pushing forward on this, which I
think the cartels are demanding, because they've made some demands.
From what you can tell now, is there a contest
between the Mexican military and the cartels in terms of weaponry.
Speaker 3: In a larger scale conventional fight, the military will win.
You did things like black and this was yesterday, black
helicopters using mini guns, you know, their door guns, hitting
targets on the ground. You're gonna have a problem with
local police forces that are in the area. They won't
necessarily fight with the cartels, but they probably won't be
helping the government a whole lot. So it'll become more
of a kind of a conventional military fight in a
kind of an urban terrain, and not conventional like tanks
against tanks, but you know, more or less force on force,
and it'll end up devolving into some sort of you know,
probably guerrilla warfare. But and then it's possible to persuade
some of these you know, low level guys. Okay, this
isn't worth it anymore. I'm out of here. But most
of these guys are so dedicated to their cause. They've
killed so many people. You know, these sakarios, these hit men,
they have no qualms about killing their rivals, killing nisent people,
so it'll still be violent and quite bloody.
Speaker 1: And right now, my understanding is that the cartels have
not withdrawn I was looking this up. They made a demand.
They want the team that took out Elmanche. And what
they've said to the President of Mexico is, we want
the team. You need to bring the team forward. We
need to know who the team is. And you know
what that means. I mean they want their names. Therefore,
find out where they live, and they intend to take
these guys out. She cannot do that, obviously, But does
she know she can't do that because I'm hearing the
President of Mexico not understand that when you kill Dementche,
you did restart the war, because I think that's how
the cartels look at that. So if they don't meet
that demand, I mean, how do they does a cartel
back off from this? Do they say, oh, never mind?
I mean, I know you can't crawl inside their heads.
You've already said that not all of them are rational people.
But I guess I'm wondering how do they actually back
down from this?
Speaker 2: Position.
Speaker 3: Well, if if the government does do that and handle
of these people, then that points to an unprecedented level
of corruption and that probably goes all the way to
the very top of the country. Yeah, it remains to
be seeing what the cartel is going to do longer
term if if their demands aren't met. A lot of
the roadblocks I said have been cleared. Yeah, it's still
not safe to travel going to you know, driving across
the border.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: We had something yesterday where someone asked me for advice.
They had family members that were playing in the travel
tomorrow driving across the border, and I put together product.
I actually sent you that product. Yeah, that persuaded them
to cancel the trip. Yeah, So it still remains to
be seeing what's going to happen longer term. But you know,
can the cartel sustain that level of trying to shut
things down? I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: Okay, there's a long time listener, desh view of our program.
I've ever met in person. I've had her own. She's
an activist. She's down there with sixteen people on a
Christian mission and they were done there doing a vision mission.
And I assume she and her husband they were in
a church. I know there's some groups that do nonprofit
work to get folks out of there, But is this
a thing where people like you, organizations like yours get
contacted by well off people or just desperate people saying
come and get us. And if so, short of having
a bunch of former special operators together on a team,
is there any come and get us at this point
right now? Or are these people just stuck?
Speaker 3: So the most part, there isn't that much of a
need to go and do any rescues, even though there
is at least one organization that is already a boosts
on the ground ye getting ready to help people. A
lot of the wealthier folks, they'll have insurance that includes
security type rescue. There are organizations that.
Speaker 2: That do that.
Speaker 3: I know when I was working in Afghanistan, we even
contracted with a with another company for that sort of service.
So it can definitely happen. I think for the most part,
we aren't there yet. Maybe some isolated groups might need
some help getting out through areas that might still be
cut off. I say, a church group, if they're in
a more remote area, they might need a security escort
at least to get back to a larger city. That's
that's currently safer.
Speaker 1: Okay. I guess I hear security escorts and I'm looking
at RPGs and I'm looking at IDs, I'm looking at
people being captured on the you know, highway, and at
this point they haven't made a point of killing civilians.
I mean, and this has to be an order from
on top, because you've said not all these people are
rational thus far. When they stop people in their cars,
they get people out of the cars, they show them away,
then they like them on fire. I watched a video
of a gas station guys letting a gas station on fire,
and they had the employees run and they had this
lady drive off on her car. Then they let it
on fire. But I guess I'm looking at security escorts
and saying, yeah, as long as you have water, you
can last a long time without food or very very
limited food. So I guess you're kind of joining with
the Mexican authorities in our own state department saying stay
where you're.
Speaker 3: At, yeah, if it's safe to do so. There are
a number of companies in Mexico, security companies run by
Mexicans that will, you know, we'll escort people through areas
and they might be able to negotiate, you know, their
way through a got it. I'm not saying that, you know,
they might not have cartel members among those organizations, but
they at least beat the local language. Say hey, look
we've got some foreigners here, we got some missionaries. We
just want to get them through. You know, they might
they might have to you know, pay pay a small
amount of money and say okay, they can get them through,
but you know that might be a safer way than
trying to do it on your own.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you'd be wise that you probably have security
companies saying you're going to want to get some some
money too, and some cash because we might meet some
extraordinary tolls. So in terms of situation, awhereenes's keeping everybody safe,
keeping people safe when they travel. How to business people, churches,
organizations get in touch with you so you can do
this this this look into their human resources and their
policies and then physical preparedness.
Speaker 3: Sure, they can go to our website at opcon dot com,
A D O, P, C O N dot com and
UH and contact us through there. They can email AOC
dot security at at opcon dot com if they if
they want to see what we're doing on social media.
AOC underscore security on both Instagram and uh and on x.
The company is also up on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1: Good good and we'll put all that stuff in the
show notes as well, so to be easy for folks.
Appreciate you coming on help. Thank you for helping us
see this through your eyes as far to see through
yours and mine. And I'm just going to continue to
pray for my friends down there and all the innocent
people and good actors trying to bring this thing about
to a good end. Thank you. I appreciate you.
Speaker 3: All right, Thanks a lot, Todd.
Speaker 1: This is the Todd Herman Show. Please go be well,
be strong, be kind, and please make every effort to
walk in the light of Christ. And please do pray
for all the innocent people in the wake of all
this stuff down there, including my friends. If you would
please at renew