Speaker 1: Welcome everybody. Today we're looking at how America hunted El Chopo.
Speaker 1: So what you're going to find out today is the
Speaker 1: special forces were a part of it. And we'll look
Speaker 1: at Joaquin Goosman Lauriel Chopo, the most powerful narco in
Speaker 1: modern history, and how he got pulled out of a
Speaker 1: rat hole in those Mochi's Mochis, Sinaloa in January of
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen. It's a story about interagency intelligence fusion, about
Speaker 1: special operation forces operating in a country where they officially
Speaker 1: weren't operating, and about a model of warfare. It doesn't
Speaker 1: look like warfare at all. I'm talking about advisors who
Speaker 1: leave no footprint, intelligence cells running real time network mapping,
Speaker 1: a targeting cycle design to find, fix, and finish at
Speaker 1: high value target adapted not for a battlefield in Iraq
Speaker 1: or Afghanistan, but for the streets and tunnels of northwestern Mexico.
Speaker 1: Let's set the table up. Twenty fifteen, Chopo had already
Speaker 1: escape from a maximum secure, already prison in Mexico through
Speaker 1: a tunnel, a mile long, professionally engineered tunnel with a
Speaker 1: motorcycle rail system built directly under its cell. I'm sure
Speaker 1: you've seen the videos by Now, that's not a cartel move,
Speaker 1: that's a state level logistics operation, and it embarrassed everyone.
Speaker 1: The Mexican government, the DEA, the entire apparatset has spend
Speaker 1: years hunting this guy. After that escape, the pressure from
Speaker 1: Washington was significant, not loud, not public, but real. The
Speaker 1: DEA and HSI have been running long term intelligence collection
Speaker 1: on the Sinaloa's cartel's network for years, humans signals, sigent
Speaker 1: financial tracking, and they had what targeting analysts call a
Speaker 1: pattern of life, a detailed map of Choppo's habits, his
Speaker 1: communication methods, his vulnerabilities. Now here's where it gets interesting
Speaker 1: and where the public record gets intentionally thin. JAYSOK, the
Speaker 1: organization that planned and executed the Ben Lawton raid, the
Speaker 1: organization that built the most sophisticated, high value target hunting
Speaker 1: architecture in human history during the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns.
Speaker 1: After twenty eleven, after Bin Laden, after the draw downs,
Speaker 1: Jaysawk didn't disappear. It adapted, and one of the places
Speaker 1: it adapted to was the Western Hemisphere. Special operation personnel
Speaker 1: operating in an advisory and intelligence support capacity in Mexico.
Speaker 1: And these are confirmed reports a Delta force US SF
Speaker 1: HADDE operators embedded with Mexican Special Forces units, particular SIMAR,
Speaker 1: the Mexican Navy Special Warfare component, not leading raids, not
Speaker 1: pulling triggers, but sitting in the room running the intelligence. Freed.
Speaker 1: This is a low visibility advisory model, and it's not accidental.
Speaker 1: It's deliberate architecture designed to preserve what operators called sovereignty optics,
Speaker 1: the political reality that Mexico cannot publicly accept US military
Speaker 1: boots on the ground conducting combat operations on American soil.
Speaker 1: So you adjust the model, you put the Americans one
Speaker 1: step back. Mexican forces hit the door. The US personnel
Speaker 1: made sure they hit the right door. The operation of
Speaker 1: those mochis went loud fast. On January eighth, twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: pre dawn, SIMAR operators moved on a safe house. There
Speaker 1: was a firefight. Five cartel members were killed, one marine
Speaker 1: was wounded. Chappo escaped through a tunnel, surfaced in a
Speaker 1: drainage channel, carjacked the vehicle. Eventually he was detained by
Speaker 1: federal police on a highway shortly after, and the media
Speaker 1: this looked like a clean Mexican law enforcement success, and
Speaker 1: the Mexican government needed it to look that way. But
Speaker 1: the intelligence trail that led to that safe house, the
Speaker 1: network mapping, the communication intercept. That work involved US interagency
Speaker 1: personnel at every level. EE agents embedded in Mexico City,
Speaker 1: CIA officers running liaison operations with Mexican intelligence and JAYSOK
Speaker 1: personnel contributing what they built over a decade. The F
Speaker 1: three eight cycle fine, fix, finish, exploit, analyze, di seminate
Speaker 1: In Iraq, Finish meant the kinetic strike or a direct
Speaker 1: action raid. In Mexico, Finish meant the Mexican Marine unit
Speaker 1: and making an arrest. The cycle is the same, the
Speaker 1: ending is different. The American fingerprints are the same. The
Speaker 1: Joint Interagency Task Force Caribbean and Central America the JIATFCC,
Speaker 1: is modeled directly on the counter terrorism fusion cells built
Speaker 1: in Iraq and Afghanistan, intelligence sharing, real time network mapping,
Speaker 1: coordinated operations across agencies and national boundaries. The al Chopper
Speaker 1: operations plural because this wasn't the first time JAS was
Speaker 1: involved in tracking him. Those operations were proof of concept
Speaker 1: for applying counter terrorism methodology to transnational criminal organizations, and
Speaker 1: that raises a series of questions that don't have answers.
Speaker 1: When you apply a wartime targeting architecture to a law
Speaker 1: enforcement problem, you change the nature of what you're doing.
Speaker 1: The legal authorities are different, the rules of engagement are different,
Speaker 1: the accountability structures are different, and the downstream consequences for
Speaker 1: civil liberties, for Mexican sovereignty, for the political stability of
Speaker 1: the bilateral relationship, well, those consequences are real. The operators
Speaker 1: who do this work are not asking those questions. That's
Speaker 1: not their job. Their job is to execute the mission.
Speaker 1: Someone has to ask the questions. The capture of El
Speaker 1: Chapa in twenty sixteen was genuinely significant, symbolically, tactically, legally,
Speaker 1: the extradition that followed the trial in Brooklyn, to the
Speaker 1: life sentence, all that mattered. But Sinaloa didn't collapse. The
Speaker 1: network didn't collapse because networks built on that scale and
Speaker 1: that level of institutional depth, they survived. The removal of
Speaker 1: any single node member Hydra that myth. I'm sure you've
Speaker 1: heard it before. In these circles. What Operation black Swan
Speaker 1: really demonstrate is the capability of the interagency architecture the
Speaker 1: United States built over twenty years of counter terrorism operations.
Speaker 1: The demonstrator the Jysocks HBT model can be adapted for
Speaker 1: non traditional environments, demonstrated a dea cii ce I am sorry.
Speaker 1: Jysock and foreign partner forces can operate in Seeman's coordination,
Speaker 1: but it didn't demonstrate that any of that capability translates
Speaker 1: into durable strategic outcomes when the underlying conditions poverty, corruption,
Speaker 1: demand for narcotics remain unchanged. The operators did their job.
Speaker 1: That's it for now. If this episode hit different for you,
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