About the Podcast

In this episode, we’ll recount the tense moments when my team and I were thrown into the back of a police pickup truck, taken to a remote location, only to be released after revealing our diplomatic immunity cards.

We’ll explore the skilled yet volatile nature of my companion Joseph, the critical importance of Krav Maga training in dangerous situations, and the grim realities we face while infiltrating trafficking rings. You’ll hear about our encounters with notorious traffickers like Scarface and Goldtooth, the life-saving sting operations, and the painstaking efforts to gain the trust of these criminals to locate trafficked children.

We’ll also shine a light on the heartbreaking stories of children controlled through fear, crossed into the U.S. border, and held by exploitative sponsors.

Join us as we delve into the dark underbelly of child trafficking and share the courageous efforts to liberate these vulnerable lives. This is an episode that underscores the danger, the resolve, and the ultimate hope in our mission to make the world a safer place for children.

Stay tuned!

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Transcript

Paul Hutchinson (00:00:01)

These Bad Dudes all ended up going to prison for a very very long time. We put them in prison for life, allowed them to plead down for 25 years in exchange for the contact information of any Americans that have been down there for these horrible deeds. 48 children it was the largest child rescue operation in history for Mexico.

Paul Hutchinson (00:00:44)

Welcome to another episode of Liberating Humanity. Today we’re going to talk about another operation that was done in Mexico. These were some really bad dudes and this operation took months and months to put together and in multiple cities just to be able to make it all happen. Started out in Mexico City, we had been working with the federal authorities in Mexico and we had done operations in Cancún, we had done operations in Aleppo, we had done operations in the Tijuana area and in Cabo San Lucas, all over Mexico. We had taken down traffickers and each time we would report to the federal agents we created some great relationships with them. Well they wanted us to dig deeper on what was going on in Mexico City itself and so we went in with a whole team. In fact a bigger team than we normally had. I think we had like seven guys at the time which is too many, too many to really be undercover, you’re like this big group of guys and whatnot. So we went in and we divided into two groups and we said, “Okay, we’re going to actually have a competition, let’s see who can find the traffickers first.” And some of these guys were fairly new. They had been kind of on the sidelines for a while, for over a year had been watching what we were doing, had been training a bunch but had never actually been on an operation before, guys like Jeremy, guys like Brian and were new, first time there in Mexico City. There were some veterans so to speak. had myself and Andy and Jimmy and a couple others that were there on that team as well and so we divided up into a couple groups and we went out. Now a couple of the new guys were trying to figure out what was going on and one of them’s like, “Hey, I know how to do this, I’ve been hunting in countries all around the world and now I just want to hunt traffickers.” I’m like, “Yeah, it’s a little bit different, you know you’re not going to sit behind a rock and wait for an animal to come and pull the trigger, It’s all about communication and rule number one, we all stay together, we never go out on our own.” And unfortunately some of them in the beginning they’re like, hey I’m going to go find traffickers come back to you….. Whatever, okay they didn’t find any traffickers because they didn’t know what they were doing but over time got really really good. In fact this became one of the most successful undercover operations of any of them that we did and ended up being the largest rescue operation in Mexico history ever of any organization anywhere. It was super successful. So started out, we’re there in Mexico City and we’re divided up into a couple different groups. I was with a group where we met with a couple people that were selling drugs at 2 in the morning. 

 

Paul Hutchinson (00:03:33)

So, we started out by sitting down with the federal agents. We said okay, let’s look at a map of the city . What are the most dangerous areas in Mexico City? Mexico City already is kind of dangerous right, so we’re identifying the most dangerous areas in Mexico City. So we identified where those areas were and the time of day that they were most dangerous, the time of day where the most drug deals are going on, the time of day where the most murders happen, the time of day where the most trafficking is going on. So we identified the locations, we identified the time, we figured it was starting about 10:00 at night, 11:00 at night, that’s when stuff started happening. So that’s when we hit the Z area. My team decided we were going to hit what they called the Zona Rosa. The red zone. Now we had been there before and I talked about this on some of the other podcasts where we had thrown a party and had brought in a bunch of the girls that were being trafficked in that area to see this mariachi band and enjoy some time and some dinner and everything else and we gave them all little cards that said, “Hey, you know, if you’re in a situation where somebody is controlling you through fear or other means then please give this number a call, we will put you in a safe place we’ll take care of you, take care of your family Etc.” So it was super successful and beautiful but that was my first time being in Mexico City. Now I had been down there many many times and had become good friends with the head of the federal police and a bunch of the other people that were working in that area. So we went into the Zona Rosa, the Red Zone, the area that we had gone in before that has over 300 plus prostitutes that are all lined up on this road and people will drive in their cars along the side of this road and just kind of look at girl girl girl and finally pick one that they want, pull over, roll down the window and talk to them and have them go and do their deed and it happens all the time and unfortunately a lot of these girls, a lot of them are being trafficked and you can tell because their pimps are sitting over in the bushes or sitting over in the park area and they’re just watching and the girls, they’ll dart their eyes over and watch their pimps if they’re in a conversation with somebody that’s not really earning a money at the time. So this is the area we decided to go in and we were connecting with some of the The Pimps that were there, finding out if they had access to other girls that weren’t there on the street, finding out who was selling kids and who was selling adults so that we could get their contact information, turn them in. Well it was actually super difficult. It was not as easy to find trafficking going on there in Mexico with miners in Mexico City itself. The government has done a really good job of cleaning that up now. Unfortunately they didn’t do as good of a job at cleaning up the people who were traffic that were in their 20s and 30s because they’re all over the streets right there. However, it was difficult to find kids. We connected with a couple different traffickers that said, “Hey, yeah yeah we’ve got some kids, you know go with us.” And we got in the back of a pickup truck driven by the traffickers. In fact I got some video of me and a couple of my operators and we’re like yeah we’re being safe “not” and back of a pickup truck driven by traffickers and in this operation there was actually four different times that we ended up in the back of a pickup truck being driven by traffickers to an undisclosed location. It was something that the traffickers felt much more comfortable with us in that we would say, yeah we’ll go with you jump in and whatever and so we’re riding in the back of this pickup truck going through the streets of downtown Mexico City at 2:00 a.m. and they ended up showing us, introducing us to some boys and girls that they were selling. Most of them were 17, 18, 19 years old and didn’t seem like they were really being trafficked, they were just connections of some of these people. And so the next day, we had multiple operations that we had going on there and so one night we went out and we were meeting with the drug dealers and we were connecting with the guys who were selling those girls in the Red Zone Etc. The next day we said okay, we’re going on with another op here but we need to be more successful than we were last night and I don’t know if it was because we had too many guys out and we had a bunch of greenies that were there just getting used to it. Either way we needed to take it to the next level and so we sat down with a federal agent. So we said, Okay, what’s really going on here? Where’s your biggest concern with trafficking? Is it really here in Mexico City? And at the time we had found out from some of the traffickers in Cancún and now the name of the city came up again with some of these traffickers. The name of the city was called Tenancingo. Now you can look this up online. Tenancingo is known throughout all of Latin America especially in Mexico, it is known as a “No Go Zone” for the police. This is a place where it’s estimated that over 10% of the people who live there in Tenancingo, over 10% of those people are involved in human trafficking and many of them are involved in child trafficking. In fact, in Cancún, if you remember that podcast, one of the traffickers that had some 13-14 year-old girls that were being sold there, he said, “Listen I can go to Tenancingo today and I’ll pick up a seven-year-old. In fact I’ll pick up a couple seven-year-olds if you want. You pay me $5,000 to go and $2500 a month to keep them and then extra money each time that you come down but I will keep them just for you anytime that you want to be here.” And so we had heard about that already in Cancún and now we’re in Mexico City and we’re hearing about it again. So we sat down with the federal agents, we’re like, “Okay we want to go to Tenancingo, we want to go where the action is. This sounds like the place that we need to take down the traffickers, this is where it’s all coming from.” And the head of the federal police said, “Nope, you’re not going there.” Now this is not the first time we had done operations in a lot of dangerous places. Acapulco at the time when we were down there in that operation, the drug cartel was running that entire region. It was super dangerous and it was no less dangerous when we’re sitting there meeting with escaped convicts in Tijuana and having them introduce us to some other traffickers Etc and we’re finding the kids that were there. So we’ve been in some super dangerous places and those ones all of them the federal police are like yeah go in, do it here connect with those guys. These guys said no, you’re not going to Tenancingo. We’re like, “Why not? I mean, we got the manpower, we’ve got the guys, we know what we’re doing.” They said no, we’re not and they showed us some pictures on their phone, these pictures were horrific, these were guys that were decapitated, that had their arms ripped off, there was just blood scenes everywhere, there was a guy that was outside of his vehicle and I said, “Who are these?” He said, “They were all undercover officers, these were police officers, federal police officers in Mexico that went from Mexico City that were trying to blend in.” He said, “these officers were good, they were really good and they blend in, they were Hispanic you wouldn’t know. He said, “you go into Tenancingo, you’re dead for sure because Americans don’t go there, nobody goes there, even the federal police in Mexico don’t go there.” He said, “it’s a bloodbath every time we send guys in there, it’s a blood path.” He said, “You can’t go.” We’re like, “Okay, well let’s figure out where these kids are coming from and where they’re going to then how about that, because if they’re being mined there, if they’re being taken there and that’s kind of the hub, great I think you guys should take care of that but let’s do something with where those kids are going.” So we found out that a bunch of those kids were being trafficked from Tenancingo through Mexico City into some of the beach areas. One of those beach areas was Puerto Vallarta. Now you guys are thinking oh I’ve been there, that’s a beautiful place. It is. So is Cancún, so is Mexico City. So is a lot of the places that we’ve done these operations and the problem is, if it’s a tourist destination for Americans, there’s a lot higher chance of finding trafficking going on. Why? Because we’re the demand, that’s where it’s coming from. Guys if we could fix our ( _ )  then they don’t have to deal with it, they’re not selling kids to the locals, they’re selling them to Americans because that’s where the money is and that’s why so many of these kids are being brought across the border. In fact I’m going to touch on that right now guys, you’re sitting here thinking; oh yeah, you know this is a Democrat versus Republican issue. No it’s not, this is a human trafficking issue. This should have never been a political issue. The trafficking that was going on in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico City and in Cancún and all these beaches anywhere where Americans were coming down to travel, these guys are like, you know what, we can make a lot more money, if we take the inventory to the customer, if we can take these kids across the border, then we’ve got rich Americans that don’t have to lie to their wives and telling them they’re going on a vacation with a bunch of dudes down to Puerto Vallarta just as a business trip. Instead these guys can  go right after work and hook up with somebody there in a hotel room. Trafficking is going through the roof in America because of that open border policy, through the roof guys, hundreds of thousands of children, undocumented children are being brought across that border. Do you really think, do you really think that that many children are coming across the border, that don’t have families? No, I’ve spent a bunch of time in Latin America recently in every single city in Honduras and Nicaragua and in Colombia and Ecuador and in Venezuela, every single country, every single day have children that are disappearing from Healthy Families, just disappearing off the streets, off out of schools, they’re gone and these families don’t have the resources to do anything about it they’re like, where are these kids going. Well here’s what’s happening in a lot of cases guys, these kids are being taken by traffickers, they’re being drugged, their ID is taken away, their phone is taken away Etc and they’re being transported up to the US border and then what happens is this, these guys control these kids through fear, they say; here’s the deal, I know where your mother lives, I know where your sister lives, you don’t want your sister to be killed, you don’t want your mother to be raped do you, right, you’re going to do exactly what we say and this happens every single day and they say okay you’re going to go across the border and you’re going to say, “Hey, I’m here and I have this family that’s agreed to take me and they have this phone number and this address of a place where they’re going to take your taxpayer dollars and transport these children to their new families. Now you and I both hope, you know we put our heads in the sand and hope that these are all healthy families, that these children are going to find a new life, which would be beautiful, that would be wonderful if that was really happening every single time but unfortunately, the system does not allow, does not have the resources in place to be able to vet each one of these sponsors and it could very easily happen, where this sponsor is somebody who is working in a trafficking ring here in the United States and taking these children into prostitution, taking these children into creating child pornography. It happens every single day. And the problem here in the United States is going through the roof because of that border policy. I know. I know because the places that we were finding the children happened to be the same places that Americans were frequenting. And then when covid happened and people weren’t traveling as much these traffickers are like, “crap how do we fix this problem.” Quote; In their minds well they do so by taking the inventory of the children to the demand of the Americans and it’s happening right in front of our eyes and they’re using your taxpayer dollars to pay for the transportation of these traffic children. “Okay that part probably is going to get this censored a little bit.” I don’t care, it’s the truth and it’s what’s happening. So back to Puerto Vallarta, we fly there. We say, “Okay, that’s where these kids from Tenancingo are ending up, we’re going to go there, we’re going to take down their rings, we’re going to fix the demand side so they don’t have  places to to send these kids once they’re taken from all these countries.” And so Brian and I jumped on an airplane from Mexico City. We were supposed to be in Mexico City for the next few days and we’re like, you know what, we’re going to follow these leads and that’s what we did. When we got into Puerto Vallarta we didn’t want to communicate with any of the local police because in a lot of these areas, some of the guys are compromised, some of them are working with the traffickers and so we didn’t. We didn’t want to know we’re there. So the head of the federal police know that we’re there, the president knows that we’re there, that the team that’s there in Mexico City those guys knew where we were, those guys knew we were in country and we had, you know, our diplomatic immunity badges things and stuff that I had gotten from some of the previous operations that make it so that just in case crap hit the fan, we have something there. And so as soon as we got there, we decided to go down to the beach area that’s where the Americans would hang out, that’s where the traffickers are going to hang out and so we’re down there on this boardwalk area, we’re walking around this boardwalk and in these dark little alleys next to the boardwalk, we met a guy by the name of Caesar. Caesar came up to us, approached us, “Hey, you want some drugs? You want some blow? We’re like, “No no, we’re just setting up a party, we’re working with the boss doing some stuff.” He goes, “Oh yeah, you want some girls? I got some! you know, there’s this massage place then, they have some miners there, if you want them or I have some guys I’m working with that have some too, I can get you in touch with them.” And so we exchanged contact information with him and down the road we met another guy by the name of Umberto or something and he was selling children as well. Both of these guys were what I call a level one though, they’re selling drugs on the street, they know the streets, they know who’s selling kids and it’s a super dangerous area but we had to build relationships with them in order to get to the ones who really had the kids. So Umberto, who we met on the street selling drugs, introduces to Manuel. Manuel’s a taxi driver. Now, we found in a lot of these operations the taxi drivers, that the corrupt taxi drivers, really know what’s going on. When we were in Honduras, the taxi driver was the one that knew everything that was going on there. When we were in Nicaragua the taxi driver was one, the Cancún operation, the entire Cancún operation came from connections from that taxi driver. So if somebody can introduce us to a dirty Taxi Driver, one who’s working with the traffickers, these guys know the street. Manuel had been working as a taxi driver for 20 years. He knew the area, he knew what was going on and he knew who was selling kids and so we got in with him, gave him some extra cash, we’re throwing cash around saying all right yeah take us to guys who can connect us with the things that we’re looking for. Manuel, let’s see what was driving us around. He took us to a couple clubs and some other places and he said listen, he said, the guy who runs the show here is named Fernando. Fernando works with the cartel. He’s a really dangerous man. They call him “Coyote” and he only has one leg and he’s a bad dude, super dangerous guy He said, but he won’t let me introduce him to you until I get to know you better. And we’re like, “Yeah we’re all good men. Let’s go to a club, let’s get some drinks, what do you need, you know so we build this relationship with Manuel that night, the next night. He didn’t feel comfortable introducing us yet. So we flew back to the US. This was only two or three different ops there on that trip. We flew back to the United States. Two weeks later, we fly back down and we meet with Manuel Again, by then he’s comfortable enough to introduce us to a couple guys. One of them we called him, we called him gold tooth. I don’t even remember his name but he had this gold tooth that was right here and he was wearing all kinds of gold watches all the time and this guy had kids. In fact, he brought a couple of them to the mall, he said “Listen, I’m not going to take you where I keep them, you know but we can meet at the mall.” And he brought these kids and they were obviously drugged and you know, to keep them from saying and very much controlled by fear. A lot of times these traffickers will bring these kids out into public places without any fear that the kids are going to say, hey look at me. This happened with people like Elizabeth Smart. Elizabeth Smart a few weeks after she was kidnapped, she was kidnapped here in Utah, she was I think 12 years old at the time, within a few weeks of her being taken. She was so controlled by fear, so controlled by the traffickers that they were able to take her to a public place, to a party and she was smiling, like she was happy to be there, scared to death of saying anything to anyone. So this gold tooth brings these kids to this mall area and you know, we sat down with, he sets them at a separate table and we’re sitting there talking to him and negotiating some things with him and he said, “Listen, I have 10 children right now that I provide for clients whenever they need them and I have access to 20 or more beyond that.” So this guy was was pretty and he showed us a menu on his phone of a bunch of these kids and showed us all these different pictures and and things that they were willing to do, all this crazy stuff and so super dark energy with this gold tooth guy but we were certain that we had found the top of the ladder. Somebody who was really trafficking girls. He was a level three, he was the one who physically held the children but we needed to figure out how to get him to take us to where he was holding the kids. We didn’t have top cover, we didn’t have federal agents that were watching us at the time because we had just flown in from Mexico City. We didn’t trust any of the local cops at the time. So we couldn’t have any of them on our side. So him bringing those kids there that was great, we could verify he had the children but we had no way of tagging his car and tracking where they had, where he had come from or where he was keeping them and so what we needed to do is maintain a relationship with him and get him to the point where he could feel comfortable enough with us to take us to see the other kids. Meanwhile, Manuel introduces us to Fernando Coyote, the one-legged trafficker, this guy now trumped the other one in terms of Man In Charge, this guy was obviously the guy who was running the cartel in the area, he had a whole bunch of kids that he had showed, he had showed us on some pictures. We met him in a public place and we got some pictures with some of the children that he had brought there with him. Coyote was a really bad man and had no empathy whatsoever for the children that he was trafficking or for the people that was working with him and multiple people told us that he had killed a lot of people before. He was super dangerous. Well two days later, we had connected with a couple of the other traffickers there. We were getting a feel for everything that was going on and Coyote wanted to meet us at a private location so he could show us something. We’re like, “okay yeah we can meet you, you just give us an address.” So he texted the address and I’m down there on this one, I’ve got myself, Joseph is there, I think Jimmy’s with us on this one. Now Joseph is our security, Joseph was my Krav maga trainer for a long long time, he’s one of the best Krav trainers in the world, amazing, amazing man. In fact he’s one every year in Israel. Now if you guys don’t know krav maga,  just so you kind of understand, I’ve talked about this before, a lot of other martial arts,  your Sensei, three points when you kick them in the leg whatever, krav maga is a brick to their head go home to your family. Israeli Special Forces, hand to hand combat is the most lethal on Earth of any of the martial arts and a lot of the moves are illegal in the ring with other modalities because they  take out their eyesight, take out their breathing, take out their ability to walk, take out their ability to talk, take out their ability to think you know. These are battleground type skill sets that Joseph has and all of our guys that have been training in krav maga and a lot of our operators that’s where their skill sets were. A lot of the Navy Seal guys that were with us, if they didn’t have a sniper on, the roof and the night vision goggles, they’re like, crap you know I feel a little bit naked here in this space but the guys who really knew Krav they could handle themselves in any kind of situation with their barrier. Now, no disrespect to the Special Forces guys, most of those guys were on Ops as well but they’ll tell you, “yeah I felt a little bit naked without my piece, without my weapons, without all of that stuff and so they could fight and when they came in, they looked like security. So we had to tell the traffickers, yeah that’s my security just keeping me safe whatever. Otherwise they would think “oh this is a military operation, what are you guys doing here.” And it would create some push back. So it’s myself, there’s Joseph, there’s Jimmy and we’re driving to go meet Coyote and we’re driving and looking at this address and we’re driving down this road. It’s the place he wanted us to meet, it looked like it was over by the beach somewhere and we’re driving down this road and Joseph, our security, he’s looking at the map on his phone and He says, “Stop stop stop right now.” We’re like, “What?” He says, “Stop, there is no other way in and out of this area except for this one road, this is a dark area.” He says, I’m looking here, this is a Kill Zone. He said, if coyote and his cartel guys wanted to take us out, this is where they would do it, we we’re not meeting him here, we can meet in a public place but if we continue down this road we’re done. He said, this is way too dangerous and when Joseph says, stop. We stop. No questions asked. We immediately turn around, we’re like, okay we’re out of here, yeah sorry we even questioned you on that and we drive out and I text the trafficker. I texted Coyote and I said, “Hey bro, sorry you know, it’s not going to work there, right now we got some other things going on, just let us know another place. Maybe tomorrow we can meet you there.” And so we did. We connected with him in a more public place the next day. He brought some children so we could verify he had access to the kids and again we didn’t have a federal agent there that could track his car but we were making sure that each one of these traffickers really did have kids and these kids, some of them were being brought in from Tenoncingo some of them from Mexico City, some of them from Honduras all over Latin America, these kids were being funneled into these beach cities where the demand was the Americans. So we fly back to the US. This operation like I say, this was I think we went into Puerto Vallarta eight different times just to set this whole operation up. Each time we went in, we met more traffickers because we didn’t want to do the sting with only one or two traffickers. If we had done the sting that first day with a gold tooth guy we would have got the 10-20 kids that he was trafficking but because of the fact that Coyote was there, Manuel was there and all these other traffickers they would have stepped back in and filled the demand immediately, immediately. So we needed to continue going in over and over again until we could make sure that we had connections with all of the traffickers that were in the area. So the next time we went back in, Manuel had introduced us to another Taxi Driver by the name of Chensi. Chensi was a bad man. Chensi was working with the cartel in the area. He was a driver, been a driver for a number of years but he had connections with all of the underbelly of Puerto Vallarta area. So we get in the taxi with him and he takes us, becomes friends with him Etc. and then he takes us and introduces us to a guy by the name of, I don’t even remember his name, we called him Scarface. He’s got this big scar that was coming down his face here, you could tell it was a knife, fight or something that he was in that he got the end of the deal for that. And Scarface had no conscience whatsoever. I mean he was talking, he was singing songs about raping children. This guy was a bad bad man, some of our traffickers we met they’re, you know they look like businessmen, they’re somewhat respectable. This was a bottom of the gutter but he was selling kids, he was selling kids as young as 8 years old for [_] and  we go got in this car, there was me and Brian, this time went back down together and we get in this car and we’re driving in this taxi car,  Chensi’s driving, we’ve got Scarface in front and me and Brian in back right, no security, no top cover, no weapons, we’re just saying, “Hey yeah we’re going, you know, take us where the party is, take us where we can find, you know whatever we’re looking for.” So we’re in this dark area and there was multiple drug dealers that were going on, we could see, in fact we have some little video footage of some drug deals that were going on in this dark neighborhood. And he takes us to a place where the kids were. Now they were all. It was about 2:00 in the morning by this time and they were  sleeping but we geotagged the location of where he took us, so that we could tell the feds later this is where he’s keeping the kids. So we geotagged that location. He said he had a number of kids there and he had some others at another location as well. So we became good friends with the Scarface guy and made sure that we could have access to all of the kids that were moving forward. Brian and I fly back to the United States again. We’ve been down there four five different times so far on different operations and connecting with every trafficking group that we could in the area and this was bad. There was a lot of people selling kids, there was a lot of kids in this area that were being brought in from all places all over Latin America. Well we then get a text from one of the traffickers, the one that had introduced us to the gold tooth guy, the one who brought the children to the mall, he said he got shot and killed by one of the other traffickers. Why? I’m pretty sure it was Coyote that did it, that killed him because he wanted to control the entire party himself and he had found out that this guy was supplying some of his kids as well and Coyote wanted to do it all himself. Now this has happened multiple times on these operations, where the traffickers end up getting shot by other traffickers. You know, when we go into these operations. I tell the operators they say, listen, I said, “It’s not our job to judge, that’s God’s job but if we need to arrange that meeting with God a little bit early you know, that’s okay, right. These guys are selling kids and I don’t have any hard feelings whatsoever that this guy ended up getting shot and killed by another trafficker because they were both competing for my business. I’m good with that, I’m totally good with that. Now the rest of them need to go to prison or end up in the same place that the gold tooth guy did. And so moving forward we’re like, we get this message that came in and I texted, I forwarded all the information, the text and everything else to the head of the federal police guy that we were working with and he’s like don’t go back. He said, this is way too dangerous, way too hot right now. He says, if you’ve got the traffickers that are shooting each other, you need to kind of lay off now, the hard part about this is that we know that there’s kids there and we know that every single day that we had to delay this operation, those kids are being abused again and again and again by sick Americans that are going down to these beach cities and engaging in these horrible activities. Now just so you know, if you’re a pedop[ _ ] and watching this, we’ve fixed a lot of this stuff. The federal agents in Mexico have shut it down. If you’re thinking of going to Mexico, if you’re thinking of going to Dominican Republic, if you’re thinking of going to Colombia, if you’re thinking of going to any of these countries to engage in these activities, you’re thinking, “oh I know how to do it, I’ll go talk to a taxi driver in the dark area and find it.” You’re going to get arrested, you’re going to get arrested because of the Sound of Freedom movie that’s come out, these countries all had this huge support from all of their people in the country saying; what are we doing about this and they have allocated significant additional resources not only to taking down trafficking and the police forces Etc but undercover guys that are there, that are posing as potential traffickers looking for you, looking for Americans that are coming down, that are looking for children. Why? So you can end up in a Mexican prison, that’s not where you want to be, that’s not where you want to be, guys you’re going to end up experiencing more pain physically and emotionally than these children ever did if you end up in a Mexican prison for buying children. So don’t do it, just don’t do it, okay. So moving forward we had to wait, we had to wait for another month. He says, “don’t go down there right now, wait at least a month until things kind of calm down a little bit. If this guy just barely got shot there’s a lot of tension going on.” So we’re like, crap! okay we’ve got to go, we’ve got to go back down, we’ve got to set up this sting as soon as possible.” So he said, okay we’ll do this thing where he set a date for it because we had connected with a lot of traffickers and we already lost one of them, he already got shot and unfortunately we don’t know, we don’t know if the rest of the children that he was selling, we don’t know if those children ended up with Coyote, I don’t know if they ended up with Manuel, I don’t know where they were, hopefully they were brought in by Coyote or something so that they could be rescued later when we did the sting or hopefully after he got shot something else happened, they were able to get away but we felt very comfortable that we had connected with the top level, the level three, level four traffickers that were in that area and we believe that we had access to a lot of those kids if we could do that sting. So we went back down. We had a sting operation set up where the federal agents in Mexico were going to send in a whole bunch of guys from Mexico City. Guys that they trusted because we didn’t know these traffickers were so high level in this area, that we were certain that the police were on their payroll as well. At least some of the police officers. We were setting up this OP. It was about 4 or 5 days before the sting was going to happen, the rescue itself. And so we flew two federal officers from Mexico City to help us set up the final aspects of the sting itself so that we could introduce them to some of the traffickers they could verify that yes we had the right guys and whatnot so they could find the house that we’re going to do the sting in etc all of this stuff. So we’re there in a hotel room, we got this Marriott Hotel and we’ve got these two federal officers. I’m there with some of the operators and I start calling and texting on my undercover phone, each one of the traffickers calling Coyote, calling Manuel, calling Huerto all of these guys who had shown us kids every one of them. I’m calling each of them and I call Scarface and no answer, goes right to the to the voicemail I’m like, how seemed like his phone was like dead or off and for the next hour, I kept trying to call, I got a hold of everybody else, I told them look we’ve got a party coming in my boss is going to be in town bring all of the kids to this location at this time, you know it was all getting set up but we had to get a hold of Scarface, this was a bad man, he was selling eight year old children and he had no remorse whatsoever. We had to take him down. He had a big operation and he had to go to jail and so I’m like crap! How do I get back in touch with him, all the other ones the phone numbers were working, that one wasn’t working at all and I thought well he was introduced to me by that taxi driver Chensi and so Chensi didn’t have a phone either. At least not one that I had a phone number for but I knew the area that he worked in so I took a couple guys, there was three of us, there was me and Jimmy and Joseph. So we went into this dark area. I told the two federal agents I said, you need to stay here at the hotel because when we’re in this area I can’t have a couple Mexican guys hanging out with me, too many guys will wonder if maybe we are working with the police and so you guys stay here, we’re going to go back out into the dangerous area, we’re going to find these guys. So we went back out and this is down by the boardwalk again and we’re there around the boardwalk and there were some other taxi drivers that were in this area and I thought you know what these guys probably know Chensi and if they do they can get me in touch with them somehow, they probably have a phone number whatever else and so we went into this area and we’re talking to these different taxi drivers and I said, listen, I show some pictures of him, I said can you get me in touch with this guy? And they said, “Oh yeah yeah I know this guy.”  I pulled out a $100 bill and here’s the thing I said, I will give you a $100 if he calls me, just tell him Pablo’s in town, tell him we’re going to have the party, he’ll be super excited.” What kind of party? “Oh you know, we’ve got our boss coming in, some special party, with some special girls and stuff and whatever.” They said, “Oh interesting okay, yeah yeah we know Cheni.” I said, “Great, just have them call me.” And so boom my phone rings just a few minutes later. boom it’s Cheni on the call, I said, what’s up, he says hey what are you doing?” I said, “Hey we need to meet, I need to get back in touch with Scarface, I can’t get a hold of him.” He goes, “Okay cool yeah yeah yeah let’s meet where are you?” I said, “we’re just down by the boardwalk.” He said, “Okay yeah good.” So I hang up the phone with him, I give the $100 to this other taxi driver and then we go out by the boardwalk and we’re just kind of hanging there. We’re waiting for Chensi to show up and as we’re waiting there, about 20 minutes later he hadn’t shown up yet and all of a sudden Boom. 10 officers full automatic weapons big guns, boom. on the ground! on the ground! on the ground! we’re like crap! you know we’re laying down on the ground getting handcuffed and now realize this, we had been on this mission for months, we’re almost three months into it if you count the original stuff we did in Mexico City. We had identified over 40 children that were being sold by these traffickers. I would rather spend three days in a Mexican prison than to lose those 40 plus children and so we’re there getting handcuffed and I’m like crap! I don’t know, are these good cops or bad cops right, I don’t know and they handcuffed us hard, I mean my handcuff marks were for weeks, I still had handcuff marks, in fact I still have nerve damage if I tap this right here my entire thumb and everything goes, I can feel it tingling in there, from the nerve damage, from getting handcuffed on this time. So they throw us down the ground, they’re handcuffing us and they pick us up and they take us over to this police pickup truck, you know the one that has the benches on the side and the guys that are sitting on the benches with all of their guns and stuff and they throw us in the back of this police pickup truck on the bottom part, while these guys are sitting on the benches with their guns and there’s a police car in front of us. There’s a police car in the back of us and they start driving. I’m thinking okay, they’re going to send us, they’re going to take us to the jail, the federal agents. I’ve got two federal agents in the hotel room at the Marriott, they’re going to realize we’re gone, you know maybe we’ll have a chance to text them or something whatever. These guys and they had already taken our phones, we were down on the ground getting handcuffed and they padded us down and they pulled our phones out and you know everything that was in our money and our phones in our pockets everything, they emptied them all and then they threw us in the back of this pickup truck and so then we’re driving. I’m thinking, okay we’re going to go to the jail, the federal agents, those two federal agents will come in, they’ll say, hey there’s a federal case and everything will be good we’ll get out. No problem, well they don’t take us to the jail, they take us down these dark black alleys towards the desert area away from the city. This is where crap happens, this is where it gets really dangerous right, when they take you out of the city, one of two things are going to happen, you’re going to get a beat out of you or you’re gonna die right, this isn’t taking us to the jail and book us in and this is not in America anymore right, you don’t get a phone call, you don’t get an attorney, you get busted up in a bad way so we’re going and all of a sudden the car stopped and I’m like crap! This is dangerous. Now at this point, I’m as scared for the police as I am for us. Now here’s why, I told you who was on that trip with us, Myself, Jimmy and Joseph. Now Jimmy and I had been taking a lot of training from Joseph but Joseph, he could pretty much kill everybody in the room with his eyes closed. He’s a trainer of trainers in Israel. I think he’s the only non-Israeli that’s qualified to train trainers. I don’t know for sure but this guy he’s good. Joseph is amazing amazing and when they threw us all down on the ground and they’re handcuffing us, Joseph’s laying there next to me and he’s like I’m gonna F him kill him, I said, bro you can’t kill him you know, we don’t know, are they good cops, I don’t know, if they’re good cops or bad cops. He goes. “No, they’re bad cops, I’m going to kill them.” You can’t kill them. He says, I can’t, I want to but we’re handcuffed. And he could, you know, he could figure out how to break that and take their guns. He’s a badass. Now Joseph had three tequilas at dinner and was a little bit tipsy right. So he’s like, oh yeah I’m gonna kill him. I can’t kill him yet. So then they pick us up, they put us in the back of the pickup truck and they start driving us. He’s getting more mad by the second and he starts yelling take you and me and Jimmy. We are like, ”Shut up! we’ve got guns to our head you know, we’re in cuffs, we’re not in a position to be pushing our weight around right now, you know he was getting matter by the minute. So then when the car stops and these guys get out and there’s guys with the batons, there’s guys with guns and the guys from the cars in the front and the back they all get out and they pull us out of the back of the truck. The truck stops the cars in the front and the back stops. These guys get out and this is where things get really dangerous, I mean, we don’t know what’s going to happen, are they going to beat out of us? Are they going to kill us? I mean why aren’t we taking us to the jail right now, This is dangerous and they get out and one of them as we’re sitting he asks, why I was asking for Chensi and why I was asking for Scarface and I said, “Well I just wanted to get with him.” He was talking about Scarface and he said, “I arrested him myself for selling children and now you’re going to tell me everything.” And he had his baton, I said I’m really happy you said that, why, because that means they were good cops right. If he arrested this guy, the Scarface guy for selling children that’s what should happen and so I’m like, I’m really happy you said that, now I can tell you who we really are, I’ve got two federal officers in my hotel room. He goes, “You’re going to tell me everything.” He’s got his baton out and Joseph’s like, “he’s going down! I said, “Joseph shut up! these guys are good, these guys are good cops you know, don’t kill anybody right now.” So I said, well just give me my phone back and we can call, I’ve got two federal officers in my hotel room, we can call them right now, just give me my phone back and we’re good.” He goes, “No you’re not getting your phone.” And he’s got his baton out and I say, “listen before anything happens, before anything happens somebody needs to understand where who we really are and I had in my undercover  pants, I had this you know, the zippers around the leg that make it turn it into a pair of shorts you know, you can zip them off, I had the zipper like that and inside part of that zipper was a hidden pocket and in this hidden pocket I had a card that was given to me by some of the guys in the Senate and some of the guys from the head of the federal police. This card had my picture on it and was basically a diplomatic immunity type of a card, it was something that talked about how I help Mexico in fighting child trafficking and in essence if these guys didn’t give me their cars, their guns, their help as police officers they could go to jail. It’s like the best get out of jail free card ever and I said, “guys, before anything happens, somebody needs to unzip that right there.” I’m handcuffed so I can’t even reach down. I said, “Somebody needs to unzip that right now and somebody unzipped the side of it. I say, “pull that card out right now.” And they pulled it out and Jimmy was translating a bunch of this because some of these guys didn’t speak English and some of them did. So he pulled that card out and he’s looking at it and he takes it up to the chief of police, he’s sitting in the car letting his goons do all the work and beat us up and whatnot. And so he takes him up to there and the chief comes out and he’s visibly upset, he’s shaking and he’s talking to Spanish with these guys and they unhandcuff us faster than we were handcuffed, they were taking us, all 10 of these officers that were there, they’re like “lo siento” we’re so sorry, we’re so sorry. I said “No, this is how you should treat people who are buying children in your country, if you got Americans coming down here buying children this is what you should do, you take them out in the desert beating them up I’m okay with that guys, this is what you have to do to fix this problem, I’m good with that. However, I don’t know who to trust, so if anybody in your department says anything to anybody that I just showed you that card, then your entire department’s under investigation. Do you understand?” “Yes sir, yes sir, we’re so sorry, we’re so sorry.” So they take us back. We do some little selfie videos and show the handcuff marks and everything else and that next week this thing happened. It was the largest child rescue operation in history for Mexico . 48 children, 48 children and these bad dudes all ended up going to prison for a very very long time. We put them in prison for life, allowed them to plead down for 25 years in exchange for the contact information of any Americans that have been down there for these horrible deeds. So anybody that they had emails for and phone numbers for any of that stuff so that we could send in to the attorney generals of those States and be able to take those guys down. Unfortunately, I’ll just tell you this right out, I was not able to be there, my ex-wife at the time, she had her Grandma’s. Well, she was my wife at the time now my ex-wife, had her Grandma’s birthday party in Peru and it was like this big big big deal for the whole family so I had to be there for that and it killed me because I couldn’t be there there for the operation itself but the fact is the entire team that had been working in Mexico City, the entire team that had been working on multiple operations there in Puerto vallarta  including our attorney general ended up going down there and being a part of that rescue of that 48 children. So it was a massive success taking down the traffickers ensuring that we had contact information of Americans that had been down there so that we can take them down as well. Super grateful for the team that was there for the success of that operation, for the fact that we didn’t get shot four or five days before the sting itself by the police officers in that area and I’m grateful that those police officers were good guys because unfortunately we’ve had a few operations where the police officers weren’t. Where they were on the payroll from the traffickers and so one of the best things that I’ve ever heard was when he said, Why are you asking for Scarface? I arrested them myself for selling children, that tells me that the good guys are in charge there. Those guys are taking down these trafficking organizations and now that we took down all of those groups together they’ve kept that place really really clean, you can’t go into Puerto Vallarta  and find kids anymore. I love that because the teams are in place, the training is there, we took down the big organizations and rescued over 40 kids.

Thank you for joining me today on the Liberating Humanity podcast. I hope this was fun to hear all of the details in this Rescue Mission in Puerto Vallarta and when you go now it’s a lot safer than it was, safer for you, safer for the kids, safer for anybody who’s in that area. So thank you to The Operators that were there, all of the brave men and women that I’ve served with over the years and for the police officers and all of their help on that operation and others. 

Thank you for joining me today. Please like and share this with many other people so that we can get the word out of things that you can do to keep your kids safe thank you!

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