♪ ♪
REPORTER (over TV): Shake this square world
and blast off for Kicksville.
NIXON (over TV): Public enemy number one is drug abuse.
NANCY (over TV): Just say no.
REAGAN (over TV): Halting the drug problem in America is
like carrying water in a sieve.
BUSH (over TV): Take my word for it.
This scourge will stop.
WOMAN: There's now an understanding that the war on
drugs was an abject failure.
MAN: You have to stop and ask yourself,
how did we get here?
TRUMP (over TV): We will build a wall.
(theme music plays)
(sirens)
CARL: I was a special agent with the
Drug Enforcement Administration.
And I was in charge of the Mexico section.
All of a sudden you see this new group popping up
on the radar screen.
They went to a nightclub,
and a small nightclub there in Michoacán.
♪ ♪
(cheering)
And our men dressed in black came in.
(cheering)
(gunshots)
Shot the guns off into the ceiling,
made everybody lay on the floor.
And then they threw five freshly decapitated heads
in the middle of the dance floor.
IOAN: Next to these five decapitated heads,
there was a narco message saying,
"La Familia doesn't kill for money.
It doesn't kill women.
It doesn't kill innocent people.
Only those who deserve to die.
Everyone should know that this is divine justice."
This was one of the weird features right away when
La Familia Michoacana broke onto the scene.
They were claiming this religious inspiration.
They were claiming to be holy warriors.
MAN (over TV): The cartel's philosophy is rooted in religion,
saying that they are protecting the state's people
as part of God's work.
IOAN: This was one of the wake up calls about something
really bad is happening in Mexico.
Who are this crazy drug cartel down in Michoacán?
What the hell is going on down there?
♪ ♪
MAN (over TV): Drug enforcement officials call it
the crack of the 90s.
IOAN: You had loads of people right across America who were
getting really bad crystal meth addictions.
PHILIPPA: Meth gives you a rush of euphoria.
You feel immense pleasure.
You feel invincible.
Even the most repetitive task feels totally mind‐blowing.
CARL: It's just such a devastating drug.
You see people that you would think were in their 50s and
find out they're only in their early 20s.
They would sit there and just shake, scratching their face.
MAN (over TV): Meth destroys.
The high is a lie.
PHILIPPA: The problem with meth
is that you can make it yourself.
MAN (over TV): What you need to make meth is all legal.
Available at a hardware or a discount store.
PHILIPPA: A number of labs exploded in the United States
and that's when it became the wild, wild West.
IOAN: Now because the United States saw a bunch
of profit off crystal meth,
they passed the 2005 Combat Methamphetamine Act.
And this banned the precursors for meth.
CARL: They pushed the production from the United States,
south of the border to Michoacán.
IOAN: Michoacán is a state on the West coast of Mexico,
to the South of the Sierra Madre mountains.
About the size of Virginia in the United States.
Michoacán is a place with having Lazaro Cardenas,
the biggest port in Mexico.
Right on the Pacific.
You could buy the raw ingredients from countries like China,
bring them in through Lazaro Cardenas,
and then create massive super labs
and really start churning meth out.
♪ ♪
CARL: This group was basically started by a man by the name
of Nazario Moreno González.
The Most Crazy One was his nickname.
IOAN: Nazario is one of the most mysterious figures in all
of Mexico's narco wars.
There is no video of him and few photos.
And even with the ones we have,
there is doubt whether they really are of him.
But we do have his writings.
He came out with this book, Me Dicen: El Mas Loco .
They call me the maddest one.
He talked about growing up in wretched poverty.
♪ ♪
IOAN: He grew up in a little hamlet in the Tierra Caliente,
in the hot land of Michoacán.
I mean, really kind of desolate bandit country.
They had a long history of drug trafficking,
certainly a lot of people living on the edge
of the law there.
When he was a, a young man,
he had a really crazy temper.
He would snap very fast.
He was playing soccer, there was a fight broke out.
And these guys started really smashing his head in.
So he was flown to a hospital in Mexico City
and they cut his head open
and put a metal plate to bind his skull up.
His face would like bulge as he got angry
because he had this kind of weird look with a metal plate.
So he was kind of a scary guy.
A kind of James Bond villain.
He was kind of seen as the, the craziest of all.
El Mas Loco.
♪ ♪
IOAN: Nazario Moreno was the founder
and head of La Familia Michoacana.
His right‐hand man is Servando Gomez Martinez, La Tuta.
♪ ♪
CARL: What we saw was it literally came in
like a flood.
They made an enormous amount of money very, very,
very fast.
IOAN: So this one regional cartel were suddenly pumped
with billions of dollars and became a major player
in Mexico.
♪ ♪
IOAN: Now there's a lot of bad publicity of the Zetas.
We were seeing in the newspapers about massacres
by the Zetas.
About how evil, horrible this drug cartel was.
So Nazario Moreno declared war on them
and the Familia Michoana was about defending the state of
Michoacán from the Zetas.
CARL: La Familia became so dangerous because that was
their instrument, to run the Zetas off,
so they could regain their state.
Within three years of throwing the heads on the dance floor,
Mexico declared La Familia the most dangerous body
to the security of the state of Mexico.
♪ ♪
(laughs)
CARL: They do this thing we call the Robin Hood effect.
They would repair a road or they would clean out an irrigation ditch,
or build a school house.
And then they would publicize that.
They were very good at publicity.
Letting people know,
especially in areas they want to control,
what they were capable of doing.
Either in a good or bad situation.
The La Familia essentially became the de facto government
because the local government were so weak.
♪ ♪
IOAN: I mean you know, 2006, nobody really understood or
expected the level of violence that would blow up.
The homicidal rate skyrocketing by mass graves
across Mexico.
♪ ♪
IOAN: Felipe Calderon wants to show
he's the new sheriff in town.
That the state is having power again.
♪ ♪
(speaking native language)
♪ ♪
IOAN: I went to Aqualia one of these big narco towns
and I saw the troops pouring into the town.
Helicopters and lining people up,
putting their T shirts over their head
and guns to their head.
Very quickly you start seeing big problems
with military offensive.
(rapid gunfire)
♪ ♪
The military could win those gunfights,
but the cartel could just disappear into the mountains.
♪ ♪
So Apatzingán is, is the biggest city of the hot land,
Tierra Caliente area.
Cradle of the La Familia Michoacana.
Very close to where Nazario Moreno grew up.
IOAN: But Nazario Moreno and the La Familia Michoacana
had the advantage of knowing the territory,
So they have a guerrilla group which is fighting very, very dirty.
♪ ♪
CARL: What they realized was they could move their market
to smaller rural cities.
But they were sending people up there that didn't have addictions,
didn't have problems.
Just fit into society.
Strategy wise it was a pretty brilliant move.
WOMAN (over TV): In this surveillance video,
a man removes methamphetamine from the wheel well of an automobile
and hands it to a woman who wraps it in a
blanket before picking up her child.
This is part of the smuggling and distribution network
of the Mexican cartel known as La Familia.
ERIC: While this cartel may operate from Mexico,
the toxic reach of its operations extends to nearly
every state within our own country.
♪ ♪
CARL: We had to stop them.
We had to stop La Familia.
MAN: Stand by.
MAN: Good to go.
(gunshots)
(shouting)
(radio chatter)
ADRIAN: You're good.
Alright guys. Here's, uh, here's how this is gonna go.
We're gonna take this house from the back.
Meth is our number one narcotics issue in our county.
We've been conducting a two‐month investigation
on this drug dealer.
MAN: Good? MAN: Good to go.
ADRIAN: We had intel that he went to Phoenix last night and re‐supplied,
so we're hoping to find methamphetamines.
The intel we got is that this subject's armed.
We don't know what to expect.
He's very dangerous.
CHRIS: Once you're on scene we should have both doors taken
and breached.
Hopefully within a minute.
Okay guys, stand by. I want you to stand by.
MAN: Stand by. MAN: Stand by one.
(gunshots)
(shouting)
MAN: Hey, come down here and get a gun on this.
MAN (over loudspeaker): Residents, come out of the house.
MAN: Sheriff's office, third floor!
Come out now out of the house!
MAN (over radio): We got the main target out.
CHRIS: Come to me!
Come to me!
Yeah, we got it.
We got cuffs?
It's here guys, it's here somewhere.
It's here. We just gotta find it.
It's right here.
MAN: Nice.
ADRIAN: Mike, if we found two little baggies with meth,
it's here.
Like there has to be more.
Another one? Oh yeah, there you go.
Have you checked that jacket?
Oh, right here.
WOMAN: Woo! ADIRAN: Boom, look it.
WOMAN: Good job. ADRIAN: Jacket.
This is a war against the drug cartels.
We're in Southern part of Arizona, United States,
and we're seeing this.
This came from Mexico. This came from a drug cartel.
♪ ♪
(speaking native language)
IOAN: The Federal police found out that Nazario Moreno would
be in a little village called El Alcalde.
He would be there for some kind of Christmas party
handing out presents.
They went in there with 2,000 federal police officers.
But the Familia Michoacana were burning
trucks on the road.
And there was about 500 cartel gunmen.
They were ambushing the federal police as they were coming in,
from the side of the hills,
and they just fired down at them with everything they could.
(speaking native language)
IOAN: Firing AK‐47s and firing 50 calibers,
just laying onto the federal police there.
(speaking native language)
♪ ♪
MAN (over TV): Drug cartel boss Nazario Moreno Gonzalez,
alias El Chayo,
was killed in a shootout with the Mexican army on Thursday.
Mexican authorities trumpeted the incident as a significant
victory in the country's fight against organized crime.
♪ ♪
(speaking native language)
IOAN: Then these bizarre stories came out,
where Mexican security forces would raid cartel safe houses and find,
like, plastic helmets they say were being
used in rituals of a drug cartel.
IOAN: So the story gets from kind of being completely crazy
to being over the line nuts.
♪ ♪
IOAN: The Knights Templar distributed this little
pamphlet around with this kind of weird series
of religious commandments.
IOAN: There was a real narco religion
and that was different than anything we've seen in Mexico before.
♪ ♪
IOAN: They began to extort people
on a very systematic level.
They began to shake down lime farmers, avocado farmers.
Really control little institutions, mayors,
security forces.
Really beyond corruption, they really controlled the
mechanisms of the state.
Some we could call state capture,
and this was very, very powerful.
Very hard to defeat.
♪ ♪
FALKO: I first stepped into Tierra Caliente in 2012,
I had heard all these horror stories about the area.
They had told me, of course you can get in,
but you will not be able to make it out again.
I'm Falko Ernst, I was a student trying to learn
and find out about the drug cartels in Mexico.
I was able to link up with local peasant organizations
and just by lucky coincidence, one of the leaders happened to
have gone to school with Servando Gomez Martinez, or La Tuta.
After three days on Apatzingán
I received a visit by a local envoy of the cartel,
who was asking questions.
Checking out if I really was a student.
And then a couple of days later I find myself in the
middle of nowhere in front of an abandoned cemetery
waiting for La Tuta,
who rolls in with his security.
(speaking native language)
FALKO: La Tuta liked to hear himself talk.
We got along.
He apparently took a liking to me.
He promised me a even better interview
with his boss, as he said.
And I was kind of like, okay, I thought you were the boss.
Because your boss had gotten killed.
So this is me catching a ride.
I'm out off Apatzingán, into the more rural parts.
This one is gonna take us right into the heart
of the Templar territory.
I get an invite to one of the rural communities.
As the party was going on,
I see a convoy of six black SUVs are rolling in.
Heavily armed people setting up a security perimeter.
One of his lieutenants came over and told me that I was to
accompany him to a table to see el patron, to see the boss.
He invites me to take a seat.
Introduces himself as El Chayo, Nazario.
He had placed a anti‐aircraft rifle right next to him
on the ground.
He had supposedly shot on a Federal police helicopter
with that very gun.
He handed it over to me.
I handed it back pretty quickly.
Very much, I think, to the amusement
of the by‐standing sicarios.
This is so bizarre.
It's so out there that you're talking about one of the most
bloodthirsty narco warlords in Mexican history,
and then he appears before you.
♪ ♪
(speaking native language)
♪ ♪
(radio chatter)
IOAN: This was a breakdown of the rule of law in Mexico completely,
to the point where people were committing vigilante justice.
And people were dying for it.
(speaking native language)
(rapid gunfire)
(speaking native language)
(woman crying)
(speaking native language)
♪ ♪
IOAN: It's all very tense.
And I'm watching this thinking when are the vigilantes gonna
seize Apatzingán?
When is the battle of Apatzingán gonna be?
And this is gonna be a bloodbath.
♪ ♪
(speaking native language)
(radio chatter)
♪ ♪
IOAN: Now I heard a story from people in the vigilante movement
and they said that the vigilantes had plotted
with some bodyguards of Nazario Moreno.
And they turned on him.
And, and beat him and shot him.
And he was killed by his own people.
You had this figure, this warlord,
who really wanted to be loved and venerated,
and he ended up being hated and having people turn against him,
damning his legacy.
♪ ♪
(speaking native language)
IOAN: Very early on when you had people raising guns
against the Knights Templar,
another cartel right away saw this as an opportunity
to gain ground in Michoacán.
So it infiltrated elements of the vigilante movement.
After the collapse of the Knights Templar,
they went on to become one of the most powerful cartels in Mexico.
(rapid gunfire)
Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.