BREAKING: CJNG Cartel is Abducting Women, Forcing C-Sections & Selling Kids | Katarina Szulc • 336
Julian Dorey · 16 Sep 2025 · 2h 37m
Host: Joey Def, Julian Dorey
Investigative journalist Katarina Szulc returns to detail a story she says is the worst she has covered: a Mexican law enforcement source telling her that in Ciudad Juárez, young pregnant women are being kidnapped, held in trap houses, and cut open near term so their infants can be sold across the border to buyers in El Paso. She describes corroborating the tip through multiple sources, walks through why she believes CJNG (Jalisco New Generation Cartel) is running the operation in coordination with elements of La Línea, and lays out the economics — babies reportedly selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars, possibly filling a revenue gap left by tighter border enforcement on drugs. She and the host press on uncomfortable questions: whether American buyers could plausibly not know where the infants come from, whether the babies are being sedated for transport, and whether this could be tied to organ harvesting or sex trafficking rings rather than adoption. The conversation widens into cartel structure and power consolidation, CJNG's absorption of Sinaloa factions after El Mayo's capture and the Chapitos' infighting, the US practice of 'expelling' rather than extraditing cartel figures to avoid the death penalty in exchange for cooperation, Mexican government denials, Canada's fentanyl enforcement failures, and a separate deep dive into fugitive Olympic-snowboarder-turned-cartel-figure Ryan Wedding. Szulc also discusses her ethical boundaries around interviewing trafficking victims and her upcoming move into international documentary-style reporting.
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What comes up
Timestamps link into the episode on YouTube.
- Breaking the Juárez baby-trafficking story
- CJNG's structure and rapid expansion
- Femicide history in Ciudad Juárez
- Graphic details of the killings and OB/GYN's role
- Crossing babies with fraudulent paperwork
- Local officials purged from the investigation
- Ethics of interviewing trafficking victims
- Sinaloa/CJNG alliance and El Chapo's sons
- El Mayo's plea deal and fugitive 'expulsions' instead of extradition
- Cartel infiltration of music and influencers
- Canada's fentanyl czar admits no authority
- Expanding into international documentary reporting
Said on this episode
Quoted from the auto-generated transcript, which mishears names and technical terms. podcite.com reports what a show said; it does not endorse or fact-check it.
“if you are getting a baby like through illegal like if you believe that this is legitimate you should not be a parent in the first place because how demented do you have to be to not see through this”
“if innocent women are being killed simply on the basis that they're a woman or that they're pregnant, you can take the baby. That is femicide.”