“DEMENTED!” - CJNG Cartel Tr*fficking is DARKER Than You Think | Kat Szulc • 455
Julian Dorey · 28 Jul 2026 · 2h 33m
Guest: Kat Szulc · Host: Joey Def, Julian Dorey
A journalist who reports undercover on Mexican cartels describes a near-disastrous reporting trip investigating sex trafficking networks centered in the state of Tlaxcala, where families rather than cartels directly run generational trafficking operations while paying protection to CJNG. She recounts being run off a highway by armed men and confronted with a gun after a phone interview with a trafficking victim, then details separate interviews with two traffickers who spoke candidly, sometimes drunkenly, about recruiting teenage girls through manipulation, extracting virginities, and the economics of forced prostitution. She describes meeting a trafficking survivor whose own family profited from and enabled her decade-long exploitation, and the psychological hold her trafficker-husband still has over her. The conversation widens into broader cartel reporting: the murder of a journalist in Veracruz allegedly involving police, the indictment of Sinaloa's governor for cartel ties, the chaos in Culiacán following El Mayo's capture, unresolved questions about El Mencho's death and CJNG's current leadership, stolen crude oil trafficking worth billions, cartel recruitment of foreign fighters trained on drone warfare in Ukraine, and expanding cartel drug labs in Africa and trafficking routes through Native land on the US-Canada border. Throughout, the host and guest discuss the ethics and psychological toll of embedding with traffickers, the limits of intervention, and the difficulty of ever ending the trade given entrenched profit and complicity at every level.
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What comes up
Timestamps link into the episode on YouTube.
- Getting run off the road in Mexico
- Lynching warnings and dangerous small towns
- Meeting an in-person trafficker
- Highway ambush and fake gun incident
- Interviewing the trafficker about his business
- Murder of journalist Roxana Guzman in Veracruz
- Sinaloa governor indicted for cartel ties
- Uncertainty over El Mencho's death and CJNG succession
- CJNG's international sex trafficking pipeline
- US intelligence involvement and cartel strategy
- Ryan Wedding case and Sinaloa succession
- Cartel expansion into Africa and Canada's native lands
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.
“CJNG profits off of human trafficking like heavily more than really any other cartel.”
“In that town, these boys are growing up thinking when I grow up, I'm going to be a trafficker just like my dad or just like my uncle.”
“They kept using her um her phone from that moment on. Like they ended up taking her phone. They were using her WhatsApp and stuff like that.”
“Because if I'm not with him, I will be alone because no other man will accept me for having done what I did. But he accepts me, bro.”