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In a small quiet diner, there's three people sitting at a table.
On one side you have a woman, and on the other side you have these two young men.
She looks old enough to be their mom, but she's not their mom.
And the three of them, they look like they're in their own little world inside of this diner.
Each of them have a plate of food in front of them, and each of them
have a completely different energy from each other.
They don't look like they're in the same conversation.
The woman Miriam is sitting there with her back straight,
staring at these guys sitting in front of her.
Almost like she's in a very tense meeting.
The guy directly sitting in front of her is focused on her, but his radio.
He's got one of those walkie talkies.
It's buzzing on the table, nonstop.
We're periodically, someone will scream street names and signal where the police are headed.
They're tracking police and military in the area.
That's what she's picking up on.
She hears them call the man sitting in front of her by the name of Sama.
That's the only reason she even knows his name is through the radio.
Then the last guy, he looks like he's at a buffet.
He's not even carrying about the two of them.
He's scarfing down his entire plate of food.
And when he's done with his plate,
he looks over at Miriam's untouched sandwich.
You're going to eat that.
She pushes her plate towards him,
and he starts taking massive bites out of the sandwich,
like it's going to be his last meal or something.
The guy with the radio, Sama, he leans forward.
Your daughter's smoke weed or something?
Excuse me?
I mean, just how relaxed she is.
Just super chill.
It's weird.
She's been easy to deal with, which is good for us,
and not freaking out at all.
I like that.
You know, I like someone who can hold their own.
That's why I kind of want to let her go.
Then let her go.
The decision isn't mine.
Now is it?
Sama tells Miriam that he can't just let his kidnap be
go without the big boss upstairs giving him the go ahead.
But Sama can try to convince the big boss that Miriam's daughter isn't worth killing
for a price.
$2,000.
For $2,000, he's going to make it happen.
He's going to convince his boss, let the girl go.
We don't need to kill her.
Miriam looks down and smiles because she has to play along.
But she knows.
Her daughter, Karen, has been kidnapped by one of the most dangerous cartels in all of Mexico.
Nobody gets taken by that cartel and gets out alive.
Deep, deep down in her heart.
Miriam knows the guy sitting in front of her, the cartel members.
They killed her daughter.
And deep, deep down in her heart, she knows that she will not stop until she takes every single one of them down for what they did.
She is going to take out the cartel for taking down her daughter.
This is the story of how a middle-aged mom becomes the most feared woman by one of the most dangerous cartels in all of Mexico.
Some actually like in this case as the real life taken movie.
This is the case of Miriam and Karen Rodriguez.
We would like to thank today's sponsor, so I've made it possible for Rotten Mango to support asylum access.
A nonprofit whose goal is to create a world where displaced people can access their rights and rebuild their lives.
Wherever they find themselves.
They have been fighting for refugee rights in Mexico for years and are currently the largest refugee legal aid NGO in the country.
This episode's partnerships have also made it possible to support Rotten Mango's growing team.
And we would also like to thank you guys for your continued support as we work on our mission to be worthy advocates.
As always, full show notes are available at RottenMangoPodcast.com.
We had our wonderful Spanish-speaking researcher help assist in the gathering of the research of this case.
But today's case truly would not have been possible without the amazing book written by Asim Ahmed titled,
Fear is just a word, a missing daughter, a violent cartel, and a mother's quest for vengeance.
Not only was the book a wealth of resources for this case, but Asim, the author,
diligently included cultural context that I think is such an important aspect of this case.
And not to mention, he conducted interviews and did his own boots on the ground research.
So please, if you're interested, please, please give this book a read.
Now regarding content warnings, today's case involves essay and sex trafficking as well as strong themes of physical violence.
And last but not least, the most crucial disclaimer.
There is no other population more affected by the cartels than Mexican civilians.
They suffer the consequences and they remain completely innocent.
And just like how every Italian person is not part of the mafia and every Japanese person is not part of the Yakuza.
For some reason, perhaps due to some of the rhetoric used in mainstream media outlets in the US,
there are groups of people out there that like to believe that most Mexican civilians are associated with a cartel member or with the cartel.
And to those people, I hope common sense finds you soon.
The existence of the cartels in Mexico is not a valid reason, nor any reason at all to generalize and demonize Mexican people,
immigrants or Mexican Americans.
This is also not meant to deter anyone from visiting or vacationing in the beautiful country.
We recently went to Mexico.
Okay, it was a reason maybe like a year ago.
It feels so recent. It's beautiful.
And in fact, of course, we encourage everyone to do their own research before traveling anywhere.
But tourism can be a positive way to support the economy and support local employment.
I also want to acknowledge that the existence of the cartels is due in part due to American consumerism.
In other words, Americans buy. Crime syndicates need customers and Americans are the biggest customers of cartels.
So with that being said, let's get started.
The United States describes Zeta as the most violent, most impraved, most feared crime cartel group in all of Mexico.
They don't just execute. They torture.
Their signature for the Zetas is leaving severed heads on stakes and dissolving bodies in acid.
They call it cooking. They always say, do you want to go cook tonight?
It means they want to go dissolve people in acid.
They will find a busy bridge and hang their competitors on the bridge one by one.
You'll see a row of 10 bodies bloodied, just evidence of torture and a painful death,
and then hung up like quote, Christmas lights to send a message.
The Zetas, they like their kitchen.
Okay, so by sanitation standards, it's probably wouldn't even pass a health inspection.
It is their sacred kitchen though. That's what they call them.
They've got kitchens all over the area.
Single story abandoned houses with these giant ovens that they use to incinerate their victims.
They cook humans and turn them into ash.
Outside these kitchens, you will find mounds of gray dirt, human ashes mixed in with fragments of human bones, teeth and nails.
And the Zetas are known for being absolutely brutal.
That is what they do. They post videos of their executions on the internet.
But the Zeta cartel wasn't even a cartel when they got started.
They were actually known as higher guns.
So the Gulf cartel was one of Mexico's oldest and most powerful criminals into kits.
At their height, they were earning billions of dollars annually every single year,
primarily from the trafficking of cocaine into the United States.
The more precise estimates are closer to $20 billion a year in annual revenue.
This is a different one you said.
This is the Gulf cartel. The Zetas were actually part of the Gulf cartel.
Now, do you know who else makes around that much money in revenue in a single calendar year?
In 2023, Nvidia made close to $27 billion in a single year.
I mean, they're obviously killing it this year, but still, you're talking about one of the largest tech
companies in the world right now. That's their last year annual revenue.
And the Gulf cartel was allegedly bringing in 20 billion a year at one point.
Now, to be fair, I don't think it was all going to the Gulf cartel.
They were strong partners with the Cali cartel from Colombia.
But even then, billions of dollars a year, that is a billion targets on their back.
That is why the Gulf cartel creates the Zetas.
The Zetas were trained by the United States.
What?
Not like, oh yeah, we modeled our unit after the US military,
but they were physically trained by the United States military.
Do you be fair? The US did not wake up one morning and decide,
let's go train the cartel members to militarize their violence.
That sounds blended. They didn't do that.
The original group that forms the Zetas were originally members of the Mexican Army's elite squad
called Air Morbel Special Forces Group.
The US and Mexico made this deal where around 400 special forces from the Mexican Army
would go train in the US. Mainly learning how to use heavy weaponry,
machine guns, automatic weapons, as well as learning strategy.
They would specifically be trained in urban warfare tactics,
like close quarters combat, building clearing techniques,
extensive training in rifle and pistol marksmanship,
training using various explosive devices, as well as sniper training,
how to use assault weapons with precision.
That's what they're being trained in.
Their whole point of their training, ironically,
was counter-narcotics operations.
Okay, taking down and going up against the cartels.
So they recruit these members specifically?
Yes.
So side note, military forces from around the world train at Fort Bragg in North Carolina,
so it's not like the most mind-blowing concept that Mexico would send their agents to train there.
But it does seem like, through this training by the US Army,
it would be the birth of one of the most violent cartels in Mexico.
They're actually credited by a lot of people for starting the violence of cartels.
Because back then, cartels were violent amongst each other.
But then slowly cartels started being violent with the locals.
And this is kind of the start of that.
The leader of the Gulf Cartel at the time, he starts feeling like the rival cartel leaders
are going to kill him.
Which, I mean, yeah, it's a very valid paranoia.
They want his very desirable border territory.
Do you know when was it born?
2010, Zetas.
That reason?
Yes.
Wow.
So the Gulf Cartel, they control the North-Eastern border that is bordering the United States.
So this is very valuable territory.
This is like prime for smuggling.
So all the other cartels, they want to take the Gulf territory.
That and the Mexican Marines are out there doing similar things as the cartels,
not the drug smuggling.
But just shooting everyone on site that appears to be a cartel member,
that's what the Marines are doing.
And the leader of the Gulf Cartel starts getting angsty.
He recruits 30 of the Special Forces agents to be his personal bodyguards, 30 of them.
He says, leave the Mexican Army.
Bring your US training and come work for me.
I will pay you more than the government can even imagine.
You don't understand how deep the pockets run in the cartels.
This sounds a bit more commonplace now, but it was not at the time.
This would be the first cartel to really incorporate a paramilitary group into their ranks.
The Zetas originally came in a group of 30 former US-based trained Special Forces agents.
They started recruiting more of their former friends and colleagues,
and they create this highly trained, highly specialized troop for the Gulf Cartel.
They were called the Enforcement Arm.
They protect the Gulf Cartel's leaders.
They carry out violent operations and assassinations.
They secure the cartel's territory and interest,
and go kill all the enemies that need to be handled.
They were highly effective.
So prior to this, the Gulf Cartel, they would just train random kids off the street to learn
how to point and shoot a gun to protect the cartel's interest.
But nothing, no one can go up against specialized training by the US Army,
along with the military-style discipline.
I mean, this is crazy.
The Zeta Wing is just straight up lethal.
There really is no better way to describe them.
They go in for the kill and they get it done.
Until the Zeta group realizes,
if we're the part that makes the Gulf Cartel so special,
then why do we need the Gulf Cartel?
It's not even like the Zetas aren't doing all the strategizing.
I mean, it would be one thing if they have the firepower,
the manpower, and the Gulf Cartel is the brains of the operation.
But every hit, every operation,
the Zetas are planning that out like a military-level job,
like a military-level sting.
So what would be stopping them from starting their own cartel and taking all of the profits?
The Zeta split off from the Gulf Cartel.
And cartels are not really known for being an easy group to break up with.
They're not going to send you nice flowers and send you hope you're doing well text messages,
if you leave.
They're going to try and kill you.
But the newly formed Zeta cartel, they decide,
why don't we send a message first?
We're not scared.
In fact, we're going to steal your business.
In fact, we're going to steal your territory.
And you will be lucky if we don't kill you.
So they split up from the leader, the previous leaders?
Yes, from the Gulf Cartel.
And they start the Zeta cartel.
March 31, 2010, is the day Zeta cartel declares war on the former Gulf Cartel that they were part of.
This takes place in San Fernando, Mexico.
4am, police get a call.
Hurry, you have to come out quick. There's been an accident on the highway, a big one.
10 squad cars rushed to the scene and there's a truck that's rolled over on its side.
And there's nobody else.
There's one truck driver, one road truck.
He seems like he fell asleep at the wheel.
He's refusing to go to the hospital.
It's just the holding is odd.
More lights suddenly come speeding down the highway.
Firefighters.
They were also called to the scene.
They said, massive accident.
You need to get down here real quick.
Oh my god.
It's just one truck flipped over.
Once all the authorities are there, it kind of feels like an overkill situation.
One truck, the truck driver isn't even badly injured and they have everyone out here on the highway
in the middle of the night.
The highway isn't even loud.
Something's going on somewhere else.
It's almost silent.
And it's a known thing in San Fernando.
You typically don't drive around at night unless you absolutely must.
It's the life of living in a cartel controlled area.
Well, it was controlled by the golf cartel at the time.
Okay.
All right, then let's pack it up.
The cops are like, we got to go.
Let's keep it moving.
The police, the firefighters, they're all getting ready to leave when they start feeling
a vibration, a rumbling.
What the hell is that?
They freeze, they look up.
And on the other side of the highway, they see a scene that looks
straight out of an apocalyptic movie.
There are rows of modified vehicles.
Giant trucks with tires that are taller than them.
Trailers, giant SUVs, a freaking school bus with a gun mount on top.
And all of them are spray painted with a Z on the side.
And all of them have assault rifles on top of their vehicles.
Make shift tanks.
A whole squad of them, rows and rows of them,
driving down the highway like they're about to go into war.
It's a setup.
Wait, are they coming for the cops?
They're coming for the town.
The hotel.
The police start rushing to their radios, warning everyone.
They jump into their cars,
sum into the nearby woods.
They're like, I'm abandoning this.
Like, I'm leaving.
I'm not taking my car.
They're shooting at us.
They're shooting at us.
Everybody come.
Like, we got to leave.
The bastards are coming from all the sides.
As the makeshift tanks are driving past the police,
they're just firing.
It seems like they have no care for wasting bullets, ammunition.
They're just firing at everything that they come in contact with.
From 4 a.m. to 10 a.m. for the next six hours,
the Zetas go block to block in San Fernando,
firing into every single public building they could find.
They do not fire into residential buildings.
They do not fire into hospitals.
But everything else, the courthouses,
the police stations, the DMV, things like that,
the buildings, they look like Swiss cheese
by the next morning.
And the message is very clear.
The golf cartel is no longer in charge.
The Zetas are.
When the San Fernando residents,
walk out the next morning,
some of the bullet casings left all over the street
are still hot.
The mass firing of the bullets was chaotic
and unhinged.
Nobody slept a single minute last night.
And by the way,
they systematically came into this town
and targeted every single public building.
It felt like they were trying to send a message
because they did not kill a single person.
The Zeta armor trucks came, split up,
took down different roads.
It was very organized, like a military operation,
like a military taking over an enemy's town
and trying not to kill the population.
It's almost forcing submission.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That is crazy.
No one was killed.
Nobody was even seriously injured.
So it's not that the Zetas tried to kill people and failed.
It's, they intentionally did not want to kill anyone.
It's like they're just here to send a message.
But what does that message mean?
Does that mean that they want to get on the good side
of the locals?
They don't know.
And that hope is very quickly crushed
because the Gulf Cartel,
they're not going to easily give up their territory like that.
They start fighting back
and within a week, all hell breaks loose in San Fernando.
Car bombs are exploding every two seconds.
Buildings are being lit on fire.
The cartel members start stealing every big SUV
from the dealership, just walking into the lot
with rifles, assault rifles,
stealing all the SUVs to put gun mounts on top
to create basically tanks.
A full-on war breaks out between the Gulf Cartel
and the newly formed Zeta Cartel.
And every single civilian in that area
would be collateral in a war that they have no skin
in the game in.
So a lot of people died?
A lot of people, tens of thousands of people.
Yeah.
Tens of thousands.
So the number in San Fernando is kind of up in the air.
A lot of people don't report when their loved ones go missing
and you'll see why soon.
But the war on drugs and the cartel violence
wars have in the span of like a few years,
I think in one year alone it was like 60,000 people died,
innocent civilians, a lot of them.
So like I said, nobody is more negatively impacted
by the cartels than Mexican civilians
that are all innocent.
Now, when the Zetas take over the town,
they wanted the people to fear them, but not despise them.
And then the Zetas soon realized it doesn't really matter
what the residents feel about the cartels.
As long as they feared them, because fear
is the biggest thing that they can have,
it's the most powerful emotion.
So the Zetas, they started implanting a new way of operating.
Murder is now the message.
That's how they operate.
Psychological warfare.
That's how they rule the territory.
If anyone wants to start their own cartel,
this is their enemy.
If the Gulf cartel wants to wage another war against the Zetas,
this is their enemy.
The Cineloa cartel most notably run by El Chapo
that is rivals with the Zetas, this is their enemy.
And you do not want the Zetas as your enemy.
Don't get me wrong.
The Zetas, they were violent from the get-go.
There is no denying that, but it is stated
that locals believe that they would still
operate similarly as before.
They believed, OK, even if the Zetas break off
from the Gulf cartel, they're going
to viciously fight the Gulf cartel.
They're going to viciously fight any other cartel
that tries to sneak up on their territory
and their smuggling routes.
They're going to decimate them with no mercy.
And there might be some collateral damage
of innocent lives taken.
But they never thought innocent people
would become the target of the Zetas,
innocent civilians that have nothing
to do with the cartel world.
Why would the Zetas target them?
What would they want from them?
The problem starts because there are only so many former special
forces that you can recruit from.
It's a numbers game.
Eventually you run out.
The ones that don't join a cartel are ruled out.
The ones that already joined a cartel are ruled out.
The ones that died from being in a cartel are ruled out.
There's not an endless supply of well-trained special forces
agents.
But you can't run a criminal enterprise without manpower.
So if the Zetas have 100 former special forces,
no matter how good they are, they
can't go up against 2,000 untrained, heavily armed rival
cartel members.
The Zetas have no choice but to start recruiting
inexperienced guys off the street.
Their recruits keep getting younger and deadlier.
There was one time the Mexican army went
and wiped out a whole Zeta training camp.
They have training camps.
And the authorities started getting concerned because they
went in afterwards to see the damage.
They found this little girl, maybe 13 laying amongst the dead.
And they thought, shit, we messed up.
We killed someone that's not part of the cartel, which
side note, the army's method of just wiping out any cartel
member is already quite controversial.
But they went in and thought, oh no, we killed a girl that's
not part of the cartel.
She was.
The little 13-year-old girl was a female assassin that
had been working for the Zetas for more than a year.
Ever since the rival cartel, the Gulf cartel
had killed her dad.
The Zetas had recruited her.
Sometimes the Zetas would recruit people that they
would just give them no choice but to join the Zetas.
They would recruit young people.
And they would practically force them.
There is a saying that is heavily
used in the cartel world by Pablo Escobar.
And he would usually say it to politicians.
Its plateau or plomo, it translates to silver or lead,
meaning as a politician, do you want to take the silver?
AKA, do you want to take the money and do as I say?
Or do you want to take the lead in the form of a bullet?
Do you want to be killed?
Those are your two choices.
The Zetas turned it into silver or steel.
Either take the money and join the Zetas,
or the Zetas had an affinity for decapitating people
with chainsaws, steel chainsaws.
They wouldn't even use bullets.
Bullets were for efficiency and chainsaws were for fun.
And the Zetas like to have fun.
These are the new recruits in Zeta.
And to keep them happy, the Zeta leaders
told the new cells or the arms or divisions of their cartel
that they can do whatever the hell they want,
as long as you don't touch oil and drug smuggling.
Everything else, human trafficking, sex trafficking,
go at it.
Earn your money that way.
So the leadership doesn't have to spend so much
on overhead funding the employees.
They're given a free for all.
Now, depending on the leadership of cartels,
it is theorized by people who study cartels
that the tighter the leadership is at the top,
the slightly less violent the cartel is to civilians.
I mean, obviously depending on the cartel and the leader,
but typically if the leadership has a tight reign
on the members, then it's much harder
for people to step out of line.
And usually the leaders, if they have a tight reign,
they tend to be a little smarter.
And I'm not saying smarter equates to anything.
They're all morally corrupt, but they tend to not
want to get on the locals bad side for no reason.
So they get very upset with their members
if they mess with the locals for no reason.
Now, this move, this was a free for all
for these heavily armed, money-hungry, violent,
sadistic new members of the Zetas.
They start going into town, forcing business owners
to pay the money for protection, essentially racketeering.
They blatantly steal from businesses, car dealerships,
even from small, mom, and pop businesses,
whatever they want, they get it.
In the beginning of someone said no,
they were brutally killed on site.
And very quickly, civilians knew that saying no
is not an option here.
Even looking at Zetas wrong on the street was a death wish.
You're signing your death certificate.
A US judge stated about a Zeta high-ranking hitman
that was later tried in the US.
They said about the culture of the Zetas.
Without mercy, without thought, they brutally murder anyone
and everyone as it suits them and the cartel.
At times, inflicting the cruelest of pain, forcing relatives
to watch their loved ones murdered
before he turns his blades on them.
Other cartels have straight up accused them
of not following the gentleman's code of conduct
when it comes to drug trafficking.
And at one time, it was considered bad form
for the cartel members to kill pregnant women,
but not anymore after the Zetas.
In one incident, a hitman for the Zetas
dismembered a young girl with an axe,
washed her's alive, and let her body on fire
in front of her parents.
It said that he did this while laughing
and shrugged at the parents and said,
so this is your remember me.
So this is you will remember me?
Meaning don't forget me, because now you remember me,
because I dismembered your daughter in front of you.
Then he dragged the mom up to kill her the exact same way
while forcing the dad to watch.
I'm assuming the dad was the target.
This is what the Zetas are doing.
Miriam, a regular civilian in San Fernando,
a middle-aged mom, is looking for the florist.
It's not exactly how she imagined her early morning
to be going.
She's still in her pajamas.
She's got a trench coat thrown on top, a baseball cap.
She just looks like she rolled out of bed
and was summoned by somebody to run this errand.
She never even liked flowers to begin with.
They remind her of funerals and death
and now she's weaving through the streets,
trying to go through the vendors that are trying to sell you
water and snacks to look for the frickin' florist.
Most people in town don't even know the florist's real name.
They just call him the florist,
because ever since he was a kid,
he would just sell flowers on the street.
He'd be standing on the corner, holding a few stems of flowers,
looking very hungry.
If it was a marketing tactic, it was definitely working.
Anytime Miriam would make a big dinner,
she was known for this.
She would call all the kids in the area
that looked like they could use a warm meal.
She would call them over and the florist
was usually on that guest list.
It's clear that nobody was taking care of him.
That is Miriam's very first and most consistent memory
of the florist, but it's interesting
because he was just always in Miriam's life.
Not really ever in her life,
but just a side character that never fully went away.
He was just always kind of there.
Even later when Miriam's youngest daughter, Karen,
starts getting older,
the florist would chase her down
and try to give her flowers for free.
Side note, they're kind of, he was just always kind of there.
Even later when Miriam's youngest daughter, Karen,
starts getting older,
the florist would chase her down
and try to give her flowers for free.
And side note, they're around the same age,
so it's not like this middle-aged florist man
chasing down a 17-year-old.
Karen has this very bright, light-colored blonde hair
and she has a quote, rosy complexion.
And so a lot of people said it made her stand out
in the area and a lot of guys were interested in her
and I guess including the florist.
But Karen would nicely reject the florist,
offer him a dollar to knowing that he wasn't doing well
and then walk back to school.
Karen was always very sweet with the florist.
That's what Miriam is thinking about
when she sees him down the walkway.
There he is, the florist.
She starts running up to him
and then tackles him on the ground.
She pulls out a loaded pistol from her trench coat jacket,
jams it into his back and whispers into the florist's ear.
If you move, I will fucking shoot you.
I'm going to go back to school.
I'm going to go back to school.
My dog, Mango, has been with me
through some really crazy times in life.
I mean, she's been with us for the past 10 years.
If you guys don't know,
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She also knew the florist was now part of the Zeta cartel.
He was part of the cell that kidnapped
and killed her daughter, Karen.
She jams the gun deeper into the skin of his back,
but she doesn't need to.
He knows she will shoot if he moves,
because this is not Miriam's first cartel take down.
The florist is her 11th target.
Before him, there were 10.
Four are now in prison and six are now dead.
The florist was about to be dead too,
if he doesn't do as Miriam says.
But Miriam took care of him, right?
Took care of him, he's arrested.
No, no, I'm saying like Miriam was giving him food.
Yes, when he was younger.
That is so sad.
Exactly, yeah.
January 24th, 2014,
a couple wake up in their home in Texas.
It's very quiet, perhaps a little too quiet.
They make their way downstairs
and on the kitchen table is a note.
Whoever wrote it, they didn't take the time to make it neat
or even to explain what the note is about.
It just reads along the lines of,
sorry, I'm never coming back.
Something awful has happened.
The couple glanced at each other
and they run to their son's room.
They slam open their door and their ten year old son
is laying in bed, sleeping peacefully.
What?
Why would their nanny just leave?
I mean, they had gotten along so well with her.
She was slowly becoming part of the family
and their son absolutely adored her.
They thought that she was enjoying the position too.
She never complained about her job.
So why would she just up and leave?
Miriam did not have time to explain.
She didn't have time to sit there
and tell the couple that she worked for,
that at 4 a.m., she got a call from her eldest daughter,
Azalea.
Miriam shoots up in bed.
What's wrong? What happened?
Mom, something awful happened.
With your husband, Ernesto?
No.
No.
Azalea starts sobbing.
Just tell me, something awful happened to Karen.
Miriam was already packing her bags by this point.
She scribbles down a note,
tosses it on the counter, starts running out the door.
She jumps onto a bus from Texas, heading into San Fernando.
It's gonna take at least two hours.
That's on top of the time that she already had to wait
for the bus, and Miriam is overwhelmed
with anxiety right now.
What is she supposed to do for the next two hours
on this bus?
She sits on the fairy back row
and starts silently sobbing.
A few people on the bus, they try to comfort her.
One of the older men hands her his handkerchief.
Are you all right, ma'am?
My daughter has been kidnapped by the Zeta Cartel.
The man just nods.
Because by now, most of the locals know
the Zeta Cartel's have been kidnapping innocent people.
He looks down and he slowly pulls out a piece of paper
from his pocket, grabs a pen,
and jots a few things down.
Call my son.
My son is a lieutenant in the Mexican Marines.
Miriam thanks him and goes back to sobbing in her seat.
She got the call from his alien
about Karen being kidnapped at 4am.
By 8am, she's back in San Fernando.
Fill me in, tell me everything that's happened.
Azalea is a mess.
I heard something near the door in the middle of the night
so I got up from my sleep.
I started walking towards the front door
and I saw Dad.
This isn't the most alarming thing
until you realize that Azalea and her dad
are somewhat estranged.
They haven't spoken to each other in the past two years.
And suddenly he's at her doorstep in the middle of the night.
She opens the door.
He looks very disheveled.
And I don't know if it's sister intuition or what,
but Azalea just blurt's out.
Karen, her dad is stepping into the house
when his phone starts ringing.
They rush inside, close the door,
pick up the phone and put it on speaker.
It's a man's voice.
Luis, by now you know we have your daughter.
I've discussed it with the group
and after much consideration,
we've decided the ransom to get your daughter Karen back
is gonna be $77,000.
USD?
USD.
Whoa.
Before they can respond, they hear Karen's voice.
Dad, please, they just want the money.
It's not about anything else.
If you pay, they'll let me go.
If not, I guess this is goodbye.
Azalea would later say,
it felt like something in her sister's voice sounded
very unsure.
Like she wasn't positive that her dad was willing
to pay the money to save her.
And before they can even respond to that,
the caller hangs up.
$77,000.
The average salary in Mexico in a year
is around $12,000 to $15,000.
They're asking for $77,000 by 3 PM the next day.
In the next 12 hours,
they have to come up with $77,000.
Nobody's slept all night.
When 8 AM rolls around,
Louise, their father is getting ready.
He puts on his best clothes, he showers,
shaves, slicks back his hair.
He needs to look as good as possible for this.
He starts practicing in his head
what he's gonna say when he walks into the bank.
Hi, I would like to get a loan for my business.
By 10 AM, the family have combined all of their funds.
Their entire life savings, the loan from the bank
that they just got, any other valuable goods
they could sell for cash, all of it
amounted to less than $10,000.
A seventh of what they're asking for.
Louise was to drop off the money at a local health center
and Miriam parks so that she could see the handoff
but the cartel couldn't see her.
She waits, they wait for two hours.
And this man, honestly boy walks up.
He looks like a teenager, he's young, he's skinny.
He grabs the bag of cash, but Louise doesn't let go.
My daughter, meet her at the cemetery in 20 minutes.
And with that, the boy runs off at the bag of cash.
He jumps into this cherry red Ford Explorer
and they speed off.
Okay, that's okay.
They're gonna be reunited with Karen.
Money is just money.
They're gonna have Karen and everything's gonna be okay
and they drive over to the cemetery and they just wait.
And wait, and wait, and nothing.
The next morning, they get a call.
The kidnappers, the cartel.
They assure the family everything's fine.
We just didn't wanna go out in the rain yesterday.
Which is technically true.
The minute that they got to the cemetery,
there was a storm as some streets in San Fernando
were even briefly flooding.
So yeah, I mean, it all tracks.
But the whole next day, the family are sitting there
anxiously waiting for another drop off location,
but it never comes.
I mean, I think all of them had this small fear
in their minds, but everybody held on to the hope.
The kidnappers just want the money.
We paid the money.
There's no reason for them to kill Karen.
The next day, the kidnappers break into Miriam's house
where she lives with Karen.
Obviously, Miriam wasn't there at the time.
She was staying with Azalea, her other daughter.
But the cartel break into her house,
go through Karen's things, which is a good sign, right?
I mean, they're grabbing clothes for her,
which means she's coming back.
They're just robbing her.
Maybe they wanted a little more goods.
But that day, after breaking into the house,
they call the family back.
We need more money.
The family just stare at the phone.
How on earth do you think we have more money?
Manzams are very tricky.
If you pay too quickly on one hand,
you do that because you want to ensure
the safety of your loved one as quickly as possible.
But on the other hand, if you pay money too quickly,
the kidnappers might think that they lowballed you,
and you have way more money than that.
And if you can easily whip up $10,000,
you can easily whip up another $10,000.
But they truly, the family, they do not have more money.
Miriam ends up borrowing from everybody she can think of,
and gives the kidnappers another $2,000.
By this point, the hope is still there.
They are truly given everything.
The kidnappers, surely, the cartel know that they're,
I mean, they're organized crime.
They know how money works.
They know how much money and families in Mexico have,
or rather don't have in this situation.
This should be enough to get Karen back within a month
with Karen still gone, that hope starts dying off.
Nobody in the family really says it ever.
They all still talk as if Karen's going to walk in
through the front door any second now,
but nobody actually believes it anymore.
Even Miriam, who was the backbone of the entire family,
the one that holds faith and hope longer than anybody else,
even Miriam is starting to lose hope.
By the end of the month, Karen is still not back,
and Miriam is falling into a depressive state,
obviously, for her missing daughter,
which I don't think we can really put into words,
but even beyond that, it's like the whole situation
breaks every concept of life that Miriam thought she knew.
She thought, as long as her kids stay out of trouble,
keep their head down, don't go out alone at night.
They would be untouched by the cartel violence.
That's how Miriam grew up.
The cartels would leave innocent, uninvolved.
They would leave them alone.
She would tell her kids all day every day,
keep your head down, mind your own business.
Don't talk back and don't go out at night.
Which even just telling them that made her insight so angry.
Miriam is the opposite of that.
She is never shy to share her thoughts
or get into these loud heated arguments
to defend whatever she thinks is the correct answer.
And Miriam tricked herself to think
that they lived in this bubble.
She thought, only the rich get kidnapped for ransom.
Only the cartel members get killed in turf wars.
Only the slightly guilty somewhat involved go missing.
They don't just take random innocent people.
It doesn't make sense.
None of it makes sense.
It's not the way the world works, right?
You're supposed to be a good person.
If you abide by the rules, nothing that bad happens to you.
I mean, obviously you experience hardships and challenges,
but you're not going to get kidnapped by the cartels.
Because what would they want to do with you?
Isn't that the unspoken agreement?
Everyone could just see Miriam's decline.
Miriam was someone who took a lot of care in her makeup
and clothing choices.
She hadn't put on makeup in the past month.
She rarely ever changed out of her pajamas.
She spent all day laying there scrolling on her phone,
trying to think of ways to get Karen back,
think of possibilities of where she might be.
And so for a month, Miriam grieved she did nothing else,
which is wallow in fear for Karen,
grief for her family, and how they're going to handle this,
and then just self-pity for herself.
She is spiraling until February 23rd, 2014,
one month after Karen has vanished.
Miriam gets up, takes a bath, sits down in front of a mirror,
and brushes her hair out for the first time.
She puts on a full-face of makeup, walks back downstairs,
almost shocking her daughter, Azalea.
Mom, are you going somewhere?
They're not bringing Karen back to me.
I know this in my heart as a mother.
Karen is dead.
There was no self-pity or grief in her voice, just determination.
For the rest of my life, with the time that I have left,
I'm going to find the people who did this to my daughter,
and I'm going to make them pay.
Miriam got into her truck that day,
and Azalea would say, her mom was never the same after that.
Because that was the day she decided, Karen is dead,
and soon her killers will be dead too,
if Miriam had anything to do with it.
But first, she needs to find out what happened to her little girl,
to find out who needs to pay.
But even that's going to be hard.
The Zeta's never have a reason for kidnapping someone.
It's just what they do now.
The city of San Fernando has a curfew.
It's not just for teenagers or minors
to get home by a certain time or else.
It's for every single resident.
Get home by 5 p.m. if you know what's good for you.
If you have an emergency that you need to go outside
after dark, really think, really weigh out the benefits.
Is it worth the risk?
Even trips to the hospital or pharmacy at night.
Will you survive until the morning?
Yeah, then maybe you should wait until then.
Because as much as the Zeta's are violent,
they are a deeply paranoid group, which
makes sense because their come up
is betraying the cartel that they used to work with
and creating their own division
and taking over the original territory of the original cartel.
Not only are they paranoid that the original cartel,
the golf cartel, is going to come back and take vengeance on them.
They're also concerned that other cartels,
the Cinaloa cartel, is going to take their territory.
But they're also concerned that other factions
are going to break off from the Zeta's
and start their own cartel.
There's a lot of paranoia in San Fernando.
So they've created a curfew. Anybody driving at night
would likely be stopped by Zeta patrols with assault rifles.
They act like they own the town.
I mean, they do.
More often than not, if you're a young man,
they will just assume that you're part of a cartel.
And if you're not someone that they're familiar with,
then in their minds, you're part of the other cartels,
which means you're the enemy and you need to die.
If you're not a young man, they could still
be thinking that you're working for the other cartels.
Or you could be up to no good.
Maybe you're selling drugs on the side.
You're not allowed to do that.
This is their territory.
Or maybe they just like your car.
Or maybe they think that you'd be a good sex trafficking
victim.
Or maybe they think that they should kidnap you and ransom you.
There really is no reason on why they kidnap anybody.
Zeta just has a habit of kidnapping locals
and forcing their families to pay hefty ransoms
to get their loved ones back.
Innocence, civilians that have nothing
to do with the cartels.
So back then, when Miriam was growing up,
cartels were just cartels.
They smuggle drugs.
They make obscene amounts of money.
They drive luxury cars and they host these parties.
I would say it's safe to say most Mexican citizens now
definitely hate the cartels.
But back then, even when the cartels
were doing their own thing, they didn't like the cartels.
But even if the police and the government can't stop them,
what are the citizens going to do?
They can't stop them.
So they're just trying to coexist.
It seems the consensus is, stay out of their way,
and they'll stay out of yours.
That's how it used to be.
Some people would even say that they actually
liked cartel leaders at one point.
Pablo Escobar was known for almost having
a Robin Hood image in his particular hometown,
not a lot of other towns, but he would fund housing projects
and help build soccer fields which generally earned him
a bit of admiration from some of the residents.
Other cartel members, not just part of Pablo Escobar's group,
but other cartels would have high ranking officials
pay for the bills of every single civilian at a restaurant
when they go out to eat, just so the community would like them,
which made it easier to traffic drugs through their town.
But it's not like that anymore.
Times have changed.
It said that cartels used to just target the rich,
but now they just do whatever they want.
One expert about the Zeta said,
the Zeta is still from everyone, not just the rich.
They certainly don't give much back to the poor,
except the corpses of their relatives.
They are just known for being a different kind of human being.
To give you an idea of what Miriam was up against,
one of the most heinous crimes committed by the Zetas
was actually all over international news at the time.
The Zetas were monitoring a highway.
They stopped two trucks that were trafficking migrants
to the US border.
There were 70 plus migrants in the trucks.
The Zetas pulled them over, forced their trucks
to drive to one of their kitchens or ranches
in the middle of nowhere.
They fed them all tacos and sodas, sat them down in a big circle
and started talking $500 a week.
That's unheard of.
The type of work you guys are trying to do in the US,
you're not gonna get paid $500 a week.
If you come work for us, $500 a week.
The offer is very simple.
Work for us, fight the war against the Mexican army
and the Gulf cartel.
The men, you guys will be trained killers
and the women will be domestic workers.
What do you guys think?
One by one, all of the 70 plus people said no.
The Zetas smiled.
Yeah, okay, no problem.
Then let's get you guys going.
They load everyone back onto the trucks,
but instead of leading them back onto the highway,
the trucks are led to another ranch.
This one is even more isolated.
There were about nine Zetas tying up everybody's hands
with zip ties.
Some were blindfolded and forced into this tiny,
abandoned single story house.
And for the next two hours, almost all of them
are brutally murdered.
72 were found dead.
For what?
It's likely that there have been more massacres like this
before, but the Mexican Marines were able to find out about it
before the Zetas cleaned up the bodies.
It became international news.
And also because a lot of the migrants
were not Mexican citizens,
it becomes a bit of an international diplomatic nightmare.
And this was just pure proof that the violence
with the cartels is getting out of hand,
even the president can't ignore it,
because the whole world is talking about it.
These are the types of people that Miriam is going up against.
But the whole world isn't talking about Karen.
Unfortunately, that's not how the news cycle seems to work.
72 dead international news.
A young girl in Mexico goes missing without a trace.
It's not even local news.
It's town conversation, it's gossip, it's a sad family,
until the next one goes missing.
It's up to the family to figure out what happened.
Not even the police really care.
Karen's family start piecing together
the last time that they heard from Karen.
Isaiah asked Karen if she wanted to go to church reading with her,
but Karen said, oh, I can't go.
I have to go out with the cousin tonight.
So the rest of the night,
Isaiah periodically tries to either call or text Karen
and she doesn't respond.
Isaiah is a bit panicked,
considering everything that's going on in the area,
but she just assumed Karen forgot to charge her phone
and she would just respond tomorrow.
But then her dad shows up at the door.
The first person Miriam talks to
is the cousin that Karen was eating dinner with,
which is the reason that she couldn't go to church with Isaiah.
The cousin said it was weird.
They were sitting down eating
and Karen got this call all of a sudden
and she tells them, I gotta go.
What?
Where?
Why?
I have to go pick up a friend.
Which friend?
Guy named Ulysses.
I gotta go.
Love you.
Bye.
Karen was out the door.
He didn't even get a chance to ask,
who the hell is Ulysses?
I've never heard of him before.
Ulysses was a dead end lead for now,
but Miriam heard someone else had been kidnapped with Karen.
Actually, Karen had been kidnapped
with a whole group of her friends.
Carlos was one of them.
Carlos was a close friend of Karen
who was there the night she was kidnapped
because he was gonna fix her car for her.
He went missing and the next morning Karen's mom
gets a call demanding money from the kidnappers,
the cartel.
She tells the kidnappers, I have no money
and they laugh into the phone before hanging up.
They say, well, then we'll send your son in pieces
and they hung up on her.
But somehow, Carlos is home.
He's back.
And he's very much alive
and he knows exactly what happened to Karen.
So for months, Miriam starts begging Carlos to talk to her
but he's terrified, likely threatened by the Zadas
that if he says anything, he's gonna be dead.
Eventually, Carlos starts telling Miriam
bits and pieces about what happened that night.
The way Carlos describes it,
it's like a group of people,
violent offenders escape from a mental hospital
with guns and chainsaws.
That's how it felt being kidnapped by the Zadas.
They're a group of unpredictable, unhinged, unstable,
terrifying, violent people.
Carlos had gone to Miriam's house.
So Miriam is in Texas working and Karen lives there alone.
Carlos had gone with his cousin to Karen's house
since he had already agreed to be there to fix Karen's car.
And while they're arriving, before they get to the front door,
they are startled.
Two men start coming out of the house to greet them.
Oh, hey, is Karen home?
Is Karen here?
She's not here if you want though.
You can come in and you can wait for her.
Carlos and his cousin walk in and immediately in the living room
they see Karen laying on the floor crying.
Her hands and feet are tied together
and her face is completely bloody and swollen.
Carlos and his cousin try to be line it out the door,
but the guys point rifles into their faces.
And one of them laughs, oh, you're so fucked now.
The two gunmen tie Carlos and his cousin up.
They're tossed near the back of the house like flower sacks,
but they could hear the two men just beating Karen,
kicking and punching her all over.
They kept demanding to know what information Karen leaks,
but she sounds so confused by this question.
What information are you talking about?
How can I leak information?
I don't know.
I think you have me confused with somebody else.
I don't know what you're talking about.
But with each denial, they just keep torturing her more.
We know you work for the Gulf cartel.
Karen is frantic.
She's screaming.
I have nothing to do with any of the cartels.
Please, they don't care.
They keep torturing her, suffocating her, bringing her back.
When she passes out and doesn't get back up,
they pour buckets of cold water on her.
They're slamming their face into her face
and she keeps telling them, you have the wrong person.
Eventually, the group, Karen and her friends
that were tied up elsewhere in the house
are taken to a separate location,
including Carlos and his cousin.
They call it the ranch.
At the ranch, they're all lined up inside.
The group from Karen's house, but also other strangers
that had already been there.
The zetas are screaming at the group, telling them,
you're going to get the bag.
Do you know what the bag is?
It's where they put a plastic bag over your head
until you're on the brink of death
and then they bring you back.
You'll get the bag if you don't cooperate.
Carlos said it sounded like the zetas were convinced
that Karen specifically was working with the Gulf cartel
and they kept trying to extract some sort of confession
from her, but she sounded as confused as everybody else.
But all the others could just hear Karen screaming,
no, I'm not with them.
And then there would just be sounds of her being tortured
and screaming for mercy.
The zetas come around to one of Karen's friends,
shoves a pistol in his mouth and asks him,
what do you want to say as your last words?
He just said, what did I do?
The kidnappers start laughing.
They do this down the line to every single person.
One of them is all of them are kneeled and tied up.
One of them says, what's your last words?
The next guy responds to the kidnappers,
may God bless you.
And the kidnappers are swinging around their assault rifles,
pointing them at them unhinged, just cackling.
This motherfucker thinks he's in a movie.
Did you hear that?
Say it again.
The third man, instead of saying something for his last words,
he complained if he could just untie his boots
because they're too tight right now
and it's cutting off the blood circulation.
The male kidnappers start laughing again
and they call over a woman.
She walks over and she laughs in his face,
starts jumping up and down with all her weight
on the man's legs until he's sobbing in pain.
She leans down in his face then.
How does that feel now?
Do your feet still hurt?
And they start laughing.
Eventually, they load everybody up
and move them to another location.
Another ranch where they're all shoved
into another small house, abandoned house,
and they're forced to sit on this dirt floor.
They were told that their families were gonna get ransom calls
and if they pay the ransom, they'll let them go.
They went one by one asking for the family phone numbers
and it was at this ranch, that same woman
that was jumping on the man's legs
starts focusing on Karen.
Carlos said this woman hates Karen for no reason.
She doesn't even seem to know Karen.
Other than the fact that Karen's pretty,
that's what this woman hates.
Carlos said the woman straight up grabbed Karen by the hair,
spun her around so that she's laying on her stomach,
straddled her back and she said,
this is for being so fucking pretty
and starts smashing her head against the floor
and using her fist to pummel her.
They were kept overnight making calls
to their families for ransom
and by the next morning, one of the guys pointed at
all of the male captives, put the assholes in the truck.
He points at Karen and her friend Barbara, the two women.
Take the bitches to the tree, you know what to do.
Two guys dragged Karen and Barbara over to the tree.
They tie a yellow rope around their necks
and fling it over the tallest branch of the tree
and start pulling the other end of the rope.
Karen is fighting back, she's trying to break free.
One guy is holding the other end of the rope,
keeping her suspended and another guy comes up to grab a stick
so he can beat Karen with it like a pinyada.
The ones that survived didn't see the rest,
but they were told and they speculate
that Karen was killed on the tree
and later potentially dissolved in acid,
cooked as they call it.
I've been trying to explore ways
to increase my creativity lately
and listening to audio books with Audible
has been one of them.
I've made it a daily habit to listen to Audible every day
for the past few years now
and I can honestly say that I found a lot of inspiration
on how to tell my stories through the titles
I've listened to so far.
Audible makes it so easy to listen to
because it's pretty much hands-free,
meaning I can listen to it as I'm driving,
doing my skincare or even when I'm cooking dinner,
I don't need to set aside a specific time
because I can pretty much listen to Audible whenever
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And I always, I mean, I think while cases are very devastating,
but I always find the ones where as kids,
they overcome all their obstacles
and somehow are almost miracle babies,
and then their lives get stolen,
I think it's like an extra level of just betrayal
from the world that Miriam is feeling
because Karen was able to overcome her heart murmurs,
she was able to overcome all of these obstacles,
and then they take her, and then they kill her.
Cristiano was Miriam's next target.
He was rather easy to catch, not the brightest one in the group.
He was arrested without a fight,
and immediately he starts confessing to who he is.
He admits that he was part of the kidnapping unit
that took Karen, and Miriam stares at the guy
that she once gave her sandwich to.
He looks even younger now.
He just turned 18 according to records.
The cops take his shirt off to take photos of him.
He looks even younger with his shirt off.
Cristiano gave Miriam a few more names to work with.
Another guy involved was killed by the Marines at the ranch.
The main boss that ordered the kill
was a guy by the name of El Larry.
El Larry was the one that took most of the money.
El Larry was ruthless according to Cristiano.
He would order kidnappies to be killed
and cooked in a giant steel pot.
His favorite thing was to just make everyone
to capitate everyone.
They would also do this thing where they would get
the kidnappies and make them fight to the death,
gladiator style, and last one standing gets to go home.
But most of the time, they don't get to go home.
With every line of aggressive questioning from the police,
Cristiano would ask for his mom,
and he would constantly state to the officers that he's hungry.
Miriam was watching all of this in a separate room.
She could hear and see them,
and she would walk into the interrogation room,
stare at this kid who killed her daughter,
and hand over her lunch that she brought for herself.
Later, the police were so confused by Miriam,
and they asked her, why would you do that?
And she said, he's a child.
No matter what he did, when I heard him saying he was hungry,
it was like I heard my own child.
And I know a lot of people might be confused,
but I think this has a lot to do with the context of,
they all grew up in an area where a lot of the kids
didn't have a lot to eat.
And so I think it's just this motherly instinct
that comes out.
I think it also goes back to probably,
given the circumstances,
most of these kids would not have joined a cartel.
That doesn't excuse anything that cartels do,
but it does seem like most of these people
would not have joined the cartels
if they had any other options.
This is probably the most mother of a story I've ever heard.
In every aspect.
And she is a deeply flawed character later, we'll see.
But everything is so wow.
Yeah.
But I mean, what can we say when Cristiano and the others
are responsible for all the other children
dying in the area?
Yeah, he's a child, but so is everybody else.
At the time, Miriam's son, Louise,
felt like his entire generation, his age group
was being exterminated.
That's what it felt like.
They're being exterminated by the cartels.
Either they joined the cartels because they have no choice.
And they die in a battle that they never had skin in the game for,
or more often than not, they just vanish because of the cartels.
He would think of a former classmate, remember them,
want to reach out to them and realize they had gone missing.
That happened way too often.
But all the pieces are coming together
with Salma and Cristiano's story, as well as some of the other survivors
from that night, Miriam comes out with a longer list,
a hit list, El Flaco, the florist, El Mario, El Chapara.
El Kike is the young man that allegedly pulled the rope that killed Karen,
Soto, a former sex worker that is now dating El Kike,
and a woman named La Machora.
That's her nickname.
Most of these are nicknames because they don't use their real names.
She is the woman that beat Karen for being pretty.
They're all on Miriam's list, and they're all involved in killing her daughter.
And one by one, Miriam is going to take them down
because to her, she said, fear is just another word.
If there is someone you don't want chasing you,
it would probably be Miriam.
The running joke in their family was,
Miriam wanted to be a cop, but she wasn't corrupt enough for it.
She didn't qualify for the job.
This wasn't even the first time someone in their family was kidnapped
or almost kidnapped.
What?
Azalea, Miriam's eldest daughter, Karen's older sister,
is married to a man named Ernesto.
One day, the couple get home and they see this letter near their front door,
and they rush inside to open it up.
There's no signature on the front or back,
but it was, however, weighted, tied to a weight.
So whoever left this for them wanted to make sure that they got it,
and they knew it was for them,
and they didn't get swept away in the wind.
They open up the letter, and it's like a stalker's confession.
A very long list of every coming and going out of the house,
what time Ernesto goes to work,
what he ate at the local coffee shop,
where he likes to grab lunch after work,
every little detail about his every little day was broken down and logged.
Clearly, someone is watching him very intently,
and at the very bottom of the letter, it reads,
if you wish not to be kidnapped, call this number.
Before the couple call the number, they call Miriam.
That seems like the best person who would know what to do.
She tells them over the phone, I have a plan.
I will drop off the money to the kidnappers.
What are you insane, Mom?
What do you think they want an old woman for?
They'll take the money and they'll let me go.
The negotiations begin between Miriam and the Zadas.
Miriam haggled on getting the ransom down.
So they're trying to get a ransom before they even kidnapped him.
Because they're like, less work.
What?
That's crazy.
They're like, if you don't pay it, we're going to kidnap you.
You're going to have to pay it anyway if you want to live.
So just pay it now.
But that doesn't even mean that they're not going to kidnap you.
Miriam haggles on getting the ransom down.
She argued that there's no way that they could afford the initial request.
Eventually, they settle on a number,
or well, Zada threatened the family
and showed more information about Ernesto.
They're on the phone, and Zadas are going off and on
about how much information they have about Ernesto and where he is
and where he works and about his own family.
And Miriam starts getting impatient.
She snaps at them.
Well, if you know so much about us, then you know that we don't have that kind of money.
Don't be such an asshole.
She's saying this to the Zadas.
And just like that, it's settled.
Miriam is going to drop off the money and hopefully she'll come back.
The fear they have is they're going to take the money and kill Miriam for the hell of it.
Or kidnap her and then ask for more ransom,
but they clearly don't have more money,
so then she's going to get killed anyway.
Azalea tries to stop her mom.
Please, mom, this isn't even concerning you.
This is our responsibility.
It's him they want.
What do they want with an old woman like me?
And besides, if they try to take me, I'm not going to let them.
She flashes her little pistol in her jacket pocket.
And before Miriam heads out, she turns to her eldest daughter and tells her,
if I'm not back in 15 minutes, pack your things, take care and go to the US.
Miriam drives to the abandoned gas station.
There's three SUVs waiting for her.
There's nobody else out.
There's curfew.
Nobody's driving around.
Miriam parks her car near one of the cars, rolls down her window,
and a masked man is sitting in the seat.
Leave the cash over there on top of one of the empty pumps.
Miriam glances over.
They want her to get out of the car.
They want her to place the cash at the empty pump.
Miriam tosses the bag of cash out the window, throws it, chucks it and just drives off.
She's like, I'm not freaking getting out the car.
Are you crazy?
Yes.
Just throws it out the window and drives off.
When Miriam gets back, Azalea and her whole family are in the kitchen with a bag packed,
waiting nervously.
And Azalea starts crying when she sees her mom walk in the door.
And she tells her mom, what you did, that's not something we can ever repay you for.
Miriam just has this tenacity that a lot of people don't.
It's very rare.
So did he come back?
Yeah.
They never told their nestles.
They never told their nestles.
They're fine.
Never got kidnapped.
Wow.
And Azalea said when Karen was four, Miriam found out that she was pregnant again.
So this was going to be another baby.
But when they went to the hospital, the doctor said, not only are you not going to deliver
the baby, but you have cancer.
Azalea remembers looking at her mom's face, looking for any sort of sign that she's going
to break down or that she's what's going on.
But Miriam just shakes her head at the doctors.
Well, I can't die.
I got a young kid, Karen's four.
Louise is barely 13.
There's nobody else that's going to take care of them.
So it wasn't pleading.
It wasn't desperate.
It wasn't like, no, I can't die.
It was just, yeah, well, I can't really die.
I'm kind of busy right now.
I know cancer has no association with how the person approaches cancer or cancer treatment.
But to just look at a cancer diagnosis like that and have that kind of response is just
very intense.
Miriam went through weeks of radiation in chemotherapy until she was finally cancer-free.
Then the doctors told her that her health was declining due in part because of her weight.
She's five-six and weighed more than 350 pounds for most of her life, which there's nothing
wrong with that.
But specifically in Miriam's case, her doctors said that she was not healthy.
Miriam ends up getting a gastric bypass procedure, which limits the amount of food your stomach
can hold.
To give you a comparison, a regular adult stomach can hold about six cups of liquid and food
when it's full.
A gastric sleeve can only hold about one cup when it's full.
Now it's not a very dangerous procedure, but Azalea was so nervous for her mom.
She asked her, are you not scared?
Her mom just said, I feel like I answered that with a cancer diagnosis.
If that didn't kill me, you think this is going to kill me?
Now she weighs 135 pounds and she is very grateful for that surgery because it helps her hunt.
Some of her days consist of hiking through abandoned ranches, staking out safe houses.
She would have to chase down and tackle Zeta Cartel members.
She is very conscious about her health.
So she's hunting down these members.
None of them are coming back to her or kidnapping her or doing something to her?
I think the leadership in Zeta, as of right now, are not scared of her.
They think she's annoying, probably, or maybe they haven't even heard of what she's doing.
So they lose a few members.
They're like, okay, whatever.
They don't even know what's going on with these low ranking members I killed Karen.
But I think these low ranking members, I think they're a little scared of Miriam.
At least one by one.
And it seems like most of them have split up.
So some of them died by the Marines, some of them are in prison.
I think if they were collectively still in a group setting, maybe they would have kidnapped
Miriam.
But yeah, in Mexico, you don't go missing.
You are part of the disappeared.
That's what they call you.
The word means something else completely.
It means your presence has basically been deleted.
Nobody knows what happened to you.
They can guess, and they're probably right, but nobody will help find you.
And if you know someone who's disappeared, then your life is in this perpetual limbo, this
torture of not knowing what happened to them and not knowing if there's anything you could
have done to prevent it.
It said to be a very devastating experience.
And up until Miriam, there was not even a support group or a community for those who suffered
from having a loved one vanish.
Miriam starts her own vanishing collective.
That's what it was called.
Many members of lost ones would come together to hear each other out, to support each other,
and to write letters and call and demand answers from the government.
This was unheard of.
This is during a time where you were told, hey, you're a loved one who was taken by the
cartels.
If you reported to the police, most likely the police work with the cartels.
And once the cartels know that you've reported it, another one of your family members is going
to go missing just because you pissed them off.
But now Miriam is gathering up all of the families and helping them get compensation from
the government.
Most of them don't even know that they qualify for compensation.
The government didn't like to tell them that they did.
And even when they find out the government is like, you got to jump through all these
hoops, Miriam would study the law.
Miriam was here.
She spent all day making calls, pulling favors, threatening people.
Miriam was a threatner.
Okay, she would threaten to expose politicians to call the Marines on the police, to call
the police on the Marines.
She was doing a lot.
But Miriam was here and she was going to help them and try and get answers.
There's something.
Miriam starts her journey as one of the better known advocates in that area.
She was known for getting shit done, which means she's very aggressive.
She was notorious for harassing and threatening officials.
Those were her things.
She told the collective, in numbers they have power.
As a group, they have power.
They can make people listen.
She told them, not even the government knows how many of us are out here.
But still, she's out here making a difference, right?
And that's when her kids, Azalea and Louise start asking her, isn't that enough?
Most of Karen's killers are slowly coming down.
She's tracked down Elf Loco, who it said he skipped town, quit the criminal world and
was now working at a factory.
She tracked him down, had him arrested.
Then she tracked down the florist.
El Mario was taken down.
The girl from the meat shop was arrested.
El Kike, the one that pulled the rope was ironically arrested at church.
The minister asked Miriam whether she had mercy or not, which is a wild thing to ask.
She looked the minister in the eye and said, and where was El Kike's mercy when he killed
my daughter?
Miriam got El Kike's girlfriend arrested.
And now the main one at large is the woman who beat Karen for pleasure.
The rest have been arrested or killed by the Marines.
The top guy was arrested too?
El Larry was still on the run for a little bit, yes.
But she didn't have as much hatred for El Larry for some reason.
I think El Larry wasn't the one that wanted Karen killed.
He just seems to be the one that's like, okay, guys, go kidnap people.
But she really hates the girl that beat Karen for no reason, yeah, because that's so
sadistic.
So, they're left.
And Miriam could do that maybe leisurely or hand over her files to the police.
That's what her kids are arguing.
Have them handle it.
Sign closure.
Miriam promised her kid she would stop when she laid her baby to rest.
Authorities had found a few of Karen's rib bones in the mask grave at the ranch.
As Alie and Louise thought, this is confirmation that's putting Karen to rest.
Or at least the part left of Karen, right, is it not?
Miriam's friends and family thought.
Isn't this enough?
Can't she stop now?
When does revenge stop being about justice and start becoming all-consuming?
When does revenge start doing more harm than good?
One day a woman walks into Miriam's store.
Do you run the vanishing collective?
Yes, I do.
My sister, Margarita, the Ravenhaired kidnapper.
Remember her?
The Ravenhaired kidnapper that led them to the ranch that was killed by the Marines.
All because of Miriam's tip.
Her sister walks in.
My sister was killed by the Mexican Marines and they told me that I can't file a complaint
related to her death.
But I would like to, I just don't know how.
Could you help?
Way.
It made Miriam sick.
Do you think a victimizer would be next to a list of victims?
But Margarita was dead.
And Miriam thought maybe her family were also victims of the cartels.
They did in a sense lose their sister to the cartels.
Margarita became a mom at 16, continued to have babies with other men.
And she couldn't really find footing in her life.
There wasn't a lot of opportunities for her.
And when she came across a member of the Zetas who was offering her money and not
stability, but some financial stability, she took it.
And her whole family told her, it's him or it's us because her dad is a pastor.
They, Margarita and her new boyfriend from the Zetas try to convince her dad, no, it's
love, it's love.
Look, he's even going to give you cash for a car.
He throws the cash back at them and said, I don't want your blood money.
Get out of here.
To Margarita's dad, she was no longer his daughter.
And the more time that she spent with these people, the more she was becoming like them
and the family just felt like they lost Margarita.
Margarita's family eventually enrolled in the state system for victims with Miriam's
help to receive compensation.
At the burial for Karen's bones, the few that were found at least, Azalia asked her mom,
when is this going to end?
When is what going to end?
This, this, all of this.
Miriam flips open the coffin, pulls out a bag of bones.
This is what I have left of my daughter.
You think I'm going to stop now?
How long was she on the hunt?
Two and a half years.
They warned her.
She had to stop before it was too late.
It was going to consume her.
March 22nd, 2017.
Three years after Karen goes missing and was killed.
29 inmates dig their way out of the prison.
They dig tunnels and dig their way to freedom.
29 killers are now free and many of them are Mersedas and many of them are the ones that
Miriam had put in prison.
Miriam is rightfully terrified.
They're going to come after her.
She can feel it.
But for once, everybody around her is a bit more relaxed than she is.
They agree safety needs to be at the highest right now, which technically the police are
required to protect her in situations like this by law, according to the victim's
laws.
But of course, they don't.
They don't even pick up her phone calls.
Honestly, everybody had the same thought process on this one.
Miriam, at this point, you are way too big of an advocate.
The Zetas are slowly losing their power.
They're not dumb enough to go and kill Miriam, the story that it would cause on a national
level.
Because at this point, the Zetas were slowly losing power.
The Mexican government, the president at the time, very aggressive, very aggressive about
the war on drugs.
So all the cartels were kind of laying low.
Because once you do something big, it becomes national news.
Everybody freaks out.
The president puts the target on that cartels back.
They're like all the forces after this cartel.
So it wouldn't make sense for the Zetas to kill Miriam right now, because they would make
national news.
And then people would be like, you got to do something, then the president would do something.
It would just be more military guns pointed directly at them.
And on top of that, these guys just got out of prison.
The last thing they want to do is get back into prison.
They want to disappear.
Commit crimes in secret.
It would be dumb for them to come after Miriam.
But she's terrified.
For the first time in her life, people said Miriam looked genuinely scared for her own
life.
Prior to this, when she was chasing everyone down, it's almost like she had this superhero
effect.
She did not believe that she was capable of dying.
That's what it felt like.
A lot of people think it's because she was getting closer to her revenge.
She only had a few more people left.
And I think as she was taking these people down, I think that she was getting closure slowly.
I think in the beginning, she didn't have the fear of dying because she was so consumed
by vengeance.
Nothing mattered.
But now it's, she's almost there.
She's fine in closure.
She's about to be free.
She's about to move on.
Yes.
No, don't tell me.
Elk Kike, the one that pulled the rope, was out.
He dug out of the tunnel.
She told her kids, I can only hope if those bastards come after me, they give me a chance
to shoot back.
May 10, 2017, Azalea had plans to meet with her mom for coffee and cake later in the
evening.
But when she didn't show up, her dad starts calling.
Azalea doesn't like it when her dad starts calling.
Azalea just had this feeling in her gut.
Something is very, very wrong.
And she picks up the phone.
Your mother has been shot.
Miriam had been getting out of her car in front of her ex-husband's house.
She had her back turned towards the street, walking towards his house when a car drove
by and fired multiple rounds into her body.
They fired 13 rounds.
Miriam was hit eight times.
Louise found her with her hand in her purse reaching for her pistol.
Louise calls the kids and both of them make it to the hospital, but it's too late.
Miriam was dead.
Killed.
The mother who went after the cartel, the mother who would not stop at anything for justice
for her baby, was killed on Mother's Day.
Louise, Miriam's son, didn't think about any sort of inheritance when his mom died.
She spent every last penny she had on hunting down the cartel members who killed her baby.
If there was anything to inherit, it would have been dead.
But thankfully, it doesn't work that way.
Instead, Louise got a surprise inheritance at his mother's funeral.
Louise was the one the son was the one planning everything.
The funeral he was slowly without plan, just naturally taking over his mother's collective
even.
It was never that he wanted to do that.
Just the members started calling, asking him when the next meeting was.
And knowing his mom, she would have been so angry at him if she found out that he canceled
it and let the collective fall apart.
It was almost pushed onto him.
He inherited it by default.
But at the funeral, he inherited something a little bit more.
Something strange happens.
Louise is grieving when this old childhood friend of his comes up to him and motions for
him to come outside.
Okay, clearly this could be a setup.
He could walk out of the house and be shot too.
But for some reason, he really trusts this childhood friend.
He walks out and there's this car parked on the side of the road.
It's criminal.
Not a good person.
He knows him for committing crimes.
I don't think he's cartel, but criminal.
He rolls down the window.
Do you know a guy named El Luce?
I've heard of him.
When you start looking into what happened to your mom, you look into El Luce.
Then the truck dries off.
Nothing else was said.
A vague tip.
Who's El Luce?
Exactly.
A vague tip that's going to keep Louise up all night if he doesn't look into it.
That is how Louise inherits his mom's vengeance.
He would need to avenge his mother's death first, then finish his sister's revenge.
When the people who killed his mom first, then find the woman who beat Karen for being
too pretty.
Louise didn't want to, but he could feel himself falling deeper into the investigation
every single day.
He was becoming more and more like his mother every single day, talking to the same Marines,
the same politicians, the same officers, threatening them the same way, hunting down cartel
members the same way that Miriam did, learning how to extract information from witnesses
just like his mom.
And it made sense.
All that grief that he feels had to go somewhere.
Asalia, she was married.
She had children of her own.
Louise just had grief.
He didn't have anybody.
He was putting all of it, focusing all of it on getting vengeance.
So with Louise's help mainly, just like Miriam, the authorities were able to get El Luce,
the man who was hired by the Zetas to kill Miriam.
So at this point, when the Zetas, they break out of prison, the higher ups of the Zetas
are pissed at Miriam.
They think that she's causing too much trouble, even with the collective.
It's preventing them from getting ransom when they cannot people.
Every kidnapping is becoming a thing now.
And they don't like it.
So they hire another random Zeta to go kill her.
It's actually not the same people that killed Karen.
He was killed before the officers could take him into custody.
And from there, it's borrowed into hunting down the cartel members that were involved
in Miriam's hit.
None of them were involved in Karen's death.
So two very separate groups, and they genuinely just wanted Miriam out the way.
She was just causing too much trouble.
They take down El Luce.
They take down Cheesefoot who did the transfer of funds, that's his nickname.
And another man named El Hugo.
And then finally, through Louise's investigations, they take down the woman that beat Karen right
before the murder.
Oh, just he just found her.
Yeah, he was able to track her down and get her arrested.
But unlike his mother, Louise is trying his best to stop now.
He wants to focus on trying to get other victims' families help, rather than getting swept
up and tracking down more.
Okay, how many people are semi-involved in all of this?
He just wants to protect what he has left of a family.
And that is the story of Miriam, the real-life story of the Taken movie.
As of right now, it does appear that the Zetas are still operating, but not in the way
that they used to.
They fragment it off mainly into new groups.
The Gulf cartel seems to be a lot more fragmented as well, with cells operating semi-independently,
almost like franchisees of a drug restaurant.
It's hard to estimate the current state of the cartel's influence in operations because
there's so many different groups.
The Zetas have also fragmented into CDN, ZVE, which are acronyms for their new groups.
But overall, the Zetas have diminished over the years.
And that does not mean that the reign of terror is over.
There seems to be a new, even more violent cartel that has taken a lot of the control in
Mexico.
They're known as the Helisco New Generation Cartel, or CJNG.
They are considered currently one of the most powerful and most violent groups in Mexico.
They were founded in 2010, and as of right now, their estimated assets are worth over
$20 billion.
And just like the Zetas, they are known for extreme public violence.
They're responsible for a lot of the decapitation.
There are some skinning videos of cartel members, skinning rivals face skin off, and decapitating
them.
Some of them are decapitated, and their heads are used as basketballs.
And those videos are uploaded onto the internet as almost psychological warfare.
There have been rumors that some of the cartel members will participate in acts of cannibalism.
Again, not because I think that they're cannibals, I don't think, but more so again for psychological
warfare as a fear tactic.
They're also very paramilitary vibes.
They use drones strapped with grenades to attack people, and they're just wreaking havoc.
So that is where we are with today's case.
What are your thoughts on this?
I don't think I've ever covered a case where a mom went after her daughter's killers with
so much...
I mean, I feel like she was a detective in a past life or something.
She's like one of the bravest person that I've ever heard about.
And the crazy thing is, Azalea and Louise said, it's sad to watch their mom go down this
route, but at the same time they knew that she would do this for all of them.
And they said not once during her quest for revenge, did they ever feel neglected?
If they had a problem, she would drop everything.
So that is the story of Miriam.
What are your thoughts?
Please stay safe, and I will see you guys in the next one.
Bye.
