The men who trained Mexico's new police later became the Zetas

In 2004 a medical-school dropout stood on a field with a shaved head and was told he was joining a brand-new elite Mexican police force. The men running the course had come out of the army's special forces, the GAFE. They were brutal. A few years later a large share of that same cadre went over to the trafficking groups and became the armed core of the Zetas. Calderon was in the formation at the time and had no idea.

That training is where his map of Mexico's drug war begins. He spent years on counter-narcotics and organized-crime investigations in Tijuana, a city that, while he worked there, was called the most dangerous place on the planet. After he left the job he became a security consultant, trained law-enforcement agencies, and wrote up what he had seen. Lex Fridman asked what the work had taught him about human nature.

The answer was short. Anybody can be got. Anybody can be corrupted. The older investigators who were supposed to teach profiling had, in some cases, already been on the take from the start. Trust no one, Calderon says, recalling the old *X-Files* line — and then watching it come true in real offices, on real shifts.

He does not hedge the claim. He is talking about people who cleared FBI-style background checks, sat through polygraphs, and survived every security screen the agencies could throw at them — and who were later found to have been taking money, or to have become someone else. A clearance is a slice of a person at one date. People keep moving.

Greed, in his telling, is rarely the first door. He names three: family, financial need, and health. Mexico is a place of chronic instability, so a sick relative or a collapsed business is enough to open a crack in the wall. Water seeps in a little at a time. Given long enough, the whole wall goes soft.

The paths he watched were ordinary. Someone is threatened with death and then learns that a nod will keep them alive. Someone is asked for a trivial favor and, months later, finds there is no way back. Someone never asked for money at all; they only allowed other people to make the decision. "Sometimes a payment for some of this corruption is just to continue on living." In that setting the moral scale is not the one that sits in a classroom.

The example he offers is one every Mexican listener, he says, will recognize. A child is in public school. You want the morning session instead of the afternoon, so you go to the director and grease the wheels. It happens when the child is six or seven. It is the first time a parent learns that a rule can be bought.

Those moments stack into a worldview. Rules start to look like price tags, and the idea of a boundary fades. Later, in front of a traffic cop or a window at a government office, the first question is often how much. Obeying, or appealing, comes after. In Tijuana the slang is *mordida*, a bite. A cop stops you, asks for papers, and if you do not want the ticket you ask whether you can pay the fine right here, then slip the cash into the paperwork. The ritual is smooth. Nobody looks embarrassed.

Fridman grew up in the Soviet Union and knows the same gray zone. Two systems a hemisphere apart trained the same muscle memory. The real fork, Calderon says, comes later. Once you learn that a little money fixes a little problem, you learn that a favor can buy a better school. Then someone puts a huge prize in front of you — a promotion, a jump in power, money that would change a family's life — and a voice says no, this is not right. Where that voice comes from, innate or taught, he does not claim to know.

Fridman asks whether you can tell, in conversation, if a person is trustworthy — a year, a meal, how long. Calderon says trust is never really guaranteed. He knows that sounds like a grim way to live. His experience is that people change, and so do the terms of a relationship. He judges character by the past, and by how someone handles their own failures.

He points at his nose, then at a hand missing a finger. "The amount of failure you can see in somebody and how they wear them sometimes is a pretty telling thing." The test has a counterintuitive result. He has trusted former criminals with his life because they had figured out that the old life would not last, a word he prefers to "reformed." He has also met people in law enforcement he would not trust with his car keys. Their mask was too good. Sometimes, he says, they no longer know they are wearing it.

Fridman pushes the question toward biology. He has watched, nearby if not close, someone who could be classed as a sociopath and someone who looked like a narcissist. People arrive with different hardware: some lack the machine that feels another person's pain, some get a dopamine rush from controlling others. Calderon answers with his mother. Her father left early. She raised two sisters and held a household together. She was independent, and she taught her son to be. He thought he had a good childhood. Only after he had a child of his own did he see that she had been trying to make him into what she never had. "If I can get to see somebody's parents, that's usually a sign of something."

He grew up skateboarding in Tijuana. He remembers the first backyard pool he broke into: the house belonged to a cartel man, the pool was in the back, and they skated it anyway. The gate was padlocked. He learned to pop the lock with a small vehicle hydraulic jack. At the time the trick was only for skating.

Years later, training with people from other Mexican states, he used the same move when a lock needed opening. The others looked at him differently and asked where he had learned it. Burglars in Tijuana, he said. After a pause they asked whether everyone from Tijuana was like that. Not everyone, he answered, but in some way yes. The city itself produces a specific person. It turns some life paths into the default and erases others from the map.

What counts as normal in Tijuana, he says, is not the baseline most of the world uses. Grow up where bribery is daily weather and violence is climate, and the moral coordinates are installed crooked from the first day. Fridman hears the Soviet echo. Calderon does not romanticize the place; he calls himself a survivor of it, culturally, genetically, and psychologically.

The man Calderon treats as a mentor is Lieutenant Colonel Izalda, who came over from the army and took command of Calderon's group. What he projected, Calderon says, was an aura of being incorruptible. The first time Izalda went out on patrol, Calderon drove him around Tijuana. He was a lead-from-the-front type. The number of assassination attempts against him was, in Calderon's view, the proof: they tried to pay him, that failed, so they tried to kill him, several times. The last attempt took the use of his legs. Calderon still thinks of him as a dangerous man.

Fridman asks whether an ordinary human can hold that line, or whether it is genetic. Calderon splits the answer. He still respects how the colonel ran the unit: the people under him felt supported, and they felt they had someone walking in front in a city then ranked the most dangerous on earth. With enough distance, though, Calderon can also see a recklessness. The last attack happened while Izalda was with his child. Taking that road, Calderon says, puts the people around you in jeopardy. "There is a sacrifice to it, a very powerful and hard one to make."

The cost showed up in Calderon's own career in smaller, colder ways. He was not picked for the operations groups he wanted because older parts of the organization knew he would not take money and did not trust him inside certain rooms. He drove a beat-up car to work; a colleague doing the same job pulled in with a Hummer H2. Society in Mexico, he says, does not reward the clean cop. The public story is that all cops are corrupt, no exceptions. Honesty reads as a suspicious anomaly. People asked him what he was getting out of it. There is a colder logic still: a cop on the take is owned by one side, and if the other side finds out he is tipping rivals, he dies fast. A clean cop, belonging to nobody, is safer in some hours and dead earlier in others. The algorithm is about sides, not virtue.

His brother Eric died at nineteen; Calderon was thirteen. He talks about him in a tone that is hard to fake: skateboards, BMX, motorcycles, hunting, the best marksman he had ever seen, "the best of us." So many people came to the funeral that it felt like a concert. That day he met three of Eric's girlfriends, each of whom introduced herself as the one.

Years later, back in Tijuana, people still pull him aside. It has nothing to do with his résumé. He is Eric's brother. After the death his parents sank into a severe depression and, in effect, let him raise himself. From thirteen on he was self-managing, and he carried a self-destructive streak he would later spend a lot of therapy on. The core of it was a sentence: if he could only die well, die for something, they might look at him the way they looked at Eric.

"Dying is not the problem. The goal of life is to die for something good." That was the operating system he took into the job. He was sure he would not live to thirty. Fridman asks whether the thought scared him. Calderon says it was a principle of life, not a fear. Fear was a large motivator in the work, he admits, but the clock he was running was already set.

Before the job he had been in medical school, second year, doing well. After September 11 the economy collapsed and he could not stay. He saw a recruiting ad in the newspaper. His surviving older brother told him not to do that shit. He did it anyway, and found himself in a field with his hair being shaved off.

The pitch was a new Americanized Mexican police: elite, scientific, educated, a career path. The training ground was a refurbished prison that had not been good enough to remain a prison. He realized quickly they were building a paramilitary group, not the community-policing force he had imagined. Day one on the field, the instructors' first line was that there was bread and digging to eat here — and the bread had run out a week ago.

Hair off, identity stripped, numbers issued, uniforms on, treated like garbage. He calls it a half-done initiation. Unlike U.S. military training, instructors in Mexico could actually hit you; that was normal. AK-47s were fired around them to simulate reality, which damaged his hearing. Chaos, abuse, and constant pressure were the curriculum. The door stayed open. You could walk out. Each extra day, though, raised the sunk cost. "In a way, you're kind of building your own chains while you're going through that process."

He was tempted to leave several times, especially when people he thought were stronger and smarter quit. The thing that truly alarmed him was sexual assault inside the camp, with women present and instructors involved. These were the people in charge of their safety and education. Some of the clearer heads saw it and walked. He stayed. After three months he was named a team leader. He bought the flags, the marching, the group, the nationalist slogans. At six months he signed. Then came the reality check.

In training they used a Beretta 92FS, a nine-millimeter Italian pistol. Over the whole course he fired twenty rounds from it. When they got out they were handed Glock 17s. He had never seen the model. His first problem was finding the safety. A few people around him were handling the guns in ways he still calls horrible.

They were badly undertrained, badly underequipped, and wrapped in a set of assumptions about what they already knew. In that condition they were thrown into what Calderon calls one of the bloodiest and longest-lived modern conflicts in Mexico's history — a war that is rarely named a war. It has no front, no declaration, no armistice. It just keeps producing bodies.

Fridman asks him to set the pieces on the board. The timeline is blurry. When Calderon trained in 2004, cartel-related events were already happening across Mexico, but not at the scale he was about to walk into. In 2006 President Felipe Calderón took office, put the military in front, and militarized the drug war; Calderon's cohort was part of that. The players, as he lists them, are politicians, the army, the police, the cartels, plus the United States and China.

He starts with markets. Mexico's domestic drug markets are huge and worth fighting over. Tijuana's, the one he knows, feeds locals and also Americans who cross from San Diego to buy. A reversal he finds fascinating: marijuana now moves from California into Mexico, because California grows it better. The old channel is still there; only the direction flipped. Money is not only drugs. Routes run by sea, under the wall through tunnels, over it, and on migrants' backs. Extortion, money laundering, and protection fees sit beside trafficking. Any mining operation in Mexico, he says, pays protection or gets hit. Taxing people who cross the border is, for some groups, the largest business.

Last time he counted, there were fifty to seventy groups. Some run a single town with guns. The big federations include the Sinaloa cartel, which he calls currently the largest and most powerful, and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, growing exponentially. The player that gets discussed least is politics. Mexico has been living through assassinations of political candidates, usually because one cartel backs one name and another backs the rival. Governors are under investigation, on the run, or in prison. Integrity as a Mexican politician, Calderon says, means no protection and a constant threat of assassination. García Luna, who ran counter-cartel operations when Calderon was active and was Felipe Calderón's man for the war, was later arrested and prosecuted in the United States for working with the traffickers.

Fridman asks whether a gray zone exists — a way to operate without deep ethical damage. Calderon does not think so. Anything that supports these groups, however indirect, supports something horrible. Meanwhile Tijuana is being called San Diego South. He says ninety percent of new houses there are being bought by Americans: economic migrants, remote workers, Californians priced out of home. Few people or vehicles get checked on the way down. A city once listed among the world's most dangerous has become, in a few years, a real-estate destination. Whether the machinery underneath has changed is another question.

Fridman had been reading about World War II and the engineering problem of killing people at scale and then disposing of the bodies. Calderon takes the analogy. Mexico, he says, is a country that industrialized body disposal. Tijuana had a figure nicknamed the Stew Maker, who used caustic acid to destroy corpses at massive volume. In that city, killing and disposal ran as separate production lines.

The details sound like a trade manual: open the intestinal tract and put rocks in so the body will not float; cut away tattooed skin; take off hands and faces and dump them elsewhere; wrap the rest in chicken wire and sink it in a river or the ocean. "This is a horrible thing but it's a craft, it's a trade craft." He traces some of that craft to the U.S. School of the Americas and the CIA, techniques that leaked into the generation he knew. There are also stories from the late 1990s of Israelis training the Arellano Félix organization in caustic soda and in how to keep a body from floating. Manuals exist, he says, with chapters on time limits, geography, and how identifiable a corpse can be left. That was common in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Now even that craft is gone. What you usually see is a body burned to a crisp and buried in a field. When murder becomes routine administration, the method that survives is the cheapest one.

He had just posted, on Instagram, a photograph of María Carmela Vásquez, forty-six, from Guanajuato. Her son Ozmar disappeared on June 14. She belonged to a missing-persons collective in Pénjamo. On a Sunday she was shot to death outside her home, the fifth mother killed that year while searching for a missing relative. The number of the disappeared in Mexico is disputed because the government does not release it well, or at all. Groups of women have given up on waiting. They walk the outskirts of their towns with metal probes, smell whatever comes up from the hole, gather IDs and clothing, and hand the pile to local investigators. "They're doing their jobs." Over ninety percent of murders in Mexico, Calderon says, are never solved.

Put Calderon's stories in a line and a closed loop appears. Corruption starts with a school schedule and grows into a default worldview. That worldview strips the police of credibility, so people stop reporting and stop believing investigations, and the clearance rate falls into single digits. The low clearance rate then proves that calling the police is useless, which further cuts cooperation. Women end up walking empty ground with probes because nobody else will.

Inside that loop, honesty is a negative asset. The cop who will not take money is kept out of the core operations group, drives the wreck, is treated as a weirdo by colleagues and a fool by the public, and may die earlier for belonging to neither side. What Calderon's colonel bought with two legs was a few years in which his people believed someone was walking in front. The return was small, the price was large, and it does not copy.

The nationalism, the flags, and the marching they were fed in the camp met, a few months later, twenty rounds, an unfamiliar pistol, and a signature on a page. Grand language lands in that shape. He talks about his brother's death, the self-destructive streak, the wish to die for something. A lot of people who take this work probably carry a version of that. An organization that recruits for it gets high endurance and a low instinct for self-protection, which is another way of saying those people will not pull back when it counts.

What stays unsettling is his method for trust: how someone handles failure, the scars on them, their parents. None of that is precise. It is only how he bets when there is no better instrument. He says so himself. A bet is not a guarantee. For the people still paying a price to hold a line the system will not reward, the useful move is smaller than reform. Notice them. Tell them you saw it.