The Cartel Del Noreste's Kingdom of Terror w/ Andrew Glazer

The Underworld Podcast

True Crime, Documentary, History, Society & Culture

4.7 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 19 May 2026

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Nuevo Laredo is one of the most feared cartel cities in Mexico, a place where disappearances, gun battles, and corruption became part of daily life as the Cartel del Noreste, or CDN, tightened its grip on the border. Born from the remnants of the brutal Zetas organization, CDN turned the city into a battlefield, fighting for control of smuggling routes into Texas while allegedly terrorizing civilians, journalists, and anyone seen as a threat. The city became so cartel-corrupted that it dismantled its own police force entirely. The documentary film Spring of the Vanishing adds another layer to the story, documenting how U.S.-trained Mexican marines deployed to fight the Zetas instead carried out their own wave of kidnappings and killings of civilians. Director Andrew Glazer pulls back the curtain on a city where families still search for missing loved ones, and where the line between organized crime and the state itself often seems impossible to separate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:56.0	Tommy Olios, Mexico.
0:57.8	A convoy of six police vehicles rolls out of a station in Camargo just on the border
1:02.8	of Texas, somewhere between 8.30 and 9 in the morning.
1:06.8	They stopped to fuel up their gas tanks, and then they head south on dirt roads towards the Rio Grande.
1:12.6	They get lost in the dust, and a convoy splits up.
1:15.6	Then, over the radio, an urgent call.
1:18.6	Coded numbers, armed personnel nearby.
1:21.6	Not exactly out of the ordinary, because the Northeast cartel and factions of the Gulf cartel still operate all along
1:28.5	this border. Still, it's not what you want to hear when you're in a police convoy. The lead
1:33.9	vehicle accelerates. The others follow. Then gunshots. One of the officers will later tell
1:40.4	investigators he couldn't make out what anyone was shooting at. He heard a commander bark at a gunner, what are you waiting for? Shoot. The gunner said, but I can't see anything.
1:49.6	The commander said, just shoot. There's 19 people in the van that they fire on. 17 migrants,
1:57.0	most from a small mountain town in southern Guatemala and two Mexican smugglers.
2:02.4	Investigators would later count 107 bullet holes in the truck.
2:06.7	Somehow, some of the migrants are still alive when the shooting stops.
2:10.9	An officer walks over to the truck and looks in it.
	...

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