Pablo Escobar, obviously, when he was killed, the whole idea, this is over, when in fact, those who helped kill him, which included criminal groups and paramilitaries, those guys who killed him became the single largest criminal organization on planet Earth in the years that followed. It's like hardly the solution

to take out these kingpins.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Change Agents, an Ironclad Original, presented by Firecracker Farm.

Today, we are going to be talking about what you need to know about the criminal groups that the U.S.

has recently labeled as foreign terrorist organizations.

My guest for today is Stephen Dudley.

Stephen is an American journalist.

He's an author and a policy analyst specializing an organized crime and security For today is Stephen Dudley. Stephen is an American journalist.

He's an author and a policy analyst specializing in organized crime and security issues in Latin America.

He is also the co-founder and co-director of Insight Crime, a non-profit think tank dedicated to investigating organized crime and corruption across the Americas.

His reporting and his research have made him one of the leading voices on the intersection of crime, politics, and society in the Americas.

Let's dive into the episode.

I mean, instead of talking about that, let's talk about Latin America in cartels,

forced terrorist organizations. I mean, how timely is this?

Yeah.

Two days ago, Venezuelan, what they're calling drug smuggers, and I did an episode yesterday,

uh, separate where it was more just talking about things in the in the current news.

I don't have enough data or no, I think enough has been released truly about who was in

that boat, necessarily the why, how they came to that.

But the person I was talking to, he was an FBI agent for quite some time.

And I'm trying to think of a time in my life.

And this may be because they didn't release the information or I just wasn't paying attention.

...