The Global Fight for Freedom

Most weeks, these pages warn about power grown too strong. This week: a "ranch of horrors" exposes the threat of a government too weak — and a culture forged from above, not grown from below.
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​Note: This week’s episode runs long — think of it as advance payment. I'm taking next week off to focus on newsletter growth. Episode 120 lands August 4th.

Flashpoints

1. "Holy Death" in the Ranch of Horrors
2. Zhulao: China's "Forged" Ethnic Unity
3. Sometimes, the Tyrant Has a Point

Country names are followed by their 2026 freedom scores according to Freedom House. Not a ranking.

They found the ovens first — three of them, dug into the earth on an abandoned ranch outside Guadalajara. Then the bones: hundreds of singed shards, skulls, teeth and fingers. Then shoes — more than 200 pairs stripped off recruits, stacked in piles by the door. Scattered throughout were figurines of Santa Muerte — Holy Death, the folk saint cartel footsoldiers pray to.
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Government troops had already searched this ranch months earlier and found nothing. It took the civilian “Search Warriors of Jalisco”, working metal rods into the dirt to catch the smell of decomposition, to find what soldiers missed.
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The victims had arrived by bus, drawn from Guadalajara terminals by online ads promising work as security guards, electricians, or farmhands. Those who refused training or tried to escape were killed. Survivors say the dead were cut into pieces by other recruits in a cinder-block room they called the butcher shop.
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The search warriors called it an extermination camp. Mexican media called it the “ranch of horrors”.
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The horrors are not confined to Mexico. Brookings Institute’s Vanda Felbab-Brown testified to the Senate this spring that Sinaloa and CJNG are quickly expanding in Europe, Canada, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific.
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And the Jalisco cartel's black-site network unearthed by the search warriors already supplies human trafficking and fentanyl on American soil. Court documents describe a Houston operation that fed five states for years. ICE agents traced a mother's call about her missing sixteen-year-old to a house in west Houston and found 86 people locked inside, guarded by men with guns.
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On July 15, DEA Administrator Terry Cole ignited fury south of the border when he claimed the Mexican government and the cartels that built the ranch are "one in the same." Severing that connection, he said, is now his agency's top priority.
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President Claudia Sheinbaum called the remark baseless and unfortunate. She has earned some of that denial. Her government handed over 92 traffickers the old extradition treaty would have taken years to process. In February, her special forces cornered Nemesio "El Mencho" Oseguera in the hills above Tapalpa, killing him in a firefight.
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But her red line is her own party. She refuses to extradite Sinaloa Governor Rubén Rocha Moya, indicted by the U.S. in April alongside nine other officials for allegedly taking bribes in exchange for protection. Sheinbaum calls it a matter of sovereignty. Her security chief, Omar García Harfuch, has publicly insisted the ranch of horrors held no crematoria, no proof anyone burned there. Harfuch has been portrayed as an uncorruptable cartel warrior – could he too be compromised?
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Trump doesn't care about Mexican sovereignty. In February 2025, he designated Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels foreign terrorist organizations, authority Biden's administration spent years debating, but never used. The designation lets Washington freeze cartel assets and prosecute material support the way it would a war crime rather than a drug charge. Trump has touted a "land force" already inside Mexico.
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It was unclear what that meant in practice, but it’s starting to come into focus.
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In March, a car carrying Sinaloa operative Francisco "El Payín" Beltrán exploded on a highway outside Mexico City, killing him and his driver. CNN reported the CIA had directly participated in the operation, part of an assassination campaign. The New York Times reported the CIA only helped plan it. The CIA denied both accounts as "false and salacious." Sheinbaum dismissed them as “fictions the size of the universe”. A former CIA officer told CNN the agency wanted exactly this: an incident built to leave everyone asking "who did this".
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Days ago, Trump designated two more cartels: Juárez and Los Viagras.
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More than 7,000 photographs of Americans killed by fentanyl line a wall at DEA headquarters. Terry Cole walks past them every morning. He invokes them often when defending his efforts.
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The Faces of Fentanyl Memorial Exhibit now displays those 7,000 faces online – sortable by their “forever age”.
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​The Democratic Senators now decrying “any unilateral U.S. military action inside Mexico without Mexico’s consent” as illegal and disastrous should start at the “Under 1” category.
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​Sources: The Washington Post, Reuters, ProPublica, PBS NewsHour, CNN, The New York Times, Brookings Institution, ICE

On July 1st, the “Ethnic Unity and Progress” Law went into effect across China, ostensibly to “safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of all ethnic groups”, and to promote “common prosperity and development.”
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The next day in New York City, Lobsang Palden livestreamed his final message to the world: "Communist China is waging a campaign to destroy the Tibetan people through its genocidal policies."
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Minutes later, Palden strode down First Avenue, planted a Tibetan flag outside the UN tower, doused himself with an accelerant, and lit himself on fire. He died at a hospital hours later.
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The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 terrified Chinese Communist Party leadership. Deng Xiaoping, China’s de facto ruler from 1978 to the early ’90s, offered a diagnosis and a cure. Watching Eastern Europe unravel, he concluded the party had to deliver economic growth and stability, or share the Soviets’ fate.
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In 2011, scholars Hu Angang and Hu Lianhe proposed a different diagnosis. Moscow’s real failure, they argued, was “nominal ethnic autonomy” — the token self-rule and minority-language schooling that prevented the forging of a single Soviet identity. They called their fix “second-generation ethnic policy”: force a “melting pot,” dissolving ethnic distinction rather than protecting it.
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Xi Jinping had already been asking party cadres, in closed sessions, why the Soviet Union disintegrated. The Hus gave him his answer. He took power in 2013 and made their theory doctrine.
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Now, he’s made it law — zhulao, he calls it, “to forge.” It’s Communist philosophy distilled into a word: society isn’t what free citizens produce, it’s what the Party forges from above. County governments must now budget and staff for it directly, making ethnic-unity compliance a precondition for the flow of state funds — all in service of what Beijing calls the Party’s “rejuvenation” of one national identity under Xi Jinping Thought.
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Beijing brands it the end of “minority privileges” — quota seats, exam bonuses, mother-tongue classrooms. What’s really being erased is the right to remain distinct at all. Mandarin now supplants Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongol, and Zhuang in schools across all 56 recognized nationalities. Resist, and you’ve committed the crime of “undermining ethnic unity,” even if you’re living abroad.
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The 1984 law this replaces explicitly warned against Han chauvinism, a scar from the Cultural Revolution. Mao’s project, resurrected with a modern legal seal.
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Beijing calls it unity. Palden knew what it really was.

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Sources: CNN, Amnesty International, China Law Translate, Council on Foreign Relations, Radio Free Asia

In early December 2024, lawmakers were crowded into a chamber of the National Assembly for an emergency session when they heard chopper blades overhead. Outside, special forces were rappelling from helicopters onto the lawn and organizing for an assault.
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Hours earlier, President Yoon Suk Yeol had appeared on national television to declare martial law, vowing to eradicate the "despicable pro-North Korean anti-state forces" plundering the country. He had privately warned allies the opposition party was teeming with Marxists determined to overthrow Korea's democracy.
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When Yoon's forces stormed the chamber, the lawmakers — opposition and ruling party alike — barricaded the doors with tables and chairs. They sprayed fire extinguishers at the advancing troops, holding them off long enough to vote unanimously to strike down Yoon's decree.
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Six hours after declaring martial law, Yoon backed down.
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Fourteen months later, our remarkably incurious Western media still hails the moment as a triumph of global democracy. The aspirations of a free people — liberated from a reckless madman. Case closed.
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They aren't wrong; Yoon's actions were egregious and illegal. But they only tell half the story — there's some truth buried in his madness.
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Take the drone flights: prosecutors say Yoon ordered drone incursions over Pyongyang specifically to provoke the North and manufacture a pretext for martial law. His lawyers claimed it was merely payback for Kim Jong Un's balloons — stuffed with trash and floated south. A Seoul court sided with the prosecution and sentenced him to 30 years, a number that raises its own question of proportion.
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More credible is Yoon's warning about the South Korean left's socialist drift. Little ink has been spilled examining the genuine threat it poses to Korea's democracy.
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From Brasília to Budapest to Washington, the same pattern repeats: left-wing governments overspend on welfare, inflate the currency, expand executive power, and wave off the strain of mass migration. Voters answer with a populist backlash. Right-wing rulers move to rein in state power, and the press cries fascism — with varying degrees of justification. The voters are branded extremists.
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Bolsonaro, Orbán, and Trump all rose this way. But the legitimate grievances behind the overreactions rarely make headlines.
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In South Korea, that grievance has a name. “Minju”, Korean for "Democratic," is the left-wing party now running the country. Its think tank signed a cooperation agreement with the Chinese Communist Party's Central Party School, and Minju flew its own banner at Beijing's 2021 CCP centennial. Minju Prime Minister Kim Min-seok helped lead a 1985 student takeover of the Seoul American Cultural Center and has never disavowed it. President Lee Jae-myung stood trial for allegedly funneling $8 million to North Korea as a provincial governor and once dismissed Taiwan, asking "what does it matter to us?"
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Lee is now pushing to abolish the constitution's one-term limit and has empaneled special counsels that could brand Yoon’s entire party as co-conspirators, stripping their seats and handing Minju the supermajority it needs to rewrite the charter.
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Washington is not exempt. South Korean officials raided a U.S. military base and seized Air Force flight records; a Minju minister leaked classified North Korean nuclear intelligence Washington had shared in confidence. Last week, the Wall Street Journal detailed a highly politicized Korean prosecution of Coupang, the American retailer.
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Not all turns against the U.S. signal a turn away from democracy, but this reversal is especially sharp — even in the context of Trump's egregious South Korean tariffs.
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Credit the Wall Street Journal for still telling both halves of this story. Threats to democracy come from both sides of the aisle.
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​Sources: BBC, The New York Times, CNN, NBC News, The Wall Street Journal, American Enterprise Institute

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