Latest / The Dustlight Archives / NXIVM: Episode 11: Rosa Laura Junco, Media Control, and the Fractal Nature of All of This

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NXIVM: Episode 11: Rosa Laura Junco, Media Control, and the Fractal Nature of All of This · The Dustlight Archives

• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: No family in Mexico has had more ability to control the public narrative than the Junko family.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Between their press ecosystem, digital networks, and deep institutional ties to other media families like the Oscar's, something doesn't become a news story unless the Junkos wanted to.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: Ironically, unlike the Boone brothers or Jack Levy, whose parents were even obscured by the idiosyncrasies of Mexican law, we are able to trace Rosalora Junko de la Vega's lineage all the way back to Spain in the 1800s.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: This is because they inhabit a different sphere of institutional legitimacy.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: They may own vast amounts of wealth, exert a political will, and even control large amounts of the physical land in Mexico through real estate.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: But their power is downright abstract compared to the Juncos.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: Boone and Levy hide behind shell names and obscure LLCs when it comes to a lot of their property.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: But the Junkos have their name etched in stone on the buildings they own.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Ever since they moved from Spain and became landed gentry in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, in Mexico, a crucial port city on the US-Mexican border during the Texas annexation and U.S.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Civil War cotton booms, they staked out their claim to the country of Mexico itself.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: The moment they truly rooted themselves into the soil like a weed would probably be the marriage between Manuel Arena Junco de la Vega and Eugenia Harregui de la Garza, sometime around the late 1850s.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: This was a merger between two up-and-coming families who both had something to offer each other at the time.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: The most obvious benefit went to Junko de la Vega, who was marrying into an elite Criollo family.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: The Criollo families were people of pure Spanish descent born in the Americas, and they were granted land by the crown through massive land grants.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: These land grants would cover hundreds of acres of agricultural ranching in borderland territory.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: And the Delagarza name in particular could be traced back to an explorer in the 1500s who founded, and I think we all know founded is a euphemism for Took, Monterey and the Kingdom of Nueva Leone.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: This is similar to an American family being able to trace their lineage back to the Mayflower.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: On the other hand, the Junco de la Vega side of this merger was liquidity, imperial trade conduits, and modern bureaucratic defense.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: The de la Garzas were land rich and cash poor.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: And without getting bogged down, simply put, the de la Vegas offered access to wealthy shipping routes and trade connections.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: And also the Spanish government's Criollo grants were understandably incredibly unpopular with the average person and no longer under control of the Spanish.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Central government was attempting to reappropriate these vast swathes of farmland, and the de la Vegas were well equipped to take on the legal fights necessary to retain these holdings.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: These two had several children, most notably Celedonio, Celestino, Yunko, De La Vega, Haureggi.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: And before we get into him, I want to talk about naming conventions real quick, because things can get very confusing very quickly.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: You'll notice these figures carry compound names layered with phrases like Dela and multiple surnames.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: In the Spanish imperial system, these weren't decorative fluff.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Commoners usually carried basic patronymics or trade names, but the landed aristocracy used toponymics, the de la to directly attach their family name to a physical land grant or territory.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: So having your first name, your surname, and then de la vega, for instance, literally stakes a claim to the fernal plane.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: It was dumb chivalric vanity, but it was also an administrative deed of ownership baked straight into their legal identity.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of the perfect example of the difference between somebody like Jack Levy or Edgar Boone and the Junko or Salinas family.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: One hides behind LLCs and obscures their lineage, and the other reminds you they own your world every time you say their name.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: Moving forward, I'll occasionally use full names for historical precision, but to keep our sanity and keep the narrative moving, I'm shortening most of these to a single first name and surname.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: Also, frankly, fuck them.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not wasting oxygen reciting four-tier feudal titles for these foppish dipshits every three minutes.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: So Caledonio Celestino Junko was a man always obsessed with words and about how to use them to exert control or power.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of history describes him as a poet, but it's important to remember at this time that the line between a poet, a propagandist, and a lawyer was not always clear.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: All three are using a command of the written word to exert your will, whether that is over the minds of others or over a legal apparatus.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, I think his specific perspective on the written word and its usefulness politically becomes even more apparent when you realize the guy had like a dozen nom de plumes and would oftentimes be astroturfing the newspapers with several different versions of his own thought.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: He would sometimes be writing one argument and then writing another argument against the first argument in the same media ecosystem in order to find the parameters of acceptable thought to readers imagining they were hearing a diversity of opinions.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: In some ways, it's almost like a very early version of a social media bot campaign, but written by a single pathological poetry major.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's also worth mentioning that he married a woman named Maria Ella Voitt Gonzales, plugging his family directly into German merchant industrial capital, and they had 15 children together.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: And what is probably his most blatantly political use of his writing ability, in 1911, he actually steps into the Ministry of Finance and becomes the private secretary to Ernesto Madero.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: And he isn't doing this out of public service.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: He is in fact doing it as an embedded structural asset for the Cohilo Nuevo Banking and Mining Syndicate.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: Two years later, Madero's regime is violently overthrown and Caledonio flees into exile in New Mexico.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: As we covered in the prologue, exile is a strange custom in Mexico reserved for the elite, where they basically just have to flee the country for a while before coming back.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: He does eventually slide seamlessly back into Monterey, where he works to start a press named El Sol in 1922 and El Norte with his son Redufo Junco in 1938, which would be wildly successful in protecting the interests of the ruling class in the area.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: He pioneered the same aesthetic trick in Mexico that has worked in the U.S.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: for decades, where he hides incredibly opinionated journalism under this conceptual fantasy of objective news.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Just for the record, as a rule of thumb, anytime a news source claims to be objective, they're lying.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: There is no such thing as journalism without bias.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: You cannot tell a story without deciding what facts to include or not include.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: The order in which you tell those facts and the weight you give those facts.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: Anybody claiming to be objective is either deluding themselves or running a con on their audience.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: When the post-revolutionary Cardenas government began aggressively expanding federal authority in the 1930s, threatening to nationalize industries, enforce land distribution, and collect federal revenue from Monterey's private enterprises, you know, just generally doing kick-ass things.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Celedonio ran a scorched earth campaign against them through his news outlet.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: As just one example of the tactics being deployed, whenever a federal auditor showed up in Monterey to investigate tax fraud, tariff evasion, or labor violations, Celedonio's newspaper would run multi-part exposes on the personal corruption or moral failings of that specific auditor.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Celedonio died in 1948, and his son Rodolfo took over his press operations.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: He modeled El Norte specifically after the New York Times and imagined himself a sort of high-minded patrician.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Much like the New York Times, it was a bunch of high-minded rhetoric and claims of doing the damn news, like some sort of lame Mexican version of Jeff Daniels in the newsroom.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: Which makes it hilarious when he absolutely gets share mogged by his two psychotic sons.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing was digital.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: And if you held the literal physical shares to a company, then you owned the company.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: So when he sent his oldest son Alejandro to be educated in finances in the state of Texas, he very much paid attention in class and took U.S.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: economic values to heart.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: So when he got back, him and his brother Rodolfo broke into the safe, took the shares, and stole the company from their dad.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: They changed the locks on him overnight, and when he came into work in the morning, his own security guards wouldn't let him in.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'd honestly feel worse for him if he wasn't a democracy dies in darkness ass soft glove fascist.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: He got an object lesson in how useless liberalism is in practice while he spent the next 40 years living in Jacksonville, Florida and complaining about his sons.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now, to be fair, there is actually more to the story, and the elite in Mexico let this happen because they were freaking out about left-wing reforms in the national government and wanted to take the newspaper out of its regional niche and use it to attack Mexico City leftists the same way it had been attacking leftists in Monterey under the new name Grupo Reforma.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: Rodolfo was too old and wasn't moving fast enough.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: So when Alejandro and Rodolfo Jr.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: took over and gave them what they wanted, they were happy about it, at the least, if not actual conspirators in the theft.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: And they did this guy so dirty.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, when he died, he didn't even get an obituary in Grupo Reforma.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: Rosa Laura Junko, the star of our episode, was born in 1969, four years before her father, Alejandro, would pull off the coup against her grandfather and his newspaper.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: As a child, she went to a school called the Instituto San Roberto, run by the Legionaries of Christ.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: It was founded by a man named Marcial Massiel.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I think in many ways, this is extremely relevant because there are a lot of similarities between Massiel's group, the Legionaries of Christ, and what would later become Nexium.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: And really, the more I looked into this guy in this group, I found my jaw hitting the floor.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is an important aside to get into before we finally press forward into Rosalora Junko.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, it's one of the main reasons I chose a sort of Roshimon style for this series to begin with.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: And at this point, over 10 episodes in, I have to imagine you all are used to these somewhat long digressions that eventually lead back to Nexium and hopefully illuminate something in the process.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: So, born in Kotiha, Mihawaken, in 1920, Martial grew up in the bloody shadow of the Cristera War.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: And very briefly, the Cristera War was a bloody counter-revolution that emerged in response to the state nationalizing church property and forcing priests to register with the state.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: And before you ask, no Opus Day was not involved.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: Opus Day would emerge in Madrid around 1928, actually.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Anyways, Martial joined seminary school and was kicked out of two seminaries by age 21 for lack of discipline.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: But we can be fairly certain that in both cases this was for predatory behavior when we take in the whole picture, considering investigative journalism written about him after the fact, firsthand accounts, and internal Vatican documents, from dossier reviews conducted under Ratzinger's Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: It seems that even by 21, he had a penchant for rape and morphine abuse, something the Catholic Church would have been aware of since at least the 1956 to 1959 apostolic visitation.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: He in fact never completed seminary school and was ordained by an uncle in an outright act of cronyism at 24 years old.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: But before he is even ordained, at 21 years old, fresh off of being kicked out of two seminaries, he creates the Legionaries of Christ.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: Now, of course, anytime some random young person creates an incredibly powerful organization out of the blue, you can be pretty certain that's not the full story, and as per usual, it is not here.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, Martiel Maciel had been a child of privilege from the moment he was born, and his uncle was both a saint and a soldier in the post-Cristero Underground.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: That would have probably been enough of a pedigree in the first place, but also the larger Catholic institution in Mexico at this moment was frantic, terrified, and looking for the next generation to spearhead a private militia.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: It probably helps to keep in mind that the whole family was very much tied into the upper echelons of the Catholic Church in Mexico.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: And the official story, at least, is that the initial canonical permission was signed for the legionaries of Christ to get him off of their hands.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: I suspect a lot more was going on here, but unfortunately it would probably require its own deep dive, which it might do someday, because the time period from the revolution to the 1990s in Mexico is absolutely fascinating to me, and we're touching on so little of it.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm not sure how handing a young drug-addicted rapist his own newly formed branch of the Catholic Church gets him off of your hands.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a side tangent to my side tangent.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: To give you an example of how interesting this whole time period is, that uncle of Martial Massiel that I mentioned was famous for being a priest that would disguise himself as a musician to gain access to the deathbeds of dying cristeros and administer their final rites.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: Incredibly interesting time period, full of no shit, hundreds of interesting stories.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: But back to Marcial Massiel, he also managed to fund his Legionaries of Christ by approaching many of the exact same people funding the creation of the PAN, which, if you'll remember, at the time was the right-wing reactionary answer to the PRI, the one-party system that spent over 70 decades winning every national election.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: And these people were willing to fund the Legionaries of Christ for two basic reasons.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: They wanted an off-grid conservative school system for their sons and a tax-exempt vehicle to store capital away from federal auditors.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: Eventually, in 1948, after receiving the decree of praise from Rome, these things would start popping up all over the place in wealthy conservative enclaves, especially when the elite academies Instituto Cumbris and Colegio Erlandis were launched in the 1950s and 1960s.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: Many wealthy families we have already touched on, including the Garzas and the Salinas family themselves, would send their children to these schools.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: Eventually, they would begin accepting both genders in the 70s.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: These schools have actually split now into two separate branches of elite and lower class private schools, and they exist all around the world, including in the US, Switzerland, and Ireland.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: For five decades, Massiel was the institutionally protected face of these schools, until a group of ex-legionaries teamed up with a group called the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith and began using the media to expose the abuse going on in these schools.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: From 1998 to 2006, the press would occasionally write stories about it, and the Catholic Church would make gestures toward investigating, but they were really basically stalling.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: In 2006, the pressure became too much, and they invited him to retire to a life of prayer and penance in Jacksonville, Florida.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: The same place Rosalora Junko's grandfather would spend in exile, where he died two years later.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: Massiel's reputation and the abuse at the schools did too much to damage these institutions.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: But they were also too essential to the ruling class that used them to just do away with.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: So they ran audits, they rebranded, and functionally it continued on.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: So it sure sounds to me like one way you might tell the story of Marcial Maciel is that a young man with psychopathic tendencies was floating around these sort of institutions that could easily scope him out as a certain personality type pretty early on.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: A mythology was built around him, and he was made the face of a sort of school, sort of cult, that it defies belief he would have the ability to run on his own.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: He was supported by powerful, wealthy, entrenched groups or people with motivations that defy belief.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: These were testing grounds and reputational credits for elites that eventually expanded into the lower classes and became multinational.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: At some point, a group of ex-members get together with members of the press and lay the foundation for his eventual destruction.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: But a sort of purgatorial time period exists, where this information is public knowledge, but before a controlled demolition by those with the power to actually end it is begun.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: The face of the movement becomes an almost singular figure of evil genius in the mainstream narrative that is told and eventually is exiled, while those who actually funded the thing and had the ability to build it face little to no consequences.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: The underlying institutions change names, rebrand, and nothing really changes.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: Does that sound like any other story?
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: You've heard recently, possibly for the last eleven episodes.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: It it's probably nothing.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: So, anyways, Rosalora Junko as a young child goes to the Instituto San Roberto, a school managed by the Legionaries of Christ.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: Besides everything we've already said, it's probably worth mentioning as well that this school existed on the street whom Berdo Junko Voigt named after her family.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: Eventually, she moves on to the Tech de Monterey, where she majors in international relations, which, as I have probably pointed out a dozen times this series with various people, in some form or another, it's pretty impossible to believe that a woman who has been surrounded with nothing but her country's aristocratic elite her entire life, and got a degree that focuses on things like statecraft, diplomacy, international law, and cross-border asset management is the dupe in this whole Nexium thing.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: And the chipmunk-faced, borderline and articulate C-grade con man using these sorts of psychological tricks your average pickup artist would find a little too unsubt, is the genius mastermind here.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's worth mentioning as well that the tech de Monterey was made intentionally to be an ideological bridge between northern Mexican industrialists and American financial and political networks, which, if you are sold on our specific narrative on the Nexium story, seems oddly poetic.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: Some might say downright telling.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: So, Rosalora Junko finishes up there and goes to work for her family and Grupo Reforma, which is, as I said earlier, a massive media empire with tons of control over what stories get told in Mexico.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: They own flagship outlets like El Norte and Monterey, Reforma in Mexico City, and Mural in Guadalajara, as well as, I mean, dozens of other intellectual properties.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: She's a high-level executive tasked with developing new projects, executive initiatives, and overseeing the move from physical to digital.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: Alejandro obviously can't make it quite so easy for somebody else to take over the company as it was for him.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: Better get those papers digital.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, Grupo Reforma even has a lot of similarities to how Nexium is run.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: There certainly are a lot of lessons involving information control and manipulation of captive populations.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: I would say, on the one hand, that the fact reporters were not allowed to take outside gifts, attend off-the-books dinners, or have relationships or meetings with state actors is the sort of journalistic ethics I wish were practiced more in the U.S.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, though, these restrictions existed as a way for one faction of the ruling class to make sure that they were not being sabotaged by another faction of the ruling class.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: And to make sure these rules were followed, reporters were regularly subjected to polygraph tests in psychological screening.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: Also, the lifestyle sections of their publications at this time held enormous influence.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: And whether you were a part of the ruling class or not could seriously be reputationally influenced by how these lifestyle sections chose to speak or not speak about you.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: And she enters ESP sometime around 2003 or 2004.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure brings a ton of her abilities to bear.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: She actually ran their hilariously named news ethics website meant to change the narrative and counter their attacks called The Knife of Aristotle.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: It would rank journalists based on perceived bias and factual accuracy.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: I will say the Knife of Aristotle may seem kind of silly when you hear about it, but this was made by somebody highly trained in the media ecosystem and really is functionally not much different than something like Snopes or Media Matters.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: This is not to say that we should take the Knife of Aristotle more seriously, but that we should take some other similar sites and groups less seriously.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: Jugo enters the Nexium sphere seemingly through Emiliano Salinas and Alejandro Betancourt, and their Mexican master franchise for ESP called First Statement, which we will spend more time on when we get to those two.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: For now, what's important is distinguishing between the dumb story for dumb idiots that gets told on TV and a much more likely reality.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: The typical story is that Emiliano Salinas and Alex Bettencourt are ready to, and I'm not kidding, basically hand the country of Mexico over to Keith Rainier, invited Rosa Laura Junko to a meeting where she was originally impressed.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: Later, she would come back to do a 16-day intensive.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: And from that point on, she was hooked.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'd say it's a lot more likely the story goes something like this.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: NAFTA had came through her country like a wrecking ball.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: Her family is already in a war of ideas, sometimes spilling into violence, with the prevailing party in Mexico, the PRI.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: The drug war was escalating quickly.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: The old gentlemen's agreements between state power cartels and northern capital were tearing at the seams.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: Kidnapping was a daily operational reality for her family and many others.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: What Emiliano Salinas offered was a shadow government.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: And to be frank, I think this, as well as a particular brand of pretty ancient racism, is where a lot of these smooth-brained theories about Keith Rainier almost becoming emperor god of Mexico originate from.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: This was a group, like I said last week, that functioned something like the Freemason south of the border.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: And there may have been an attempt by the ex-president's son, the largest media dynasty in Mexico, and other industrialists and wealthy landowners to either do an outright coup or at least quietly govern outside the regular institutions.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, though, Reneri would have never been anything but the court jester at best in this scenario.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: Also, I do think the 16-day intensive was an important turning point, but it was an interdynastic escrow process.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: When you sit in a locked room for over a hundred hours confessing your psychological vulnerabilities alongside the sons of presidents and media barons, you aren't getting enlightened.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: You're signing a non-aggression pact backed by mutual leverage.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_00: In 2008, the Juncos moved to Austin, Texas.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: I think there were several reasons for this.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: Primarily, this comes down to the fact that they could continue to generate vast amounts of wealth in Mexico without physically staying in a place that they saw as becoming more dangerous.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: The cartels in the state were starting to intertwine more than ever before.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: The risk of violence, even against the ruling class, was real, and it was becoming harder to guarantee that the state would provide safety.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: There is also something to the fact that Tech de Monterey was created as a bridge between the U.S.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: and Mexico, but specifically, that bridge led directly from Tech de Monterey to UT Austin.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'm betting it has something to do with the fact that Tech de Monterey wasn't built just to educate engineers.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: It was engineered as the economic and intellectual conduit between the Monterey group and American Capital.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: The pipeline from Tech de Monterey to UT Austin is a well-paved highway for cross-border tech transfers, venture capital, and sovereign intelligence sharing.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now, thanks largely to the Juncos and Rosalaura in particular, Nexium began to buy up a lot of property in Austin at this time.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: As far as I can tell, this served a couple of functions.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, it allowed Rosalaura Junko to have her own base of operations, both to work on the knife of Aristotle and to try to bring in new tech entrepreneurs.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: This also functioned as a pipeline between Mexico City and Albany.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: Mexicans taking ESP classes would oftentimes move from there to Austin and take further classes or use Austin as a place to stay on their way to Albany.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: It also was a great place for Mexicans in the U.S.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: to hide and keep their head down when everything blew up.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: It kept them from having to return to Mexico while also being far away from the heat in New York.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: Rosalora Junko also bought a lot of property in Albany, one of which would be the sorority house that would eventually contain DOS.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_00: I know I mentioned in an earlier episode the absurdity of the claim that it was some genius move by Keith Rainier to not own any property, but it's really worth pointing out that this operation was taking place in physical spaces owned by the Bronfmans and the Junkos primarily.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: They also were both first line masters who held and viewed all blackmail collateral.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_00: Who knows who else this blackmail is going to, but it is passing through them first.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: I do still find it interesting that Rosa Laura Junko was so deeply enmeshed in DOS.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: It makes sense to me that Alison Mack, a basically disposable minor celebrity.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: And even Lauren Salzman, who grew up in Nexium and had no protection except for her mom, who very well may not even give a shit about her daughter's well-being, would be caught up in this.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_00: It even makes sense to me that Claire Bronfman would end up enmeshed in DOS because she was one Bronfman daughter of two, and obviously got a sweetheart deal.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: But DOS was always a hot potato.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm inclined to believe when you consider the absolute crudity of tattooing the initials of Keith Rainier on the women and the smoking gun evidence that buried Keith Rainier, which begins with Alice and Mac reciting the time and date on a recording like she knew it was always going to be a legal piece of evidence.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: The DOS was always a setup.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_00: The best answer I can come up with for Rosa Laura Junko's involvement is that it's a major source of blackmail on a lot of people, which is in many ways her family's bread and butter, and maybe she correctly understood the system well enough to know she could stand right within the blast radius and not get hurt.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_00: She also supposedly was in charge of finding women to breed with Keith for some scheme he had to spread his genetics.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: This seems to have not really happened, and I'm kind of convinced it was never meant to and never would have.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: What I do think is of interest is that Rosa Lura Junko being a first line master means she had to sleep with Rainiri according to trial testimony.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: We have nothing about her specifically because she was never arrested and never testified, but it is a claim made by some of the other first line masters, and this begs the question: how involved was her family?
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: I can't see a cult of so many women involving powerful families, and not start to see these women as disposable to the very families they come from.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_00: I think the most egregious examples are Catherine and Pamela Kafritz.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: But everywhere you look, there are aristocratic women being pimped out facing jail time, granted, oftentimes very limited jail time, and being put in dangerous illegal situations.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe she didn't sleep with Keith Reneery.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe it was her own choice.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: But when you start thinking about how the whole family moved to Austin, and almost certainly the Junko family would have to have been involved in working with the State Department to avoid her prosecution, it does raise some questions.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: Elite families have a long history of trading their daughters' well-being, safety, and physical autonomy for their own gratification or strategic positioning.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's something I've grappled with this season because I don't want to deny these women agency.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure the motivations are complex and context specific, but it's really hard to believe Pamela Kaffrids wasn't coldly thrown to the wolves.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: And India Oxenberg, brought in by her mother at such a young age, and Lauren Salzman, who was raised in Nexium by her mother, those are the ones I think I can firmly say were thrown into danger directly by their families and treated as disposable.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: Laura Rosa Junko sits right on the line between personal agency and being a node in something larger for her family.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_00: And to be honest, I don't know exactly what I think.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: As always, uh, if you have some ideas I haven't thought of, please let me know in the comments.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: I always love to hear them.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you yet again for tuning in to another episode of the Dust Light Archives.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_00: I will be back again in two more weeks with the next part of the Nexium Investigative episodes.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: As always, if you're looking to support me non-monetarily, leaving five stars or a comment, a review, any of that sort of stuff, it really helps.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_00: It makes a big difference with visibility and it means a lot.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, if you are able to support me monetarily, or if you would like some more content, as always, you could head over to my Patreon that is linked in the description.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: And there you will find my Sinister Forces book club, which at this point I think we're four episodes into.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna drop the fifth episode next week, and they are going to keep coming.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, these investigative episodes, I try to spend a lot of time making sure that they're very uh precise because oftentimes I'm trying to make uh an argument that could easily be disregarded.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: When it comes to the book club and examining the different things claimed in Sinister Forces, for instance, and then the books we'll do in the future, uh, it allows for a looser format, and so the episodes tend to go quite a bit longer.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: If that's something you're interested in, if you're interested in something that's longer than you know, the standard 30 to 60 minutes, these episodes have become uh I mean, we're hitting about 90 minutes per episode on those, so there is that as well.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and I'm really enjoying it.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: Seems like some other people are enjoying it too.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: Also, the the five dollar donations, they mean a lot to just me personally to know if somebody cared enough to bother to support me, as well as the comments.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_00: And lastly, uh, if you truly can't afford it, hit me up.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I want to get these episodes out to as many people as possible, and I certainly don't want to make a money paywall that people can't afford.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_00: So if that is the case, you can always write to me and we will figure something out.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_00: So thanks a lot, and I will see you next week.