Chapter 34. Captivity Logic

But in the end, they both got what they wanted.

Personality does not solidify in childhood; it forms between twelve and nineteen — the exact years he spent inside the machinery of gang life. Leaving home at fourteen, even from a good family, meant stepping into an environment defined by instability, violence, and survival. Extreme adolescent trauma fractures personality development. It creates patterns of frantic attachment, identity instability, and emotional volatility. When those traits are layered over a lifetime of gang conditioning and prison survival, the behaviour shifts into something that looks less like ordinary instability and more like calculated exploitation.

Superficial charm becomes a tool rather than a personality trait. He learned to read people the way other men learn to read maps — scanning for vulnerabilities, mirroring back whatever they most want to see, becoming an instant friend to unsuspecting targets. In the world he came from, the con was not a hobby; it was a survival mechanism. Trust was a liability. People were resources to be extracted, stepping stones to the next advantage.

This is why remorse rarely appears. He felt entitled to whatever he took. In his mind, his past “importance” — real or imagined — justified the lies, the theft, the exploitation. He told himself he deserved the money. He told himself his victims were naïve, soft, easy. The story he told himself protected him from the truth: that he was not powerful, not feared, not respected, but simply a man who learned to survive by taking from others.

This combination — emotional chaos fused with predatory calculation — is what made him so dangerous. It is why he could appear loyal one moment and ruthless the next. It is why he could look me in the eye with tenderness while quietly assessing what else he could extract. It is why he could convince himself he cared about me while simultaneously draining my resources.

And I really was trapped. I felt helpless for my children. I knew I was in trouble; I just couldn’t find a way out quickly. I even went to immigration in Puerto Vallarta and told them I had overstayed my visa, hoping they would deport me and the children. But I only had one child with me. They would not collect the others. They could not help me.

I didn’t want to do anything erratic that might put my children at risk. I was terrified of staying, and terrified of leaving. I knew that if I left the country, my children would be taken from me — but I also believed they might be safer if they weren’t with me. That is how distorted my thinking had become. That is how deep the fear ran.

And yes, I believed he had connections in Brisbane. I believed he could reach across borders. I believed that being near my children put them in danger. At the end he would say, the kids will be okay with their father — we have people who will keep an eye on them. Those words were never said as comfort; they were warnings disguised as reassurance. I no longer knew what was real and what was not. That was the point. The uncertainty was the trap. All I knew was that the safest thing I could do for my children was to remove myself from their proximity. And so I went back to Mexico — not because I wanted to, but because he wanted me there, and because I believed that distancing myself from my children was the only way to keep them safe.

I had to stay as far away from my children as possible because being near them felt dangerous. That was the level of psychological captivity I was living under. That was the cost of surviving a man shaped by violence, abandonment, and the machinery of prison.

There is a part of this story that still feels impossible to explain, yet it was the most logical decision I could make inside the conditions I was living under. It began to feel safer to separate myself from my children than to stay close to them. That wasn’t abandonment; it was survival logic. When you believe a dangerous man has reach, when he hints at connections that could harm the people you love, your mind does something protective: it removes you from the equation. I wasn’t thinking, I can’t handle my children. I was thinking, If he targets me, he will target them too. In that state, distance becomes a shield. My presence felt like a liability, a risk multiplier. Staying away from them felt like the only way to keep them safe. That is what coercive control does — it turns love into a vulnerability and convinces you that the greatest act of protection is to disappear. And that was the biggest reason I went back to Mexico. José wanted me there; he didn’t want me to leave at all. My children needed to be safe, and the only way I could protect them was to remove myself, return to the danger, and try to figure out a way through it without bringing the threat any closer to them.

What surprised me the most was how completely everything went unnoticed. In Mexico I often wondered if someone, somewhere, had seen a fragment of what was happening — a neighbour, a passer‑by, even the Australian Embassy who arranged our emergency flights home. I thought perhaps they had sensed something, that someone might quietly pull me aside and ask if I was safe. I held on to the idea that when I finally reached Australia, an authority figure would look at me properly and ask the one question that could have opened the door: Are you okay. If anyone had asked what happened over there, I might have been able to speak. But there was nothing. No questions. No pause. No recognition. I was processed, released, and placed straight onto the streets — homeless, carrying eighteen months of unspoken terror.

Homeless, with no support and no safety net, my children were in the hands of their father — which, as I had already explained, was the lesser of the two evils at the time. It was not the choice I wanted, but the only choice that did not place them in immediate danger. In the distorted reality I had just escaped, distance felt like protection. Keeping them with him felt safer than keeping them near me while I was still carrying the threat he represented. That is the part people never understand: sometimes the most protective thing a mother can do is step back, not because she wants to, but because the danger follows her, not them.

So now you can understand why it has been so difficult for me to share this side of the story. We all read about journalists who write the wrong thing about the cartel, and even though my audience is small and I’m far outside their neighbourhood, that fear of accidental sabotage still lingers. It’s a residue you carry long after the danger is gone. Most of my story was already written before I finally reached the part that mattered most — the part I had avoided, circled around, softened, rewritten, and postponed. Just those last couple of chapters that reveal everything. And at some point I had to ask myself: what are they really going to do about it now? Charter a private jet, cross borders without passports, and come looking for me? The thought is absurd, but the fear was real. That’s what coercion does — it stays long after the threat itself has lost its power.

Don’t get me wrong — everything I have written about José is true and honest. He was always a hard worker, loyal, sincere in the ways he knew how to be, and willing to help anyone who asked. But it was a performance, one long, spectacular performance, and for the most part I had no choice but to go along with it. A good man who was really dangerous, and a dangerous man who could sometimes appear good. And in a strange way, the same could be said of my ex‑husband — a bad man who sometimes did the right thing, even if only by accident. Their roles blurred so easily that I could never fully separate one from the other.

One man had already put a gun to my head, and the other had no money, no passport, no transport, no friends, and no weapon of his own — yet somehow the reach still felt far. That’s the thing about fear: it doesn’t need resources, it only needs a story you believe. And the truth is, both of them held that power over me at different times. They even had one thing in common: both had smacked me in the face and broken my nose. I used to joke that maybe that was my problem — that I simply didn’t know when to shut the fuck up — but the truth is, speaking up was the only thing that ever kept me alive. Silence never protected me. My voice did.

But in the end, they both got what they wanted. They both walked away, and I was the one left carrying the consequences of the lives they had built and abandoned in equal measure.