2. Sabotage

People often speak about specialised hidden groups in Mexico as if they operate on a single plane — one organisation, one motive, one predictable pattern of behaviour. It’s a comforting simplification, the kind that allows outsiders to imagine a single threat that can be mapped, understood, or avoided. But when I lived there, even briefly, I learned the landscape is layered. Influence shifts by region, by allegiance, and by the quiet calculations that determine who is seen, who is ignored, and who is removed. Nothing functions as a single structure. It is a moving map, constantly redrawn by forces that rarely announce themselves.

Certain times of the year, the atmosphere changes in a way no one will explain. I feel it before I understand it — a subtle tightening, a shift in air pressure, a kind of alertness that doesn’t belong to me but settles over the town like a second skin. No one comments on it. No one warns me. But everyone feels it. It often begins with a party at the edge of town: not a fiesta, not a community gathering, but something that announces itself with volume and intent. Music erupts without warning, looping until the night feels pressurised, and cars arrive in a steady, dust‑cutting procession. Headlights sweep the single road, windows tinted, plates unfamiliar. I look at the faces inside and realise I don’t recognise a single one. The cartel has arrived, again.

By 2026, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) has a documented and harmful presence in Nayarit, part of a central‑western corridor where their influence is widely reported and deeply felt. Their return is not announced; it is sensed. And once you’ve lived through it, you learn to read the signs long before anyone speaks. The CJNG is recognised in public reporting as a highly violent, Mexico‑based transnational criminal organisation responsible for severe harm and human rights violations. In recent years, governments have escalated their classifications: the United States formally designated CJNG as a foreign terrorist organization in February 2025, and Argentina followed with its own designation in March 2026. These labels do not simplify the landscape, but they do acknowledge the scale of violence and the transnational reach that communities like Nayarit have been living with for far longer than the world has been willing to admit.

Now this is where it becomes personal, because whatever forces were moving through that landscape eventually collided with my life in ways I still struggle to understand. My story traces everything I remember — every irregularity, every shift, every moment that didn’t fit — in the hope that a pattern might emerge. Was someone sending a message? Was it arbitrary? Was it misidentification, miscalculation, or something else entirely? I was one mother with four children, trying to hold a life together. My former husband served in the Australian Defence Force, but even that connection doesn’t explain the scale or precision of what unfolded. None of it makes sense, and the not‑knowing is its own kind of torment. If I could ask the people responsible one question, it would be simple: why? But silence has been the only answer, and so this book becomes the place where I try to make sense of what they refused to explain.

And because I had to live through the worst of it, I refuse to carry the shame of their actions. That is one of the cruelties of harm: it teaches you to doubt yourself, to shrink, to question your own innocence. But their psychological games were temporary, and surviving them gave me a clarity I didn’t have before. I understand more now — the tactics, the pressure, the way fear is engineered. They may not appreciate what I have to say, but I didn’t appreciate what was done to me either. They had their turn. Now this is mine.

I write not as a friend, not as an enemy, but as someone who lived through it and is no longer willing to disappear into the shadows. This is the voice of a survivor reclaiming her narrative. And if there is one truth I hold onto, it is this: I am still here. I am still standing. I am not afraid. What they tried to break in me did not break. What they tried to silence in me did not stay silent. I am not invincible in the comic‑book sense — I am something far more dangerous to those who rely on silence. I am a woman who survived, and who is finally telling the truth.

And yet, even with all of that unfolding inside me, life around me continued with its own strange normalcy. The town didn’t pause to acknowledge what I was learning or what I was surviving. It simply carried on, as if the extraordinary and the everyday were meant to coexist. That is one of the disorienting parts of living in a place shaped by forces larger than any one person: my private upheaval happened alongside public routine, and the two realities never quite touched.

Whenever they arrive, I notice the same thing: the locals just go about their business as if nothing unusual is happening. Shops stay open. People sweep their front steps. Children play in the street. But beneath the surface, there’s a quiet understanding: this is not for us. The party is happening in my town, but it has nothing to do with me. And it goes on all weekend. The music doesn’t stop. It’s the same tracks looping endlessly, the same relentless beat cycling through the night until it feels less like music and more like a pressure system settling over the town. The cars keep coming. The same people, the same movements, the same atmosphere. It feels choreographed, as if the event has been rehearsed a hundred times before. No invitations, no announcements, no explanation. Just an eruption of activity that appears out of nowhere and disappears just as quickly. The entire enactment becomes something like a broken record — repeat, repeat, repeat — until the repetition itself becomes the message. And later, I would learn that this was the pattern in every domain: the same tactics, the same rhythms, the same psychological loops. After a while, it stops feeling threatening and starts feeling dull, predictable, almost monochrome in its insistence on sameness.

It gets to the point where I want to scream into the night: be different. Break the pattern. Do something unexpected. But then I realise that, like any “organisation,” they have no incentive to change what already works for them. Not even the music. Repetition is part of the design. And the more I lived through it, the more I saw that this wasn’t unique to them. Nothing in this world functions as neatly as people imagine. Systems fray. Institutions contradict themselves. We are all caught in the firing line of government‑manufactured precarity — the product of poorly made policy decisions, fragmented agencies, and entities that don’t truly coexist or coordinate. Everything becomes temporary, unstable, improvised, and repetitive. And in that instability, repetition becomes a kind of power: predictable for them, exhausting for everyone else.

Then Monday arrives, and everything snaps back to normal. The music stops. The cars vanish. The unfamiliar faces dissolve into the landscape as if they were never there. People open their shops. Children walk to school. The town exhales. But the residue remains — the sense that something passed through, something organised, something with its own rules and its own reasons. And the strangest part is how often it happens. Several times a year. In different towns. In different regions. Always the same music, the same atmosphere, the same choreography. And when they leave, they leave everything behind — the bottles, the plastic cups, the cigarette packets, the scraps of a weekend that never belonged to the town in the first place. A kind of physical aftertaste. A reminder that the event was real, even if the people who created it have already vanished back into whatever system they came from, slipping into the shadows again as if they were never there. Sometimes there’s more than litter — a small bag of drugs dropped or forgotten, the kind of thing that makes me realise just how close the town comes to being entangled in illegal activity it never invited.

After a while, I stop trying to interpret it. I simply learn to recognise the pattern. I learn to feel the shift before the first car arrives. I learn that some events are not meant to be understood by the people who live closest to them. And that’s the part no one tells you: the repetition becomes its own kind of message. Not a warning. Not a threat. Just a reminder that there are layers of life moving around me — layers I’m not meant to access, layers that operate on their own timetable, with their own logic, indifferent to whether I understand them or not.

I get used to it.

But you never stop noticing.That was the first lesson — not taught in a single moment, but absorbed slowly, through the accumulation of small observations. The way certain people moved through town without being questioned. The way others disappeared from public spaces without explanation. The way conversations changed when particular names were mentioned. It wasn’t dramatic. It was atmospheric. A kind of social weather system that everyone understood without speaking about it directly.

The second lesson came later, when the activity around my property began.

When an operation relies on sending people to move around a home at night, the tactic is designed to be used sparingly. Its effectiveness depends on surprise. The first time you hear footsteps outside your window at 2 a.m., your body reacts before your mind can form a thought. The second time, the reaction is sharper. By the third, your nervous system has already begun rewriting itself. Hypervigilance becomes a companion you didn’t invite but can’t dismiss.

But once the same manoeuvre is repeated, the pattern becomes visible. Predictability turns intimidation into information — something that can be observed, understood, and eventually neutralised. The emotional leverage they were counting on erodes with every repetition. Fear is powerful, but it is also fragile. It relies on uncertainty. Once you begin to see the structure behind the tactic, the tactic loses its edge.

And in the beginning, it worked. Hypervigilance took hold and refused to let go. I carried it for weeks, then months — a constant, exhausting alertness that threaded itself through everything else happening at the time: the financial abuse, the abandonment, the phone issues, the responsibility of four children, the anxiety already simmering beneath the surface. It was a period of life where every system that should have supported us was either failing or being stripped away. In that environment, even small disturbances felt amplified.

Sometimes I wondered if I was simply paranoid. That’s the quiet cruelty of these tactics — they rely on your doubt. They rely on your willingness to question your own perception before you question the behaviour of others. But repetition shows its true colours sooner or later.

And repetition breeds something else: sloppiness. The kind that shows up in small, careless traces. Like the night one of them cut a foot in the laundry and left a thin trail of blood across the floor. It was meant to be invisible. Instead, it confirmed what the pattern had already begun to reveal. Patterns expose weaknesses. They reveal the limits of training, the edges of competence, the places where confidence slips into carelessness.

I contacted the police, but there was nothing they could do. They didn’t even file a report. To them, it didn’t seem like a significant incident. That was another lesson: in that part of Mexico, the police were friendly, approachable, and often kind — but their role was limited. They drove around, chatted with locals, maintained a presence. I got to know some of them quite well, and they were genuinely lovely people. But at that stage, I still hadn’t realised that the people who operate in the shadows — the ones you never see — are often the ones who hold the real power.

If sabotage is an art, then restoration is the real test of expertise — the part that reveals whether the saboteur ever understood the full architecture of what they dismantled. But that was never their objective. They stopped at destruction, never pushing their abilities to their full potential. Their aim wasn’t mastery. It was disruption.

It was a steep learning curve to witness, first‑hand, the tactics of sabotage by an unseen force at work — subtle in the beginning, yet effective. But as the actions repeated, the structure became clear. The operation wasn’t creative; it was procedural. And the repetition made one thing unmistakable: much of what happened was not accidental.

The pattern extended beyond the property. It followed me across borders.

They say that when two brand‑new MacBook Pros became corrupted in Panama, it must have been the damp weather. That sounds reasonable.

They say that when the car’s engine malfunctioned in Canada and the entire engine had to be replaced, it was just a faulty engine. That sounds reasonable.

They say that when the internet failed in three different homes, across three different locations, it was simply poor service. That sounds reasonable.

They say that when a brand‑new Microsoft Surface Pro became corrupted, it must have been a manufacturing fault. That sounds reasonable.

But none of it was covered under warranty or insurance, and the cost of replacing everything — again and again — became its own kind of evidence. Reasonable explanations, repeated often enough, can start to feel like a script. And when every “reasonable” answer leaves you carrying the consequences alone, you begin to wonder whether reason is the wrong place to look.

And this all happened in a very short amount of time — too fast to be coincidence, too concentrated to dismiss.

At the time, though, we did dismiss it — because the worst was still ahead. After my ex‑husband abandoned his family and left the country, he began cutting us off financially, slowly and deliberately, until there was nothing left to stand on. And I was alone, with four children to protect, trying to make sense of a situation that kept tightening around us.

And then the digital signs began.

People assume you can’t feel when a phone is compromised, but you can. Not in a dramatic way, but in the subtle shifts that accumulate until they form their own pattern — a pattern that mirrored everything happening in the physical world.

Rapid battery drain and overheating.

High or unexplained data usage.

Unfamiliar apps appearing and disappearing.

Strange noises during calls.

Irregular performance.

Suspicious account activity.

Individually, each sign could be dismissed. Together, they formed a quiet, persistent question: What exactly is happening here?

People told me it was nothing — a glitch, a bad update, poor reception. And maybe that would have been believable if it had happened once. But when every device you touch begins to falter, when the timing aligns with the rest of your life coming undone, the explanations start to feel thin.

When you’ve lived through domestic violence, you learn that danger doesn’t always arrive with a raised voice or a slammed door; sometimes it slips in through the devices you rely on, through the quiet spaces where no one thinks to look.

This was the moment when coincidence began to look like data — and the story I thought I was living revealed itself to be something else entirely.

For a while, I was genuinely concerned. Something felt alive inside my phone, moving in ways I couldn’t explain, and I needed confirmation from someone who understood the technical world better than I did. So I sought out a local IT specialist who agreed to meet with me and assess the device.

We met at a local bar in the early afternoon. The bar was quiet, with only a couple of regulars, nothing out of the ordinary. I arrived first. Even though I hadn’t met him before, I recognised him immediately when he walked in. He was quietly spoken, polite, and his English was excellent — no communication barriers at all. But he seemed slightly nervous, glancing up at the cameras now and then, as if aware of an audience I couldn’t see.

I expected questions. I expected curiosity, maybe even concern. Instead, the encounter was brief and oddly empty. He held the phone for barely a minute, tapped through a few screens without expression, and announced that nothing was wrong. No diagnostics, no explanation, no attempt to understand what I had been experiencing. When I looked at him, waiting for something more, he only offered a polite, apologetic smile and said there was nothing else he could do.

I walked away unconvinced. The dismissal felt too quick, too rehearsed, as if he knew something he wasn’t free to say. It took time for me to understand the feeling that settled in my chest afterward — that sense of a quiet pressure behind the scenes, a force that didn’t need to show itself to be felt. A force that issued instructions, and people simply followed them.

So what were they trying to achieve? For a long time, all I could feel was the surface effect: the unsettlement, the disruption, the quiet intimidation of an unknown force pressing in at the edges of my life. Those feelings were real, but even they faded eventually. What didn’t fade was the aftermath — the wreckage left behind. Some of it was practical, some of it emotional, and some of it was simply impossible to repair.

Whoever was involved seemed bigger than me, and certainly more than one person. I never figured out how many. A small team, perhaps. What struck me was not their number but their reach — how easily they seemed to move through the world I was living in, as if the boundaries that constrained me didn’t apply to them.

Now, with distance, their presence feels far away, almost dissolved. But the question remains: how did they engage? What were the mechanisms that shaped the pressure I felt?

Over time, the patterns pointed to a familiar set of tactics — not unique, not new, but effective in combination:

Coercive control — the slow tightening of circumstances, choices, and resources.

Cyber interference — the digital disturbances that mirrored the physical ones.

Entrapment — situations engineered to limit movement, options, or support.

Psychological pressure — the constant uncertainty, the erosion of confidence, the sense of being watched.

Intimidation — not loud or dramatic, but persistent, calculated, and unnervingly quiet.

Sabotage — the disruptions that accumulated until they formed a pattern too concentrated to dismiss.

None of these tactics operated in isolation. They overlapped, reinforced one another, and created a kind of atmosphere — one that was difficult to name at the time, but unmistakable in hindsight.

And that is the part no one warns you about:

the tactics fade, the pressure lifts, the presence dissolves — but the understanding stays.

Once you’ve seen the pattern, you can’t unsee it.

Once you’ve lived inside it, you recognise its shape everywhere.

And that recognition becomes its own kind of clarity.

Then there’s the question of tactics — whether repetition is the most effective tool for psychological sabotage, or whether unpredictability does more damage. I still don’t know which one worked “better” on me. I have a strong mind, and yes, the tactics got under my skin for a little while, but the pattern kept forming. That was the problem for them: I could see the structure. I’m sure I made an interesting test subject, but even then, something always felt missing. The design wasn’t complete. The repetition exposed them as much as it unsettled me.

It’s become an area of personal study now, something I’ve taken a deep interest in because of what I lived through. And with the experience I have now, I doubt it could ever happen again in the same way or to the same extent. To get past me now, someone would have to challenge themselves, break their own habits, become genuinely creative — and I’m not inviting that. I’m simply telling the truth of what I learned, in the hope that it helps someone else recognise the early signs.

Because if it starts happening to you, the indicators are there. You’ll feel the pattern before you can name it. And if you’re a tourist, or someone without roots in the community, don’t wait around to see how far it goes. Once they target you, they don’t ease off until you’re stripped of everything that made you stable. I thought I could fight through it. I thought I could outlast it. I was wrong.

And that’s part of why I’m writing this now — not to dramatise what happened, but to make sure no one else walks into the same storm thinking they can weather it alone. I tried. I learned. And I survived, but not because the system made it easy. In Mexico, it was impossible to have anything properly assessed. And trying to find an outside authority was its own labyrinth. That’s the part people don’t understand until they’re in it: once the pattern begins, you’re already negotiating with forces that don’t negotiate back.