“Bad boys, bad boys, what you gonna do when they come for you?”

That line used to make me laugh, something you’d sing under your breath when life felt chaotic in a harmless way. But in Nayarit, the words took on a different weight — not threatening, not ominous, just strangely fitting. A soundtrack for a place where danger and kindness lived side by side, where the world was never quite what outsiders imagined.

Nayarit had a heavy concentration of CJNG — the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación — and their presence was woven into the landscape as naturally as the palm trees and the dust. People back home would have imagined danger, gunfire, shadows lurking behind every corner. But the truth was more complicated. The cartel I knew wasn’t the force that sabotaged my life. Everything I learned, everything I saw, told me they didn’t target tourists. And the people I met — the ones everyone else called “bad” — were, in many ways, very kind to me.

They were men with families, with children, with responsibilities. Men who helped me when I was homeless and helpless. Men who treated me with respect. I never asked what they did for a living — some truths don’t need to be spoken aloud — but I saw their humanity long before I saw their shadows. They were “bad” only in the way the world labels people it never bothers to understand.

There was only one man in that world who left a bitter taste in my mouth, I don’t know who he was, or if I ever met him. A local cartel boss. A man whose decisions rippled outward and landed on our doorstep one Friday afternoon.

This happened after my ex-husband abandoned me.

By then, Jose and I had started a small carpentry business — Sullivan Carpintería — in Lo de Marcos. It was humble, but it was ours. Jose had spent weeks building furniture with the children and me. He was patient, talented, proud of the work he was teaching the kids to do. We were building something honest, something hopeful, something that felt like a future.

Then BTG — Big Truck Guy — arrived. His oversized blue truck was loud, impossible to ignore. Usually he came as a friend. That day, he came as a messenger. “Sorry, man,” he said to Jose, almost embarrassed. “The boss wants all this furniture. And your cowboy boots. Payment is twenty thousand pesos… in product.”

The boss was hosting a party. He wanted extra furniture. The boots? He took them because he could.

In that world, you don’t say no.

Jose’s jaw tightened. He had worked long hours, trying to build a life that didn’t involve the cartel, and now he was being paid in drugs — something we didn’t want in our home, let alone to sell. The children had helped build that furniture. They deserved food, not this.

BTG quietly took some of the drugs back and handed us five hundred pesos. After he left, Jose punched a hole in the wall, flushed the rest down the toilet, and sent me to buy food. Then he went back to work as if nothing had happened. I knew he was hurting, so I never spoke of it again.

The incident with the furniture was a violation. It was coercive, humiliating, and it crushed Jose because it attacked the one thing he was trying to build honestly. That moment cracked something in me. It made me wonder whether any of it — the place, the struggle, the hope — was worth it.

I knew how it would look from the outside. One incident like that could make me look like a bad mother, “connected to bad people,” as if survival were a moral failing. But I’m not here to argue. I’m here to be honest. People can draw their own conclusions. This is why my situation is complex. No matter what I did, I knew I wouldn’t get the support I needed if I returned to Australia.

For a brief time, I did feel safe being oceans away from my ex-husband. He could no longer hurt the children or me physically or emotionally. But the financial abuse followed us like a shadow. He refused to pay child support. He refused responsibility. He controlled us from afar, threatening to accuse me of being an unfit mother if I ever returned to Australia.

He fit the established patterns of coercive control:

• financial domination

• emotional manipulation

• substance-fueled neglect

• guilt-tripping

• rewriting reality to make me doubt myself

• weaponizing institutions against me

I wasn’t imagining it. I weren’t overreacting. I was living inside a system designed to make me feel small, dependent, and afraid to leave. And when I did leave, he simply shifted tactics — from physical proximity to long-distance sabotage.

That’s not a coincidence. It’s a pattern.

He lied to authorities, calling me a drug addict, ignoring his own behaviour that started in Panama, that continued all the way through to Mexico — the cocaine, the alcohol, the cigarettes, all the nights spent partying while I cooked, cleaned, taught the children, took them on outings which he rarely participated in. I bathed them, put them to bed, and held everything together. One of us had to stay functional, and it was always me. He was the soldier, who later became the Officer - he was always away, sometimes for very long periods - and when he was home, it was like he didn’t want to be there. So it was no different to being overseas - how stupid I was to think things would change.

In Panama, he smoked pot with neighbours, mixed his medications with cocaine, drank heavily, and spent money recklessly. It didn’t matter that I always worked — even when the children were tiny — he controlled the finances. He controlled the money for the trip. He told me not to worry — that we could survive on his military pension. I didn’t know he planned to abandon us once the money ran out.

His spending and drug use escalated in Panama. It worsened by the time we arrived in Mexico, Mexico didn’t change him. It magnified him. it was out of control. He pressured me to take drugs socially, especially when we made friends — sharing cocaine at our expense, draining our savings while pretending everything was fine. Spending money carelessly was part of his nature. He spent money recklessly, always putting himself first.

When he left Mexico with false promises of returning, everything changed. I stopped drinking. I stopped taking drugs. I cut down to two cigarettes a day. My life shifted overnight.

But I was trapped between two worlds — struggling to survive in Mexico, terrified of returning to Australia. Mexico was still the lesser of two evils. And thankfully, we only had one negative encounter with the cartel — one man misusing his power. Bullies exist everywhere. Some people use their position to intimidate because they can. I feared my ex-husband more than I feared that man.

Nineteen years of bullying teaches you something: people get away with it, no matter where they come from or who they are.

I’m not just angry at individuals. I’m angry at:

• systems that failed me

• institutions that dismissed me

• people who judged me without context

• authorities who hid behind bureaucracy

• the anonymity of those who interfered with my life

I’m angry because I was left to carry the consequences of other people’s actions while they walked away untouched. That’s not self-pity. That’s injustice.

If the system buries me under red tape, if I’m forced to carry these memories forever with no justice, then I just want to give up. It feels like nobody cares. Like I failed. Like I’m just another invisible victim of domestic violence.

I was already dealing with abandonment, financial abuse, exhaustion, and mental strain. And then — suddenly — something else hit me, harder than everything before.

The real sabotage of Mexico.

This was different. These weren’t random people. They were skilled — cyber specialists, ghosts, invisible, watching, waiting, hiding behind smoke screens. They took things too far, and they know it.

They called themselves MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE.