Name: Discussing Cocaine Manufacturing in Central America w/ Marianne Van Zeller
Uploaded: 2025-08-19T15:30:31.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Discussing Cocaine Manufacturing in Central America w/ Marianne Van Zeller' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-08-19. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Discussing Cocaine Manufacturing in Central America w/ Marianne Van Zeller' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-08-19. Transcript available.

one of the first episodes we ever did for traffic was about cocaine and we went
we went we were in
peru we were in colombia and we basically saw what it means for a kilo of
cocaine to go where
it's made we went to the jungles of peru we saw how it's being made in these
big pits with the
coca leaves take me through it a little bit oh it's fascinating it's actually
super fascinating
here i want to hear about it yeah um you've got the jungles of peru for the coca
leaves
uh there they they harvest the leaves and you can see fields and fields of coca
leaves that have
existed for decades in in this area of peru it's the rhyme frame valley of peru
and it's sort of
it's some soft music too nick if you don't mind sorry i've had a love enjoying
cocaine in my life
but um but no okay going in peru i've never actually tried it um yeah i was
gonna ask you
i've been offered it so many times you bet by by like the purest uh you got it
at least yeah so this
is then they dry the leaves and then they put them in a big pit so we went in
the middle of the night
we're going down this sort of trail in the middle of the night it's super muddy
it's sort of rain foresty
raining all the time and i'll never forget where it's dark and we're carrying
all of us are carrying
we're like six of us carrying equipment plus the guys that are taking us to the
place where they're
making cocaine and uh the my dp who's french uh he was uh with his very french
french accent complaining
it's like oh i can't what do i do i can't and complaining that he's like we're
slipping and
sliding everywhere meanwhile holding these like very expensive cameras and
canvas bags full of gear
and we thought it was going to be you know like we'll be there in five minutes
ten minutes and 45
minutes later we're still walking wow down this rainy path in the middle of the
night with nothing no
light at all yeah we're such americans like oh we'll just park and then walk
right over there that's
what we thought was going to happen we'll get the closest parking spot and uh
and meanwhile yeah and
then uh there's no light and i i basically have as i have now the phone with my
at the time was
another photo of me and my son and this oh and they told us we can't use flashlights
even though we had
flashlights with us because they didn't want people around the valley to see
this because what they were
doing was they could get them killed and so where i'm only using the light from
the front of my phone
to sort of just see where i was walking um you know i'm covered in mud we get
there and there's this
pit enormous pit it's like uh olympic science pool pits with all the drugs all
the cocaine leaves being
mixed with products that then they once they it stays like this for days and
then they sort of bring
it out into these buckets gigantic blue buckets and they mix it with everything
from gasoline and uh
dye and all these products that eventually get made into this powder and so we
are literally seeing
the whole process and as this is happening we start hearing noises um in you
know yeah and and that's
the moment that we knew they were like okay so as you know as long as it took
us to come down that
valley it took us about half that time to go off because we were running out
yeah i even look at a
bag of cocaine i start hearing you know so i feel you there i definitely um
anyway carry on you could
actually is there a gift shop you could smell it i mean in the air you could
kind of you could smell
the petrol you could smell the whole thing and i a bunch of us were worried
that we were going to
get i've been in fentanyl labs and that's even worse because there you can
actually feel your body
starting to like warm up the like physical um we were in an enclosed uh fentanyl
lab in sinaloa mexico
where the chemist we're all we're actually using like hazmat suits and masks
because we're an american
group meanwhile these guys have like you know like a bandana around their head
uh face and they're
touching the powder and he's telling me i was like how do you know when it's
ready and he's saying
because i can feel my heart starts beating really fast and that's when i know
the fentanyl is ready it's
insane you should watch that oh that's crazy crazy and that was last season
that was actually season
one we did a first season at fentanyl but then just to finish the cocaine
because it's so fascinating
yeah for sure how it gets out of this this valley this region we then spent the
night with these kids
16 17 year old kids who are backpacking and taking these you know 20 30 pounds
of cocaine or 20
something kilos of cocaine on their backs for days on end for a whole week on
in the middle of in you know
really rough terrain seeing some of their friends being killed in front of them
by rival groups
um one of the ones i interviewed i will never forget this interview it sort of
very much changed the show uh this interview that we did that i did with them
is the second episode we
ever did of trafficked and it was i'm talking to this kid i'm asking like why
why uh why do you do
this i mean you're you've seen friends being killed it's back-breaking work you
know they get
insects all over it's they're sleeping out in the open for days it's just
horrible terrible conditions
and he's saying look i've always wanted to go to college and i want to be a
dentist and my family
is super super poor and they're never going to be able to afford my education
and so this is the only
job that's afforded to me i do this once a month and i get x amount of money
and i'm saving that money
to one day become a dentist i thought and dentist is an interesting why dentist
right you hear lawyer you
hear doctor you don't hear dentist and he says because there's a lot of ads for
dentists in my
town and they all show people with a big smile and i want to make people smile
and i want to make them
happy oh and so it's stories like this and i seriously started hearing more and
more stories
like this that i was like okay i think this is the message of the show yes it's
a dangerous world we
should be careful where we should explain and you know shine a light in these
underworld but ultimately
i think the message of the show is to show is that this could happen to any of
us you know if we
depending on where you're born you know it's like the wheel of history turns
and where and when you're
born this is determines whether you get lifted or or crushed by it right and
that's the idea i think
behind behind the show and so much of what i've learned
Thank you.