Con Ink. (Part Six)

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The laws changed in the United States, and, for the first time, U.S agents were permitted and encouraged to go overseas and find children who Americans were abusing.

And it must have been around this time that an idea was sparked.

He was effectively attempting to launch a film production company whose primary content was the dramatic rescue of child sex slaves.

Their television series proposal was not being picked up right away.

So Ballard turned to someone else. I would like to introduce you to a website called operationundergroundrailroad..org.

And I would like you to bring this to your churches.

I'm Patrick Kuralche.

And I'm Adriana Cortez.

And this is Red Pilled America, a storytelling show.

This is not another talk show covering the day's news, we're all about telling stories.

Stories Hollywood doesn't want you to hear.

Stories The media mocks stories about everyday Americans that the globalists ignore.

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Hey Colombia.

We are working with the Cuerpo Tecnico de Investigacion, or CTI, which is the Colombian equivalent to the FBI, in order to coordinate these operations. These are truly dedicated men and women who want to eradicate trafficking in their country.

The dog tag moment may have provided the premise for the based-on-a-true-story movie Sound of Freedom, but the Haiti and Colombia operations provided the drama. Now, in the movie Sound of Freedom, there's a dramatic search and attempted rescue of a little girl in the jungles of Colombia. The filmmakers claim that girl is actually a dramatization of the real-life little boy Garty Marty that they looked for in Haiti. Yeah, it's a bit of a stretch to connect the two as a true story, but anyway, the Haiti operation launched in early 2014. And Ballard would eventually explain what kicked it off.

By nothing short of a miracle, an informant came forward and said they had information on where we might find Garty.

They were unsuccessful in their search. Garty Marty was never found, but their Colombian operation was a different story.

In a now-defunct our podcast called In the Trenches, Tim Ballard explained the genesis of the 2014 Colombia operation.

Colombia was also an operation that had begun, or at least the beginnings of it, began when I was a government agent.

Ballard claimed that when he was still working for ICE, he trained federal police in Colombia on how to infiltrate child trafficking rings.

The training that I was doing was actually a powerpoint presentation, I was kind of bored of doing it. I didn't think anyone really paid attention. Everyone just felt good because we checked the box right in the training. I remember doing that training.

But once he got that initial seed funding for our, Ballard says he went back to his law enforcement contacts in Colombia, and they directed him towards a specific beach.

Playa Blanca, these islands, out in Baru island and the prosecution, the Colombian authorities said. We believe that children are being sexually assaulted out there and abused and sold. So we went out there, we walked on that beach.

Ballard said he and his team posed as wealthy real estate investors looking for a good time.

And I remember we were approached by a man named Fuego.

Fuego means fire in Spanish. Ballard claimed that within a matter of just a few seconds, Fuego was offering up young girls for sex.

Maybe 25 seconds, right? And he was just like, I got girls as young as 13, 12, 13, and I was just like, what he's like? Yeah, they're in the house, we can go right now.

According to Ballard, Fuego said he needed to speak to the guy running the trafficking operation. A man named Eduardo, the founder of OUR, claimed he turned over that information to the Colombian federal authorities.

M.S. Cartagena.

Actually, her real name was Kelly Johanna Suarez.

Kelly was Ms. Cartagena famous in town?

Kelly wasn't actually Ms. Cartagena, and she wasn't really famous, at least not yet, but she was a former beauty pageant contestant in an annual pageant in Cartagena that celebrates Colombian independence. She didn't win, but she represented her.

And she recruited kids to her modeling agency, but she was selling them 12-year-olds.

Ballard told the alleged traffickers that they were having a party on an island for their money. Man, and asked for them to bring their flock of child sex slaves to the party. If they did, he'd pay them a lot of money, a reported $25,000, a life-changing sum in 2014. Colombia.

This whole group of traffickers got together and they came to us wanting not just to supply us with children for a party, but they wanted a business partnership. They wanted us to invest in property so they could build a child sex hotel, they said. Look, we'll build the hotel, we'll keep the talent, we'll keep it packed with young girls, minors, children, and you bring the clients. That was the deal.

In the immediate wake of one meeting with the alleged traffickers, Ballard expressed that he couldn't believe what they'd caught them saying on camera. Apparently, one of the traffickers offered up a young virgin.

It went so, so well, it went so well. I'm telling you, they said things at this meeting tonight that I've never heard traffickers say. They come out and say they're innocent and delicate.

On the day of the sting, Tim Ballard prepared his team for the main event, explaining the logistics of the operation. One of the people on his team was Utah's appointed attorney general, Sean Reyes.

At one point, you're going to see some of the kids are going to go out and sit at the table. They're not going to hear what we say. They're just going to show them so we can get a good video of them for evidence, so they can see these are the kids. And then we ask them, Are you talking about that girl and that boy, right? What are they going to do?

Ballard's team had set up video cameras throughout the island location.

We get them to talk as dirty and as pornographic as we can. It's a punch to the stomach, but we've got to get them to do it because that's what puts them away for a long time.

The stage was set and just a few hours after his pep talk, Tim Ballard would get the PR coup of his life. But when we dug deeper into this Cartagena operation, we found that this Colombian sex trafficking sting wasn't exactly as Ballard was portraying.

Hi everyone, it's me Katie Couric. Have you heard about my newsletter? Called Body and Soul? It has everything you need to know about your physical and mental health. Personally, I'm overwhelmed by the wellness industry.

Welcome back to red-pilled America. So, on October 11, 2014, Tim Ballard and his new operation, Underground Railroad Team planned what he branded as a major sex-trafficking sting in Colombia. Now, this operation actually encompassed three Colombian cities, Cartagena, where Ballard set up a party in hopes that he'd get sex traffickers to sell him child sex slaves. And on the same day, similar parties were set up in two other Colombian cities.

Simultaneously, we were doing operations in Medellin and Armenia, Colombia as well, so it was like a huge roundup called triple Take.

But Ballard's focus was on Cartagena, that party was set up on an island.

So we get all basically the traffickers in that entire region to the same place. And they sold us all these kids, right? Ultimately, they brought the kids to the island, near to the property they wanted us to buy.

On a Saturday in October 2014, the trap was set once the alleged traffickers said something incriminating on camera and money was exchanged. Colombia federal authorities raided all three locations.

Ex-candidata reina de belleza colombiana, pasaron de un trono.

Colombia, donde una ex-reina de belleza no pierde su esposo, se pasa de la pesar.

It was almost as if the operation had a publicist, and it wasn't just Spanish-speaking media that went with the story. CBS Evening News ran a huge segment on Ballard's Cartagena operation.

Last weekend, police broke up a major sex trafficking ring in Colombia, which has become a destination for tourists looking for sex with boys and girls. The police had help from an American who went undercover to rescue the children.

Tim Ballard has one mission to track down child traffickers.

And CBS News wasn't alone in the days that followed, both ABC News and MSNBC ran stories about Ballard's child sex Slave Rescue organization as well.

Ballard is a former CIA agent and a former investigator for homeland security, specializing in human trafficking cases.

In a new film, an ex-CIA agent teams up with a Hollywood actress to liberate enslaved children throughout the world. Their team's operations are not officially sanctioned by the U.S government, but they get results. How's that for a pitch? This movie is not actually a thriller written by Hollywood screenwriters.

I imagine your work to be sort of like the Liam Neeson character in Taken, you have a particular set of skills. He believes he's rescuing children from slavery, a modern-day abolitionist. I'm a big, big Lincoln fan.

It was a massive PR windfall for Tim Ballard, and Operation Underground Railroad. American Cable and Network Television had produced major puff pieces on his work. But as information on the Columbia raid started to trickle in, some accounts began to contradict many of Ballard's claims, and CBS News is reporting.

I have to say that the CBS report was irresponsibly done, it was not good journalism.

That's investigative journalist Lynn Packer. We heard from him earlier in the series. Lynn was covering our when the 2014 operation Triple Take broke.

Operation Triple Take shows one of the biggest hypocrisies of Tim Ballard's message.

Ballard claims that he had to leave ICE because the government was tying his hands on liberating child sex slaves.

So he says, I had to quit because I want to rescue kids, because we don't do that.

I can imagine a lot of our viewers looking at this and saying, Geez, what a noble thing. But still being kind of skeptical, like there's something that doesn't sit right. Like. It feels like this should be the work of government, it absolutely should be, and if the governments were doing it, we wouldn't try this.

Now he goes in with the cooperation of the local government because they can't carry guns, and so they set up the operation. They do the sting, they set up the sex party and go in and make the arrest and free these kids. And basically, CBS follows along with that.

CBS News didn't clearly report that it was actually U.

That was an operation that was put together by the very unit, the very agency that Tim Ballard had left. And now he finds out that there's this operation going on and wants in so he can take all of his cameras. They willingly let him do it because he says, we can use this for evidence. And they did the Homeland Security people, they defended Ballard what he was doing.

But that was just one of the misrepresentations of these Colombian raids. Another was the notion that this was some major sex trafficking ring, CBS News led with that claim.

Last weekend, police broke up a major sex trafficking ring in Colombia.

But that wasn't remotely the case, one of Colombia's most important newspapers, El Giraldo, stated.

Although the operations in the three capitals took place simultaneously last weekend, the prosecutor's office has not yet established any connection between the three gangs.

Colombia's influential weekly magazine Semana added.

None of these networks were connected, they were all small, flexible, without major leaders.

The reality is that the alleged Cartagena traffickers were poor.

Red Pill de America spoke to John Montaño, a veteran reporter at El Tiempo, one of the top newspapers in Colombia.

This whole group of traffickers got together and they came to us wanting not just to supply us with children for a party. But they wanted a business partnership. They wanted us to invest in property so they could build a child sex hotel.

But it appears that it was actually Ballard that came up with that narrative, and he put that idea in the mouth of the so-called trafficker. Remember, Ballard and his team were posing as wealthy real estate investors? Well, when you review footage from his reality series, you can see that it was Ballard. That suggested they build a child sex hotel, not the alleged traffickers.

Is it possible to keep doing these kinds of parties here in a hotel? Do you know how to do that? Eduardo? Is it possible?

Of course, answered Eduardo, it wasn't the alleged traffickers idea to build a child sex hotel, it appeared to be Tim Ballard's idea. Then there were the questions of whether any children were actually being saved in the Cartagena sting. When you review footage from the Sting, it's easy to see that Tim Ballard's words don't always match what's happening on the screen.

The Cartagena operation is about to begin. I had met the traffickers at the harbor to take them to the house and they had prepped the children well.

Ballard said they were children, but even with their faces blurred, you could see that they weren't the disheveled, scared 5-12-year-old children. Sex slaves depicted in the Sound of Freedom. These people looked like the age of the crowd that you'd see at the Coachella Music Festival, and they had about the same demeanor as well. Reports varied, but somewhere between 54 to 60 youths attended Ballard's Island party. According to the Colombian prosecutor's office, over half were adults, with the remainder appearing to be high school-aged teenagers. They were not stressed-out hostages.

Well, even though they blur out a lot of the faces in the actual footage, these girls are smiling. They're all dolled up. They're all there to have a good time and make some good money.

Videos show them excitingly hooping and hollering as they got ready to board the boat to the island. And there's probably a reason for that.

He was just like, I got girls as young as 13, 12, 13.

But some of the footage from the operation tells a different story. In one scene from the reality series, Ballard speaks in Spanish to the so-called head of the alleged traffickers. And it's clear that he's the one pushing for young girls.

Over the years, Ballard has faced this accusation that by going to poor foreign countries, waving around cash and specifically demanding for young girls, he was in fact creating child victims. Ballard typically waves off this accusation as ridiculous.

We're very careful to, and there's ways that we can do this to where we're not creating demand. Right? This stupid argument that people love to make up that have no idea what they're talking about. You know, the whole oh, you are creates demand. Like, what does that mean? I don't know. But some professor told me to say that because they want the funding to write books and not rescue kids.

But Ballard clearly was the one pressing for kids with the alleged traffickers. At one point, one of the young women being offered up by the traffickers said that she could ask her minor sister to come to the party.

In 2015, I first or 16, whatever it was, I started working with Operation Underground Railroad. I was introduced to Paul Hutchinson.

That's Jimmy Rex, a former Operation Underground Railroad field operative, on a September 2023 podcast. He stated that sometimes the our operations that he was on actually created situations for kids to be trafficked when they otherwise wouldn't have been.

And now I'm going to speak to a bigger issue. That, like a lot of people have talked about whether or not we were causing trafficking to happen or not, or soliciting for trafficking.

Jimmy Rex recalled times on an operation where they'd met some young men who claimed to be pimps.

And I remember when they showed up to the party and they had these girls. And I remember thinking to myself, like, did these guys just go round up some girls they know? Or like, whatever? And said, come to this party. Sleep with these Americans, these rich Americans will pay you or something. And I never, it just never sat right with me and I saw that firsthand. And so when people say, maybe they create trafficking, I'm not saying that didn't happen.

It isn't only professors claiming Tim Ballard was creating the demand for child sex trafficking, it was one of his former operatives as well.

They flash big money and say, bring kids.

All this leads to a logical question What really happened on that Cartagena raid? I mean, people were arrested. The Colombian prosecutor's office did say that there were minors at the party as young as 13 years old, not the 11-year-olds, Ballard was claiming, but they were still minors.

So I started a free newsletter called Good Taste that comes out every Thursday, and it's serving up recipes that will make your mouth water. Think a candied bacon, bloody Mary tacos with cabbage slaw, curry, cauliflower with almonds and mint, and cherry slab pie with vanilla ice cream to top it all off. I mean, yum, I'm getting hungry.

Join today and help us save America one story at a time, welcome back to red Pilled America. So when we began looking into Tim Ballard's famed Cartagena sting operation, we learned that. The alleged child sex traffickers were all released from prison. None of them have been convicted of child sex trafficking, they're all free.

We're in regular contact with the prosecutor's office, showing them our video, our audio, making sure that we are constantly in line with their prosecutorial guidelines.

Ballard claimed the video evidence he was capturing would put them away for a long time.

It's Operation Day. We set up hidden cameras to capture video and audio of the traffickers for evidence. This media becomes essential in the court cases against the traffickers that we're going to arrest today and ensures that they go away for a long time. We get them to talk as dirty and as pornographic as we can. It's a punch to the stomach, but we got to get them to do it because that's what puts them away for a long time.

He claimed that he caught the traffickers saying things that made it effectively a closed and shut case.

I'm glad it went well.

It went so, so well, it went so well. I'm telling you, they said things at this meeting tonight that I've never heard traffickers say. I've never heard them talk. Because they're trying to distance themselves a little bit from how horrible this is.

The potential sentence for their alleged crimes was reportedly 20 years.

The code says that when there are more than three detainees, there are 240 days for the authorities to start the trial. And it hasn't started, not because of the defense. We filed a habeas corpus after several requests for release due to term expiration.

Kelly Johanna Suarez was released from jail in April 2016, on her 22nd birthday. Shortly after her release, she spoke to the media.

We asked the prosecutor's office to stop the media spectacle and to thoroughly investigate and arrest the networks that provide the funding and the pedophiles who hire these services. The prosecutor's office is still failing Cartagena as they present people without substantial evidence or charges, and later they are released.

Denounced Cartagena lawyer Heido Rojas for Kelly Johanna Suarez's part, she appeared to take her defense into her own hands. As of this broadcast, Kelly Johanna Suarez is a law student and has periodically represented herself in the 2014 sex trafficking hearings that still seem to flare up in Colombian courts.

Coming up on Red Pill of America.

The Davis County attorney, Troy Rawlings. He knew Sean Reyes, he knew of Operation Underground Railroad. He suspected that it was basically a scam, a way to solicit donor money.

The Davis County Attorney's Office has opened a criminal investigation into operation Underground Railroad.

Before we started filming the movie, we made a beautiful deal with Fox Latin America.

But then Disney bought Fox.

I got an email from them and a phone call saying that this movie is not for them.

In the meantime, Tim Ballard and Eduardo Verastegui find Angel Studios. They realize, OK, this is a way that we can market the movie.

The greatest threat to children right now, honestly, more than the traffickers in a lot of cases, are people that disparage others in the nonprofit industry.

The women suing Tim Ballard and our contend those trips they took with him overseas were not what they appeared to be.

Red Pill of America is an iHeartRadio original podcast. It's owned and produced by Patrick Karelchi and Me Adriana Cortez of Informed Ventures. Now, you can get ad-free access to our entire archive of episodes by becoming a backstage subscriber. To subscribe, visit redpilledamerica..com and click Join in the top menu. Thanks for listening.