Going Rogue with Lara Logan - THE SCREW WORM BIOWEAPON & THE CARTELS with Expert Ammon Blair | Going Rogue with Lara Logan | Ep 86
Who’s Pushing the Latest Attack On America’s Food Supply?
In this explosive episode, Lara Logan sits down with Ammon Blair — former U.S. Border Patrol agent, U.S. Army infantry officer, and Senior Research Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation — to expose one of the most disturbing threats slipping across the southern border: the New World Screwworm.
Once nearly eradicated in the U.S., this flesh-eating blowfly is back. It lays eggs in open wounds as small as a tick bite, where hundreds of maggots hatch and burrow into living tissue — devastating livestock, wildlife, pets, and potentially humans. With confirmed cases surging in Mexico and already appearing in the United States, the economic and national security implications are massive.
Ammon Blair breaks down how Mexican cartels are exploiting cattle trafficking routes to move infected animals northward, flooding legitimate supply chains with falsified documents. He connects the outbreak to cartel territorial expansion through protected rainforests, the failures of open border policies, and the collapse of domain awareness along the Texas border. The conversation dives deep into how cartels have evolved from drug runners into hybrid terrorist organizations controlling food supply chains — turning America’s dependence on Mexican imports into a strategic vulnerability.
Lara and Ammon explore whether the screwworm’s resurgence is merely opportunistic or something far more sinister, including possible bioweapon origins and gain-of-function research ties. They also examine the broader picture: NAFTA’s lasting damage, offshored food production, and the urgent need for operational control of the border.
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00:00 Screwworm Horror: Flesh-Eating Maggots
00:43 Introducing Ammon Blair
02:02 What Is the Screwworm?
06:21 Cartels, Cattle, and Territorial Control
16:47 The Evolution of Mexican Cartels
20:29 NAFTA, Avocados & America’s Food Dependence
30:54 Screwworm as a Bioweapon?
35:48 How Cartels Are Weaponizing Cattle
40:44 Border Security Failures & Domain Awareness
51:34 Closing Thoughts & Where to Follow Ammon Blair
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Screwworm, Flesh Eating Parasite, Southern Border Crisis, Cartel Bioweapon, Food Supply Threat, Lara Logan Ammon Blair, Mexican Cartels, Border Security, Livestock Disease, Bioweapon 2026, Texas Ranchers, Open Border, Screwworm Outbreak, National Security, Cartel Cattle Trafficking, USDA, Darien Gap, Food Supply Chain
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Lara Logan: Welcome to this week's episode of Going Rogue with Lara Logan, and my guest this week is one of the most clever people I have ever known, Ammon Blair, who is a senior research fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and before that worked on the southern border as a border patrol agent for many years. I met him down there in the sweat and the heat of the madness of the southern border. Ammon, and also an infantry officer in the United States Army, and of course, your career cut short because you, out of principle, refused to take the COVID shot — the kill shot — which was, in retrospect, a fantastic idea, Ammon, although I know it cost you dearly, losing a career that you loved very, very much. I think you're coming back to that, right? They're restoring you.
Ammon Blair: Yes, ma'am. Yeah, I'm going through the review process right now as we speak.
Lara Logan: Okay, well, we wish you well with that, but we aren't here to talk about COVID and your restoration in the military, although that is a very important thing. We are here today to talk about something that is making the news a little bit, because it has spread from Mexico across the southern border into the United States, and it is called the screwworm. Now, the title alone, of course, lends itself to memes and sounds crazy, so people may not be taking it seriously, but I've been investigating this as a bioweapon and I'm very concerned about what I've found, Ammon, and you've been writing about this, you've been studying this. I know that you do work on a lot of different things. You are a devoted Texan and a wonderful father, and a great person. But one of the things that I have always appreciated about knowing you over many years is how much I learned from you. So for those in the audience who don't know what screwworm really is, can you explain it, please? It's this flesh-eating, horrible, disgusting... I did all those videos, yes, looking, you know, researching this. And it was horrible.
Ammon Blair: Yeah, well, first, thanks for having me on here. I greatly appreciate the opportunity. And then, two, yeah, so really it's a blowfly that lands on any victim. It's attracted to the scent of open wounds or sores, and it lays eggs inside of those, as small as a tick bite. So if you're out in the woods and you get a tick bite, the fly can actually go in and lay eggs inside of you. And so the eggs themselves hatch within roughly a day — could be up to ten hours to a day. And then when they hatch, they start eating you. So it's not like other flies that are attracted to dead carcasses. This is a fly that is attracted to live [tissue]. And so the screwworms start to eat living flesh. And if you look at the body of the maggot itself...
Lara Logan: I really try not to... it kinda looks like a screw.
Ammon Blair: Right? And so it has like these somewhat spikes and it's in a spiral form so that it can dig its way more into your flesh. The flies will come in and then start laying more eggs, and then you could have up to three hundred to four hundred maggots inside of you, eating you.
Lara Logan: Wow. Okay. So, Ammon, that is disgusting. Okay. It's just truly disgusting. But the disturbing thing is that it is very, very real. And those flies can land on your livestock if you're a rancher providing meat for people in this country. They can land on your horses. They can land on your pets. You know, I think everybody knows at this point I have eleven dogs and nine cats, and so I don't want those flies on my cats 'cause I've seen the video, you know, where it's just awful. In fact, screwworm has been around for quite some time, and USDA, when you go to their website, you can look up the old videos, right? You can see them. I love those old videos because they really help you understand what you're looking at and give it some context. But what I took away from that is that these screwworms that are really — I don't know why we call them worms because the larvae burrow — but they really come from the fly. Right? And they drop off these wounds into the ground, and that's where they form that cocoon around themselves, and then they're reborn. And it's a much bigger problem in a hot place than a cold place, right? Because like in Texas, we don't have the cold to freeze them and make it difficult for them to survive. So it's across all these southern states that are super hot over the summer where it's going to get worse, is that right?
Ammon Blair: Yes, ma'am, and that's why it's still so prevalent in South America, even though we somewhat eradicated it completely all the way down to Panama by 2006, and we had like a containment zone near the Darién Gap. But if you look at how much loss the countries in South America have in their agriculture sector, you'll see that it's somewhere like $3.6 billion in terms of the amount of loss that they currently have each year because of the screwworm.
Lara Logan: Okay, so we're talking now more than two thousand people affected in this current outbreak, and how many animals?
Ammon Blair: Yeah, so right now you have about eighteen hundred live cases that are south of us in Mexico. You have right now, I think, nineteen cases in the United States already. Overall since 2023, when the CDC started really paying attention, it's a little over a hundred and eighty thousand cases. Now, the majority of these are gonna be from your livestock or from ranchers. So we really don't — you know, the amount because of wildlife, right? There's only like a few groups that are actually looking into this in the wildlife sector, and that's actually the Wildlife Conservation Society. They're the ones who have actually tracked this more than almost anyone else, as well as Inside Crime. And it's because they were actually looking into the jungles of Mesoamerica, like in Central America, for the eradication of the protected rainforests, and that's when they realized that the cartels were utilizing the cattle industry to gain control over territory, and that's when they really started tracking this issue themselves.
Lara Logan: What do you mean the cartels were using this to take over territory? Can you explain that, please?
Ammon Blair: Sure. So the Mexican cartels were seeking to gain territory. Whether you're an insurgency, a foreign terrorist organization or whatnot, territory matters, whether that's in conventional war or asymmetric war. Having control of territory means that you can use that to forward your operations, whatever those operations are. And so the cartels know this, and so they were using cattle to seize territory or terrain in really four or five protected areas in Central America: Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. And when you look at the area, the rainforest where it's at, it buttresses up against the Guatemalan and Mexico border. And so the cartels were going in and utilizing or quote-unquote using the cattle industry as a way to gain access to that area and seek to gain control over land. And so they gained control over millions of hectares of land across Mesoamerica, so Central America, and they used the cattle industry to do that as a catalyst to gain control of it.
Lara Logan: What do you mean, like buying up cattle ranches or—
Ammon Blair: Yeah, narco ranches inside of protected rainforests.
Lara Logan: I see. So they basically just threw money at the problem, right? And is that how they got past the conservationists and the protected areas?
[Ad read for Purge advanced parasite cleanse by Lara Logan — omitted from main discussion transcript for brevity.]
Ammon Blair: So the conservationists are the only ones who are actually showing this. They've been using drones, technology kind of like what we have on our southern border, AI, to try to protect this. And that's when they really found out the true level of who is actually destroying the rainforests. It's actually foreign terrorist organizations, the Mexican cartels, and also the various cartels in South America, not just Mexican cartels.
Lara Logan: So the Colombians?
Ammon Blair: Colombians and then, like, if you look at Guatemala right now... Guatemala is in a really bad place right now, and it's because of CJNG, Sinaloa, but also because of the internal gangs, the transnational gangs in Guatemala.
Lara Logan: MS-13?
Ammon Blair: Yep.
Lara Logan: And for people who don't know, CJNG — Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación out of Guadalajara in Mexico — and Sinaloa, obviously one of the oldest and one of the biggest cartels in Mexico.
Lara Logan: Okay, so Ammon, gosh, you know that talking about that eating, flesh-eating thing makes me itchy like all over, it's so disgusting, but more than that, it has a cost. And I wanna talk about the physical costs and the cost to the food industry, but since we're talking about the cartels moving into these areas, what it reminds me of, Ammon, is I recall when you and I were working together on — really you were helping me understand how these cartels have transformed from narco-terrorist organizations... Can you just tell people a little about that?
Ammon Blair: [Detailed history of cartel evolution from marijuana/heroin to cocaine, PRI one-party rule, debt crisis, NAFTA impacts, avocado trade, supply chain control, etc. — full details preserved in the raw audio.]
Lara Logan: [Discussion on NAFTA, food supply offshoring, California water policy, national security implications, cartel designation as terrorists.]
Lara Logan: Okay, so Ammon, how is the cartel using the screwworm as a bioweapon and why?
Ammon Blair: [Explanation linking emergence to 2021 Darién Gap migration surge, smuggling routes, cattle trafficking, falsified documents, economic destabilization, interstate trade impacts, etc.]
Lara Logan: [Further discussion on border security failures, domain awareness, private property issues in Texas, horse/cattle smuggling methods, satanic nature of cartel violence.]
Lara Logan: The question is, Ammon, I know that we are running out of time... who's directing the cartels? ... And then, you know, according to sources... this goes back to Fort Detrick, Maryland... Can you confirm that there's been gain-of-function research into the screwworm at Fort Detrick?
Ammon Blair: You know, I've been researching it... So I'm looking into that research right now as well.
Lara Logan: Okay, well, I definitely want to talk more to you about this, Ammon... Would you disagree with that [bioweapon characterization]?
Ammon Blair: No, I wouldn't disagree with that... based off their actions, it looks as such...
Lara Logan: Thank you so much, Ammon. It's great to talk to you. ... Where can people find you and where can they follow you?
Ammon Blair: Everyone can look at my work at texaspolicy.com or they can follow me at @AmmonSBlair.
Lara Logan: Ammon S. Blair, B-L-A-I-R, right? ... Thank you so much, Ammon. We'll talk to you again soon... Thank you, everybody, for watching, and as always, I'm so grateful. Thank you for being bold enough to go rogue with Lara Logan.
