So you're forced to join a gang and fight their rival gangs, or you form your own gang equipped with rifles and grenades ready to commit violence, so that you can fight against joining that gang, or any other gang. Either way you're in a violent gang.
I guess I'd rather have the state maintain a monopoly on violence.
The state monopoly on violence (+ a judicial system) tends to result in a low amount of violence... at least intra-state. Wars are another matter. Notably, there is no monopoly on violence between states. States are allowed and somewhat expected to be violent psychopaths externally.
Internally as well, given what happens to any push back against law enforcement where I live- in the US, at least, if you try to defend yourself against state violence you'll be summarily executed in the street.
The conflict isn't because of the lack of monopoly. The conflict and lack of monopoly are because whoever as the closest thing to a monopoly is doing such a bad job.
Reminds me of when ISIS was at its peak a few years ago and the BBC and all other news in the UK would always prefix it with “the so-called Islamic State”.
Like… no, it was a state. It had borders, it had a monopoly on violence within those borders, it collected taxes, it provided some public services.
Whether it offended the BBC’s sensibilities or not, it was a state
You are completely correct. As much as many people don´t want to hear it, Mexico is a failing state. It´s extremely obvious when you are there that the United Mexican States lost most of the reins some time ago.
It started with the debt crisis, and its causes, but was definitively realized by 1994 when the Zapatistas took much of Chiapas.
Too much emphasis is put on the drug cartels alone, when the problem is much larger. I suspect by the end of the century maps will no longer show Mexico in its current form.
They are not states, but a tool of regional political groups. They do the illegal things politicians in power avoid if they want to maintain the facade. They don't have the monopoly of violence, they're intentionally allowed to act without serious retaliation.
Idk. I'd probably put it the other way - part of the state turned into gangs.
Most of the core leadership of major cartels who haven't been arrested were mid-level officers in the DFS (Mexico's version of Italy's SID and Turkey's MIT from Operation Gladio days).
And what is interesting isn't the narcos who are arrested and indicted by the DoJ, but those who are arrested and then let go.
The story of Salvador Cienfuegos is a good example of that - arrested by the DEA on drug charges that were sealed while being Defense Minister, but charges were dropped for diplomatic reasons [0] or the DEA's investigation into AMLO in the 2000s and 2010s that was eventually dropped [1]. Meanwhile, giants like El Chapo or El Viceroy were successfully extradited or in the case of El Mencho killed.
To me, it feels like "untouchables" like Cienfuegos, Adán Augusto López, and Marcelo Ebrard or established networks even above them are likely running the show.
Sort of like how the KGB broke bad in the 90s or the Turkish military in the 1980s-2000s or the KCIA before Korea democratized in the 1990s or how leaders in the vice industry in Thailand tend to be associated with military leadership or how both the IRA and Protestant paramilitaries turned into drug cartels in North Ireland.
I also don't think it's a party ideological thing - PRI, PAN, and now MORENA have the same mid- and upper-level people.
But further, perhaps our sense of morality atrophies when we concede the idea of just violence (just as in "justice") only to the state.
I presume those fighting the cartels might have more of a developed sense of civic pride and duty than anyone in a more stable place. Perhaps I'm wrong though
> But further, perhaps our sense of morality atrophies when we concede the idea of just violence (just as in "justice") only to the state.
> I presume those fighting the cartels might have more of a developed sense of civic pride and duty than anyone in a more stable place. Perhaps I'm wrong though
100%. You can either become familiar with violence and temper it, or you are simply subject to violence by anyone that wishes it upon you.
For most of the Western world we grow up as "house cats", but that isn't the case in much of the world.
Without oversight, a self-defense militia may expand beyond its original scope in unfortunate ways. The history of the Italian Mafia can be instructive here.
I'm pretty sure that a self defense militia was the standard way that people would defend their farms and livelihoods against violent outsiders for the majority of human history
That gang has international arms. They have logistics trains. They have industry analysts! Sometimes maybe they have Pay and HR issues. They're a global business with external trade agreements with elements in other countries. They lease other business services back and forth like B2B.
The only equating I did was to point out that either way you're stuck having to align with a group of people willing and ready to commit lethal violence with lethal weapons.
Use whatever words you want but I think that's clearly violent and it's clearly a gang, which by definition is "a group of persons working together" or even more specifically, "a group of persons working to unlawful or antisocial ends". In this case the newly formed gang is certainly unlawful.
I'm not sure that it's certainly unlawful to defend yourself against gang violence, but I'm not a Mexican lawyer. It's such an odd thing to say that people defending their homes are now a gang because they fight back against the cartel.
Mexico has gun laws which are significantly more restrictive than the USA. There is only one legal gun store in the country, they must all be permitted, calibers are limited, and only permitted within the place of residence. "Monopoly on violence" is an illusion that's propped up mostly by the culture of the people who live in a country.
Sweden's gun homicide rate has increased by 400% since 2010 due to nothing other than demographic change.
In the 1990s, I traveled into Tijuana from San Diego County a few times. We usually walked, because of reasons.
For people traveling north into the USA, the border checkpoint included long queues of vehicles and people alike, customs inspections, routine searches of everything, passport checks, and questions by actual Border Patrol officers.
Walking south into Mexico, there was a broad, unsupervised walkway and a one-way turnstile. Large signs read:
It's not an ideal situation, but since the Mexican government refuses to do its job and protect their people and uphold the law what choice do they have?
Right now these people are just doing whatever they can to survive but it's just treating the symptom. The source of the problem is the Mexican government who is either incompetent or happy to take bribes to look the other way while their citizens are left the mercy of paramilitary gangs.
What can the government do at this point? We are talking about criminal syndicates with basically standing armies. If the Mexican government goes to all out war it will lead to a humanitarian disaster.
They should send in the army. How is what's happening there now not already a war and a humanitarian disaster? The only difference is that the civilians are the ones forced into fighting and they're having to buy their guns from rival gangs to do it. Actual soldiers with the firepower of the government should be doing the fighting instead of random farmers.
He fought a war against unsanctioned drug trafficking. Drugs are not an enemy you can defeat. He should have gone to war against the cartels, but then I guess that's hard to do when your Secretariat of Public Security is working for them. Either way, as with any war, deaths are to be expected. Freedom and sovereignty are usually considered to be worth the cost.
This is not your usual vigilante group. This is a reaction to an overwhelming force of criminal gangs killing citizens and the government being powerless to stop them.
> Is the Mexican government, with their tens of billions in military spending, actually "powerless" to stop these gangs? I very much doubt it.
Then to be blunt, you don't know how a fucking thing.
The cartels have their own intelligent networks, anti-air missiles, RPGs and anti-tank weapons, encrypted radio comms and their own 5G/LTE networks. They have helicopters, armored vehicles, etc. In many cases they have the support* of the people.
* through fear, intimidation, coercion, social bonds, financial motivators, etc.
If the cartels had more military fighting power and training than the entire Mexican army, air force, and navy the entire country would have been overthrown by now. If Mexico's entire armed forces really are outgunned and outclassed then I guess the cartels should have it. They might as well take Canada too since their military is roughly as powerful as Mexico's and there's a long list of countries with far less military spending then Mexico they could consider invading since they are so unstoppable.
The strength of a military or militant organization is not a binary concept. It is context dependent.. a remote mountain area is the kind of place that the military you describe simply is spread too thin to have much coverage of. Sure they could go beat an insurgent in a single battle but that insurgent will dissolve into the hillsides and re emerge later..
Many countries are effectively ruled by gangs and cartels. That’s why kings became kind of a big deal in Europe. The states monopoly on violence was solidified back the
> At some point when your government is so corrupt, you got to take weapon and organize yourself. It's sad.
At that point you might as well point those weapons at the failed government that forced you to have to play soldier instead of protecting you. Not allowing your own citizens to be enslaved by roving bands of criminals is like the single most basic thing a country's government is for. Since the Mexican government has abandoned them and ceded control of that land to hostile armies I hope those poor farmers aren't still paying them taxes.
A characteristic of most of Latin America is that the Police and the Army were created to protect power, not the people, and there hasn't really been an effort to change the mentality.
Meanwhile in the US the laws are being changed to protect the wealthy, while the current administration is siphoning value of national assets into their own pockets. The poorer the country, the more likely this is to happen. I wonder how long it will take for warlords to set up shop in Kansas...
Back in the 60's and 70's my Dad worked or Lockheed Martin. He made frequent trips to Mexico to work with engineering teams there on projects he was working on. It only took him one trip to realize how corrupt the police were.
He had parked outside of his hotel with his rental car. Came out. It was surrounded by Policia. They told him he couldn't park here. "Sure thing, I'll move it and not park here again." "You don't understand gringo, you have to pay the parking fine now." He caught on, and asked how much it would cost to just park here, you know, rent this spot instead of paying their fine? The cops gave him an amount and he paid it and they left him alone the rest of the week he was there. He told me a bunch of other stories about the corruption there, not just the cops. It was pretty eye opening to hear some of these.
The corruption can't be fixed. Its engrained in the system. It was rampant fifty years ago, there is no fixing it - its completely normalized now. The cartels simply used the system against itself to gain total control and power.
Because of their neighbors to the north having an insatiable appetite and willingness to spend large amounts of money on illicit goods. Mexico should probably legalize and bring these into a regulated state of the United States would not allow it
The proper solution is to end the war on drugs, allowing people to do what they will with their own bodies. Once people can legally buy their drugs, the cartels will starve.
Use the money saved from reducing our prison population by 75% to pay for widely-accessible treatment for addiction as well as mental health problems. Build more affordable housing so homelessness is less of an issue. As an added bonus: roll back the last half-century of disastrous trickle-down economics which gutted the middle class, so there's less incentive to start using in the first place.
Reminder: the Nixon tapes reveal that the war on drugs was started in the first place not to protect the public from harmful drugs but rather as a means to criminalize his political enemies (e.g., hippies and black people) in a way that couldn't be challenged in court on 14th amendment grounds.
The problem, of course, is those solutions are hard, it's a lot easier to get voters to root for building more walls and sending troops to kill more foreigners, and there's a lot of money to be made by the military industrial complex and private prison system by prolonging the problem.
That is a pipedream coming from some one who supports drug legalization, you think a multi billion dollar enterprise with unique position of having weapons and even armies are gonna pack their bags after USA become a drug haven?
No they will do what they do now:
Expand into other illegal and legal venues and worst case attempt a coup.
Why should the US be fighting Mexican gangs? Mexico should send their own army to fight the criminal gangs. If we want to send our army after gangs we have plenty of them right here in the US. We could start with the ones in our Sheriff's Departments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangs_in_the_Los_Angeles_Count...
If you think the outputs of Mexican cartels stay in Mexico, you're severely underinformed. Do you know how many civilian deaths (to say nothing of human trafficking and more) are directly due to Mexican cartels?
The US absolutely has an interest in the destruction of Mexican cartels.
I'm not uninformed about cartel drug manufacturing and resulting American deaths. That's why we had to seal the border, and we need to keep enforcing it. But to send troops into a country that denies their entry is another thing.
I don't mind bombing the cartels from a distance. I'd rather the U.S. continues to pursue diplomatic options vs. war.
What's the difference between an American drone operator dropping a bomb on cartels in Mexico, and an American infantryman shooting at cartels in Mexico?
Also the cartels are funded and propped up by the CIA. We need them to destabilize the Mexican government, launder blood money, traffic children for our rich pedophiles and push drugs into our poor neighborhoods.
Related, Colombia's new president Abelardo d' Espriella is getting sworn in in a couple hours. He won a somewhat close election against a more peace process party, on a platform of radical violence & all out total war against the various cartels, gangs, and rebel factions.
Definitely huge echoes of El Salvador's intense crackdown. But it seems pretty uncertain that he actually has the military force capable of doing this. Colombia's wide array of insurgents are far more organized and well equipped than El Salvador, ala the Mexico situation here; this isn't like the nasty but kind of low level violence of El Salvador. Who all in all had a pretty easy time at it just built a ton of super brutal prisons, stripping legal protections, and then rounding up a couple % of the state's population immediately (and letting some go too, eventually, after months of brutal incarceration).
I'd love recommendations beyond War Fronts, who in tune into a decent bit. I need to subscribe, to support. They just had a video on Colombia today. https://youtu.be/OiQZCJmkmR8
Those responsible for all those deaths are those doing drugs. A debate could be had as to drugs should be legal or not but if you're doing coke, meth, fentanyl, etc. you simply are part of the problem because those drugs are illegal and represent a big part of the 3 to 5% of the worldwide GDP that's linked to crime (official World CIA factbook numbers).
You are funding these cartels. You are both complicit and responsible for the countless deaths and power these cartels and drug dealers have.
I don't think the US should be fighting drug cartels: I think the US should be punishing consumers much, much, much more.
Have fun thinking about those killed by drug cartels next time you sniff.
Very sad but true post. When you think about it many of the ones who are downvoting this post are the children and grandchildren of old dopeheads who created the market that the cartels eventually began to fill. None of this happened without the consent of ordinary Americans who chose to consume the illegal drugs. All of these people share responsibility for the deaths of those who lost their lives due to addiction, whether theirs or someone else's. The tens of thousands of people who have died in Mexico and Central America while trying to stay out of the way of these cartels and their violence all died because Americans created and still sustain a market for illegal drugs.
Those with the most blame are the ones highest placed in our system who knew about and facilitated the smuggling, paying Americans along the way to assist, so that drugs could be located by anyone interested no matter where in this country they lived. They helped create the system that would lead to incarceration of people at the bottom of the ladder while those at the top who financed it all and benefited the most from it escape accountability. They created a network of small-town airports, private airstrips, and safe houses where distribution could be managed in a way that shielded the money people from the operations.
If you are a drug user, even a casual experimenter in your own home, your drug use continues to cause death and misery to uncounted other people and that makes you partly responsible for the societal destruction that drugs have wrought.
I was under the impression ferrying migrants over the border and avocados were almost as big revenue streams as the drugs. Et tu, avocado toast and gardener?
No, not really, it's two orders of magnitude smaller overall. Drugs, gold (from illegal mines in the Amazon) and weapons (from US lost military stock/police seizure mostly) drive cartels economy (in that order last time I checked, pre-covid).
Human trafficking and racketeering are for smaller, more local gangs. Most illegal immigrants cross the border legally and overstay, and racketeering have a scale issue. It might have changed recently but I don't see how.
So you're forced to join a gang and fight their rival gangs, or you form your own gang equipped with rifles and grenades ready to commit violence, so that you can fight against joining that gang, or any other gang. Either way you're in a violent gang.
I guess I'd rather have the state maintain a monopoly on violence.
These gangs are states. We can tell this because they have monopolies on violence.
The entire reason there is any conflict there is a lack of a monopoly on violence… The monopoly part is significant. It’s not just “doing a lot of”.
I don't think you need total control, just enough so that you're the go-to party for diplomatic and military negotiations in the geopolitical region.
In this case it's like cable TV. Only not a monopoly if you look at the whole country...
Personally I would prefer no violence from either side…
The state monopoly on violence (+ a judicial system) tends to result in a low amount of violence... at least intra-state. Wars are another matter. Notably, there is no monopoly on violence between states. States are allowed and somewhat expected to be violent psychopaths externally.
Internally as well, given what happens to any push back against law enforcement where I live- in the US, at least, if you try to defend yourself against state violence you'll be summarily executed in the street.
Personally, I would prefer 10B USD liquid and tax-free
The conflict isn't because of the lack of monopoly. The conflict and lack of monopoly are because whoever as the closest thing to a monopoly is doing such a bad job.
So Russia isn't a state?
Reminds me of when ISIS was at its peak a few years ago and the BBC and all other news in the UK would always prefix it with “the so-called Islamic State”.
Like… no, it was a state. It had borders, it had a monopoly on violence within those borders, it collected taxes, it provided some public services.
Whether it offended the BBC’s sensibilities or not, it was a state
Are you sure that the "so-called" was addressing the claim of statehood, and not of being Muslim?
You are completely correct. As much as many people don´t want to hear it, Mexico is a failing state. It´s extremely obvious when you are there that the United Mexican States lost most of the reins some time ago.
It started with the debt crisis, and its causes, but was definitively realized by 1994 when the Zapatistas took much of Chiapas.
Too much emphasis is put on the drug cartels alone, when the problem is much larger. I suspect by the end of the century maps will no longer show Mexico in its current form.
They are not states, but a tool of regional political groups. They do the illegal things politicians in power avoid if they want to maintain the facade. They don't have the monopoly of violence, they're intentionally allowed to act without serious retaliation.
Very relevant book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Cartels_Do_Not_Exist
Idk. I'd probably put it the other way - part of the state turned into gangs.
Most of the core leadership of major cartels who haven't been arrested were mid-level officers in the DFS (Mexico's version of Italy's SID and Turkey's MIT from Operation Gladio days).
And what is interesting isn't the narcos who are arrested and indicted by the DoJ, but those who are arrested and then let go.
The story of Salvador Cienfuegos is a good example of that - arrested by the DEA on drug charges that were sealed while being Defense Minister, but charges were dropped for diplomatic reasons [0] or the DEA's investigation into AMLO in the 2000s and 2010s that was eventually dropped [1]. Meanwhile, giants like El Chapo or El Viceroy were successfully extradited or in the case of El Mencho killed.
To me, it feels like "untouchables" like Cienfuegos, Adán Augusto López, and Marcelo Ebrard or established networks even above them are likely running the show.
Sort of like how the KGB broke bad in the 90s or the Turkish military in the 1980s-2000s or the KCIA before Korea democratized in the 1990s or how leaders in the vice industry in Thailand tend to be associated with military leadership or how both the IRA and Protestant paramilitaries turned into drug cartels in North Ireland.
I also don't think it's a party ideological thing - PRI, PAN, and now MORENA have the same mid- and upper-level people.
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/08/magazine/mexico-general-c...
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/world/americas/mexico-pre...
I agree, not all violence is the same.
But further, perhaps our sense of morality atrophies when we concede the idea of just violence (just as in "justice") only to the state.
I presume those fighting the cartels might have more of a developed sense of civic pride and duty than anyone in a more stable place. Perhaps I'm wrong though
> But further, perhaps our sense of morality atrophies when we concede the idea of just violence (just as in "justice") only to the state.
> I presume those fighting the cartels might have more of a developed sense of civic pride and duty than anyone in a more stable place. Perhaps I'm wrong though
100%. You can either become familiar with violence and temper it, or you are simply subject to violence by anyone that wishes it upon you.
For most of the Western world we grow up as "house cats", but that isn't the case in much of the world.
Not sure its fair to equate a gang fueled by drug smuggling to a self-defense militia.
Without oversight, a self-defense militia may expand beyond its original scope in unfortunate ways. The history of the Italian Mafia can be instructive here.
I'm pretty sure that a self defense militia was the standard way that people would defend their farms and livelihoods against violent outsiders for the majority of human history
Apparently, words can just mean whatever people want, so long as it aligns with one's feelings or helps them feel superior to others.
Yeah, I guess "self-defense militia" aligns more closely with some people's feelings than "violent gang" does. To each his own.
In case you need one, you have made a friend. Excellent comment, which fits the scene as might a custom tailored glove.
The reminded me of Johnnie Cochran "If the glove don't fit, you must acquit" slogan he used during the O.J. Simpson murder trial.
That gang has international arms. They have logistics trains. They have industry analysts! Sometimes maybe they have Pay and HR issues. They're a global business with external trade agreements with elements in other countries. They lease other business services back and forth like B2B.
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Oh yeah, you wont catch me defending the US government one bit.
What I'm saying is a group of people in a community taking up arms to defend themselves is not inherently the same as a drug cartel.
The only equating I did was to point out that either way you're stuck having to align with a group of people willing and ready to commit lethal violence with lethal weapons.
Use whatever words you want but I think that's clearly violent and it's clearly a gang, which by definition is "a group of persons working together" or even more specifically, "a group of persons working to unlawful or antisocial ends". In this case the newly formed gang is certainly unlawful.
I'm not sure that it's certainly unlawful to defend yourself against gang violence, but I'm not a Mexican lawyer. It's such an odd thing to say that people defending their homes are now a gang because they fight back against the cartel.
Laws != morality
> I guess I'd rather have the state maintain a monopoly on violence.
Like the Taliban?
All states maintain a monopoly on violence. That's literally the definition of a state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
Did you respond to the wrong comment?
The OP is saying they want the state to maintain the monopoly on violence.
My counter to that argument is the very existence of the current Afghan government.
It's a "Are you sure you want that?" statement.
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Mexico has gun laws which are significantly more restrictive than the USA. There is only one legal gun store in the country, they must all be permitted, calibers are limited, and only permitted within the place of residence. "Monopoly on violence" is an illusion that's propped up mostly by the culture of the people who live in a country.
Sweden's gun homicide rate has increased by 400% since 2010 due to nothing other than demographic change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_Sweden
In the 1990s, I traveled into Tijuana from San Diego County a few times. We usually walked, because of reasons.
For people traveling north into the USA, the border checkpoint included long queues of vehicles and people alike, customs inspections, routine searches of everything, passport checks, and questions by actual Border Patrol officers.
Walking south into Mexico, there was a broad, unsupervised walkway and a one-way turnstile. Large signs read:
And that was it! We were in Mexico!These self defense groups sound great until you think about all the problems with vigilante groups. Also they have a history of turning into cartels.
That and all things being equal I suspect most of the people in these groups would rather not be fighting.
It's not an ideal situation, but since the Mexican government refuses to do its job and protect their people and uphold the law what choice do they have?
Right now these people are just doing whatever they can to survive but it's just treating the symptom. The source of the problem is the Mexican government who is either incompetent or happy to take bribes to look the other way while their citizens are left the mercy of paramilitary gangs.
What can the government do at this point? We are talking about criminal syndicates with basically standing armies. If the Mexican government goes to all out war it will lead to a humanitarian disaster.
They should send in the army. How is what's happening there now not already a war and a humanitarian disaster? The only difference is that the civilians are the ones forced into fighting and they're having to buy their guns from rival gangs to do it. Actual soldiers with the firepower of the government should be doing the fighting instead of random farmers.
Calderón did exactly that. Fought an all-out war with the cartels. 60,000 people dead and nothing changed.
He fought a war against unsanctioned drug trafficking. Drugs are not an enemy you can defeat. He should have gone to war against the cartels, but then I guess that's hard to do when your Secretariat of Public Security is working for them. Either way, as with any war, deaths are to be expected. Freedom and sovereignty are usually considered to be worth the cost.
What choice do they have?
This is not your usual vigilante group. This is a reaction to an overwhelming force of criminal gangs killing citizens and the government being powerless to stop them.
> This is a reaction to an overwhelming force of criminal gangs killing citizens and the government being powerless to stop them.
Is the Mexican government, with their tens of billions in military spending, actually "powerless" to stop these gangs? I very much doubt it.
> Is the Mexican government, with their tens of billions in military spending, actually "powerless" to stop these gangs? I very much doubt it.
Then to be blunt, you don't know how a fucking thing.
The cartels have their own intelligent networks, anti-air missiles, RPGs and anti-tank weapons, encrypted radio comms and their own 5G/LTE networks. They have helicopters, armored vehicles, etc. In many cases they have the support* of the people.
* through fear, intimidation, coercion, social bonds, financial motivators, etc.
The cartels also have tens of billions.
If the cartels had more military fighting power and training than the entire Mexican army, air force, and navy the entire country would have been overthrown by now. If Mexico's entire armed forces really are outgunned and outclassed then I guess the cartels should have it. They might as well take Canada too since their military is roughly as powerful as Mexico's and there's a long list of countries with far less military spending then Mexico they could consider invading since they are so unstoppable.
The strength of a military or militant organization is not a binary concept. It is context dependent.. a remote mountain area is the kind of place that the military you describe simply is spread too thin to have much coverage of. Sure they could go beat an insurgent in a single battle but that insurgent will dissolve into the hillsides and re emerge later..
What other choice ? Politics are yet to give a solution after decades of problems.
The article said they got their arms smuggled in from the US, but that only explains the small arms and drones. Where are they getting hand grenades?
Mexico has been like that for decades, I believe it's top 1 priority for most Mexicans yet it's still not fixed. What gives ?
At some point when your government is so corrupt, you got to take weapon and organize yourself. It's sad.
Many countries are effectively ruled by gangs and cartels. That’s why kings became kind of a big deal in Europe. The states monopoly on violence was solidified back the
> At some point when your government is so corrupt, you got to take weapon and organize yourself. It's sad.
At that point you might as well point those weapons at the failed government that forced you to have to play soldier instead of protecting you. Not allowing your own citizens to be enslaved by roving bands of criminals is like the single most basic thing a country's government is for. Since the Mexican government has abandoned them and ceded control of that land to hostile armies I hope those poor farmers aren't still paying them taxes.
A characteristic of most of Latin America is that the Police and the Army were created to protect power, not the people, and there hasn't really been an effort to change the mentality.
Meanwhile in the US the laws are being changed to protect the wealthy, while the current administration is siphoning value of national assets into their own pockets. The poorer the country, the more likely this is to happen. I wonder how long it will take for warlords to set up shop in Kansas...
That's a characteristic of police everywhere.
>> Mexico has been like that for decades.
Back in the 60's and 70's my Dad worked or Lockheed Martin. He made frequent trips to Mexico to work with engineering teams there on projects he was working on. It only took him one trip to realize how corrupt the police were.
He had parked outside of his hotel with his rental car. Came out. It was surrounded by Policia. They told him he couldn't park here. "Sure thing, I'll move it and not park here again." "You don't understand gringo, you have to pay the parking fine now." He caught on, and asked how much it would cost to just park here, you know, rent this spot instead of paying their fine? The cops gave him an amount and he paid it and they left him alone the rest of the week he was there. He told me a bunch of other stories about the corruption there, not just the cops. It was pretty eye opening to hear some of these.
The corruption can't be fixed. Its engrained in the system. It was rampant fifty years ago, there is no fixing it - its completely normalized now. The cartels simply used the system against itself to gain total control and power.
Mexico is hardly the only nation where this is a problem.
Because of their neighbors to the north having an insatiable appetite and willingness to spend large amounts of money on illicit goods. Mexico should probably legalize and bring these into a regulated state of the United States would not allow it
About 30% of Mexico is gang-controlled
the real war the US should be fighting
There's no need to fight.
The proper solution is to end the war on drugs, allowing people to do what they will with their own bodies. Once people can legally buy their drugs, the cartels will starve.
Use the money saved from reducing our prison population by 75% to pay for widely-accessible treatment for addiction as well as mental health problems. Build more affordable housing so homelessness is less of an issue. As an added bonus: roll back the last half-century of disastrous trickle-down economics which gutted the middle class, so there's less incentive to start using in the first place.
Reminder: the Nixon tapes reveal that the war on drugs was started in the first place not to protect the public from harmful drugs but rather as a means to criminalize his political enemies (e.g., hippies and black people) in a way that couldn't be challenged in court on 14th amendment grounds.
The problem, of course, is those solutions are hard, it's a lot easier to get voters to root for building more walls and sending troops to kill more foreigners, and there's a lot of money to be made by the military industrial complex and private prison system by prolonging the problem.
That is a pipedream coming from some one who supports drug legalization, you think a multi billion dollar enterprise with unique position of having weapons and even armies are gonna pack their bags after USA become a drug haven?
No they will do what they do now:
Expand into other illegal and legal venues and worst case attempt a coup.
Why should the US be fighting Mexican gangs? Mexico should send their own army to fight the criminal gangs. If we want to send our army after gangs we have plenty of them right here in the US. We could start with the ones in our Sheriff's Departments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangs_in_the_Los_Angeles_Count...
And then we would get to hear about American imperialism forever....
Why should the US fight Mexican cartels? They have their own armies and plenty of ammo.
If you think the outputs of Mexican cartels stay in Mexico, you're severely underinformed. Do you know how many civilian deaths (to say nothing of human trafficking and more) are directly due to Mexican cartels?
The US absolutely has an interest in the destruction of Mexican cartels.
I'm not uninformed about cartel drug manufacturing and resulting American deaths. That's why we had to seal the border, and we need to keep enforcing it. But to send troops into a country that denies their entry is another thing.
I don't mind bombing the cartels from a distance. I'd rather the U.S. continues to pursue diplomatic options vs. war.
What's the difference between an American drone operator dropping a bomb on cartels in Mexico, and an American infantryman shooting at cartels in Mexico?
Safety, law, and politics.
Also the cartels are funded and propped up by the CIA. We need them to destabilize the Mexican government, launder blood money, traffic children for our rich pedophiles and push drugs into our poor neighborhoods.
I'm not going down those rabbit holes. If a previous CIA was or was not responsible for that, that's that. Now, we're here.
Maybe after the US annexes Greenland, for some reason.
Highly recommend the 2015 documentary 'Cartel Land'
Our heroic self defense group.
Their brutish narco terrorist cartel.
What’s their choices then? At least they got something to protect them
I'd recommend reading the history of Autodefensas and FARC/FLN in Colombia.
Anti-Drug militant groups have a habit of turning into drug lords as well.
Related, Colombia's new president Abelardo d' Espriella is getting sworn in in a couple hours. He won a somewhat close election against a more peace process party, on a platform of radical violence & all out total war against the various cartels, gangs, and rebel factions.
Definitely huge echoes of El Salvador's intense crackdown. But it seems pretty uncertain that he actually has the military force capable of doing this. Colombia's wide array of insurgents are far more organized and well equipped than El Salvador, ala the Mexico situation here; this isn't like the nasty but kind of low level violence of El Salvador. Who all in all had a pretty easy time at it just built a ton of super brutal prisons, stripping legal protections, and then rounding up a couple % of the state's population immediately (and letting some go too, eventually, after months of brutal incarceration).
I'd love recommendations beyond War Fronts, who in tune into a decent bit. I need to subscribe, to support. They just had a video on Colombia today. https://youtu.be/OiQZCJmkmR8
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Those responsible for all those deaths are those doing drugs. A debate could be had as to drugs should be legal or not but if you're doing coke, meth, fentanyl, etc. you simply are part of the problem because those drugs are illegal and represent a big part of the 3 to 5% of the worldwide GDP that's linked to crime (official World CIA factbook numbers).
You are funding these cartels. You are both complicit and responsible for the countless deaths and power these cartels and drug dealers have.
I don't think the US should be fighting drug cartels: I think the US should be punishing consumers much, much, much more.
Have fun thinking about those killed by drug cartels next time you sniff.
Very sad but true post. When you think about it many of the ones who are downvoting this post are the children and grandchildren of old dopeheads who created the market that the cartels eventually began to fill. None of this happened without the consent of ordinary Americans who chose to consume the illegal drugs. All of these people share responsibility for the deaths of those who lost their lives due to addiction, whether theirs or someone else's. The tens of thousands of people who have died in Mexico and Central America while trying to stay out of the way of these cartels and their violence all died because Americans created and still sustain a market for illegal drugs.
Those with the most blame are the ones highest placed in our system who knew about and facilitated the smuggling, paying Americans along the way to assist, so that drugs could be located by anyone interested no matter where in this country they lived. They helped create the system that would lead to incarceration of people at the bottom of the ladder while those at the top who financed it all and benefited the most from it escape accountability. They created a network of small-town airports, private airstrips, and safe houses where distribution could be managed in a way that shielded the money people from the operations.
If you are a drug user, even a casual experimenter in your own home, your drug use continues to cause death and misery to uncounted other people and that makes you partly responsible for the societal destruction that drugs have wrought.
I was under the impression ferrying migrants over the border and avocados were almost as big revenue streams as the drugs. Et tu, avocado toast and gardener?
No, not really, it's two orders of magnitude smaller overall. Drugs, gold (from illegal mines in the Amazon) and weapons (from US lost military stock/police seizure mostly) drive cartels economy (in that order last time I checked, pre-covid).
Human trafficking and racketeering are for smaller, more local gangs. Most illegal immigrants cross the border legally and overstay, and racketeering have a scale issue. It might have changed recently but I don't see how.
those that sniff aren't thinking about anybody except themselves, not one little bit
This is true, though.
But please do not say this out loud, you might hurt the feelings of a passing junkie.
Just remember, American caused this