The art of trade. As long as someone produces stuff that meets your standard, and you can get it without been punished (i.e. through legal trading), then you have too little reason to care about their real-life struggles.
Plus, at this stage, Mexico's problem is too big to be fixed all by themselves. Trading with the world maybe the only few chances that they still got if they wanted to change the status quo for the better.
I'd say it's because the US can get cheap stuff from Mexico, and corporations can take advantage of incredibly lax (absent?) labour laws to get things done quickly and cheaply.
Something that occurred to me reading this article, is how corrosive the cartels' hold on Mexican society is on market efficiency in small markets - the article mentions half a dozen small businesses in Iguala that are run by cartel members or associates. All those businesses, some of which may be fronts in the classic sense but others are likely semi legit "day jobs" for cartel members, are effectively able to operate outside of a fair market. A square competitor pops up? They can just threaten them or kill them to shut them down. A customer complains about service? Shake them down and kick them out, and black list them at every other connected business in town.
The effect of cartel corruption on the legal and judicial systems is more well documented and fretted about, but I imagine this dimension of corruption has more impact on the everyday lives of Mexican civilians, especially in the small cities and towns like Iguala where the corruption is complete.
borderland beat covered this and it was a combination of the students stealing a cartel bus used for smuggling and the corrupt local government asking for favors of the cartels they work for to teach a lesson. Btw there is many more terrible things surfacing from mexico these days like everyday plebs having to post identifiers on their vehicles to indicate tax was paid to some cartel then rivals posting videos of killing these same plebs saying you better not get caught paying our rivals. It's just lose/lose for anyone trying to lead a normal life in certain disputed states which is growing all the time basically 19 of 32 states now.
Much insanity happening in places like Veracruz I deleted because ppl won't believe it until the see it and these idiot thugs livestream their crimes every week.
Yea idk, I think that version is an attempt at a (pathetic) post hoc justification for the crime (not saying it was made up by gp, but rather the cartels or their apologists). I had read that they were public municipal buses, which I guess could conceivably be used for smuggling, but would seem like an odd choice, as it doesn't seem like they would have much need to "smuggle" within the the municipality where they already operate with impunity, and driving the buses out of the territory would seem impractical/surreptitious.
Let's be honest, it was never a war on drugs, it was a war on drug addicts - a group that already had enough problems on their plate before they had the full force of a police state hunting them down.
If you want to see what a war on drugs looks like, just look at Singapore.
Since 1975, after the proposal by then Minister for Home Affairs Chua Sian Chin, the death penalty was mandated as the sole punishment for drug trafficking, should the amount of whichever drugs exceed the capital threshold.[106] As a result of this legal reform, 28-year-old Penang-born Malaysian Teh Sin Tong became the first convicted drug trafficker to be hanged at Changi Prison on 28 April 1978, after the High Court found him guilty on 13 October 1976
The majority of executions in Singapore are for drug offences. Since 2010, 23 prisoners have been executed for drug offences, while only five have been executed for other offences, such as murder. Death penalty supporters, such as blogger Benjamin Chang, claim that Singapore has one of the lowest prevalence of drug abuse worldwide. Chang claims, for instance, that over two decades, the number of drug abusers arrested each year has declined by two-thirds, from over 6,000 in the early 1990s to about 2,000 in 2011.
No, ir was a war on political opponents, not necessarily addicts at all. The War on Marijuana and Acid was to go after hippies, and the War on Crack was to go after inner city blacks. The idea being all of these groups would have voted liberal and the Republican base supported punishing these groups. This was all assumed for decades but made explicit as the strategy by one of Nixon’s top lieutenants in recent years.
Drug addicts was a side effect. It was to target, well it's no secret now...
> “You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?
> We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
> Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Part of the answer is climate and geography. It's just meaningfully different south of the US than north of the US for drug production. And this is not limited to just mexico, a lot of non-mexican-produced drugs also traffic through mexico.
But why don't they produce world-leading levels of illegal synthetic narcotics, purely in search of profit on the American illicit market? If farming isnt viable and drugs are massively profitable, why does Canada not suffer from the allure of American dollars?
> Mexico was already in trouble
I agree, but does that mean Mexico cannot solve its problems without an American Savior intervening?
I have begun to wonder if it's ever possible for a poorer country beset by corruption to be helped in any meaningful way by outsiders, or if change necessarily has to come from within.
>But why don't they produce world-leading levels of illegal synthetic narcotics, purely in search of profit on the American illicit market? If farming isnt viable and drugs are massively profitable, why does Canada not suffer from the allure of American dollars?
There is less production of narcotics in Canada because Canadian law enforcement is more effective at suppressing it than Mexican law enforcement is.
The war on drugs in the 80s was focused on Colombia and disrupting Pablo Escobar's coke empire. That was successful but caused production to move closer to Mexico. Everything was stable until the national army took over policing enforcement in 2006 and now you have many 1000x more murders. Some of the murders that are reported as cartel murders can be national army murders. It's a different situation that resolves itself when demand drops.
Canada was winning best weed strain at shows but was never really supplying the US. The US was supplying Canada with weed/coke from Mexico and premium California bud if Canada was lucky. I'm sure some BC bud flowed south but everything was small operations.
That tells me what happened, but not why? (I appreciate the detail, though)
Why isn't Canada a major narcotics manufacturing center? Why is Colombia?
I think the answer is probably complex and involves poverty (meaning switching from lawful occupation to unlawful occupation is a bigger difference than in, say, Canada) and corruption/lawlessness (which may also be consequently tied to the poverty, if corruption is a way to escape it).
It must surely go much deeper than "it's America's fault", and I think it may also be solvable without American intervention or action (though of course, it would be harder)
Well, just as every country in the world wants to export stuff (clothes, commodities, manufactured goods, all the junk available on aliexpress) to the states and other rich countries, so do the cartels and criminal gangs in poor counties. They export to wherever they can make maximum profits. With respect to Cocaine, coca plants need rain forests, so one is left with Colombia, Peru, etc. Opium poppy is grown in Asia; Mexicans started poppy plantations in Sinaloa, they can make heroine.
Mexico is completely avoided when cocaine is sent to Europe from South America. Albanian mafia, Italians, and others use ships to transport cocaine from South America to ports in Europe. Mexican cartels are hardly involved in this. Same logic: why export to UK and other wealthy EU countries? More profit. If they were to sell cocaine to Iranians or Nigerians, they aren't going to make much money. Nigerians are also involved in Cocaine smuggling, because Nigeria is a transit point for some cocaine shipments from South America to Europe. Nigerian gangs get paid commission in cocaine for their help in transiting cocaine through their ports, so Nigerians sell the cocaine they obtain as helpers. That's why Nigerians use mules to send cocaine to India and other countries.
If Mexico were richer than Canada/USA, yes, people would be exporting drugs to Mexico.
I'm guessing the climate has a lot to do with it, plus the huge amount of land you need to cultivate enough coca to produce cocaine (Canada having historically a stabler rule of law than Bolivia or Peru), plus the availability of extremely cheap (or, effectively, slave) labor for the cultivation.
If this begs the question "why is Canada more stable than Columbia, Peru, or Bolivia", apart from the fact that those are developing countries, it's worth remembering that the United States was aggressively and violently intervening in their politics into the middle of the 20th century. The same can't be said of The Maple Leaf States.
Can we please stop it with the victim blaming? This is the cartel's fault and no one else. I've never seen people as self-hating as liberal Americans. Only the English come close.
I mean, it's great to be introspective and self-aware of what your country is doing, but not to the degree that you put the blame for drug crime on the people trying to eradicate drug usage. The problem with the war on drugs isn't that it exists, it's that it's done limp-wristedly (mainly because of objections by bleeding hearts), instead of being waged ruthlessly.
The end result of social libertarianism results in the same thing as for economic libertarianism: misery for the majority.
Don't "social libertarians" want drugs to just be legalised so they can be produced by local businesses and thus cut off the flow of cash to criminals?
Wanting more Clear and Present Danger-style ruthlessness in the war on drugs (after decades of failures of varying levels of ruthlessness) I guess is an idea if you don't care about body count and collateral damage, but just feels like without legalisation it's going to be a complete waste of time.
You're jumping all over the place here. Walmart? Portugal? Assassination attempts?
I suggest looking into the ways different states and counties in the US manage and regulate the sale of alcohol and marijuana to get a realistic idea of what legalized drug sales could look like.
Portugal decriminalized, not legalized, which is a gargantuan difference. Decriminalization is basically the government saying "we'll stop enforcing drug laws, thereby de facto endorsing violent criminal gangs to handle the sale and manufacture as they see fit". As a result, drugs don't get less contaminated and black markets continue to thrive. I think it's a cowardly half-step.
And if the US legalized drugs, who are the cartels going to assassinate exactly? US Senators? The President? Then there actually might be a US military intervention and I doubt the cartels want that.
The entire world. The drug trade is global and the USA is a huge market, perhaps the biggest.
Also worth reminding people that the whole point of money laundering is to keep the operations going without having to keep big secrets or make anyone unnecessary complicit. It's not about corruption, shady business, or legislation. Those are all lies told to get normal people to believe even uglier lies. No, it can all be completely reformed, swamp drained, and regularly audited to be squeaky clean and still the money and drugs will continue to flow unimpeded. This is outside the scope of individual governments. Even if the USA and Mexico cooperated perfectly, the money is already clean before it hits their domestic banks and the smuggling is less about avoiding getting caught and more about overwhelming the system. This is why it's called a "war" on drugs.
Americans. But it’s more like the head-end of Americans paying cartels for drugs and in order to pacify the ass-end from complaining they, in collusion with Mexico, have to make it “look like” they are doing something about it.
I picked a story from 2016, so you can read with the benefit of hindsight, but it’s been the same story since the 1970’s (and arguably since the tail end of the prohibition days, when the US made the Mexican government choose between destabilizing itself or not having anesthesia for its hospitals).
Since the US’s continuous morally-reprehensible actions created and then propped up Mexico’s narco-state for about a century, and people keep voting in the US politicians that perpetuate the cycle, I can only assume things are working as intended.
The US forced countries to criminalize the export of drugs to the US, even though though no country (the US included) has the resources necessary to enforce those laws.
The result is shadow economies, then corruption and finally narco states. This profits corrupt actors in the US government, so they perpetuate the cycle.
There are basically two sides in the war on drugs: almost everyone (non-users, users, small-time producers), and para-military syndicates that control distribution, enforcement agencies, and government policies.
If you read the article I linked, and also the one this thread is about, it is clear that the US decided to back one of the cartels with military aid and support in the local election. That caused a transfer of power that left 100,000’s dead, including the 43 students that were murdered by US-backed Mexican government officials.
> The South and Central American drug war(s) is one of the most violent wars in modern history .. Over a million people have died in the conflict since 1970, and that’s not counting the over 50,000 Americans who die every year from opioid-related deaths, or the 20+ thousand American homicides every year, the majority of them in some way related to gangs that fund themselves off drug sales..
US intervention against the Mexican Cartels would be taking on organized forces that have been under arms longer than the Taliban, are better funded than Ukraine, have a population and territory bigger than Saddam had in Iraq, and some of whom, as in the case of the Los Zetas Cartel, are themselves former Special Forces trained by American Green Berets..
America has had a massive advantage in every war it’s fought in the past 100 years: America has always been fighting elsewhere .. America’s population, industry … They’ve all been safely 10,000 miles away across oceans from the enemy and pretty much untouchable .. A military intervention against the Cartels would instantly end that.
This, again, is a blog that ran within the last few weeks a story suggesting that the Jews were America's "Cossacks", an ethnic group granted special favors and privileges.
Maybe we can cool it with the analysis from this person on HN threads.
It's nothing personal, I just hate the feeling that I have to interrogate every sentence of someone's writing to find where they're smuggling in the weird fascist stuff. If they're just Orson Scott Card-style LARPing about international conflicts, well, we can do better than this, right?
You're more familiar with this blog than I am (this being the second time you've brought it up here). Is there some qualification they have on this issue that I didn't know about? I'm happy to stop bringing this up if there's some particular reason to take them seriously.
I'm not a fan of filter bubbles. There are many HN threads where discussion/comments are superior to source article. Often, any weird -ist or -ism source content can be filtered by reason rather than interrogation. My comments cite words, not the person.
> LARPing about international conflicts, well, we can do better than this, right?
> Republicans suggest everything from terrorist labels to an invasion to decimate drug cartels in Mexico ... U.S. Northern Command assesses that 30 to 35 percent of Mexican territory is ungoverned, giving space for the drug cartels to roam free. Should the U.S. launch military operations in Mexico, a crush of people would find their way to U.S. ports of entry seeking asylum and their claims would be stronger by fleeing an active war zone involving U.S.-labeled terrorists ... There are other complications, such as what the terrorist label would mean for people selling drugs online or shipping them — would a FedEx delivery person be jailed?
Leaving aside election debates on hypothetical conflicts, NYC Central Park is being considered for housing asylum seekers, flowing today into NYC from the US southern border. More and better analysis is needed. https://www.axios.com/2023/08/03/new-york-city-central-park-...
I'm not a fan of filter bubbles either, as the term is normally defined, but I'm comfortable with the idea that there are limits to the things you can believe and still be taken seriously. If you non-ironically believe that the Earth isn't spherical, and that there's an "atmosflat" rather than an "atmosphere", I'm comfortable disqualifying your science takes. So it goes with The International Jew.
I don't have a better source! If this source is actually good, rather than someone, again, doing the thing Orson Scott Card so notoriously did, of fanfic'ing international politics and military conflicts, that'd be a good thing to point out! Is it?
Client-side kill switches FTW. Hopefully we will also have browser plugins to combine private ignorelists with webs of transitive (dis)trust.
> If this source is actually good
It's the only source I've found on this specific topic, since I don't follow Republican debates. It's full of typos and rambling, but has motivated me to seek more material on the topic.
This is such a bad take. Cartels have small arms the US military has drones, satellites, the NSA. A war against the cartel would be much like our participation in Syria.
> “El Coyote” Head of the New Jaurez Joint Cartel, was the man who ordered the attack on the Cactus Lounge and similar massacres on US soil, he would be killed in a US airstrike in 2032. But his Lieutenant and successor, Cartel Boss, Mexican Nationalist Front commander, and Future Mexican President, Jaun Herrera would reveal in his 2054 memoirs Smuggling to Freedom: From Narco to Patriot that the US expansion of the war had been Coyote’s intent, and that the NJJC had been losing members and revenue for months before the wider war and resultant chaos in the US changed their fortunes making recruitment and smuggling operations vastly easier, even as the first American “Free Men” Militias began to fight their own war against the ATF Paramilitaries and FEMA Press-Gangs brought about by the 2030 Gun Confiscation and 2031 Conscription Acts.
and speculation later in the article:
> There’s absolutely no reason for Mexican drug war violence to stay south of the border if US military assets don’t stay North of the Border… which of course means a good chunk of the fighting would be North of the Border… And intensive fighting at that. There’s no reason the Cartel’s playbook of kidnapping the families of government officials, blackmail, and armed militias wouldn’t let them start setting up hidden bases and operations within the US… Hidden bases that would have to be retaken, operations that would have to be subjected to random unconstitutional checkpoint stops and searches to disrupt. Further diluting American civil liberties and risking an American armed backlash…
They are assuming that the US would let it get to the point of cartel operating in the States with impunity kidnapping and murdering their way into effectively owning the government. This seems to be predicated by the understanding that the US has met abject failure in its campaign to hold, reform, and dominate perceptively weaker countries. It's true we couldn't dominate Mexico any more than we could dominate Iraq. It would be a deadly waste of blood and treasure that would work out horribly for all. We don't actually have to however.
We could trivially and in short order destroy Mexicos ability to function as a modern nation by destroying power generation, water, farming, roads, bridges, shipping, trains, airplanes. We could deny all large scale transport in or out and keep this up for years for less than the cost of Iraq. There wouldn't be a drug business there any more than there would be any other kind of business once all the engines that enable commerce are silent.
The logical end game for infinite acceleration is maximum violence on both sides. The fantasy described assumes that the cartel is able to accelerate infinitely while the US is stuck in first gear. I think in fact that the US citizenry are far too bloodthirsty for that to be reasonable. More likely far less acceleration on the cartel's side sees join missions between US soldiers and Mexican authorities leading to a shit ton of dead cartel followed by comparative peace leading to disengagement. Ultimately the drug trade returns to normal and nothing is resolved.
> They are assuming that the US would let it get to the point of cartel operating in the States with impunity kidnapping and murdering their way into effectively owning the government.
No, they aren't.
They are explicitly describing that the US might be forced to take extreme action domestically to avoid the “with impunity” part, because the cartels have the resources and US penetration already to act, if they were no longer constrained by the threat of what the US might do if they did, which they cease to be when the US goes to war anyway.
> We could trivially and in short order destroy Mexicos ability to function as a modern nation by destroying power generation, water, farming, roads, bridges, shipping, trains, airplanes.
What happens to conditions in neighboring countries when the US has done that elsewhwere?
Now, where is Mexico?
> There wouldn't be a drug business there any more than there would be any other kind of business once all the engines that enable commerce are silent.
We destroyed Afghanistan that way.
It didn't destroy the drug business there, quite the opposite. Well, until the Taliban takeover, but I’m not sure that's the win you want to look for in Mexico.
> There wouldn't be a drug business there any more than there would be any other kind of business once all the engines that enable commerce are silent.
This would conflict with US goal of reshoring manufacturing from Asia to NAFTA/USMCA.
It would acheive both: destroying the goals long sought by US trade policy, and increasing terrorist violence (in the short term by cartels, but once you destroy Mexico, it won't just be the cartel members with motives, opportunity, and a perception of nothing to lose) directed at US policymakers.
> Chemicals manufactured in China and bought by Mexico's narco cartels in transactions facilitated by a global network of Chinese criminal groups are fueling the fentanyl crisis, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people in the United States, the world's biggest market for illegal drugs.
> It's the Chinese government that actually has secret police stations all over the US right NOW
Yes, but that's a complete non-sequitur.
If the US decides to change the “War on Drugs” from a metaphorical war to an actual war with the US military invading Mexico, there will both be actual direct consequences of the type described on the US side of the border, and use of the conflict and those actual consequences as pretexts against civil liberties in the US.
> Because one is confirmed and the other one is fantasy
One is a reasonable prediction of what would happen if there was no longer a marginal threat of US escalation constraining it because the US decided to escalate fully without it, the other is a non-sequitur in this discussion.
> Cartels have no nation-state level power
Nation-state isn't a power level, and if it was, well, the Mexican cartels do have power which rivals nation-states, and in any case international criminal organization don't require the power of a nation-state to do any of the things described, as history has repeatedly shown.
> the Mexican cartels do have power which rivals nation-states,
Not the Mexican state in terms of firepower & resources
> and in any case international criminal organization don't require the power of a nation-state to do any of the things described, as history has repeatedly shown
No Mexican drug lords dare show their face in public for long - they operate in the shadows. There are no strongholds, no cities, states out of reach.
The moment they become popular it’s time to lay low
> Not the Mexican state in terms of firepower & resources
Much of the firepower and resources of the Mexican state (not “firepower and resources equivalent to the much of that of the Mexican state”, but “much of the exact firepower and resources notionally attributed to the Mexican state”) are in the hands of the cartels.
Symptomatic of this is the arrest by the US of the former Mexican defense secretary in 2020 on charges related to cartel involvement (against whom charges were dropped under intense political pressure from the Mexican government, including reported threats to expel the DEA entirely and end all anti-drug cooperation with the US) and the subsequent arrest by the US, and conviction earlier this year, of the former Public Security Secretary (and, before that, head of the Federal Judicial Police), also on charges of working within the government for the cartels.
> No Mexican drug lords dare show their face in public for long - they operate in the shadows. There are no strongholds, no cities, states out of reach.
To the extent this is true, the threat within Mexico largely comes from other cartels, whether working through organs nominally in the service of the state or otherwise. Sure, individual high-value targets tend to make some effort at opsec, but the cartels as a whole operate openly, in some areas with enforcers in marked vehicles, with the Mexican Army doing nothing but helping keep the peace between major cartels by enforcing cartel territorial boundaries.
There's no reason that it couldn't be both. Every administration at the national and state level has been corrupt enough for at least all of my lifetime.
> The murder rate in Ciudad Juarez is 103 per 100,000. One of the murder capitals of the world. The murder rate in El Paso, Texas is 4.4 per 100,000. About the US average. These are the same city geographically .. El Paso, and the US in general, are peaceful because the cartels are happy to maintain an unspoken agreement: The US Keeps its military and policing assets out of Mexico, the Cartels keep their violence in Mexico .. they try to keep things quiet or let American based gangs (who understand how to keep heat low) handle the violence north of the border because they don’t want to have to deal with drone strikes and SEAL Teams. If America starts a hot drug war intervention in Mexico that incentive is gone…
> America has had a massive advantage in every war it’s fought in the past 100 years: America has always been fighting elsewhere .. America’s population, industry … They’ve all been safely 10,000 miles away across oceans from the enemy and pretty much untouchable
If you want to protect your population in the short-term, that's good. But if you want to win a war, that's a hindrance:
Meh, that's a gamble that only rarely works. Japan during WW2 spread propaganda that Americans will kill everyone, and forced even civilians to die rather than surrender.
The cartels are not motivated guerilla armies. They are made up of 100% mercenaries. I doubt that there would be many encounters between them and US SOF because once that possibility is on the table, most of them will decide it's not worth the paycheck.
Also, guerilla forced that have fought the US have all been dependent on state support. There will be no such support for the cartels as they have no state allies.
> While the involvement of Chinese money-laundering rings in handling drug proceeds from Mexico is nothing new, a number of recent court cases in the United States have revealed crucial information about how these schemes work ... weekly pick-ups from representatives of Mexican criminal groups, made in cash ranging between $150,000 and $1 million, with an average of $500,000. These were made in large cities including Chicago, New York and Atlanta ... network of Chinese-owned businesses in the United States and Mexico ... transfer a correspondent amount of money through Chinese banking apps. This happened entirely through the Asian country’s domestic banking system.
And yet you see reports of NAFTA trade and the fact that Mexico is now America’s largest trading partner.
Hard to reconcile the two. A state without law and order is also a leading trading partner with tons of complex, large scale manufacturing.
What gives?