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?
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.
What are Europe’s shortcomings?
https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/statistics/highlights/t...
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.
In case you get paywalled
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.
That sounds rather irrational of them. Also, not what the NYT reported.
Local cartels know and use students to smuggle drugs, weapons, people on these rides
Police and another local cartel were aware buses coming into their turf
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.
> “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.”
I don't think Mexico's problems would be solved if drugs disappeared tomorrow.
For example, the cartels are robbing fuel [depots, refineries, regular gas stations, etc]. They'll keep doing that, it's profitable.
So, how can Mexico solve its own problems? I have no idea.
Does Canada produce Marijuana and Cocaine ? Mexico is an agricultural producing country
> I don't think Mexico's problems would be solved if drugs disappeared tomorrow.
Mexico was already in trouble before the drug trade kicked off
Low education, low productivity, limited opportunities
How many Canadians jump the wall to wash dishes in the US ?
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.
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.
But this is exactly where the blame lies. Alcohol production and distribution related crime dropped to essentially zero once the prohibition ended.
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.
How does ending our prohibition on drugs resolve the a nearly total collapse of law and order in a neighbor?
> 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.
Maybe we can cool it with the analysis from this person on HN threads.
Would appreciate pointers to scenario analysis of potential US-cartel conflicts.
> “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…
Think about how much drugs are smuggled across the border and the seas ?
Where are the border encounters? Where are the National Guard shooting Narcos ? The Coast Guard ? Texas Rangers ? Sheriffs ? FBI ?
How many drugs are being smuggled under Abbott's nose in Texas by the Zetas and what does he do ? Drown migrants on the Rio Grande
> 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…
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:
Soldiers in desperate straits lose the sense of fear. If there is no place of refuge, they will stand firm. -Sun Tzu, Art of War https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9551422-throw-your-soldiers...
Look how it worked out for them.
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.
Do Mexico and China count?
