I guess I'd rather have the state maintain a monopoly on violence.
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
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.
Very relevant book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Cartels_Do_Not_Exist
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...
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
> 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.
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.
Like the Taliban?
Sweden's gun homicide rate has increased by 400% since 2010 due to nothing other than demographic change.
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:
WELCOME
¡BIENVENIDOS!
NO FIREARMS
That and all things being equal I suspect most of the people in these groups would rather not be fighting.
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.
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.
The cartels also have tens of billions.
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.
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.
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.
The US absolutely has an interest in the destruction of Mexican cartels.
I don't mind bombing the cartels from a distance. I'd rather the U.S. continues to pursue diplomatic options vs. war.
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
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.
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.
But please do not say this out loud, you might hurt the feelings of a passing junkie.