Thousands of women and girls disappear in Mexico every year
bbc.com
bbc.com
You want to grab that country by the shoulders and shake it to its senses. But then again you (or whatever is left of your body) don't want to end up hanging upside down from a bridge somewhere ...
From what I read and hear -- being married to someone who grew up in Mexico and follows the news there pretty closely, and having studied Mexican history a bit myself, it seems that since the end of one-party rule by a party with a fairly stable relationship with the major cartels, the level of violence between cartels and the government, between rival cartels, and between cartels and the populace designed to put pressure on the government, has gone up -- and its visibility has been magnified beyond the actual increase because there is less ability to sweep it under the rug and more genuinely competing interest groups with access to some of the levers of power.
Its obviously not a great situation to be in, but I don't think there was any route from where Mexico was to a good situation that didn't go through something like what they've been going through the last few decades.
I'm also not sure there is any route out of it -- other than back to the where it came from, which is bad in other ways -- so long as the combination of the US market, US domestic prohibition, and US international anti-drug policy is effectively pouring vast stacks of money into both sides of the fight.
You mean the USA, right? The "Narco Cultura" would not exist if it were not the United States "War on Drugs".
I just don't get this line of reasoning. If you take marijuana out of the equation, 80-90% of Americans think drugs should be illegal. They don't want drugs in their communities and in their society. And they're the bad guys for exercising their democratic right to regulate their own society, because some opportunists in Mexico are deranged enough to kill a bunch of people to circumvent those rules?
Those people exist everywhere (including, in no small numbers, in the United States), though not everywhere has as much poverty as Mexico combined with as much money being tossed onto both sides of the illegal narcotics trade as Mexico due to its proximity to the US.
> If you take marijuana out of the equation, 80-90% of Americans think drugs should be illegal. They don't want drugs in their communities and in their society.
Manifestly, making drugs illegal has not stopped drugs from being in their community or in their society. So either the unsupported support numbers for prohibition you presented are wrong, or they don't mean that people don't want drugs in their communities and in their society, or the people involved have tenuous grasp between cause and effect. (I suspect all three are involved, to varying degrees.)
> And they're the bad guys for exercising their democratic right to regulate their own society, because some opportunists in Mexico are deranged enough to kill a bunch of people to circumvent those rules?
If your policy choices knowably have negative impacts, and don't achieve the positive ends that you cite to justify them, and you continue for decades to make the same choices, yes, there is culpability there.
That doesn't mean the people making that choice are the bad guys -- responsibility is not exclusive.
The war on drugs is responsible for the cartel situation in the same manner that the prohibition was responsible for the rise in prominence of the Mafia during the 20s. Individual individuals decided to go down the path of providing these illicit services but the well meaning legislation provided the substrate on which they could go about making their fortune exploiting.
This is simply the economic reality of what happens under these scenarios. The conservatives Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell correctly predicted many of these negative outcomes decades ago during the start of these policies.
And I think you're delusional about the "small number of social conservatives" who think drugs are a problem. Support for keeping drugs like cocaine and heroin illegal ranges from 80-90%: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/17/drug-legalization-p.... Marijuana is the only one that a slim majority think shouldn't be legal.
Also, most people do not try drugs harder than marijuana at any point: http://archive.samhsa.gov/data/NSDUH/2012SummNatFindDetTable.... 70% of people never try an illicit drug other than marijuana, and only 7.5% report using an illicit drug other than marijuana in the past year.
And even if a substantial minority of people do try an illicit drug other than marijuana at some point, what does that mean? 13% of surveyed Americans reported driving drunk in the past year (double the percentage that report doing any non-marijuana illicit drug in the past year): http://www.fairwarning.org/2010/12/more-than-30-million-amer.... How many of them do you think nonetheless believe drunk driving should be illegal? Does the fact that a minority of people engage in conduct that may be hypocritical negate the sentiments of the majority?
I think your point about drinking and driving isn't quite accurate: I think if you refine your definition of drinking and driving in both survey results about actions and survey results about laws you may find different results: many people have drank a couple of beers before driving home; fewer have driven blackout drunk. Most agree the latter should be illegal, but the first? A more appropriate analogy would be, instead of suggesting we ban drunk driving (a universally laudable goal to ban not a substance but a particular misuse of it), how many Americans do you think would say alcohol should be illegal? I'd say on the order of zero.
You need to understand survey results in the context of the previously mentioned propaganda campaign: people don't quite exactly say what they really believe in the face of this, they say what they have been conditioned to believe in some sense. We need to look at their actual actions and provide context for the responses from them in terms of what they do. If someone really believes marijuana should be illegal, they won't try it or use it. Similarly with the harder drugs. We are slowly undoing the damage that has been done to this country with the anti-drug campaigns but it takes time; marijuana is the beginning. It's not really fair to say Americans are actually anti-drug after such an effective brainwashing session.
Also all of your points are based on survey results: and when it comes to drugs what people say they do or want and what they actually do or want are quite distinct. I don't think relying on them is reasonable: instead to get some accurate proportion we'd need to look at the drugs coming in and do some calculus based on how they are distributed among the population.
The perverted War on Drugs inflicted by the US onto Mexico and other countries could not have evolved as it did without corrupt governments in the first place.
You are a middle level government employee that has certain responsibilities. You are sitting alone at a restaurant enjoying your lunch. A nicely dressed man sits at your table with a briefcase. He places the briefcase facing you and opens it to show $100,000 in cash. He then tells you that you can either take the money and ignore certain activities or they'll kill you and your entire family. He then places photos of your spouse and children with addresses/times of their whereabouts. He then leaves.
What do you do?
Sometimes the corrupt government thing isn't as black and white as you may think.
There are parts of the U.S that operate in the same manner. We have "bad cops" who use their position to help drug traffickers smuggle weapons and drugs. It's no different... you just hear it less in the media.
You are a cop in a city overrun by a major drug cartel. You are sitting alone at a restaurant enjoying your lunch. A nicely dressed man sits at your table with a briefcase. He places the briefcase facing you and opens it to show $100,000 in cash. He then tells you that you can either take the money and ignore certain activities or they'll kill you and your entire family. He then places photos of your spouse and children with addresses/times of their whereabouts. He then leaves.
What do you do?
And so on, and so on, and so on.
It does have problems, yes, the government for one, a culture of corruption, a "caste system" mentality, a lack of focus on community (which leads to awful habits like littering).
The media reports constantly show Mexico's problems, which to be fair it does have, but Mexico has come a long way in the last 25 or 30 years. The average standard of living has risen considerably. I would say the average citizen is more aware of the wider world outside their little community. That's just my experience.
Do you really think Mexico made progress during the past decades just b/c they have malls and fast internet? I guess any untouched indian tribe in the Brazilian rain forest offers more original culture than what developed in Mexico during the past twenty years.
And also one point for the indian tribes with Rigoberta Menchu in Guatemala (peace). Not bad, much better than Argentina, Colombia or Spain in the same time in fact.
Enough said.