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Comment by gozur88 | Hacker News Reader

Some of the violence? Sure. Most? Not even close.

What fuels all that violence? Mostly drug related shit, and the US is by far the biggest market in the region for all kinds of drugs, not to mention the historic influence of e.g. the CIA in the drug smuggling. In exchange for drug money, US weapons end up in South America (what else is to be expected when one can buy AR-15s in Wal-Marts?!).

So therefore it is legitimate to blame the US for most (or even all) violence in South America.

The US drug market makes things shittier on the margin, but it is not the main cause. If they stopped buying drugs the gangs would fight over the control of some other resource.

For example, the town of Tancítaro became prosperous (and therefore valuable for organized crime) because they grow lots of avocados. The US doesn't fight a war against avocados.

The reason drug traffickers are billionaires is that they are drug traffickers. In the absence of that, they would have no money and no power.

They're rich because they have a large organization capable of carrying out organized crime. They're also do extortion, kidnapping, pimping, and anything else they can think of to make money.

Yeah but the most money can be done by dealing with drugs. Extortion or the other stuff is small fish compared to drugs - it's a pest for the small businesses but in the end it's passed on to customers. Pimping is vile but can be helped against by empowering sex workers, and the number of whores on the streets should be identical even after an end of drug criminality.... after all, the number of customers in a city should remain constant (if not shrink a bit because the gang-financed customers vanish).

You are assuming prostitution is driven by demand-side concerns alone (or that eliminating trafficking gangs has no effect on the supply side.) Trafficking gangs using addiction to trap people into prostitution is not unknown, so eliminating criminal trafficking gangs should have supply-side impacts as well.

I was thinking about the angle "the drug trade vanishes, so the gangs will drift into pimping" - which is, imho, not really valid since where prostitution is illegal, the gangs are already in pimping and the supply/demand is more or less matched, so there are no new profits to be made there.

Yeah, it's amazing, the way to keep criminals out of any industry, is to make that industry legal...

Do you think they'd just shrug their shoulders and go home and be poor?

Some violent predatory thugs die. Some go to prison. Some get old and chill out. Some remain violent predatory thugs. They all run through cash pretty quick, though, so when American drug users start buying their drugs from normal nonviolent firms, the violent predatory thugs will be poor.

Since they don't know any reputable trades, some problems with protection rackets etc. will remain for years. No one will be perverse enough to blame those echos of The Drug War on the fact that we finally decided to end it. What, did you think that narcos are somehow representative of Mexican national character? They most certainly are not.

Please source the claim that the legal purchase of firearms by US citizens from FFLs, such as Walmart, is a significant contributor to the presence of firearms in Central America.

Because other than botched ATF stings, I haven't heard any claims of this previously.

> Please source the claim that the legal purchase of firearms by US citizens from FFLs, such as Walmart, is a significant contributor to the presence of firearms in Central America.

For example, one study is at https://nacla.org/article/small-arms-trade-latin-america.

> The U.S.-Mexican border is also a central route through which illicit small arms enter Latin America. A study released by the Mexican government suggests that as many as 2,000 guns are crossing the U.S.-Mexico border daily. As in Colombia, these guns are fueling an arms race, in this case between Mexican drug cartels, costing the lives of 4,000 people in 18 months.14 Weapons, including assault rifles like AK-47s, AR-15s, and M-16s, fetch up to three times their U.S. market value in Mexico, assuring a continued southward flow of weapons.

Exceedingly small numbers of civilians hold M-16s legally in the US. If there are M-16s going over the border the source is military or law enforcement.

> Exceedingly small numbers of civilians hold M-16s legally in the US.

M16s are only a part of the problem. AR15s and ordinary 9mm handguns can be had in Walmarts or "conveniently" bought without any background checks/documentation on private sales.

I mean, I understand the appeal on having a 9mm at home for self defense, and a hunting rifle for, well, hunting - but having AR15 or worse for everyone at a supermarket? And then the ability to sell 'em on without any record of the transferral? I don't get the US on gun rights sometimes.

There's violence across the region, even in countries that have little or nothing to do with the drug trade. Bad governance is more responsible for violence than anything the US has ever done in countries like Venezuela and Argentina.

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