Drone strikes, thermobaric bombs and an acceptable level of collateral damage.
There's plenty of El Chapos ready to take his spot, every decade or so you are able to actually arrest one of them.
I would find this totally unacceptable. I also find extrajudicial killings by drone strikes in other countries totally unacceptable but in my own country I'd consider such practices even worse.
From the standpoint of words, about "subverting the whole justice system".
So here is why this is comical to me. On the one hand, the original commenter is right. An agent who can destabilize the entire justice and legal system of a country deserve be eliminated by extreme force - at least it would be nice to see that in Mexico, a country so decimated institutionally by the drug cartels. The country has an active insurgency and is not far off from a failed state.
Where does the comedy come in? Well the other side of this coin. What is is going on in the US? There is an active agent trying to undermine the justice system and the judiciary. For different reasons, but the result can be said to be comparable. It is the very president of the united states, Donald Trump!
That is precisely what the President Of The United States Donald Trump is doing. He is actively trying to undermine the FBI, firing James Comey, bullying the Secretary General in a weird way, manipulating evidence of the Muller investigation. Trump has even gone so far as to say that he will probably do what he can to manipulate and restrain the justice department. I guess also by - by proxy - appointing someone such as Kavenaugh as a judge for the court of supreme justice.
Maybe it's not comical...It's tragicomic. I don't know. Maybe we don't even have a word for this. Reddit calls it the "Witnessing events occurring in the Darkest Timeline." I tend to agree, this must be the darkest timeline.
For more information on the creation of the justice system and the FBI, I recommend watching the movie Hoover. Although probably brief, biased and Hollywood'ised - I like the way it presents the creation of the FBI. For more information about the charades of the sitting government in the US, watch the entirety of season 04 to season 05 of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
These are my views. I am not american, and beyond a degree in Political Science, I probably don't know enough to make an informed statement about this. One thing is certain, we set on the other side of the pond, gasping while watching th e events unfolding each and every week of the Trump administration.
Your confidence that you'd sacrifice yourself heroically in circumstances it's utterly certain you'll never find yourself in is admirable.
Well not kill myself for a start...
You have a kid that grew up thinking (not without a reason) that there's no better way than that do what the boss says. It will die to protect him. "Oh that kid is just a criminal, kill him!". In many cases, places where these cartels thrive are places where they locally can do better job than the government does.
I don't think that taking out the highest figure simply solves the problem. It wouldn't change much on the long run and on the short run highly increase the violence.
But more importantly, it seems extremely rare, that you could make a world a better place simply by killing somebody or a bunch of people. It's easy to think that, and a HN comment is too short to dive into that, but when you take time to think everything through, it seems far from obvious.
It would entirely depend on the situation, but without doubt there are levels of crime and depravity I could find myself surrounded by where I'd welcome it. Duterte's extra-judicial killings are far from unpopular. Also: did occupied Western Europe want to be liberated, despite the inevitable collateral damage? I'd expect largely the answer was yes.
Police assertions that most violent crime in the Philippines is drug-induced/related wasn't even supported by their own data in 2016! Where's the data that shows illegal drug flows are actually being reduced and that such reductions are affecting crime rates? Where are the 'big fish' (ranking police officers, big businessmen and politicians) that were promised to be arrested/imprisoned/otherwise neutralised in 2016? Those who have been killed are either small-fry, cases of mistaken identity, or innocent bystanders.
Make drugs legal, and the problem will fade away with time.
Of course, not immediately. But when the lucrative funding of drug trade is cut off, it will slowly diminish their might.
https://www.historyextra.com/period/modern/1940-the-year-mex...
The drug cartels were losing out on a lot of money too as a result apparently.
Without less money they will have less power, and less appeal, reducing the pool of capable candidates for leadership roles and therefore decreasing their effectiveness as an organization.
https://www.historyextra.com/period/modern/1940-the-year-mex...
Decriminalizing drugs also had a similar effect in Portugal. To be honest, I think that if the government really wanted to they could stomp all these cartels out of existence. The problem is that there is a lot of incentive not to.
I believe that law should be modeled after reality, not the other way around. If there is demand for drugs, then there will also be ways to satisfy this demand, legal or not. On the other hand, there is also demand for murder so obviously this problem is not as easy as it seems.
Where does a lawmaker draw the line?
What legalisation can achieve is to reduce demand. I believe Holland has quite a low incidence of cannabis consumption.
> I think that if the government really wanted to they could stomp all these cartels out of existence
As long as there's demand (and the US has oh so much of it), someone will provide it. Trillions have been wasted on the drug war and nothing has been stomped out of existence. This has nothing to do with lack of incentive.
For this to be true, organized crime would have to be largely reliant on drug money. My understanding is they're not. Prohibition fueled the creation of these organizations, but if you're suggesting they've an inability to diversify, that seems questionable.
As much as I'm pro legalise everything, I struggle to come up with a scenario where meth & heroin become legal apart from a kind of "look the other way" method Holland uses for cannabis. But this still involves illegal large scale cultivation and import of product that keeps criminal enterprises alive. Afaik most of the hash sold in Holland is smuggled in illegally from hash producing countries like Morocco, Pakistan, Nepal.
"Make drugs legal" is not actually as an easy a solution as it appears to be.
Furthermore, making drug use legal and moving law enforcement resources to addiction treatment would make more people seek help in battling their addiction.
One of the nastiest facets of war on drugs is that it creates criminals of people who harm no one and stigmatize them to the outskirts of the society.
Worked post WWII most places.
You're conflating two very different situations in regards to Iraq. It's not one Iraq forever war.
There's the Iraq war (Second Persian Gulf War), and there's the Iraq civil war. The Iraq war, versus Saddam's regime, ended very quickly. That war was won trivially. The US could have optionally left at that point if it just wanted to declare an easy victory. Civil wars can go on forever (and given Iraq was a forced together nation of three major groups that dislike each other, it's likely going to).
The US achieved its primary goal in Afghanistan very quickly as well. It wiped out nearly all the organizing and attack projection capabilities that Al Qaeda had in using Afghanistan as a haven. The primary objective was not to kill all the Taliban. The Taliban was a different, optional objective. Afghanistan, like Iraq, is now a civil war between multiple factions that all want power.
> wiped out nearly all the organizing and attack projection capabilities that Al Qaeda had in using Afghanistan as a haven
It's questionable as to how much they had in the first place ... and yet, Al-Nusra, an AQ-derived splinter organisation, is now fighting alongside US-backed groups in Syria. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/are-al-qaed...
We even now have weird indirect US-Iraq-Iran cooperation against ISIS. https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/field/field...