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Comment by anticodon | Hacker News Reader

I've never been to South America and I have only a couple friends from there, but I've watched these shows and they definitely look like exaggerated propaganda. Same way my country and my nation is always portrayed by Hollywood: grumpy blood thirsty villains dreaming of killing all people in the world. So I don't really believe it.

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They look exaggerated but aren't. The true extent of Cartel violence is far, far worse than what these series show, and it got worse in the past couple decades than it ever was in the 80s. The propaganda is mostly about the role of America in the region.

I don't know anything about South America, but when it comes to Mexico there's a lot of both. In Texas I was hearing from a young age about rampant violence on the border. If you listened to some people, it was always a boiling bloodbath threatening to spill over into the U.S. You hear that year in and year out, and eventually you learn to ignore it. On the other hand, sometimes (much less often) people who routinely visited family in Mexico near the border would say now is not a good time to go, and talk about feeling scared everywhere they went, hearing gunshots and sometimes even seeing bodies despite their best efforts to stay on the safest roads and in the safest parts of town.

I traveled through Central & South America on a motorcycle. No where in South America did I really feel unsafe.

In parts of Central America, I absolutely felt unsafe. Civilian Militias with guns blocking the roadways. Anything of value was guarded by a guy with a shotgun. Things I saw guarded first hand: - Gas Station - Truck with Propane Tanks (Guy was laying in back on top of the tanks) - Banks - Honda Motorcycle dealership - Motels

I was never sure how to feel about the guys guarding our motels with a shotgun. On one hand, it's nice to know there is someone there deterring any weird activity. On the other hand it also means you're in a place where a guy with a shotgun is necessary to protect stuff.

Most places the locals would look at you and have a warm curious smile. In the sketchier areas the smiles were gone. You'd get stares. Stares that said, 'Why would you think it was safe to be here.'

That being said, these sketchy, unsafe areas were not the norm in Central America. Most places I felt completely safe and absolutely welcomed.

I don't know if that's completely true. I worked with a guy who was the boss for all the IT for Colombia's elections back in the late 90s and early 2000s. He told me stories about how they would secretly rent rooms in a hotel to gather the final election data, and even then people would try to break in by digging through the floor below and ceiling above. He got out because the threats were so great. Think of it: the IT guy for elections, not some player in drug land.

Are they exaggerated ? I am from a very small eastern european country in the central/eastern europe and we have had our share of organized crime in the 90s. Remember these groups have not had an access to a large rich market like the US of A and still managed to be very brutal.

Dissolving people in acid was common, having a dedicated mafia graveyards was also common. They had units of assassins that served as hitmen and were connected to the intelligence services. They had access to explosives, sniper rifles and even at some point were able to detonate the bombs remotely (remember this was in the 90s very early after the fall of the Iron Curtain and such devices were really uncommon).

I've been to Mexico, and one thing I knew while there is how corrupt police can be (some cops are genuinely good people to be fair), and I'm not even a drug lord seeking to bribe police officers. My brother in law had a US license plate, so he was popular to pull over, always getting asked for money, another time we all got pulled over by a pickup truck full of men with rifles (all cops) but we were all in a family truck, so they literally said "oh you're with family" and let us go. What in the world? What would they have done if it was just him, or just me and him?

In the El Chapo show, there's a group called "Los Emes" which is basically "Los Zetas"[0] and when I was in Mexico my brother in law told me they were the most dangerous group in Mexico, he certainly was not wrong.

As other comments have shared there's crazy violence in the border alone, a coworkers wife heard gun shots from Texas every day she was near the border for Hurricane relief.

In Puerto Rico where I'm from right now people are killing people in daylight[1], for what reason? Who the heck knows, it could be anything: looked at you wrong, owed drug money, whatever. When a big time drug lord gets arrested what ends up happening is people start killing each other to get to the top. Cops are resigning to work elsewhere in the continental USA due to loss of basic benefits. The former police chief in Puerto Rico doesn't even go outside after night time[2].

Puerto Rico isn't necessarily Latin America, and most people wont see the worse things happening in their lifetime if they don't live in those rough areas, but the cartels are pretty damn awful. I'm sure Netflix / Telemundo (or was it Univision?) wont get every detail right, but plenty of it is pretty darn close.

That all said, I still would go back to Mexico and Puerto Rico. I love both places, I would still be weary whilst in either of those places, but you gotta know where to go really. Drug Cartels are pretty brutal and have massacred civilians.[3]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Zetas

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/13/us/puerto-rico-crime-murd...

[2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/puerto-rico-violence-former-pol...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_San_Fernando_massacre

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