In Mexico, cartels are hunting down police at their homes | Hacker News Reader

In Mexico, cartels are hunting down police at their homes

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213 pointshbcondo714231 comments

I'm reminded of this recent viral Youtube which depicts what is apparently a routine occurrence in South Africa: A professional gang, armed with heavy caliber weapons, executes a sophisticated highway ambush in an attempt to capture a vehicle loaded with cell phones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAvqDF3Wujc

I watched an interview with Leo Prinsloo, the star of the video. He mentioned that although this incident went viral, it is actually a common occurrence in South Africa, and many gangs have ex-police and ex-military members. Unsurprisingly the police don't provide effective protection against these professionalized gangs, creating the need for private security guards like Prinsloo.

In the US, we are used to thinking of "crime" as just another political issue. But observing countries like Mexico and South Africa, where gangs and police forces have started to merge, has helped me realize that there are important nonlinear effects.

Once "crime" gets bad enough, the state begins to lose its monopoly on force, and I'm not sure it is possible to recover from that. I'm starting to understand why people in the Philippines might support politicians such as Rodrigo Duterte who disregard due process--at a certain point, it becomes more important for the state security forces to win than for them to play fair.

So what you're observing is the process in which states originally asserted themselves as sovereign in the first place. Ie with a ton of violence. Say in ~20 years if those states failed, and Narco states were born out of them, eventually they'll establish a version of governance and im sure sure the cycle would continue.

There was an old (facetious) John Stewart bit where he said the cheapest way to defeat (iirc ISIS) was to not fight them at all but let them get bogged down in having to actually govern. Obviously ISIS is an extreme example but I do think this method could be applied in a way to cartels. I’m not up to date on the situation but I do know that Columbia officially ended its civil war in 2019 with the FARC becoming a political party.

Some cartels in Mexico govern way better than the Federal government there.

So, funny joke, but we'd be better off inviting them to the UN and sternly demanding that they codify their random executions into some form of law that they follow consistently.

>Some cartels in Mexico govern way better than the Federal government there.

Do you have a citation for this?

Experience? Infrastructure? Level of development?

You can act afraid of Mexico or just go there and have a good time and notice the difference. The only bad parts of Mexico is where the recognized government and the local cartel haven't ceded power and are in conflict.

They both like a booming economy and market confidence, just a different strongman to pay from a user experience perspective.

Supposing my pocket is picked in a cartel-governed part of Mexico, what remedies are available?

To be fair there are few places in the world that would be able to offer you significant recourse in that situation.

Exit the market

Negotiations can break down very quickly

Insurance is likely your best option for an actual remedy.

That kind of crime can be very difficult to deal with. Prosecution, enforcement, all of it is very expensive. Damages to the victim can be severe or minor.

Best defense is to avoid being a victim and or having options should it happen anyway, and or limiting your personal risk exposure.

As another said, remedies are not robust and that is true for many governments / parts of the world.

Scams, and other petty crime work in similar ways.

Maybe the best overall approach is to run the nation well enough to make the risk / reward equation less favorable by reducing the value of the reward. Another option is education delivered in immediate, can't miss it fashion.

Happy, healthy people tend to not need these crimes, and they will happen less. Educated travelers tend to present unfavorable risk / reward scenarios.

As a potential target, your best defense is to also make that risk reward equation less favorable by both increasing risk perception and marginalizing the perception of there being a reward in like kind.

Similar dynamics apply right here in the USA as anyone living in the wrong part of town can tell you.

Just for general interest, my spouse and I got to put all that to work after buying our first home. After experiencing a little of that kind of crime, we lit the place up, got a dog, and began to approach the neighbors.

Some were moving, and other starter families like us moved in.

It took about a year. Everyone cleaning up, lighting up, dogs, other basics, and lots of positive activity on the streets.

Prior to all of us doing that work, minor property and person crime, as well as the occasional shooting nearby were the norms.

Police would respond, take reports and basically could offer nothing but the promise of more frequent patrols. I am not sure that had any impact.

After talking with a friend who does security for a living, we gained insight:

Simply not being a desirable target is by far and away the most effective thing one can do.

Risk / reward thinking is very highly effective! We noticed posotive impact after only a month or two and after a sustained time, it was a different neighborhood. One where kids could play in the street, go from home to home, etc... it also was one where people did not need locking gas caps and lug nuts too.

We enjoyed roughly a decade.

As people moved, it began to break down. The big change was working on jeeps guy right across the street. Unwilling to participate, the area saw more crime return. Just did not take long.

We left, and two years later it was the same warzone we had changed for a decade.

In the case of pick pockets, you being a stranger, doing your best to not look like a mark, not act like one, and blending in, not flashy all add right up.

To the pick pocket, you become elevated into undesirable and will be fine. They want lower risk, easy marks that offer solid to great rewards.

They can be in, do it, and out and may not even be identified before anyone can really understand what has happened and convince authorities to respond.

Some regions post info on this for travellers unaware and who may act on the info to better their chances.

We do it in airports with the often heard, "it is illegal for others to offer you a ride" notices we hear after air travel arrivals, for example.

We do that because poisoning the waters, so to speak, is effective in ways policing cannot easily be.

Heck, a cartel interested in tourism may well do the same thing any local government would with similar outcomes and maybe a bit more harsh penalty for regular offenders.

None of that is a remedy for you directly, but it all can make the equation less favorable, which does help you, and can be considerable help given indirectly.

The rest is on you, hopefully savvy traveler.

Source: regular attendance when the bell at the fine school of hard knocks rang, graduated with honors eventually.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paragraph

If it were formal writing...

But it is not.

Doesn't matter, since it's hard to read.

Ok then, it does not matter. Fact is, people put stuff here. I read it.

I do not tell them they failed to do enough for me.

ISIS did actually govern. They had their own DMV.

Which was always the reason I thought there was more to ISIS than the western portrait of a group of extremist ideologues. State construction and maintenance is not a trivial thing and their are not the sort of skills you stumble upon within a group of "madmen". The groups spontaneous arrival and near immediate success in this regard was a little remarkable imo, and raises interesting questions on support and backing.

> the western portrait of a group of extremist ideologues.

That was not just the West's portrait, but Da'esh' own self-portrait as well. They focused their own recruiting on extremist madmen who were single-mindedly committed to their violent interpretation of Islam - hardly an exercise in peaceful state-building.

More thoughtful commenters (e.g. Taleb) actually noticed early that ISIS and wahhabism in general is a deeply rooted and quite old political movement, not all-of-a-sudden religious cult and madness.

Partly because of this conflation the whole narrative (heavily sponsored by oil money of course) have kept blind Western elites for very long time, especially in Europe, where they only start to understand that worship places with heavy foreign aid inflow are not necessarily harmless community centers, and "religious liberties" must have strict bounds to be classified as so.

ISIS is wahabist? I thought they were salafist and Al-Qaeda is wahabist (or at least its leadership is)?

wahabis and salafists are sets with large intersection, but for practical purposes they are the same.

Ah, interesting. I had the impression that they were sworn enemies with philosophies that looked very similar from the outside.

In the west it's common to take an overly reductive view and start throwing labels around as if they actually mean anything.

Wahhabist is not really actually something anyone would refer to themselves as. It seems to refer to really any Muslim group that has some links to Saudi Arabia which is a key player in the geopolitical arena of the Middle East.

Salafi is really anyone that would like to emulate the companions of the Prophet Muhammad and the immediate generation thereafter, Salaf meaning ancestors. This actually would have no more outward political ramifications than what has already been in Islam from the beginning, Islam is meant to encompass governance whether one would agree with that or not, it's part of the religion. Salafi would nearly exclusively refer to the Quran and Hadiths as their source.

I have seen the term thrown around as a label for individuals that have done terrible things but by all accounts were not even remotely close adherents to salafi like doctrine. It's not a political group it's more of a doctrine.

Religious claims and cited sources of any group generally worth nothing, we only care about down the earthly deeds and imposed policies when/if in power.

Not every religion is a religion, that is.

They conquered an area, so by necessity they governed. No sane person would claim that was good governance in any shape or form.

I think I'm going to earn my Godwin point.

My understanding is that Da'esh governance (and recruitment, to some extent) was not dissimilar to early Nazi governance. Yes, they managed their state, but within an ideology based on an imaginary past, on permanent internal violence against real and imaginary enemies of the state, total war against foreign inferiors, and of course genocide (against Yezedi in the case of Daesh).

To add to the parallel, the economy of both states were also, to a large extent, based on plunder, and both nations were born from the ashes of scars of the partial destruction of their country at the hands of foreign powers and a revenge fantasy against said powers and the imaginary conspiracy that caused the fall.

There are also many differences, of course. But my take on it is that there are enough similarities that the world (including myself) not seeing it coming is a failure. Also, yeah, both nazis and da'esh had a mostly working state, but at what cost?

Yes, though this also is my point. That Nazi government had a lot of individuals that were experienced in governance.

I'm not talking about rallying people to cause but rather ensuring municipal activity is happening regularly and that one is generating enough revenue to sustain these activities. Arguably Nazi Germany never really had the latter though, and instead needed to borrow heavily and go to war.

These points seemed that gone over the heads of most here who defaulted to the "oh look, bogeymen that we are all so superior to"

That’s not a defeat - it’s a race to the bottom. And a country can stay there for a long time. Example - Venezuela.

I think it's a bit more complicated than that.

First, just because the state loses its monopoly doesn't mean some other entity gains a monopoly. In Mexico, cartels aren't just fighting the state, they are also fighting each other. If the state collapsed, they will continue fighting each other, and the people of Mexico will effectively live in a semi-permanent warzone.

Second, not all violent entities are created equal. Cartel members are motivated by greed and lust for power. Many are willing to employ tactics such as torture and terrorism to advance those goals: https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Mexican-drug-cartels-new...

I'm not claiming every cop is a saint, far from it. There is certainly room for improvement in the US at least. However, bad cops are newsworthy because we expect better from our cops than our gangsters. On a statistical basis, a much larger fraction of the police force is motivated by a desire to protect and serve the public. And our police forces are subject to at least nominal democratic accountability.

If due process requirements don't meaningfully differentiate cops from gangsters in your eyes, we might as well do away with them anyways.

> In Mexico, cartels aren't just fighting the state, they are also fighting each other.

To be fair, states also sometimes fight each other. They also tend to de-escalate these fights over time as long-term institutional arrangements come to predominate.

"To be fair, states also sometimes fight each other. "

That's basically European history in a nutshell. The middle ages was basically walled cities fighting other walled cities, renaissance too.

> Second, not all violent entities are created equal. Cartel members are motivated by greed and lust for power. Many are willing to employ tactics such as torture and terrorism to advance those goals

First world governments are known to employ torture and terrorism to achieve their goals, but it's abstracted away as much as possible. While I think the same motivations of greed and power lust exist in governments too, I do agree there is a big difference between cartels and "good" governments: a good government represents the will of the people, and has checks and balances to at least reduce the brazenness and frequency of their violent excesses.

To me, the takeaway is that we can't really rely just on individuals to run moral power structures, but that we need to encode these values into the rules of structure itself - the democratic principles, laws, and enforcement - to get a decent approximation of a civil society. I don't know the details of cartel governance, but I imagine it's authoritarian without much oversight.

> To me, the takeaway is that we can't really rely just on individuals to run moral power structures, but that we need to encode these values into the rules of structure itself - the democratic principles, laws, and enforcement - to get a decent approximation of a civil society.

Hmm, I took exactly the opposite message: democratic checks and balances don't work unless individual members of society really believe in them.

Yes, look up Enrique Camarena

I think most of what you just posted has very little to do with what OP posted.

Due process, btw, isn't some inherent property of states. Lots of states were with pretty capricious forms of justice.

I happen to agree with OP that if the state failed, then these gangs would rapidly take their place, but without the trappings of liberalism that are part of modern Mexico's government. However, I also happen to think that it is not analogous to how states form because these gangs rely on the state; they are more like parasites on the body politic. Sometimes parasites kill their hosts though.

The mafia's idea of economy is based on sucking people dry via their vices and weaknesses. I don't want any sort of governance by pushers, pimps, and goons.

vices and weaknesses -such as fast food, lottery and tax-free religions?

pushers -like the pharmaceutical industry? Pimps like the folks in Hollywood who make money off of titillation (and more -see Harvey Weinstein for one example) and goons such as the ones who raid travellers of cash in the name of "civil forfeiture"(eg https://www.huffpost.com/entry/civil-asset-forfeiture-cash-m...? )

The difference is becoming less profound than you may perhaps be aware of. Ask yourself -why do the police still commit violent abuses even with body cams and the bad publicity? The answer is -because it doesn't matter, because they can. That is different from "goons" how?

The biggest fast food chains are a mafia in business terms and treat their employees and IP accordingly. Same with patented Monsanto GMO, for instance. Non-government lotteries are dubious at best and held by the mafia at worst (at least in eastern euro). Non-instituionalised religions prove time and time again to be cults.

The pharmaceutical industry is based on science, and subject to audits and regulation. In fact, one of the best ways to rehabilitate people is gradually decrease their intake with pure, medical-grade narcotics. That aside, the infamous ADHD/OCD pills are last-ditch effort - nobody talks about schizophrenia and mania pills that do a good job.

A small fraction of police still commit violent abuses because America is full of aggressive, suppressed, violent people. Again, police officers' actions are subject to audit and regulation, and action in a court of law. Let's not forget they have the right to apply necessary force to make you comply, a lot of people simply earn a beating. The rest of the cases are a minority nonetheless.

We must move on and escape the mob mentality. Root it out of our DNA. Amortise punishments over time and rationality.

"Monsanto GMO, " You made my case for me

"Non-instituionalised religions prove time and time again to be cults."

Institutionalized ones tend to be ...hotbeds of child abuse, spousal abuse, fraud and grift on a mass scale.

"The pharmaceutical industry is based on science, and subject to audits and regulation." You forgot to mention lobbying (AKA legalized bribary) which is used to tailor regulation (writing or enforment) in their favor.

"A small fraction of police still commit violent abuses because America is full of aggressive, suppressed, violent people."

"Folks are basically decent/conventional wisdom would say/but we read about the exceptions/in the papers every day"(Rush, "Second Nature" ) ACAB didn't appear out of thin air, and the "few bad apples" theory doesn't hold up once you consider that those "bad apples" are not held accountable and are supported by the "good" apples.

We are not going to escape the mob (by which I assume you mean criminal?) mentality -just the opposite. Most of history has been strongmen oppressing those who can not fight back assisted by a religion that tells the oppressed that they'll get theirs "by and by" or in another life or that they deserve to suffer full stop (original sin, mixed with the divine right of kings). We had a bright shining moment of roughly half a century -but now that is over, corruption and superstition (Qanon, anti-vax,anti-maskers, flat earthers) are going to take us back to the brutality that most of recorded (and unrecorded) history has been.

The only thing we'll be rooting out is weeds in the muddy fields of our multi-national overlords.

For something almost as harrowing but much closer to the US, the carjacking attempt in Nuevo Laredo while less viral is for me even more terrifying. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyBV81kVKVw

The video you linked to titles it a cash in transit heist. Was it really cellphones?

Yes, they seem to be a more valuable commodity than cash in South Africa: https://www.thesouthafrican.com/news/who-is-leo-prinsloo-dri....

This is absolutely wild. I had watched that video earlier, and assumed it was a car transporting cash.

Someone should start a drone cellphone delivery business for South Africa. It's hard to understand people putting their lives on the line like that to deliver cell phones.

People also put their lives on the line for cellphone towers in South Africa.

  where gangs and police forces have started to merge

"By 1923 it was estimated over half of the PPB were also members of the Klan."

If you research most municipal police forces in the United States, it's always been that way.. we just aren't taught that in American schools.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_Police_Bureau

”Most” is quite definitely an overstatement.

That was about 100 years ago. Do you have more recent numbers?

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy

Not numbers, but it does appear that the problem far right radicals in law enforcement persists to this very day:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fbi-white-supremacists-i...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/27/white-suprem...

When I lived in the Philippines a couple of years ago, Duterte was extremely popular on the street for this reason. He basically "cleaned the place up", when I asked people about it.

It's dehumanisation.

1. Many of the police's murder victims were children. People accept this because hey, it's not my kids.

2. The process by which victims are chosen is opaque. When you're dead, no one's going to listen to your family protest your innocence.

3. Early on Duterte promised to haul in big fish: generals, governors, and the like. So far the biggest fish have been mayors in small towns in far-flung provinces. Most victims have been from the poor and marginalised. Anyone who thinks the drug trade has been stamped out is kidding themselves.

4. What little statistics there were at the time the anti-drug campaign was launched showed that drug crime was not the bogeyman it was hyped to be.

5. Street crime and violent crime is still rampant. Wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be the same cops now emboldened with a license to murder.

The human cost has been appalling, for no benefit that I can see.

Holy moly. For anyone else wondering what kind of vehicle this is, here's pictures of the aftermath:

https://twitter.com/Abramjee/status/1388195293565489156

Another camera angle of the ambush, shows what's going on:

https://twitter.com/eNCA_BBateman/status/1389839622914510849

For an Indian example where the links between crime and government are more direct, there was a recent scandal where a disgraced Mumbai Police Commissioner wrote an open letter where he said his (also disgraced) subordinate was tasked by the state's Home Minister to extort 13 million USD from the city's businessmen every month. Heck, I assumed that nearly all politicians and a lot of policemen here are thoroughly corrupt. This open letter showed me I had underestimated the extent of it. The aspect of Vaze's "encounters" are worth a read too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachin_Vaze#Extortion_allegati...

Edit: I wonder how imprudent it was of me to not use a VPN'd account to write this comment. On the one hand, this information is on Wikipedia. On the other hand, the political party I wrote about has a history of sending their police dogs after ordinary citizens for comments made on the internet.

>>Edit: I wonder how imprudent it was of me to not use a VPN'd account to write this comment.

Unless they can hack HN servers to check its logs, I don't see how they'd track down the IP from where your comment was submitted from.

They don't hack. The send legal notices to the companies. They have sent legal notices to get people on Google, Facebook, etc. I still wrote my comment assuming that HN is obscure enough for them not to be aware of it.

Why would a site hosted outside of India respond to a legal notice from India?

The usual reason is that if they don't, the website gets banned in India.

Could be posting from inside India?

Given HN uses HTTPS, there's no way they can determine how a particular user is interacting with HN just by monitoring the data being routed by India-based internet switches.

I would say that depends on how intensely you are being watched. Traffic analysis and timestamp correlation are a powerful tool.

Small traffic bursts going out, slightly larger ones coming in: surfing, reading the front page. (Or new post page.) Small traffic burst going out, lots of traffic coming in: loading an active topic thread page. Slightly bigger traffic burst going out, lots of traffic coming back in: posting a comment to an active, non-trivial thread.

Number of packets (and total outgoing bytes) are useful for bucketing the size of the comment posted. Short comments should fit into a single payload packet. Longer comments obviously have their payload split across multiple packets, and by counting the total bytes sent, you have a decent estimate to the size of the comment posted.

Combine comment timestamps with their lengths and you can infer quite a bit.

Metadata defines the difference between security and privacy.

HTTPS is a great first-base — it is not enough.

Are you saying HN doesn’t log IPs?

@dang, you don’t?

HN logs IPs.

Yes, in India a lot of police force acts as extortion agents for whoever is in power. I have some extended family members as officers in police. They told me in every police station there is a policeman whose only job is to collect ransom from local bars, businesses and crime lords. This money is collected all over state and the majority of the cut goes to heads of political party in power. These funds are then used for elections. Everyone gets a cut. The cut depends on which level of bureaucracy you are employed at. This arbitrage exists because India has a lot of very strict and obscure laws around everything and to not have law interfere you have to pay this ransom. This is also known otherwise as licence raj.

About your statement on posting via VPN, I think you are overreacting a bit here. I don't deny that institutional persecution doesn't happen in India. But what you have posted is already there in the public domain and has been widely reported.

When PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) ruled Mexico, things were stable. There was a plaza system. Whatever you see in India today is a microcosm of such a plaza system in Mexico. As PRI lost power, also because of the kingpin strategy used by the USA, Mexico is in shambles: emergence of many ruthless cartels. Many believe that Ex-president Carlos Salinas and his brother made billions from such a collusion between PRI, plaza system and crony capitalists. For instance, people say, Carlos Slim funneled money for Salinas, etc.

"Narcotrafficking had formerly been integrated into the PRI corporatist state, an under-the-table equivalent of labor, peasant, and business organizations. As such it was subject to a certain degree of regulatory control, and to unofficial taxation, in return for the de facto licensing of smuggling (the plaza system). The state’s abandonment of this form of corporatist inclusion contributed to the independent growth and power of organized crime syndicates."[1]

1. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/mexico-drug-cartel-neolib...

I think Mexican cartels are well past just having ex police and ex military members and are effectively have the status of "monopoly on force" in some regions.

Here's CJNG showing off some of their troops:

https://old.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/ht8bx7/this...

Here's one of them not only with a police escort but happy to show it:

https://old.reddit.com/r/NarcoFootage/comments/mdq35m/cjng_o...

Yeah it really is time for the Mexican federal government to start training elite military forces to take out these guys and treat them as full on terrorists and kill on sight orders. War is ugly.

I’m sure that’s what they’ve been doing. And it works to some extent. The problem is that often times those elite forces find out there is more money to be made either working with the cartels, or replacing them altogether.

South African here. It's not so much the state has lost its monopoly on force, but rather through years of top down corruption which has pervaded all levels of government, police and state officials aren't incentivised to be effective at combating crime.

> But observing countries like Mexico and South Africa, where gangs and police forces have started to merge, has helped me realize that there are important nonlinear effects.

This happens in the US[1][2], as well.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-fbi-investigating-...

[2] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-13/villanue...

I was going to say...as someone who grew up in New York in the `60s and `70s, the idea of the police force collaborating with the “gangs” is a pretty commonplace one for me.

> Once "crime" gets bad enough, the state begins to lose its monopoly on force, and I'm not sure it is possible to recover from that.

Exactly, it's the old hobbes-ian dilemma, you need a "Leviathan" to hold said monopoly on force no matter what, otherwise you risk sinking into a civil war situation.

The article is about Mexican cartels taking the fight to the police.

As a South African, I worry that our crime levels probably get more attention than they deserve. The are certainly not much more than any other country. Even on platforms like HN, a few people watch a few videos and see a few social media posts. Conclude the country must be rife with violent crime and proceed to happily spread the word, even when no one asked or whether it's relevant to the topic.

South africa is not a police state. Surveillance and obsessing about would-be crimes is not on the agenda. Police respond to crime and act accordingly. Just like everywhere else.

It's difficult to compare crime statistics due to the nature of what is criminalized being different, but the numbers for South Africa are stark enough for this to not matter.

Here's a report from the SA police on crime for 2020 - https://businesstech.co.za/news/government/421424/south-afri...

I can see that there were 22k murders on a population of about 60 million.

I couldn't find USA crime statistics for 2020, which has seen a surge of murders; but the 2019 statistics show 19k murders on a population of over 300 million. Even taking the increase into account, that's a factor difference of x4-5.

Here's wikipedia's page on intentional homicide rate by country - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

SA's rate of 36 for 2018 is only surpassed by countries in Central America, like Venezuela and Honduras. The US's rate for 2018 is 5.

For comparison the USA...

Therein lies my problem. You are going to compare one of the wealthiest, most powerful countries in human history, with South Africa?

Umm okay. Which country do you want me to compare it with? How about some from Africa?

SA - 36

CAR - 20

DR Congo - 13.5

Uganda - 10.4

Nigeria - 10

How about some poor countries from Europe?

Ukraine - 6.1

Bulgaria - 1.3

War-torn countries in Asia?

Iraq - 10

Afghanistan - 6.6

Hoorah.

But what does this have to do with the Topic discussed about Mexican Cartel operations against the police? Is it relevant?

This is not the right thread for discourse about SA. We shall leave that for the appropriate platform/post.

>The are certainly not much more than any other country.

I appreciate your naivete but we have to face the truth. The homicide[+] rate of South Africa (as of 2018) is 36.40. For comparison, Afghanistan is 6.6. The US sits at 4.96. Most of Europe is below 3. And that's just the kiling part. South Africa is notorious for its rampant sexual violence. [++]

[+] Within the broad range of violent deaths, the core element of intentional homicide is the complete liability of the direct perpetrator, which thus excludes killings directly related to war or conflicts, self-inflicted death (suicide), killings due to legal interventions or justifiable killings (such as self-defence), and those deaths caused when the perpetrator was reckless or negligent but did not intend to take a human life (non-intentional homicide). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... (2018)

[++] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics#South%20Africa (2010)

This isnt the right thread to wax lyrical about your skill in linking wikipedia articles for crime stats.

Its about cartels on Mexico taking the fight to the police. My point was an aside to OP seeming fascination of including South African crime when it isn't relevant. Wait for the right post and we shall discuss at length about the dangers of painting pictures with mere quantitative analysis.

Not trying to offend any party here but the violence in Mexico seems more organised, targeted but brutal and extreme. The violence in ZA seems more random, more opportunity crime and more about property than people.

At least this is how media show it. I may be wrong here.

One of the most jarring things about violence in SA is that the crimes are usually property related, but there seems to be a complete disregard for life by the perpetrators. Robbers will quite often gun down their victims or security, even if they're not trying to actively resist. I don't really know what the cause for this is.

> at a certain point, it becomes more important for the state security forces to win than for them to play fair.

If the state security forces aren't going to follow the rules; what does it matter whether they are stronger or not? The only difference between them and the crime gangs is the crime gangs can balance a budget. A strong state that sees itself as above the law is no less dangerous than out of control crime gangs.

It's not a 'disregard of due process'. It's straight up murder. The drug crime situation in the Philippines was never as bad as what we're seeing in Mexico. Voters were shown a bogeyman and many fell for it.

Also, the victims of the anti-drug campaign are suspiciously mostly small-fry (or worse, innocent). Anyone who thinks that this is any sort of systemic solution is kidding themselves.

I knew a SA who left because of this kind of gang violence. She’d mentioned people would booby trap their cars and also some people would carry flame throwers with them depending where their trip took them.

SF isn’t there yet by a long shot, but a couple of decades of hands off approach and deference to criminals and it’s not out of the question.

>In the US, we are used to thinking of "crime" as just another political issue. But observing countries like Mexico and South Africa, where gangs and police forces have started to merge, has helped me realize that there are important nonlinear effects.

In the US we have legalized extortion, which have a benign term: taxes. Take away the taxes and the people in powers will morph in not what is considered the mafia. To me they are both, sides of the same coin.

Yeah but in the philipines they went from extra-judicial killing of drug dealers right to extra-judicial killings of drug users.

They also have outright literally terrorists living/hiding on some of the islands, so the unlimited force thing obviously isn't a solution.

The problem with saying legalization will solve everything is the legal industries, such as avocados, are subject to extortion by the cartels. So if you legalized drugs you'd just have cartels extorting the legal drug makers and have the same amount of violence and gang activity.

Some areas where the local militia has replaced the police now exist because the police are too demoralized, corrupt or scared to protect the industry in that area from extortion, so the industry creates its own security force by arming local citizens.

This makes a case for the second amendment. If the police are too scared to protect you, why not let people without a criminal record have guns and form a militia?

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/may/18/avocado-polic...

No one says it will solve everything, but taking cocaine trafficking away from them will hurt them in their pockets.

There are only so much avocado entrepreneurs they can kidnap and extort.

Legalizing alcohol again in the US didn't make organized crime disappear, but it did make them much weaker. It has been a success.

Good point. In that regard, i think the cartels have also latched on to the oil trade.

> The problem with saying legalization will solve everything is the legal industries, such as avocados, are subject to extortion by the cartels.

Assuming your country's police force is sufficiently independent, then the extortion will fail when the perpetrators are arrested.

Technically yes, legalisation isn't the be all and end all, but then, what point is any law, if your justice system and law enforcement officers are thoroughly corrupt?

Without high-margin profits from drugs, cartels can't maintain the manpower and incredible level of violence necessary to extort avocado growers.

"Not a failed state"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_San_Fernando_massacre

>Mass murder of 193 people by Los Zetas drug cartel at La Joya ranch in the municipality of San Fernando, Tamaulipas, Mexico in March 2011. Authorities investigating the massacre reported numerous hijackings of passenger buses on Mexican Federal Highway 101 in San Fernando, and the kidnapped victims were later killed and buried in 47 clandestine mass graves.

>Reports mentioned that female kidnapping victims were raped and able-bodied male kidnapping victims were forced to fight to the death with other hostages, where they were given knives, hammers, machetes and clubs to find recruits who were willing to kill for their lives. In the blood sport, the survivor was recruited as a hitman for Los Zetas.

Just another day in Mexico. The S. Fernando massacre is not to be confused with another mass kidnapping of students in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Iguala_mass_kidnapping

> Just another day in Mexico.

Comical exaggeration doesn't help your case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Mexico

> Failed state

According the the wikipedia article, the military took over the town and arrested 82 people, including the leaders and local police. If by failed state you mean Tamaulipas, sure. If you mean Mexico, you need to talk about degrees of failure.

About that last sentence: "former U.S. Ambassador [...] said in April that López Obrador views the fight against drug cartels as a distraction ... So he has basically adopted an agenda of a pretty laissez-faire attitude towards them, which is pretty troubling to our government, obviously.”

Not from Mexico, but from Colombia, where we also have a very hard time with drugs. The real problem with drugs has never been here. It is always because the US which always pushed us to fight drugs from this side, while they don't seem to do much from their side, this way they push the war to this side. while they get to enjoy the benefits of unregulated markets.

The true solution to the problem is regulated drug market, where the country people can make a profit out of it, and every link of the chain pays its due taxes. But cocaine is so big of a business that mafias aren't letting that happen.

US doesn't even care about cocaine, otherwise they would be doing a far better job at eliminating the trafficking. It is just that if they're not the ones making a profit, then no one should make a profit.

Typical case of a northern country exploiting a southern country.

> the US which always pushed us to fight drugs from this side, while they don't seem to do much from their side

Isn't the typical complaint that the US does too much to fight drugs?

Maybe they do the same that politicians do here... they keep the cops busy grabbing individuals, but they turn a blind eye to the shipments of tons that are sent via airplanes that could be intercepted easily. In the end everyone knows that it is a deal between traffickers and politicians.

> In the end everyone knows that it is a deal between traffickers and politicians

This is not true in the US. We have no politicians that are suspected of being involved with cartels.

While our policies might not help the situation, no politician is actually working with traffickers.

Yes you’re right, I can’t say from that side.

What I can say is it has happened here for a long time, and no one questioned as they were also in control of the media. Just until recently it became widely known the 20+ years of smoke of “fight against drugs”. Maybe over there is different, or maybe is not a big of a deal, as, even if there is a lot of money in drugs, there is orders of magnitude more money in big tech, and also from a cleaner origin, so who knows.

No, that's what the CIA is for. [0]

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

It’s definitely not like that in the US (at least on a large scale) and we regularly have large busts and individual cities taking down large operations. Even large scale gangs don’t tend to last long as a centralized bloc because then the fed launches an operation and seizes bank accounts/arrests all the guys at the top.

The problem is that people want to do cocaine, they just do. I’ve been to plenty of parties full of people who aren’t into drugs, the type from well of families with good degrees and good jobs who’ve never been arrested, where cocaine is brought out because it’s considered a party drug like ecstasy among the American middle/upper class. When people like that are willing to spend hundreds of dollars there is a lucrative market and someone is going to supply it. So when American agencies take down large scale operations another (usually decentralized) group swoops in and the cycle repeats.

The skeptical part of me makes me think that it is just smoke... the police takes down large gangs as it draws too much attention, so they gotta do their job. But really big fishes never get caught, and everyone gets good scores in their reports. Down here it is known that some cops are in the trafficking network, and micro traffic is the norm.

Large shipments quite literally rely on small individuals being busted. For at least ten years now, border security agencies have been receiving training on how not to act in the face of a small bust. Their typical response is to start waving people through with little to no scrutiny, because all of the agents want to have some part in the bust, if at least just to have a rubbernecked sort of view at the excitement going on. Now they are being trained that the presence of a small bust is the cue to start raising scrutiny on all vehicles, and larger vehicles in particular.

One of the most disturbing findings is that the largest busts are almost always precipitated by some individual getting caught who is absolutely insistent that they didn't know that a brick of coke was taped to their gas tank (or similar). Previously, those individuals might go straight to prison for a decade or more on trafficking charges. Now that agencies (and defense lawyers) are catching on, there is now a lot of credence given to the idea that those individuals are actually unwitting drug mules used to distract CBP agents from doing their jobs while they slip truckloads past them at the border.

How many "drug traffickers" have we imprisoned that have merely been pawns in a drug trafficking scheme that they had no part in?

Small captures are just the distraction, heck, they even made a tv show “alerta aeropuerto” where they show how efficient they are grabbing mules (that’s the name we give individuals who transport cocaine). The truth is that cocaine transportation is a business that airlines and politicians are into. Nothing unexpected, knowing the dirty records of very high security agencies from both sides.

Well, I can only speak from this side, I don’t really know what happens in the US, but here we have always been fooled by the media, so maybe it can happen there too. And we all know what politicians are capable of.

No wonder the "war on drugs" is a failure, it literally is the delivery mechanism.

The complaint, as I understand it, hasn't been the US does too much; it's been that the US has adopted an incredibly violent and inefficient system to fighting drugs by heavily punishing users.

Throwing an entire generation of drug users in jail did little to curb the actual inflow if illegal drugs into America.

Exploitation in the drug market happens in the reverse of what you think. The target market is the first world, because the product has maximal value there.

The positive externalities are all gained by the producer countries. Traffickers and coca producers have even risen to become major politicians in places like Venezuela and Bolivia. Meanwhile, negative externalities -- crime, addiction, and so forth -- get distributed to the consumer countries.

The product is addictive, so you can't exactly be surprised that consumers continue to buy it. It is all too common in Latin America to hear people complain about the big bad USA, but that line of reasoning is casual and has its limitations.

I think most people would consider the violence and murders associated with cartels more of a negative externality than coke & weed addicts.

61% of Mexico's drug exports (by dollar value) is marijuana. 61,000 people in Mexico vanished related to drugs / cartels last year. 105 people were killed in a single day. 40,000 people were killed by cartels between 2006-2010 alone [1].

The overdose crisis in the US was mostly created by our own pharmaceutical industry. Recently, Mexico started supplying SOME of the Fentanyl. The vast majority of it comes from China - either directly or indirectly through Mexico [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_drug_war

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/research/fentanyl-and-geopolitics-...

The case here is that coca traffickers and producers are very different. Producers the bottom of the chain, who live in the violence, sometimes they’re threatened if they try to change their crops. Traffickers are the ones that have got into politics, actively sabotaging any effort of legalization, while also controlling the mass media, and preaching under the blessing of US drug fight. That is the very same group of right wing capitalist politicians that have signed disastrous coal/oil mining regulations, and signed free trade agreements that have hit the local farmer the hardest. The moment when the money of cocaine actually reached the people was back in the time of Pablo Escobar. Since then almost none of the profits have reached the actual farmers.

This comment feels like trolling to me...

Why Mexico or Colombia should care about exporting drugs? As you say, it could be a net win for them.

Instead of that we see a state of war in the country, because the pressures of the "big bad USA" and their "war on drugs". I suppose it's easier to have a war when the deaths are in other countries.

"Typical case of a northern country exploiting a southern country"

Like Canada exploiting the US. Or Columbia exploiting Chile. Or Sweden exploiting Denmark. Typical? No...

US and Canada are very into southern politics, to do a lot of coal/oil/etc mining very below the actual worth, because it is always so much cheaper to lobby local politicians, who get elected year after year because they control the big media chain, making the whole circle of corruption and then labeling it democracy and capitalism

Big media is controlled by big players in the US as well. People stopped trusting the media. The people seem to be falling for it in your country. Is there anything you can do to educate them? Without a population who questions all is lost.

You should work for them. I'll give your trick a try.

well according to the Netflix "Rotten" episode about avocados, violent criminals will kidnap and murder for anything of value in Mexico. Therefore I'm not so sure the legality/regulation of the market has anything to do with it. If anything, the issue is the proximity of a poor country to a rich country.

The taxes will have to be low enough where a grey market would not thrive. In LA, I roughly estimate half the dispensaries are illegal. This is because taxes (local, state, and sales) amount to 30%. Grey market is automatically cheaper by a substantial fraction.

Will this trend lead to fewer and fewer people joining law enforcement, which would further weaken the government?

Regarding whether this constitutes a "failed state", I'd say it depends on how bad this gets.

Similar to the concept of "peaceful transfer of power", there also needs to be a relatively peaceful maintenance of power.

Politicians, judges and law enforcement are the very people who constitute a functional government. If, going forward, a certain threshold of the "good guys" start to opt out of joining their own governing system (in one of those capacities) for fear of having themselves and their families murdered, then the country becomes a failed state.

How can other countries prevent that from happening to them, especially Mexico's neighbors?

Which kinda reminds me of “defund the police” and “ACAB” movements in the US, promoting that all cops are bad and no good person should join police force.

I don’t think it does any good for future crime rates.

Well, its a problem yeah. But its not a few bad apples. Police abuse people pretty systematically. Its no good having a police force that is basically unaccountable. Which is what we've got now. Also, police are called in to do things that really they shouldn't be, like resolving disputes between spouses, dealing with people having mental health issues, etc. And they carry guns all the time which just means that the chance of them using a gun in a casual encounter goes up massively.

> Which kinda reminds me of “defund the police” and “ACAB” movements in the US, promoting that all cops are bad and no good person should join police force.

This sounds like a huge mischaracterization of the movements to me. From what I've seen it seems the movement mainly has two goals: - Demilitarize the police, i.e. don't let them buy toys that are overpowered for the work they're supposed to do. - Don't make the police do tasks that are better handled by others. Like, don't put all the responsibility of dealing with mentally ill people. Move money from the police to various departments/institutes that can help and treat people with mental illness.

> I don’t think it does any good for future crime rates.

It's much worse to neglect mental health, to remove social security systems, and to let income inequality get out of hand. That's the point of "defund the police". Invest in policies that reduce the need for a militarized police, by treating the illness rather than spending money on dealing with the symptoms.

> promoting that all cops are bad and no good person should join police force.

This is not what defund the police was about. This is misinformed. It was about reducing the amount of things police do and giving those responsibilities to people better trained for it. Also getting rid of things like military equipment.

50% of black Americans agree that MORE police are needed on the street, according to a 2020 study. [1]

To campaign for their reduction is to campaign against the interests of black people. In fact, it sounds incredibly racist to suggest black people can't decide this and their voice needs to be trampled upon.

[1] https://www.vox.com/2020/6/17/21292046/black-people-abolish-...

can you show me where in my post I was talking about black americans or explain why its relevant to my post? Or even the parent post I responded to?

I'm just pointing out the racism of the suggestion. But if you don't support it then it's no problem.

No one is talking about race? All races are affected by over policing.

Why do you think you can decide what black communities need more than the majority of black people? They want more police. You are advocating for them to get less, against their wishes, no?

>It is a type of direct attack on officers seldom seen outside of the most gang-plagued nations of Central America and poses the most direct challenge yet to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s policy of avoiding violence and rejecting any war on the cartels.

Why would the Mexican President not want to just get rid of the cartels?

Because they’ve been doing that, with not great results. This new guy got elected partially on this new approach.

Could be working for the cartels.

Very very senior officials in Mexican government get busted for corruption all the time. It would not surprise me if this president was bought. Most recently, the former minister of defence who runs the entire army, the war against the cartel, and reports directly to the president, was arrested by the DEA.

https://www.lamag.com/article/mexican-military-arrest-lax/

In the year President Andrés Manuel López won, 113 politicians and 43 candidates running for office were assassinated. That was about 2/3rds of all of the presidential candidates.

This year, 34 Mexican presidential candidates have been murdered so far.

Most people want to get rid of the cartels and every year, people try, but all of the Mexican presidential candidates that want to, get murdered by a Mexican cartel.

People in countries with strong rule of law who criticize the people of countries like Brazil and Philippines for electing brutal leaders whose forces carry-out extra-judicial killings don't understand that the alternative to that brutality, is not the rule of law.

Is there any example in recent history, where a failed state managed to turn around and improve/start functioning properly?

And if yes, how did they do it?

If the US decriminalised cocaine and other illegal drugs you would immediately put the cartels in a stranglehold financially. Upon this, you can start going after their "legitimate" interests in legal businesses like resorts and manufacturing.

Just like the US prohibition emboldened the Mob, drug prohibition emboldens the cartels.

The Mob used to literally have shootouts with police in the street.

What work do you think these people would start doing to fill in the financial gap? I’d suspect worse crime if no alternatives exist.

The way it was done is that crime was nationalized. For example in the USSR, the NKVD secret police nearly exterminated the criminal underworld completely, put the remaining in forced labor camps (Gulags) and used them to repress the political prisoners. Crime became a state monopoly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thief_in_law

What are the arguments against two years of compulsory police (or naval) service for men at age 18 in Mexico? It would certainly alter the political dynamics of the war on drug cartels if moms nationwide were to send their sons to fight trafficking, and scooping young men out of their communities might prevent them from getting involved in criminal enterprises.

> fight trafficking

The message the cartel is sending to those who are trying to do exactly this seems like a strong deterrent.

Not saying it's a bad idea. But there is ample evidence of police not being paid enough and accepting "bribes" (I use quotes here because I think the negative connotation is unfair, somewhat, when a lot of this happens simply because they don't make enough in the first place - it's a different moral worldview when you're trying to support your family), so I don't know if it would be easy to stop them from being "corrupted", or "paid off", especially if the service is compulsory.

I think in general, the issue is super complicated, and if there were a simple panacea or idea, it would have been tried by now. I honestly don't know what can be done to stop the cartels with the amount of economic clout they have and how entrenched they are in all aspects of society.

There's a great line in Narcos (apologies for using a show, but I really think it's a very applicable line); a colonel was asked what he needed to stop Escobar, and he said "Incorruptible men".

Incorruptible men are very hard to come by. Incorruptible men who don't fear their families being slaughtered are probably even harder to come by.

Sexism, for one.

There are gang members in the U.S. who join the military to receive weapons training. It won't eliminate the problem. You will just see corrupt soldiers instead of corrupt police.

> There are gang members in the U.S. who join the military to receive weapons training.

1) There are people everywhere who do all sorts of things. The nightly news is replete with one-off events presented as a worrying trend. Is it a thing to worry about? is the question.

2) What's worse than a gang member entering military service? A gang member not entering military service: a 4 year commitment to being told what to do by your betters, learning life skills like how to cooperate and follow instructions. Would a "gang member" go back to his old life after successfully navigating that? Depends on the gang I suppose, but not many I would imagine.

3) With compulsory service, everyone would have weapons training, criminals and non-criminals alike.

It would help to merge police and cartels even more. They are not two distinct entities, there is significant overlap between the two. If you force young man into military, you might just force them into situation where he has to cooperate with cartel or get corrupt.

It uses young men as a tool to coerce their mothers to do something political without even being sure what that thing is. You want sacrifice young men but don't stare for what.

Does anyone remember what happened when the authorities tried to destroy favelas in Brazil? Criminals started eliminating police officers' families. That's the way it works. You don't touch them, they don't touch you.

Anyone knows what happened when Russians eliminated their 'thieves in law' (criminal bosses)? Street crime overwhelmed that city.

You can't live w/o counter-elite. There's a kind of balance, as always.

The amount of money and power a cartel have is not even comparable with the police resources. And even if a local police would want to things with proper training and weapons, the cartels are still having influence at the state and federal level.

If I were running things in Mexico I would legalize or decriminalize all drugs. Setup compounds to securely house the police forces. Change the policy to "balazos, muchos balazos".

The politicians are probably much less powerful than the cartels (if they are not allies). To try to pass a bill to decriminalize all drugs would probably fail and get you killed.

Multiple Mexican Presidents in the last few decades have been shown to be CIA assets, so

Since HN downvotes before searching these days:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16195392

Legalizing it in Mexico isn’t a solution since they aren’t selling to Mexican citizens for most of their profit. America and Europe are large, developed economies with wealthy middle/upper classes who like to do coke. I’m sure crack cocaine makes up a decent chunk too but I can’t imagine that the poor that partake in that make up even close of the same percentage as the wealthy coke consumers.

> If I were running things in Mexico I would legalize or decriminalize all drugs

This is a naïve "Bernie bro"-style take. What do you with cartel turf wars? Legalize murder? The problem is not only complex on a local scale (city or country), but there are geopolitical pressures at play as well.

Cartels tend to be very populist, often funneling money back in their communities making them (paradoxically) better. On the other hand, you've also got offshore banks that protect cartels, laundering their money, just as they protect the likes of large tech companies stash their money in tax-free havens. If you want to change that whole machinery, be prepared to take on the world's billionaires.

The reason cartels need to murder people at all is because the business is illegal and there is no justice system to mediate disputes. F500 CEOs aren't doing drive-bys on each other over patent infringements because they can just sue.

Why would the cartels want to legalize drugs?

They don't. It would mean no more risk premium and the involvement of people that could do a better job than them, but don't get involved in the trade for obvious reasons.

The big mistake you're making is that legalising it also magically brings all the infrastructure to neuter the cartels.

Of course it doesn't, they just transfer to other illegal activities, see: bootlegging by organized crime during prohibition.

The problem the cartels will face is that there is no other business that makes as much money, and it would require a retool of the entire organization (or scale up, at a minimum) to get back to even a fraction of their power.

Cartels are not some unstoppable juggernaut: they run on capital, same as every other business. No money for bribes & no money for foot soldiers == no more cartel at a recognizable scale.

Kidnapping and extortion of wealthy avocado growers is already a lucrative business many cartels have been branching out to.

And Kidnapping of avocado growers is a billion dollar industry? How many are there to kidnap? That doesn't compare to the income generated by cocaine traffic.

> The problem the cartels will face is that there is no other business that makes as much money

This is not true. See this article[1] and HN thread[2]:

> “It’s good business,” El Polkas says with a shrug. “It makes a lot of money.” When I ask how gasoline compares to narcotics, in terms of overall revenue to Los Zetas, he rubs his index fingers together. “Fifty-fifty,” he says. “It’s approximately as profitable as drugs.”

[1] - https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/drug-w...

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18101141

One anecdote and a thread about semi-fictional action movies about Brazilian Special Police Operators? Not exactly the strongest rebuttal.

And a quick search reveals:

>he Mexican government said fuel theft — huachicol as it is known in Spanish — decreased from about 60,000 barrels per day in 2018 to about 11,000 a day in 2019, with estimated savings of $6 billion.

> According to Pemex, fuel theft averaged about 4,440 barrels per day in 2020.

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/despite-some-successes-mex...

I have no idea how good the source is, but there's just absolutely no way black market fuel sales could ever generate the same amount of revenue.

> On 2 July state-owned oil firm Pemex reported a 114 per cent year-on-year increase in illegal tapping during the first four months of 2020, during which authorities recovered 9,291,986 litres of stolen fuel with a commercial value of MXN157m (around US$7m).

10,000,000 only has a commercial value of $7m. Imagine the logistics of scaling that kind of operation.

That might have helped if they did it decades ago. At this point, there are plenty of other victimful crimes—human trafficking, protection rackets—to keep the cartels in business.

Cartels only exist because of its illegality. Same reason alcohol smuggling gangsters existed during the US prohibition era.

Cartels would continue to exist though. Because there are always other illegal services that need to be provided. Prostitution, gambling, murder-for-hire, mercenaries, unlicensed surgeons, as well as a still-extant illegal drugs market because they are merely cheaper, or sold to those who cannot buy the otherwise state-approved drugs(underage, banned for some reason).

None of that provides 1% of the income that illegal drugs does.

> Cartels only exist because of its illegality.

Wait, what? You are saying there are no cartels in enterprises where the underlying good is legal? For example, oil cartels don't exist? The cartel will exist if the existance of the cartel causes it to make more money than would otherwise be the case. You should read about all the knee cappings and dirty dealings standard oil did in the U.S. When the US had mob problems, yes the mob was involved in prostitution and gambling but it was also involved in port unloading, ice delivery, meat packing, unions, and plenty of other legal goods/activities. Many of the organized crime issues the US struggled with were related to fixing elections and paying off city workers, particularly in big east coast cities like NY, Boston, and Chicago, where loyalty to the machine meant city contracts, city jobs, etc. There was fixing of construction contracts, service contracts, garbage delivery, etc. All of these goods/services were legal.

Cartels are just organized crime, and what causes an end to cartels is rule of law. As long as there is no rule of law, it will always be more profitable for someone to break into a store and take something than to obtain it legally, and it will always be more profitable to burn down a rival company's factory than to outsell the factory by lowering your price, and it will always be more profitable to seize market share with a gun than with a better product and to extract payments by offering protection to small businesses who can't rely on the police to protect them because there is no rule of law. The idea that a country without proper rule of law can get rid of organized crime by legalizing everything they do seems pretty far fetched. The Sicilian mafia existed because of a lack of rule of law, not because of drugs. It took up drugs, it took up other activities when the opportunity arose, but it far predated them. Mexico has a rule of law problem and a corruption problem, and really a weak central government problem. Fix that, and cartels can be brought under control.

That's not something most people associate with cartels in Mexico.

Parent mean “[Drug] Cartels” not all cartels

the cartels in mexico are just powerful organized crime syndicates, involved in oil theft, human trafficking, local elections, various rackets, as well of course as drug smuggling. They would still fight for territory and control of key industries and would still be a state unto themselves.

> For example, oil cartels don't exist?

Oil cartels are a different kind of cartel. They don't go around casually murdering their rivals, let alone innocent people as acceptable collateral damage.

they certainly do. Ever heard of saudi arabia? They also murder people all over the world, and they are much, much powerful than the petty drug cartels of mexico.

Khashoggi was casually murdered by the Saudis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Jamal_Khash...

It's obviously he means drug cartels, not cartels in general

Mexican drug cartels have diversified into other industries, such as avocados. They employ the same tactics as they do with drugs in order to monopolize production.

Legalizing drugs would eliminate the risk premium, but both fentanyl and avocados are high-margin products. The problem is at least partially structural and cultural, not merely regulatory.

Ok, Mexico can stay a drug cartel infested country. I honestly don't see the problem with avocado cartels, at least they are not drug cartels.

What does "Bernie bro" add to this?

Perhaps a better term would be populist-tier.

These turf wars exist because these people have a lot of power from trafficking drugs over a very widespread area. In the moment that every person can have a coca plant in their house, the trafficker loses this power.

These cartel bosses have fancy cars and luxurious homes. We could drone them all day every day if we wanted, but we don’t because they are employees of our intelligence services. They pay their tribute and they get to be rich, while “our” side gets a fat black budget not accountable to congress.

The banks who launder the money only get fees and no jail time because they are working under the table for the same agencies.

This is a serious accusation you have no proof of, it doesn’t belong here.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_co...

The Iran-Contra affair is irrelevant to the topic at hand

There is plenty of proof that the CIA facilitated cocaine transports to get their weapons in Nicaragua?

We are talking about current cartels in Mexico, not Iran-Contra

It's making a gamble that legitimate drug companies operating with their own security forces and the support of the government could out-compete cartels in both security and economics.

I think it would work absent external pressures. A drug company that can openly operate on the highways and ports, pay for its own helicopters and operate its own militia for security, and call in the police and army at need, has a significant edge over a cartel operating covertly. Unfortunately, a legitimate company would at the very least not have access to the North American market, which would stop it competing with the cartels.

I don't think it is naive at all. Drug decriminalization programs have success in the Netherlands and Portugal. Prohibition on drugs is similar to prohibition on alcohol in the US in that it is a source of funding for organized crime.

The source of the violence in Mexico is drug cartels. Drug cartels take profit from the illegal drug trade. Eliminate the illegal drug trade and you will greatly reduce the funding for organized crime.

Attacking their funding is the solution. Cartels would not be popular if they did not have money. If they cannot smuggle illegal drugs they will have lots less money.

Compounds to house the extended families of police as well? Otherwise what's the point?

Stopping cartels requires true international effort and coordination. Unless the bankers and money launderers bear some responsibility for the murders and drug flow nothing will change. It's nearly impossible I think, given the absolutely vast sums of money and profit on the table. Life sentences are not too much for the people enabling the corruption and destruction of Mexico.

In France, the gendarmes (police force outside of big cities) are military and live with family in garrison-like building blocks. SWAT team members identity is a secret, and if you mess up with them, French special forces will get you anywhere in the world, even if it means dying trying. We also have institutions like the Legion to give a safe reboot place to « guys with a history ». There are ways for institutions to compensate the power of money.

If you were running things in Mexico you would have zero ability to legalize or decriminalize all drugs in the actually relevant markets (USA).

And even if it was legalized so anyone could make drugs in Mexico... the cartels would kill the non-cartel makers of drugs along with fighting with other cartels at the same time.

US' politicians would make sure your government doesn't last very long.

Legalize drugs would not change anything, cartels here in Mexico get money from many activities, extortion, kidnapping and many businesses that from the outside look legitimate. Even compounds made to house the military have being attacked by cartels in recent years.

why do humans do this sort of thing?

Money.

Would you take a life if one was taken from you?

An equivalent question is: why does human evil exist?

Your answer will depend on your worldview -- your beliefs on matters like origin, meaning, morality, and destiny.

If you're not sure, I'd suggest evaluating candidate worldviews with an eye toward comparing the extent to which their propositions correspond to reality and are internally consistent.

It’s not evil. These people don’t go to bed at night thinking they are the villain. The real answer is more depressing: people have to eat. These police are part of a system that is threatening the livelihood of cartels and with the exception of a few people at the top this livelihood is what feeds theirs families.

What? You can definitely find jobs to eat in Mexico. This is the silliest take. It's not like the villages suddenly don't have land to grow food on

I mean, I didn’t say you couldn’t. But that doesn’t change the fact that cartels are businesses and the reason for these terrible things aren’t because the people are evil but because it’s their livelihood. I’d also wager that working for a cartel pays a lot better than working on a farm in Mexico. It also isn’t a “take.” When you start throwing around words like evil you are demonizing the enemy which you should never do.

It's not so much demonizing someone as calling a spade a spade.

These cartels are built on an explicit disregard of ethics and human rights. People in these organizations are encouraged to commit bloodshed against innocent people.

To say that's not evil is a grave ethical miscategorization -- and those who fail to label evil accurately can't help stop its progression.

Because that's who we are.

Part of what's going on in Mexico is that the cartels have spread romanticized images of themselves to the point where many Mexican youngsters actually aspire to cartel life. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcocorrido

Music promoting crime and kids aspiring to that life isn't a purely Cartel thing unfortunately. Gangster rap and drill music often promote crime.

Indeed when El Chapo was arrested there were loads of memes going viral about how good he was to the poor. I do believe this is somewhat factual (not El Chapo but drug lords in general) but they tend to be equally or even more cruel to those who don’t bow to their whims.

I would guess this reputation is based on a few high-profile charity cases optimized for maximum PR impact.

They are setting up legitimate business, and hiring whole towns.

I can see why certain people turn their heads.

There's part of me that went numb to other countries problems. America needs to help itself. I'm seeing more desperate, disenfranchised Americans than ever.

For some young people their only role models are terrible people who take advantage of their trust and get them into this life. It's a big issue in the U.S. too.

We didn’t become the dominant species on earth by playing nice with others.

no, we became the dominant species on earth by playing nice with each other.

though that kind of thing usually plays along in-group/out-group boundaries.

If someone punches you in the nose, you(or someone you love) might want to punch them in the nose twice. Repeat x 100000000

I think it comes down to economics. Countries are not islands. Poor countries and poor neighborhoods create a situation where people legitimatize criminal gangs. Many men may see that as the only way to gain any power.

In a country with more money, more opportunities and a vietual police and military monopoly on force the situation is different. We have many, many prisons in America. But think about what it was like in the prohibition era. I would argue that the biggest difference was actually economic.

Not even just power, I grew up in a fairly poor neighborhood (in the US) and most of my friends were pretty poor. The guys who sold weed or harder drugs had a lot more money to spend than those who worked legitimate jobs as teenagers. When you’re given the option of working a job that doesn’t respect you and then going to college so you can make a few thousand a month seven years from now or selling drugs and getting that plus respect now it isn’t hard to see why people choose the latter. And that’s in the US in the developing world the choice is more be poor and maybe work in agriculture, take a chance and moving far away and maybe finding a decent job or getting into a gang where you can take care of your family now.

Humans do this when they are extremely poor and must survive poverty by themselves and then, an organization (criminal, by the way) starts to take care of them.

Care is materialized by revenue here, but imho, what is important is that those organizations won by giving those people a future the government failed to provide.

States are also cartels but we just call the overlords by different names (Police, Mayor, Military, etc). Both commit obscene amounts of violence. Just look at the military history of United States for instance.

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