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.
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.
That's basically European history in a nutshell. The middle ages was basically walled cities fighting other walled cities, renaissance too.
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.
Hmm, I took exactly the opposite message: democratic checks and balances don't work unless individual members of society really believe in them.
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.
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.
Do you have a citation for this?
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.
Negotiations can break down very quickly
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.
But it is not.
I do not tell them they failed to do enough for me.
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.
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.
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.
Not every religion is a religion, that is.
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?
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"
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 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.
"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.