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And still there's no incentive to fix this? Not even for the sake of the future generations?

The UK also has a lot of leakage. It would be nice to fix it but it's slow and expensive, often requiring digging roads up to get at the pipes.

A lot of our water comes from groundwater and I guess the leaks go back into the ground so it all works out sort of.

If you have the ability to fix this, you are getting bribed to not fix it (i.e. the subcontractor paid to handle this is pocketing the money and giving you a %). Rocking the boat means the gravy train ends, and you’ll probably be tortured to death if you’ve inconvenienced the cartel for “the sake of future generations”.

Quite frankly unless there is a US intervention in Mexico (never gonna happen as the US would lose) or a large scale revolt this will probably never change meaningfully.

Why do you say that the US would lose an intervention in Mexico? As long as the goal is simply to remove the existing cartel system it doesn’t seem that hard. I don’t think the Mexican people would see it as an attack in the same way that people in various middle eastern or Asian countries saw US intervention as an attack on themselves. The cartels have enough support to stay in power but I feel like the people would abandon them if the US were to get involved directly.

But, I am not Mexican so I’m just speculating really.

Obviously the US would win in an actual military engagement to take down the Cartels, it would just not be worth the monetary and political cost. If a Mexican civilian is killed by an order from an American while attempting to oust the cartel, you better believe the cartel is going to broadcast the US as evil as possible to stir up sympathetic Americans into fighting the US government to stop the intervention, and get Mexicans to side with them as some sort of revolution against the US which would be quite popular in certain areas. If the US ensures 0 civilian deaths, the cartel automatically wins when they just operate within civilian infrastructure. Targeted raids to limit civilian casualties means boots on the ground and american casualties, which will rile up americans who don’t want americans to die for an internal mexican power struggle.

One of the cartels would have to basically pull a 9/11 level event for an intervention to ever happen, and they will never do that because they know the US is content to leave them be as long as they stay in their own lane, and they’re right because the US doesn’t care about them at all as long as they don’t kidnap american tourists (this is why whenever it does happen, the cartel will happily investigate and bring them into custody)

A lot of mexicans dislike the US and much as they dislike the cartels. Latin american politicians love to blame the US for their own political failings and corruption, so a large minority of people legitimately believes their local warlords have their interests in mind over imperialist usa. I’m mexican (moved to the USA) so maybe I’m biased or maybe things changed over the last few years but the average mexican is more likely to side with Russia than America purely because they dislike usa. I mean even young latin americans that live in america think all of their countries problems are because of america, its not unrealistic to think they will turn around and start fighting the US if there was ever an intervention.

If 80% of the Mexican voters approved US going in guns blazing, then that would be a different conversation, although lets hope it doesn't get that bad to seriously consider this.

The US federal government has come close to formally designating Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations several times in recent years. This would provide the legal justification for direct military intervention, most likely in the form of drone strikes. So far they have held off on the terrorist designation because it would poison relations with Mexico. It would essentially be saying the quiet part out loud and acknowledging that Mexico is a failed state which no longer controls their own territory.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mexican-drug-cartels-terrorist-...

> Quite frankly unless there is a US intervention in Mexico (never gonna happen as the US would lose)

This is such a strange hypothetical. The US is not expansionist, why would it attack Mexico? Helping people with the barrel of a gun was tried in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a very large part of the US population did not like that at all. But you could say that the Iraq and Afghanistan regimes were enemies of the US. Mexico is in no way an enemy, the idea that the US would start a military action against Mexico is baffling. I never heard of anything like that. And if the US starts such an action, but the popular will is against it, it's a certain recipe for disaster. The defeat in Vietnam was not due to the US being beaten on the battlefield, it was due to the domestic anti-war protests.

> This is such a strange hypothetical. The US is not expansionist, why would it attack Mexico?

Mark Esper says in his memoir that Donald Trump in 2020 asked about the possibility of launching missiles into Mexico to destroy the cartels' drug labs.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/us/politics/mark-esper-bo...

So what? He asked, and presumably he got an answer. The answer was most likely that yes, it technically is possible, but it's not a good idea, because there are so and so issues with doing that. Did Trump insist, or he left it at that?

Since that administration leaked like Niagra falls, I wouldn't take the information necessarily to mean that the hypothetical question was unique, just that it leaked.

Given that he didn't launch any missiles, just like everyone else, I'm not sure there's anything to get worked up about.

The recognized united mexican states is not an enemy in this case, the recognized state does not actually control large swaths of its claimed territory or even some of its own armed forces. What happens in mexico at the state and local level is mostly up to the highest bidder, and that’s what the intervention would be about. Even the federal government doesn’t even control part of its own armed forces, they are just paid off and too many people are too well protected.

It would be like if California Highway Patrol was in the drug business, and they used their legitimate power to create a system to ensure they could legally do this all in the open because the guy in charge of keeping them in check is getting a cut of whatever they sell, all while sabotaging efforts to do anything about what’s going on. Even if someone did finally get enough evidence, there’s enough paid off government employees that it will just get lost. If all else fails and government officials start acting to remove you, well, there’s a reason being a mexican politician is so deadly…

It would not be USA vs Mexico, it would be USA and part of the mexican military under Mexican control vs Fuerza Tamaulipas mixed in with cartel foot soldiers and “”””civilians””””.

The cartels would make sure to frame it as Mexico vs USA (calling the mexican government collaborators in the pocket of big bad usa of course), so they could replenish their foot soldiers fighting the “anti imperialist revolution” (straight from the terrorist playbook, because they are terrorists holding the entire population as blackmail).

Unless you can figure out a way to bill fetuses for capital projects, gonna have to go with a "nope!".

I know I'm being a little silly here, but this kind of thing is what you get with under-/post-/non-industrialized populations that crank their GDP from . . somewhere. Classic example are oil states[1], but it goes to some extent for the US as well, where our dominance results from the USD's reserve status[2], rather than any great vitality among the citizenry.

Anyway, when you don't really care about how well the citizens do, then . . why spend money getting them nice water? Especially if you've gone with professional, high tech militaries and all the state surveillance money can buy.

[1] Where the Maximum Leader is genuinely better off without pesky citizens, just (possibly foreign!) wage slaves to mine/pump and a chunk of loyal soldiers.

[2] I also have a personal theory, that started as a joke (and now it's not quite a joke anymore), called "The Blood Standard". How many people can your nation kill in 24 hours? This gives you a baseline for your foreign exchange. UU, Russia, China? They could probably kill a good chunk of the world's cities, so their currencies have a hard floor. Mexico or Brazil? Good frickin' luck.

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