Hacker News Reader

Comment by nessbot | Hacker News Reader

Murdering buses of people doesn't bring the full force of the US military on them. The difference is the risk not the depravity.

View on HN

This is the answer. The cartels would have to be insane to poke that particular bear. They would get crushed like a bug. IIRC they murdered a single US undercover officer in the 90s and the retaliation was so bad that they themselves handed over the perpetrators.

You are right rationality is their strongest character trait.

The cartels are incredibly rational - what they lack are morals and ethics

Do you have much evidence of them behaving irrationally?

I would recommend reading the Freakinomics book or listen to their podcasts on drugs.

TL;DR: drug cartels are run like businesses. They are very rational. But, unlike your boss, their boss can also shoot you in the face if you annoy them too much

How are they not rational? Violence is a tool. They operate an illegal business so they can’t sue other parties for breach of contract. They can't call the police if they are robbed or file an insurance claim for what was taken. Even the over-the-top violence has a rationale. They aren't punishing the victims as much as they are attempting to broadcast that there is a higher price to be paid than any gain from giving information, to reduce their future losses and enforcement efforts. It isn’t moral or ethical, but I wouldn’t say it is irrational.

Lots of organized crime around the world manages to operate without cutting all the limbs off somebody then arranging them like flowers in a "vase" made out of the poor soul's ribcage. The cartels take violence far beyond what is pragmatically necessary. Their system of crime breeds excessive violence and insanity.

Marketing, if you don't know the answer it's always marketing

This stuff mostly followed after the zetas. It was a very deliberate strategy to compete in a hostile landscape that others eventually copied to survive.

It's notable that a lot of the Zetas came from a military special forces background, making it seem as if their extreme brutality was a strategic choice inculcated during their training.

https://ctc.westpoint.edu/a-profile-of-los-zetas-mexicos-sec...

> How are they not rational?

It's the meth.

It's a business not an ideology.

> They would get crushed like a bug.

Much as I despise them, I'm not so sure that would be the case. I seem to remember folks saying the same about the Taliban, and the cartels have a lot more money and high-tech kit, than the Taliban.

Asymmetric warfare is a tough gig, on all sides.

I don’t think the technology matters nearly as much as the asymmetry. Iraq had better technology than the Taliban and their military didn’t last a week.

True enough, but the cartels are also experts at running what is basically guerrilla warfare, against each other. Not sure if the Mexican Army has ever tried to take them on. A lot of cartel soldiers come from the army.

That conflates two very different things:

* A conventional military war, on a battlefield: Neither Saddam Hussein's military nor the cartels nor the Taliban would last long against the US.

* An unconventional insurgency: The Iraqis quickly turned to this approach and it worked very well for them, as it did for the Taliban. The Taliban won, and the Iraqi insurgency almost drove the US out of Iraq and was eventually co-opted.

The cartels of course would choose the latter. They, the Taliban, etc. are not suicidal.

The Taliban did not "win" their insurgency.

The US decided to leave because staying was not politically popular, and left. They were not beaten by the Taliban, they were beaten by the political climate at home.

If someone is actively kicking your ass, then they decide that you aren't worth the effort to keep hurting and decide to walk away, that doesn't mean you "won" the fight even if you get what you want afterwards.

The Taliban control what they and the US and allies fought for. That's winning. Your personal requirement of how it must be won is not important - nobody cares how it was done and it doesn't change the outcome. The Taliban don't care and the US and its allies don't care.

It's also a perfectly common, expected way to win a war: First, wars always end with political solutions. The most well known principle of warfare is that it is 'politics conducted by other means' (i.e., by violence rather than by law or diplomacy). If there is no political solution, the war never ends. That's why the US didn't win the war in Afghanistan after decades - they couldn't create a stable political solution because they were unable to impose one on the Taliban, who in the end imposed one on the US and its allies.

Victory by outlasting enemy resources, including political will, is fundamental to warfare; wars end when resources to fight (for the political outcome) run out, but few end in total kinetic destruction of those resources - someone runs out of money or political will. It's also the explicit strategy of insurgencies. Enemies of the US know it very well and have used it for generations - that is how North Vietnam won, for example. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the Afghans famously told them, 'you have the clocks (the technology), we have the time'.

Annoying your parents until they give you a cookie is still getting a cookie. Just because you didn't leverage overwhelming military firepower to get the cookie does not mean you aren't holding a cookie

The analogy here is you are verbally arguing with your parents over whether or not you can have a cookie.

Your parents get frustrated and leave. You now take a cookie from the jar.

You have a cookie, but that doesn't mean you won the argument.

I think the key difference between the Taliban and the cartels is that the Taliban were a bunch of ideologues who actually enjoyed being an insurgency and living under siege in caves, with making money from the drugs trade being a mere means to their real purpose of fighting infidels, whereas the cartel leadership sees wealth and power from controlling the drugs trade as an end, crushing local rivals as a means, and would really rather avoid the sort of conflict that's bad for their medium term business prospects.

I mean, some sort of cartels would bounce back after any "war on drugs" because supply and demand, but the people running them aren't hankering for martyrdom or glory over consolidating their territory and accumulating.

The Taliban was repeatedly crushed. All of the leadership was killed many times over. The problem is the Taliban is an idea that transcends individual human members and it can always be reconstituted. It also benefited from being able to harbor supporters in Pakistan, which is a nuclear power the US was not willing to also invade.

There isn't a real analogy there because cartel leaders have no official state support anywhere, let alone in a bordering nuclear power, but even if they did, it hardly seems reassuring from their perspective to know the drug trade will outlive them after they all get killed. It's different when you're deeply religious and believe what you're doing is worth dying for and the larger arc of history is more important than your own life and wellbeing. I don't think drug lords think that way.

All this is true. Yet the cartels operate like militarized insurgents. Adopting similar tactics seen in Ukraine fighting so it’s interesting to say the least that they might be utilizing drone technology for their purposes.

I didn’t mean to start this giant thread about Mexican Cartels but here we are. Most think it’s just an isolated problem. Others know it’s more widespread. I simply stated that these murderous thugs are out there in full force with technology and armored vehicles. If provoked, they would lash out. It’s ridiculous because of course going up against the US is a losing proposition but each “generation” of cartel leader thinks they can somehow manage it.

How did that full force of the US military work out in Vietnam?

Pretty badly for both sides

It was never used, there.

Millions of dead Vietnamese.

In any case that was a war against a hardened, experienced, determined enemy fighting for its freedom from any form of colonial occupation, both as a formal military and as an insurgent force in South Vietnam.

I scarcely think the Mexican population would rise up in defense of the cartels here.

I think a lot of people would be cheering on the destruction of the cartels.

The destruction of cartels would involve careful policing and corruption controls, the best American administrations have been bad at this. The worst... can barely put its pants on much less dismantle foreign organized crime. You can't shoot a missile at a cartel and poof it's just gone.

They'd probably quickly stop cheering as their own homes and families were destroyed as collateral damage, which is what would happen if the "full force of the US military" were deployed against the cartels.

The last time America invaded Mexico City it created martyrs. It's a fascinating story that they do not teach at US highschools lol.

Curious, because the martyrs were Mexican high-school students.

We were briefly greeted as liberators in Iraq too.

A non-aligned population will look out for their own interests and are aware that the attention of the US is temporary but the cuadillismo that lead to cartels are a durable cultural artifact.

  The Battle of Culiacán, also known locally as the Culiacanazo and Black 
  Thursday, was a failed attempt to capture Ovidio Guzmán López, son of Sinaloa 
  Cartel kingpin Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, who was wanted in the United States 
  for drug trafficking.
  
  Around 700 cartel gunmen began to attack civilian, government and military 
  targets around the city, despite orders from Ovidio sent at security forces' 
  request. Massive towers of smoke could be seen rising from burning cars and 
  vehicles. The cartels were well-equipped, with improvised armored vehicles, 
  bulletproof vests, .50 caliber (12.7 mm) rifles, rocket launchers, grenade 
  launchers and heavy machine guns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Culiac%C3%A1n

The problem is you can't just target the cartels, the cartels are made up of random Mexican people. There is an almost guarantee that any significant US strikes would be 90%+ civilian casualties.

I don't really think you thought through that one. It sounds like what your saying is that the Vietnamese won and thats the outcome that matters. It does matter but that isn't the issue - it is the cost that everyone is talking about: the amount of destruction that was brought upon the country and people was terrible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com