If they weren't, they'd quickly got kicked out from the market by someone who was.
> Those guys are regular greedy criminals, some with sociopathic tendencies.
Like some enterpreneurs are much different.
You assume that because they're doing bad things (morally and/or legally), they're not thinking, but instead they are driven by their impulses. It's a silly assumption and I think disproved many times. Freakonomics comes to my mind as one example.
It's pretty naive to imagine that black market cartels are competing in anything like an idealized free market. In the lawless environments being talked about, a worse businessman can always beat a better competitor simply by being better at violence.
Gang warfare and mass killings are rife down their. This isn't some naive libertarian fantasy market where La Familia is just another scrappy silicon valley startup.
Speak for yourself. I'm not.
BTW, I didn't assume anything, I just read the news and talk to people that have been through the fear of losing their lives by these crooks hands.
I don't understand what you're trying to rationalize here, probably you've never had someone determined to take your life away for nothing.
The Nicaraguan counter-revolution backed by the CIA took an estimated 29K lives.
The two seem comparable. And the comparison in this case is reasonable because the Mexican war stepped up when mercenaries who had fought in Central America joined the cartels.