Seriously? What the fuck is wrong down there? Can’t they cut the army loose on the fucking cartels? I think there’s been about 100 beheaded bodies lying on the highway this year.
Time to drop the hammer of justice!
No more burritos for me, thanks.
Looks like the cartels have things well in hand.
In some places, the difference between the army and the cartels is the same as the difference between the cartels and the cartels.
I’m afraid it has to be the hammer of justice together with an admission that the war on drugs is really stupid. The same old way of dealing with the problem is just creating more Alcapones with better and bigger armories.
Weren’t there rather large confrontations between the Mexican army and the cartels a few years ago? I don’t know if one can say that today’s violence is because, despite or not influenced by that, but the Mexican gov’t has used “dropped the hammer of justice” in the past.
Also, keep in mind that the cartels do not make it easy to find them. Also, some Mexicans might dislike the cartels but dislike the idea of suspending whatever constitutional rights people may have against what would follow from extensive use of the Mexican military.
Pave Mexico. That would take care of supply.
Of course, to be fair, you would also have to pave the USA, to take care of demand.
I’d be lying if I said I understood in depth the sociological dynamics going on, but I do know that the cartels assassinate police chiefs, prosecutors, judges and politicians. They also engage in raids on police stations and prisons. They bribe and intimidate the police (the police and military sometimes fight for the cartels). The Los Zetas cartel was started by the Mexican equivalent of Green Berets, and they use their military training to train new recruits.
It is a different kind of criminal gang compared to what you find in the US where a handful of teenagers with handguns kill people and rarely/never direct that anger at high ranking legal or political officials. I have no idea what they can do.
There is desperate competition between the cartels to meet the USA’s gluttonous appetite for drugs. Anyone who approaches the problem without accepting that basic truth has no hope of understanding any possible solution. Unfortunately the cartels are very well funded and very well armed since money and weapons are what they get back from us in exchange for this drug delivery service.
Most of the mass murders that make news are fights between competing cartels and rarely involve innocent bystanders, although sometimes they do. Besides knocking out competition they also serve to keep the public in general terrified and unwilling to stand up against them. The same terror makes it hard for citizens to find much fault in any rights violations the military or police impose on them.
Military roadblocks on Mexican highways are commonplace and they stop and search vehicles for weapons and drugs all the time. As long as there is an endless supply of money and guns from the US there will also be an endless supply of new, heavily armed cartel members ready to deliver.
While there aren’t routinely piles of corpses being left on US highways in this battle, at least not yet, it is important to consider that the entire supply chain could not be possible without corrupt US officials and law enforcement north of the border. And there is quite a bit of ‘drug violence’ and ‘drug-related homicide’ in the US news every day. It just isn’t depicted as being related to the cartels.
Simple solution - USA stops buying drugs. (not bloody likely)
Another solution - legalize drugs, tax them and (after paying down the entire national debt in a very short time) devote the majority of those taxes to treatment, medical care and educational programs for addicts.
A stack of 49 mutilated bodies on the side of the road sounds more like Rwanda than it does gang violence.
Not that I’m promoting it but do you think there will ever be international intervention?
Have you ever tried to eat a whole Mexican? It’s more food that it looks.
Because this is the Dope, I’m going to pick this nit-- the value of the entire worldwide drug trade is about $350 billion. Even if you could raise that amount of money through legalizing and taxing drugs (which represents an extremely high tax on a market that is largely not within the US at all, and so would require taxing foreigners), and no negative societal effects occurred because of the flood of easy access to methamphetamine, cocaine, Oxycontin, heroin, and other seriously addictive drugs, and the prices of drugs remained at their current prices even after moving off of the black market, and you didn’t inadvertently create a market for underground, tax-free drugs… even if you did all that, you’d still have accounted for only about a quarter of the annual deficit. Not the debt, but merely the deficit.
I agree with your proposed course of action, but you’ve massively overestimated the consequences.
OK, ending the national debt might be optimistic but it would be more than sufficient to fund treatment and education services way beyond what are currently available at no cost. The flood of easy access to these services could turn out to have a beneficial societal effect overall despite any downside of legal availability.
And don’t forget all the costs we would eliminate by not prosecuting drug cases and filling up prisons with nonviolent drug offenders. The military and law enforcement costs in the ‘war on drugs’ at home and abroad are not trivial. These savings alone might be more than the potential tax revenue from legalization.
Despite all these costs there are more drugs available in the USA now than ever before. They are pretty much easily available to anyone who wants them. I don’t think there would be a sudden spike in meth addicts - but I concede that the possibility exists for some downsides. Prisons and courts are currently overflowing with drug offenders, blood is currently overflowing highways in Mexico and the money that we willingly spend on drugs is going to some very violent people who make so much of it they actually pose a threat to modern police and military.
If its a given we’re going to buy drugs despite their prohibition (and it is) and that we are spending so much money on drugs people are literally dying for a chance to sell them to us (and they are), then that money might as well go directly to programs that treat and prevent drug addiction in the first place. That simple logic really can’t be oversimplified. Our hands would no longer be bloody from the cartel violence in Mexico. We would be forced to find solutions to our national drug problem at home instead of declaring war on it. It is ugly to look at and there are no simple solutions for the big picture, but in the context of removing ourselves from culpability in the Mexican drug violence that really isn’t their problem and it is just that simple.
That is a bit of a high head count.
CPV
I don’t know about full legalization for everything, but we can do better, from a cost-benefit perspective, than we are now.
I can never finish the beans or the rice.
Rwanda’s been a stable, safe country for 18 years now. It’s up there with New Zealand in terms of countries I’d be willing to wander around alone from a safety standpoint.
Yeah, the entire place is corrupt as fuck (I lived there, I know). There is no rule of law there.
I guess they . . . got it all out of their systems, all at once.
How are things in Bosnia nowadays? Anybody know?
So then maybe just the liver, with some fava beans and a nice chianti?