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In Mexico, cartels are hunting down police at their homes

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Re: In Mexico, cartels are hunting down police at their homes

#111

Post by coolspot »

observr9 wrote: post #80

Will this trend lead to fewer and fewer people joining law enforcement, which would further weaken the government? Regarding whether this constitutes a "failed state", I'd say it depends on how bad this gets. Similar to the concept of "peaceful transfer of power", there also needs to be a relatively peaceful maintenance of power. Politicians, judges and law enforcement are the very people who constitute a functional…

Which kinda reminds me of “defund the police” and “ACAB” movements in the US, promoting that all cops are bad and no good person should join police force.

I don’t think it does any good for future crime rates.

Re: In Mexico, cartels are hunting down police at their homes

#112

Post by zozbot234 »

Guthur wrote: post #109
papito wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ISIS did actually govern. They had their own DMV.

Which was always the reason I thought there was more to ISIS than the western portrait of a group of extremist ideologues. State construction and maintenance is not a trivial thing and their are not the sort of skills you stumble upon within a group of "madmen". The groups spontaneous arrival and near immediate success in this regard was a little remarkable imo, and raises interesting questions on support and backing…

> the western portrait of a group of extremist ideologues.

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.

Re: In Mexico, cartels are hunting down police at their homes

#113

Post by lifeformed »

qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #85
gonzo41 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what you're observing is the process in which states originally asserted themselves as sovereign in the first place. Ie with a ton of violence. Say in ~20 years if those states failed, and Narco states were born out of them, eventually they'll establish a version of governance and im sure sure the cycle would continue.

I think it's a bit more complicated than that. 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 equa…

> 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

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.

Re: In Mexico, cartels are hunting down police at their homes

#114

Post by jonnycomputer »

qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #85
gonzo41 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what you're observing is the process in which states originally asserted themselves as sovereign in the first place. Ie with a ton of violence. Say in ~20 years if those states failed, and Narco states were born out of them, eventually they'll establish a version of governance and im sure sure the cycle would continue.

I think it's a bit more complicated than that. 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 equa…

I think most of what you just posted has very little to do with what OP posted.

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.

Re: In Mexico, cartels are hunting down police at their homes

#115

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

totalZero wrote: post #72
boterock wrote: post #11

About that last sentence: "former U.S. Ambassador [...] said in April that López Obrador views the fight against drug cartels as a distraction ... So he has basically adopted an agenda of a pretty laissez-faire attitude towards them, which is pretty troubling to our government, obviously.” Not from Mexico, but from Colombia, where we also have a very hard time with drugs. The real problem with drugs has never been he…

Exploitation in the drug market happens in the reverse of what you think. The target market is the first world, because the product has maximal value there. The positive externalities are all gained by the producer countries. Traffickers and coca producers have even risen to become major politicians in places like Venezuela and Bolivia. Meanwhile, negative externalities -- crime, addiction, and so forth -- get distri…

I think most people would consider the violence and murders associated with cartels more of a negative externality than coke & weed addicts.

61% of Mexico's drug exports (by dollar value) is marijuana. 61,000 people in Mexico vanished related to drugs / cartels last year. 105 people were killed in a single day. 40,000 people were killed by cartels between 2006-2010 alone [1].

The overdose crisis in the US was mostly created by our own pharmaceutical industry. Recently, Mexico started supplying SOME of the Fentanyl. The vast majority of it comes from China - either directly or indirectly through Mexico [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_drug_war

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/research/fentanyl-and-geopolitics-...

Re: In Mexico, cartels are hunting down police at their homes

#116

Post by ratsmack »

>It is a type of direct attack on officers seldom seen outside of the most gang-plagued nations of Central America and poses the most direct challenge yet to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s policy of avoiding violence and rejecting any war on the cartels.

Why would the Mexican President not want to just get rid of the cartels?

Re: In Mexico, cartels are hunting down police at their homes

#117

Post by qPM9l3XJrF »

edgyquant wrote: post #82
qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of what's going on in Mexico is that the cartels have spread romanticized images of themselves to the point where many Mexican youngsters actually aspire to cartel life. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcocorrido

Indeed when El Chapo was arrested there were loads of memes going viral about how good he was to the poor. I do believe this is somewhat factual (not El Chapo but drug lords in general) but they tend to be equally or even more cruel to those who don’t bow to their whims.

I would guess this reputation is based on a few high-profile charity cases optimized for maximum PR impact.

Re: In Mexico, cartels are hunting down police at their homes

#118

Post by boterock »

totalZero wrote: post #72
boterock wrote: post #11

About that last sentence: "former U.S. Ambassador [...] said in April that López Obrador views the fight against drug cartels as a distraction ... So he has basically adopted an agenda of a pretty laissez-faire attitude towards them, which is pretty troubling to our government, obviously.” Not from Mexico, but from Colombia, where we also have a very hard time with drugs. The real problem with drugs has never been he…

Exploitation in the drug market happens in the reverse of what you think. The target market is the first world, because the product has maximal value there. The positive externalities are all gained by the producer countries. Traffickers and coca producers have even risen to become major politicians in places like Venezuela and Bolivia. Meanwhile, negative externalities -- crime, addiction, and so forth -- get distri…

The case here is that coca traffickers and producers are very different. Producers the bottom of the chain, who live in the violence, sometimes they’re threatened if they try to change their crops. Traffickers are the ones that have got into politics, actively sabotaging any effort of legalization, while also controlling the mass media, and preaching under the blessing of US drug fight. That is the very same group of right wing capitalist politicians that have signed disastrous coal/oil mining regulations, and signed free trade agreements that have hit the local farmer the hardest. The moment when the money of cocaine actually reached the people was back in the time of Pablo Escobar. Since then almost none of the profits have reached the actual farmers.

Re: In Mexico, cartels are hunting down police at their homes

#119

Post by ttz »

totalZero wrote: post #95

What are the arguments against two years of compulsory police (or naval) service for men at age 18 in Mexico? It would certainly alter the political dynamics of the war on drug cartels if moms nationwide were to send their sons to fight trafficking, and scooping young men out of their communities might prevent them from getting involved in criminal enterprises.

> fight trafficking

The message the cartel is sending to those who are trying to do exactly this seems like a strong deterrent.

Not saying it's a bad idea. But there is ample evidence of police not being paid enough and accepting "bribes" (I use quotes here because I think the negative connotation is unfair, somewhat, when a lot of this happens simply because they don't make enough in the first place - it's a different moral worldview when you're trying to support your family), so I don't know if it would be easy to stop them from being "corrupted", or "paid off", especially if the service is compulsory.

I think in general, the issue is super complicated, and if there were a simple panacea or idea, it would have been tried by now. I honestly don't know what can be done to stop the cartels with the amount of economic clout they have and how entrenched they are in all aspects of society.

There's a great line in Narcos (apologies for using a show, but I really think it's a very applicable line); a colonel was asked what he needed to stop Escobar, and he said "Incorruptible men".

Incorruptible men are very hard to come by. Incorruptible men who don't fear their families being slaughtered are probably even harder to come by.

Re: In Mexico, cartels are hunting down police at their homes

#120

Post by jonnycomputer »

coolspot wrote: post #111
observr9 wrote: post #80

Will this trend lead to fewer and fewer people joining law enforcement, which would further weaken the government? Regarding whether this constitutes a "failed state", I'd say it depends on how bad this gets. Similar to the concept of "peaceful transfer of power", there also needs to be a relatively peaceful maintenance of power. Politicians, judges and law enforcement are the very people who constitute a functional…

Which kinda reminds me of “defund the police” and “ACAB” movements in the US, promoting that all cops are bad and no good person should join police force. I don’t think it does any good for future crime rates.

Well, its a problem yeah. But its not a few bad apples. Police abuse people pretty systematically. Its no good having a police force that is basically unaccountable. Which is what we've got now. Also, police are called in to do things that really they shouldn't be, like resolving disputes between spouses, dealing with people having mental health issues, etc. And they carry guns all the time which just means that the chance of them using a gun in a casual encounter goes up massively.
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