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She Tweeted Against the Mexican Cartels. They Tweeted Her Murder

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Re: She Tweeted Against the Mexican Cartels. They Tweeted Her Murder

#141

Post by shkkmo »

ripb wrote: post #23
Natsu wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what about all the customers of this cartel who give them the money to pay people enough to do things like this?

>And what about all the customers of this cartel who give them the money to pay people enough to do things like this? Drugs are a fact of life, they've been used since the dawn of man and will be used likely until the end of man. They're not going away. It's abhorrent that in order to access drugs, you've to essentially send money down the chain to people carrying out such acts...but people are going to do drugs, and…

If FoxConn ever assassinated a journalist and posted pictures of said assasination on that journalist's twitter account...I'm pretty sure they would no longer be an Apple supplier.

There are a number of disconcerting realities surrounding companies like Nestle and Apple. None of those come close to the direct violence perpetrated by the Cartels in Mexico and to claim they are even in the same realm is pretty obtuse.

I would be EXTREMELY happy if the levels of abuse perpetrated by mexican cartels were reduced to within an order of magnitude to those perpetrated by FoxConn.

Re: She Tweeted Against the Mexican Cartels. They Tweeted Her Murder

#142

Post by lazaroclapp »

nashequilibrium wrote: post #98
lazaroclapp wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have quite an amount of oil. But that oil will continue to be sold to the U.S. (and others) regardless of what happens with the cartels or to the people of Mexico (Short of a revolution, I suppose). In fact, in recent years, reforms have been passed to make it easier for foreign companies to get involved in oil extraction in Mexico. Given that, there is very little incentive to send an occupation force in order to…

What would be the effects of legalizing all drugs in Mexico? Will this reduce the power of the cartels?

Just within Mexico? Without changing anything in the US? Not sure. It might not have any effect at all, or it might reduce violence because it diminishes the clashes of the cartels with the Mexican authorities. But, as far as I understand it, the vast majority of the income of the cartels comes from trafficking drugs from Mexico and south america into the U.S. market. So, as long as drugs are both illegal and widely consumed in the U.S, I wouldn't expect the influence of the cartels to diminish significantly.

That said, violence spiked significantly after the Mexican government decided to use the army to combat the drug cartels (10 or so years ago). So maybe if drugs were legal within Mexico and we completely refused to have any part on policing their traffic across the border, we might have a more peaceful situation, albeit still one in which organized crime has a huge influence in politics in most or all of the country's territory. Then again, at this point the cat might be out of the bag regarding the violence... a lot of it involves cartels fighting each other for control of different regions or routes at this point.

Re: She Tweeted Against the Mexican Cartels. They Tweeted Her Murder

#143

Post by tzs »

theobon wrote: post #25

Why are the majority of the comments here blaming the victim? This is the death if a person who tried to stand against an overwhelming force. To try and stand against the cartels where the police didn't dare and instead of honouring her work or get death you mock her for not using tor. If you seriously think that lack of cybersecurity is the problem then at least use this to highlight the lack of good easy to use sec…

> Why are the majority of the comments here blaming the victim?

There were few if any comments here blaming the victim at the time you posted, so I must assume it is the comments discussing proper operational security for one in her position that you are misidentifying as blaming the victim.

It's important that security failures like this be discussed and analyzed so that others who may find themselves in a similar situation can learn from them so as to be able to fight the bad guys without getting killed.

> If you seriously think that lack of cybersecurity is the problem then at least use this to highlight the lack of good easy to use security software

Security software, or lack thereof, is probably not the most important thing in this kind of operation. Physical security is more important, namely making sure the bad guys do not get access to the computer you conduct your social media operations from or that you use for communications with your fellow activists.

Doing any of your activism from your cell phone, such as accessing your social media from it, is very risky. It means that if the bad guys have some reason to detain you unrelated to your activism they might find out your secret.

In many ways, the anti-cartel activists are in a position similar to that of those who are in an underground resistance in a conquered nation, such as the French resistance in WWII. Success in that situation generally involves maintaining a dual life, with the public side being something innocuous and non-threatening to the bad guys, and the private, resistance side kept very separate.

Re: She Tweeted Against the Mexican Cartels. They Tweeted Her Murder

#144

Post by handle_bars »

rurounijones wrote: post #112
handle_bars wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that we legalise everything that is currently illegal, so that we would have no need to prohibit anything and turn nobody into criminals? We could very well apply this logic to say, murder. Why not let us legalise murder, set up appropriate channels for people to hire hitmen to kill each other, so that the underground killers would not have any more customers and then they will gradually die out?

Person A takes drugs, person A is affected. Person A kills Person B, person B is affected.

This has got to be the most naive reasoning I've seen.

We totally live in a deterministic world where 1 action affects only 1 person, and everything else is isolated from one another.

Re: She Tweeted Against the Mexican Cartels. They Tweeted Her Murder

#145

Post by handle_bars »

serf wrote: post #106
handle_bars wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that we legalise everything that is currently illegal, so that we would have no need to prohibit anything and turn nobody into criminals? We could very well apply this logic to say, murder. Why not let us legalise murder, set up appropriate channels for people to hire hitmen to kill each other, so that the underground killers would not have any more customers and then they will gradually die out?

>We could very well apply this logic to say, murder. Why not let us legalise murder, set up appropriate channels for people to hire hitmen to kill each other, so that the underground killers would not have any more customers and then they will gradually die out? like a government sponsored drone-strike-for-sale hotline? put the hitmen out of business with pure capitalism and good old legal (international) murder.

Good ol' pure capitalism my friend.

Re: She Tweeted Against the Mexican Cartels. They Tweeted Her Murder

#146

Post by handle_bars »

tn13 wrote: post #119

The blame rests on her. She was rich, able to afford college education and unnecessarily painting the poor equal-opportunity lacking folks on street as thieves. Instead of tweeting against the cartels she should have tried to build a bridge to their hearts, reach to the root cause of crime and should acted like a responsible citizen. She instead chose adventurism. US is doing a great service to these people by contin…

According to the article, she's dead.

Re: She Tweeted Against the Mexican Cartels. They Tweeted Her Murder

#147

Post by jpatokal »

tn13 wrote: post #122
legacyfruit wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the epilogue one of his books (maybe "the drowned and the saved"?), Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi describes giving a talk to a group of schoolchildren. One boy asked him to describe the layout of the camp, and then described how he would have escaped if he had been in Auschwitz. Nothing Primo Levi could say would convince the boy that escape was impossible. Now I'm not saying that it was impossible for this citize…

It seems that you have reached the heart of the problem. Most of us are miles away from that sort of threat. When the word is out that people are out there looking to murder you, it is immensely stressful. You cant eat or sleep. If I was in her place I would have fled to a different city taking a few days off from work or simply given up the activism to reduce it to a level where the mob would not have bothered that…

A few days, and then what? Her job is at home, and so is the mob. Most people can't just hop across a border and start a new life on a whim.

Re: She Tweeted Against the Mexican Cartels. They Tweeted Her Murder

#149

Post by lazaroclapp »

vacri wrote: post #109
lazaroclapp wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have quite an amount of oil. But that oil will continue to be sold to the U.S. (and others) regardless of what happens with the cartels or to the people of Mexico (Short of a revolution, I suppose). In fact, in recent years, reforms have been passed to make it easier for foreign companies to get involved in oil extraction in Mexico. Given that, there is very little incentive to send an occupation force in order to…

Has that ever turned out well in recent memory? Yes - UN peacekeepers do have a positive effect. They just don't hit the news much because they're not dramatically beating their chests about it and bragging about how big their guns are. They're not perfect, but they're certainly better than just leaving things be. Have a poke around here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_Nations_peac...

I guess I was thinking about a unilateral intervention by a single country's army. UN peacekeepers are a different thing altogether, both the scope of the mission and the goals are usually very different. I don't have enough information to know how would that turn out. Keep in mind that they would be going into a very complex system that includes actors such as: the drug cartels, federal and state police, the Mexican army, federal and state political bodies, (multiple) self-defense civilian armies, (multiple) organized protest movements. The more official of those actors are - to an unknown degree - corrupted/infiltrated/colluded with the cartels. The more unstructured ones might very well consider peacekeeper intervention forcing them to disarm or stopping them from protest acts (which have included burning a state police building, an act that had surprising public support) to be further government repression.

In general I think just having independent media and investigators from outside the country can be helpful, since they can be perceived as not part of the system of internal corruption. I think it gets a lot more complicated when you have international actors as supposed to observers and/or pressure. Not saying it can't work, but it is far from simple to predict... (there are, of course, people who know great many orders of magnitude more about the issues involved than I do, both within and without Mexico, so maybe someone is looking into whether or not that sort of intervention would help).

Re: She Tweeted Against the Mexican Cartels. They Tweeted Her Murder

#150

Post by Dylan16807 »

prawn wrote: post #133
wyager wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why are the majority of the comments here blaming the victim? I am tired of this sentiment. It is not necessarily incorrect to ascribe partial blame to someone just because they got the short end of the stick in some situation. Being a victim does not automatically preclude one from being at fault. For example, if I jump off a cliff without a parachute, it is clearly reasonable to blame me despite the fact that I am…

How very generous of you to apportion "most of the blame" to the murderers in this situation.

Does this comment serve any purpose? You can mock any damn statement in the world with "how very generous of you".
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