Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Did a Drug Gang Kill 43 Students? Text Messages Hold Clues

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 110 posts

Re: Why Did a Drug Gang Kill 43 Students? Text Messages Hold Clues

#101

Post by SenAnder »

hedora wrote: post #96
SenAnder wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a direct consequence of US government policy Which policy do you mean? Not legalizing drugs? Because the US is no exception in that regard.

The US forced countries to criminalize the export of drugs to the US, even though though no country (the US included) has the resources necessary to enforce those laws. The result is shadow economies, then corruption and finally narco states. This profits corrupt actors in the US government, so they perpetuate the cycle. There are basically two sides in the war on drugs: almost everyone (non-users, users, small-time…

> The US forced countries to criminalize the export of drugs to the US

Are such laws outliers? In how many countries is the manufacture and/or export of drugs (to any country) legal?

Re: Why Did a Drug Gang Kill 43 Students? Text Messages Hold Clues

#102

Post by vorpalhex »

standardUser wrote: post #47
vorpalhex wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you see a world where Amazon sells fent and.. undercuts the cartel or something? How does ending our prohibition on drugs resolve the a nearly total collapse of law and order in a neighbor?

Reducing a major funding source would obviously weaken the cartels dramatically.

But again.. how do you see that happening?

Even in a Portugal decriminalization situation, we aren't going to be selling drugs at Walmart.

And the cartel isn't going to play fair. Undercutting the cartel means assassination attempts and kidnappings.

Re: Why Did a Drug Gang Kill 43 Students? Text Messages Hold Clues

#103

Post by foogazi »

dragonwriter wrote: post #98
foogazi wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because one is confirmed and the other one is fantasy Cartels have no nation-state level power

> Because one is confirmed and the other one is fantasy One is a reasonable prediction of what would happen if there was no longer a marginal threat of US escalation constraining it because the US decided to escalate fully without it, the other is a non-sequitur in this discussion. > Cartels have no nation-state level power Nation-state isn't a power level, and if it was, well, the Mexican cartels do have power which…

> the Mexican cartels do have power which rivals nation-states,

Not the Mexican state in terms of firepower & resources

> and in any case international criminal organization don't require the power of a nation-state to do any of the things described, as history has repeatedly shown

No Mexican drug lords dare show their face in public for long - they operate in the shadows. There are no strongholds, no cities, states out of reach.

The moment they become popular it’s time to lay low

Re: Why Did a Drug Gang Kill 43 Students? Text Messages Hold Clues

#104

Post by jasonm23 »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #79

I see reports like these and think that Mexico is a failed narco state. And yet you see reports of NAFTA trade and the fact that Mexico is now America’s largest trading partner. Hard to reconcile the two. A state without law and order is also a leading trading partner with tons of complex, large scale manufacturing. What gives?

This implies the US is not a failed state. Take a closer look.

Re: Why Did a Drug Gang Kill 43 Students? Text Messages Hold Clues

#105

Post by jasonm23 »

glimshe wrote: post #88
xordon wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mexico isn't the USA's largest trade partner, it isn't even the largest one in NAFTA.

One thing HN commentators have in common with LLMs: the ability to say completely wrong things with total confidence.

possibly attempted astroturf...

Re: Why Did a Drug Gang Kill 43 Students? Text Messages Hold Clues

#106

Post by jasonm23 »

anonym29 wrote: post #21
jdkee wrote: post #16

Perhaps we should end the fifty years long "War on Some Drugs" in the US that funds the cartels.

Let's be honest, it was never a war on drugs, it was a war on drug addicts - a group that already had enough problems on their plate before they had the full force of a police state hunting them down.

Drug addicts was a side effect. It was to target, well it's no secret now...

> “You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?

> We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.

> Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Re: Why Did a Drug Gang Kill 43 Students? Text Messages Hold Clues

#107

Post by dragonwriter »

foogazi wrote: post #103
dragonwriter wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because one is confirmed and the other one is fantasy One is a reasonable prediction of what would happen if there was no longer a marginal threat of US escalation constraining it because the US decided to escalate fully without it, the other is a non-sequitur in this discussion. > Cartels have no nation-state level power Nation-state isn't a power level, and if it was, well, the Mexican cartels do have power which…

> the Mexican cartels do have power which rivals nation-states, Not the Mexican state in terms of firepower & resources > and in any case international criminal organization don't require the power of a nation-state to do any of the things described, as history has repeatedly shown No Mexican drug lords dare show their face in public for long - they operate in the shadows. There are no strongholds, no cities, states…

> Not the Mexican state in terms of firepower & resources

Much of the firepower and resources of the Mexican state (not “firepower and resources equivalent to the much of that of the Mexican state”, but “much of the exact firepower and resources notionally attributed to the Mexican state”) are in the hands of the cartels.

Symptomatic of this is the arrest by the US of the former Mexican defense secretary in 2020 on charges related to cartel involvement (against whom charges were dropped under intense political pressure from the Mexican government, including reported threats to expel the DEA entirely and end all anti-drug cooperation with the US) and the subsequent arrest by the US, and conviction earlier this year, of the former Public Security Secretary (and, before that, head of the Federal Judicial Police), also on charges of working within the government for the cartels.

> No Mexican drug lords dare show their face in public for long - they operate in the shadows. There are no strongholds, no cities, states out of reach.

To the extent this is true, the threat within Mexico largely comes from other cartels, whether working through organs nominally in the service of the state or otherwise. Sure, individual high-value targets tend to make some effort at opsec, but the cartels as a whole operate openly, in some areas with enforcers in marked vehicles, with the Mexican Army doing nothing but helping keep the peace between major cartels by enforcing cartel territorial boundaries.

Re: Why Did a Drug Gang Kill 43 Students? Text Messages Hold Clues

#108

Post by nirui »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #79

I see reports like these and think that Mexico is a failed narco state. And yet you see reports of NAFTA trade and the fact that Mexico is now America’s largest trading partner. Hard to reconcile the two. A state without law and order is also a leading trading partner with tons of complex, large scale manufacturing. What gives?

The art of trade. As long as someone produces stuff that meets your standard, and you can get it without been punished (i.e. through legal trading), then you have too little reason to care about their real-life struggles.

Plus, at this stage, Mexico's problem is too big to be fixed all by themselves. Trading with the world maybe the only few chances that they still got if they wanted to change the status quo for the better.

Re: Why Did a Drug Gang Kill 43 Students? Text Messages Hold Clues

#109

Post by standardUser »

vorpalhex wrote: post #102
standardUser wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reducing a major funding source would obviously weaken the cartels dramatically.

But again.. how do you see that happening? Even in a Portugal decriminalization situation, we aren't going to be selling drugs at Walmart. And the cartel isn't going to play fair. Undercutting the cartel means assassination attempts and kidnappings.

You're jumping all over the place here. Walmart? Portugal? Assassination attempts?

I suggest looking into the ways different states and counties in the US manage and regulate the sale of alcohol and marijuana to get a realistic idea of what legalized drug sales could look like.

Portugal decriminalized, not legalized, which is a gargantuan difference. Decriminalization is basically the government saying "we'll stop enforcing drug laws, thereby de facto endorsing violent criminal gangs to handle the sale and manufacture as they see fit". As a result, drugs don't get less contaminated and black markets continue to thrive. I think it's a cowardly half-step.

And if the US legalized drugs, who are the cartels going to assassinate exactly? US Senators? The President? Then there actually might be a US military intervention and I doubt the cartels want that.

Re: Why Did a Drug Gang Kill 43 Students? Text Messages Hold Clues

#110

Post by pauldenton »

anonym29 wrote: post #21
jdkee wrote: post #16

Perhaps we should end the fifty years long "War on Some Drugs" in the US that funds the cartels.

Let's be honest, it was never a war on drugs, it was a war on drug addicts - a group that already had enough problems on their plate before they had the full force of a police state hunting them down.

If you want to see what a war on drugs looks like, just look at Singapore. Since 1975, after the proposal by then Minister for Home Affairs Chua Sian Chin, the death penalty was mandated as the sole punishment for drug trafficking, should the amount of whichever drugs exceed the capital threshold.[106] As a result of this legal reform, 28-year-old Penang-born Malaysian Teh Sin Tong became the first convicted drug trafficker to be hanged at Changi Prison on 28 April 1978, after the High Court found him guilty on 13 October 1976

The majority of executions in Singapore are for drug offences. Since 2010, 23 prisoners have been executed for drug offences, while only five have been executed for other offences, such as murder. Death penalty supporters, such as blogger Benjamin Chang, claim that Singapore has one of the lowest prevalence of drug abuse worldwide. Chang claims, for instance, that over two decades, the number of drug abusers arrested each year has declined by two-thirds, from over 6,000 in the early 1990s to about 2,000 in 2011.

Post reply on HN