The Mexican Drug Wars

Uhm, they kill politicians to make sure that laws don't get enforced and terrorize whole regions.

This is entirely accurate.

Which means it's not Trump's idea.

I'm about 99% sure this has come up over the years in politics and media.

Not really, thought the idea if a "Soft vs harsh approach" has being discussed.

I think the issue right now is that AMLO discourse is the naive Pacifist stuff that we believed was a strawman, something invented for radicals "shoot don't ask" to demonize reasonable measures and not a actual idea. "Hugs, No Shots" has being pretty much completely ineffective, scandals like Chapo's son being captured and then freed because the cartel just forced the police by threatening several civilians don't help.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Nov 27th 2019 at 3:47:11 PM

Designating the cartels as terrorist organizations isn’t a great idea. The fact that it would allow the US to unilaterally send troops into Mexico would be a serious strain on relations.

They can start by cracking down on cross-border arms trafficking, at least.

Legalizing pot will tear into one of their most lucrative businesses. The cartels have armies because they have GDP equivalent to countries. For all the Trumpasaurus Rex's complaints about them exporting drugs, we need to crack down on America exporting weapons to them.

AMLO doesn’t want American military forces to be in Mexico and intervene.

Hence the terrorist designation. If the cartels are officially terrorists the US doesn’t need AMLO’s permission, they can just show up.

The government may not want the Americans there, but they’re not dumb enough to start a shooting war over it. A terrorist designation would give the US essentially a blank check to operate in Mexico.

Legalizing drugs will not help the issue, at all.

If you want to help the other side, crack down even harder on buyers, and by that I mean make sure that no citizen of the USA, be it rich, poor, white or black, gets a light sentence for selling blood products.

I’m all in for regarding the cartels as terrorist organizations, it will allow the Mexican forces more flexibility to deal with them.

How is labeling the cartels “terrorist” giving the USA a blank card to operate in Mexico?

Edited by raziel365 on Nov 27th 2019 at 7:12:57 AM

Last statement from AMLO mentions that the problem should be solved by Mexican LE Os and the new national guard.

Sure

The US military and intelligence community has a broad legal mandate to prosecute “terrorist” targets anywhere they might be found, and regardless of the wishes of the country they’re found in.

Putting the cartels on the US terror list isn’t going to change anything for Mexican forces.

Edited by archonspeaks on Nov 27th 2019 at 7:54:41 AM

The legalization of pot in Colorado and Washington State had a measurable impact on the Cartels' finances.

https://qz.com/1449304/when-us-voters-legalize-pot-they-hurt-mexican-cartels/

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/22/vicente-fox-legalizing-drugs-is-the-way-to-combat-cartels.html

Not just legalisation. It's legit domestic suppliers that did them in. I think that it's a problem that parallels the legalisation of sex work: without real regulations to accompany it, you risk driving up up illegal trafficking and greasing the flow of the blood money.

Criminalization is what makes the blood money flow. When all people engaging in a business are criminals by definition, none of them has any interest in getting the police's attention, which favors organized crime (case in point, the prohibition of alcohol in the USA). When a business is legal, people engaging in it don't need to hide from the police and can turn to legal channels when problems arise.

I get your point, but decriminalisation is just one part of the equation. If the demand is booming and above the board, then you'll need regulations to make sure that the supply is above the board as well.

DIW Berlin did a study on human trafficking cases in Germany and the Netherlands post-sex work legalisation (plus Sweden's "Nordic model"); it concluded that legalisation has both a substitution effect favouring legit, established providers and a scale effect, where the growth in demand keeps an open niche for illegal or trafficked providers. The trick is that the balance comes down to market dynamics in the end.

So in this case, where the cartels have the economies of scale on their side and enough throughput to outbid legit suppliers - in hard drugs if not marijuana - yeah, I wouldn't count on the market keeping them down for long, barring some far-sighted regulations.

Besides, from what I understand part of the reason why the prohibition failed so spectacularly was because the USA government did not invest enough to see it through, be it in creating a bureaucratic and policing body to tackle the cities or by planning out the quotas of alcohol consuption reduction properly.

It could have taken the USA government twenty years, but with genuine investment and preparations the prohibition could have a chance to succeed.

Sweden's Nordic model is a form of criminalization (and definitely shouldn't be grouped with either legalization or decriminalization), because if one party to a transaction is criminal, the whole transaction is illegal. Also, too-tight regulations create bottlenecks which encourage the illegal side (of course, some regulations are still needed to prevent abuses).

Major embarrassment in the Mexican prison system for the nth time:

Vice has this vid documentary.

In a democracy, you can't make a policy that has an invested majority opposition succeed by throwing money at it. The ineptitude of the execution didn't help, though.

A Vice doc on the people who are forced to be IDPs in the drug wars in Mexico.

Vice News covering the Sinaloa Cartel's Fentanyl ops:

Another one from Vice.

100th post. Yay...

Anyway, Salvador Cienfuegos was arrested in LA, but released him so that Mexican LE Os can do the investigating and likely charge him with drug-related crimes.

He's the ex-Defense Minister from 2012 to 2018.