Your solution for the Mexican drug war? - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14333465
The Mexican drug war is so catastrophic and dystopian that it doesn't even seem real- it reads like something out of a post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel. Tens of thousands of people have died in recent years, and the violence shows no sign of stopping.

What's your solution for the Mexican drug war?

I personally think legalizing soft drugs and getting the US military heavily involved would fix the issue- I don't mean a full on military invasion, but heavy use of drone strikes and precision spec ops teams to assassinate key cartel leaders.
#14333494
You're asking for an escalation of a largely ineffective war. Mexico has thousands of its own troops already involved. DEA, ATF, FBI are all involved in intelligence gathering and drug/gun raids. Mexican military and police are being trained by the US. Yet, the violence worsens. Using dubiously ethical tactics forged in the War on Terror for taking out ideological enemies to take out cartel leaders is a big move, their organization and goals are very different. JSOC and drones won't solve Mexico's problems, but would make them more sci fi.
Last edited by sol on 24 Nov 2013 14:48, edited 1 time in total.
#14333619
Legalizing drugs to defund those motherfuckers and letting the Mexican working masses form militias to rid themselves of their exploiters, be they bourgeois or criminal. No other solution can conceivably work.
#14333627
[Legalizing drugs to defund those motherfuckers and letting the Mexican working masses form militias to rid themselves of their exploiters, be they bourgeois or criminal. No other solution can conceivably work.

^ This. Nothing short of a proletarian revolution can possibly fix Mexico's problems, and even that is doubtful.
#14333715
Weed I can believe. The US will never legalize hard drugs though. Not in our life time. Therefore, I don't really have a solution to this. When in doubt kill more people I guess.
#14333885
I do love today how no matter the theatre, the opponent, or the underlying cause and circumstances, there is always someone to suggest that all is lost, it is completely unwinnable, and the best solution is to give the opponent everything they desired from the outset without a fight, as resistance is obviously futile.

That the fragmented Mexican armed forces, the corrupt to the bone federales, and the corrupt club of gangsters and plutocrats calling themselves the government of Mexico who back both up can't beat off the cartels they are half the time in league with says exactly nothing. Only the Mexican army has been worth anything in that fight and where they have acted in unison such as in parts of Baja California and Chihuahua states (northern Mexico by the U.S. border) they have made progress. The violence which reached its height and a boiling point until mid 2010 from Puerto Palomas to Ciudad Juarez has substantially receded in swaths of these territories.
#14333889
You can't win a war if it's never meant to be won. If the government were honest about cracking down on drugs, they would've shut down the border a long time ago. If humans can travel the border undetected, drugs are even easier to smuggle. I think everybody knows by now the real reason why the government is taking a half-baked approach to the war.
#14333898
Of course, but like so many other campaigns, that doesn't mean that the stated reasons for the war are wrongheaded, but that the war under its present leadership is untenable because it is led by a worthless government out of Mexico City of media moguls and oil men who at times not only fail to act, but act deliberately in contradiction of their stated intentions.

The Mexican government and the institutions it is responsible for are weak because they are designed to be weak. This is advantageous to both parties from over the U.S. side of the border as well as Mexico's wealthiest families and business interests. The internal house cleaning which would see the status quo regime in Mexico City thrown out as quick as the cartels can only come from the Mexicans themselves, who by now have resorted to vigilantism in various major urban centres and border towns where the perception is that the police have abandoned them to be shredded by crossfire. Only when it reaches a point where this is some form of national call to (armed) action against these groups and their paid lackeys in the state will progress be made.

The Mexican Drug War can only be won internally by Mexicans with a genuine passion and stake in guiding the future of their own country, because no one else gives half a damn.
#14333905
The Mexican government and the institutions it is responsible for are weak because they are designed to be weak. This is advantageous to both parties from over the U.S. side of the border as well as Mexico's wealthiest families and business interests. The internal house cleaning which would see the status quo regime in Mexico City thrown out as quick as the cartels can only come from the Mexicans themselves, who by now have resorted to vigilantism in various major urban centres and border towns where the perception is that the police have abandoned them to be shredded by crossfire. Only when it reaches a point where this is some form of national call to (armed) action against these groups and their paid lackeys in the state will progress be made.

The Mexican Drug War can only be won internally by Mexicans with a genuine passion and stake in guiding the future of their own country, because no one else gives half a damn.

Which is basically what I said.
#14334228
Indeed Potemkin (great minds and all that jazz...) and thanks Demos.

I will add one more point. Earlier this year, in the city of Matamoros (in Tamaulipas state directly opposite Brownsville, Texas), violence escalated to a point unseen in the area for years and running gun battles between security forces from Reynosa and other areas of the state, local police, armed civilians acting in concert with security forces, and cartel foot-soldiers made national headlines (in Mexico). It's presently considered among the worst of the U.S.-Mexico border crossings and it goes without saying that it's a primary smuggling route for narcotics.

A few weeks ago in Michoacan state in central Mexico west of Mexico City, armed cartel men deliberately blew up transformers and electrical plants in Morelia and around the state, before setting fire to petrol stations and local businesses. Over a million people lost power and whole towns in Michoacan's outlying suburbs were brought to a standstill for days. A well armed squad from one of the larger cartels beat back police and took control of the city hall in Apatzingán and there was no effective federal response for days there and in Morelia and surrounding towns while gangs entered people's homes and took over residential properties while fighting the authorities. Thus while the army's push in the north has at times yielded significant results (most significantly along the Pacific coastal highway south of Tijuana which is a major trafficking route) and this has been done first by the transfer of patrol duty from the absolutely worthless bought out police to the military, there are cities where the military has little to no active presence further south. These cities have descended into lawlessness which has taken on the character of insurgency and can no longer be considered a matter of crime control.

Territory hotly contested by rival cartels has in parts more closely resembled Kandahar or Mosul than other Latin American cities (This isn't an exaggeration - A few years ago at the height of the Drug War, Juarez had more violent deaths than Baghdad for the year) as the creation of effective no-go zones for police has seen the flight of other elements of social services necessary for a basic quality of life for the population who can no longer remain with non-existent protection, and with it the exodus of thousands of residents. Puerto Palomas in Chihuahua, which I referenced earlier, once a more vibrant cross-border transit point and at one point a recipient of far more American tourism, has seen the population drop from 12,000 to 4,000 in a period of a few years and go up and down again with the times amid a downward spiral of violence which saw the police chief flee across the U.S. border in request for political asylum, the mayor kidnapped, bound, and executed; several severed heads displayed in the town park in the main square, and decapitated corpses burned in large numbers a few kilometers from the town centre.

Michoacan is particularly volatile and another point of contention for turf and influence. Over the summer, a vice admiral of the Mexican navy, Carlos Salazar, commander of a major naval base at the tourist hotspot of Puerto Vallarta, was slaughtered when men employed by one of the leading cartels forced his car off the road before riddling it with bullets.

There was some truth in Ron Paul's statement when he said that this administration and likely any subsequent administration in Washington D.C. is infinitely more concerned with affairs on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan than crafting any solution for the border areas between the United States and Mexico. This violent conflagration barely seeps into U.S. news and when it does, it's an afterthought which draws one hundred times less attention then when any faceless boy and his goat are killed by a drone in Somalia.

In the absence of any solution which the U.S. government is not interested in, and by extension the inefficient, corrupt, wildly unpopular liberal Mexican sockpuppet government is not interested in, more and more Mexicans are waking up to who, where, and what to fix their guns on. But allowing the country to be engulfed in such bloodshed, at times stopping it with blunt force where it is advantageous and at other times either turning a blind eye and failing to allocate any state resources or actively assisting and profiting from it is a precarious game for the Mexico City regime, because it's a fire they can't ultimately manage indefinitely.

And as anger toward the cartels and the abandonment of the population to the mercy of criminal militants increases, so anger toward the central and regional governments increases and begins to work in tandem. And so it will reach a boiling point. Some of the more tranquil areas such as San Cristobal de las Casas and other parts of Chiapas demonstrate a correlation between a population (many of whom are indigenous and considered political outliers by the central authorities) who over the course of generations have been more actively involved in the administration of their quadrant of the country and less likely to shy away from a vigilante response, typically backed by popular sentiment, than those living in areas traditionally reliant on the state who have grown up expecting what is now no longer forthcoming. Thus there can be said to be at least two, if not many Mexicos in that sense and this division along racial (the "white Mexicans" and Latinos or Ladinos who represent the faces of industry, entertainment, commerce, and finance vs. the Maya and other indigenous peoples clustered in the Yucatan peninsula but also littered throughout the country), regional, and class lines (which often correlates with the former) has worked to prevent a mass national awakening amid such a staggering security crisis and legitimized national corruption which affects the life of virtually every single worker and middle class family. What's more, the Mexican elite knows such pre-existing divisions serve this end and their backers in Washington know it, and this is why state policy seems to at times deliberately exacerbate it.

Yet the issues of untouchable forces of crime ensuring anarchy and a government designed to be divided are increasingly being linked in the minds of millions of Mexicans, and it would be naive and ahistorical to expect the status quo to remain as is. Contrary to what some expect however, the more Mexicans take the future of their streets and state into their own hands and make the connection between the political paralysis and the explosion of underworld violence into their daily lives, the more the situation will become more volatile and violent rather than less, at least in the interregnum. Only next time the smoke clears, it may just be the Mexican state with guns fixed on their throat.


Worry grows over Mexico vigilante movement

Armed citizen patrols fighting drug cartel violence join forces with a radical teachers union in Guerrero state opposed to an education reform law.

MEXICO CITY — Debate is intensifying over armed vigilante patrols that have sprung up in crime-plagued sections of rural Mexico, particularly in the state of Guerrero, where some patrols joined forces this week with a radical teachers union that has been wreaking havoc with massive protests, vandalism and violent confrontations with police.

The two groups, on the surface, would appear to have little in common. The vigilante patrols, typically made up of masked campesinos, are among dozens that have emerged in the countryside in recent months, purporting to protect their communities from the depredations of the drug cartels. The state-level teachers union, meanwhile, has taken to the streets to protest a sweeping education reform law backed by Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.

Their alliance was announced in a joint meeting Sunday. A leader of the vigilantes said they were joining with the teachers because it was the vigilantes' "watchword to fight against injustice."


The groups took part in their first joint demonstration this week in Chilpancingo, the capital of the southern state, which is home to the well-known resort city of Acapulco. The vigilantes apparently chose to march unarmed, and there were no reports of serious trouble.

But there is concern that an already-volatile series of political protests may take on a violent edge.

Before the alliance was announced, stick- and pipe-wielding members of the union, known as the State Coordinating Committee of Guerrero Education Workers, three times had blocked the key freeway connecting Mexico City and Acapulco, disrupting commerce during Acapulco's crucial spring break season.

Last week, some of the union protesters attacked federal police with homemade weapons as officers removed them from the road, according to police reports carried by Notimex, the state news agency. According to police, 15 officers were injured.

The vigilantes' decision to participate in political protests is an "unpleasant Molotov cocktail," Francisco Arroyo, president of Mexico's Chamber of Deputies, told reporters Tuesday. "A state that permits its citizens to arm themselves in order to achieve justice by their own hand is a failed state."

In general, the idea of aggrieved campesinos taking up arms and demanding justice resonates deeply in the national mythos, and the vigilantes have been embraced in some quarters.
In January, Guerrero Gov. Angel Aguirre proposed giving salaries and uniforms to a group that patrols the city of Ayutla.

There have been problems, however. In February, a group in the Guerrero community of Las Mesas shot and injured two tourists headed to the beach who failed to stop at a vigilante roadblock. In March, federal authorities announced the arrest of 34 members of a self-defense group in the neighboring state of Michoacan, alleging they were connected to the drug cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion.

The newspaper Reforma counted vigilante groups in 27 of Guerrero's 81 municipalities. The Peña Nieto government, which took power in December, has downplayed their presence as the administration tries to move the focus in Mexico away from the country's persistent violence and toward a package of reforms — including the controversial education reform law — that it hopes will spur a golden age of economic growth.

Peña Nieto was visiting Japan this week, hoping to drum up investment. At a news conference Tuesday, he was asked about the developments in Guerrero. He said the vigilantes' effort to take justice into their own hands was "beyond legality" and one "that my government will have to fight."

On Wednesday, protest leaders said their new group, which includes students and union members, would be called the Guerreran Popular Movement. On Thursday, hundreds of protesters again blocked the freeway to Acapulco.

Aguirre, the governor, told a reporter that he refused to be intimidated.

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/11/world/la-fg-mexico-vigilantes-20130412



Note that Nieto declares an intention to fight those Mexican citizens defending their families, homes, livelihoods, and country.

What do the government and the cartels have in common? They are both defecating in their trousers at the thought of a popular, armed Mexican national awakening. Yet it is the only solution which can see both equivalent sides of the trash bin flushed into the Gulf and something just, prosperous, and glorious built atop the massive empty space they would leave in their wake.
#14487162
Quantum wrote:You can't win a war if it's never meant to be won. If the government were honest about cracking down on drugs, they would've shut down the border a long time ago. If humans can travel the border undetected, drugs are even easier to smuggle. I think everybody knows by now the real reason why the government is taking a half-baked approach to the war.

Agree.
Anyway, like the war on Mafia, you just need to keep fighting. I think that Mexico gets economic benefit from drugs, whether its legal or illegal. Mexico has to fight these families, and develop their economy further. Thats all. There is no 'solution' tomorrow, and thats fine, but don't give up just like that.
#14487199
Legalize marihuana and execute hard drug sellers....put hard drug users in a mental ward and give them behaviour modification treatments. If necessary implant a chip in their heads to give them nausea if they do use any drugs. That should take care of the problem.
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