Rejecting a renewed “war” against drug traffickers, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Tuesday unveiled her strategy to battle organized crime in a nation where each day brings word of new assassinations, gang wars, massacres and other bloodshed.
. . .
Instead, she outlined a four-point strategy that emphasized intelligence-gathering, troop deployment, improved federal-state coordination and providing opportunities to dissuade impoverished young people from joining organized crime — which is among Mexico’s major employers.
A centerpiece of the plan is doubling down on the often-criticized “hugs not bullets” strategy of Sheinbaum’s predecessor and mentor, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
What to say to avoid decapitation while formulating a plan, maybe
How does a country get this under control? If you assemble a crack team of professional Intel/gunfighters/breaching team, all the gang leaders will do is target their families or other things around them. In a firefight, they outnumber your team thousands to one. You can’t assemble a large fighting force (standing army) without them knowing and stopping you/ infiltrating ranks. You can’t ask another nation to help - you run into basically us/Soviet’s in Afghanistan where they’re seen as occupiers, and generate resentment among even your supporters.
I understand the change probably has to come from within, but how does a government convince the lowest common person to not fall under the organized crime’s strong influence to keep people in line?
Build the economy and fund education and social programs. Fight corruption hard.
Its not glamorous or exciting but its what works in the long run.
Why do people turn to crime? Maybe a few idolize Pablo Escobar and the like, but the vast majority are trying to get by, feed their families and bring their kids through school. If legal work has you slaving away for a pittance that won’t even feed your family and corrupt governments take away money meant for the betterment of the community you start to see why some people stop caring or see illicit means as their only way out of poverty.
Education. An educated populace means a skilled workforce, which leads to better paying jobs and a chance out of poverty. I don’t think the choice between a good paying job in an international pharmaceutical company and a dangerous drug lab is a difficult one when you have legitimate options on the table.
I think the key is to tackle the incentives that brought narcos into existence in the first place. Unfortunately, a lot of that is outside of Mexico’s control. As long as there is demand in the US and drugs remain criminalized, impoverished people in Mexico will be attracted to the drug trade. Also lax US gun laws make it easy for weapons to flow to the narcos making them a tougher target.
TBH it might continue like this until the rest of the world legalises cocaine and it can be produced by businesses instead. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen.
At the end of the day this is a counter insurgency fight. Violence needs to be limited to only the absolute necessary because it’s about ideas. And if you kill someone’s brother they aren’t going to stop to ask what their brother was doing. Or worse, when civilians are caught in the crossfire.
You still need the crack raid teams and such but your goal is to make the insurgents unable to function by removing key people, shutting down income streams so they can’t pay a thousand fighters, and taking their ideological ground away by making other paths available. Like you could go hide in the desert and risk your life and freedom. Or you could go work in the new air conditioned car parts factory.
Once you’ve got all that setup it’s really just a matter of protecting it and going after corruption in a big way. That last part is where so many governments fall down in this kind of a fight. The corruption goes unchecked and the insurgents get all of their moral high ground back with funding secured by the new infrastructure you paid for.
I guess crime exists due to two reasons:
- poverty exists. as long as poverty exists, people seek a way out.
- organized crime exists. it draws people in.
So, pacifying the country needs a two-sided approach. On the one side, you must show people how to live a good life without being reliant on crime for basic necessities. People must be able to support themselves without falling back on criminal organizations.
On the other hand, probably the bigger issue, is that these crime organizations have a lot of money, and demand for labour-force. that means that they actively recruit new people, and draw people in. organized crime mostly exists because there’s too much money being made on the black market by selling/trafficking drugs. So I guess that it would make sense to legalize drugs (at least to a certain extent), because every $1 spent legally when buying drugs is a $1 you take away from the black market, and therefore crime organizations.
Many of yesterday’s warlords are today’s founders.
The US would glass Mexico before it accepted a Narco-State on it’s borders. And I’m exaggerating, but not by much.
“No war on narcos”
Instead, she outlined a four-point strategy that emphasized intelligence-gathering, troop deployment,
Sounds a bit warlike to me.
In any case, I hope her plan has a positive effect.
Its not a war, its a police action.
Solution: legalize all drugs. Make it so you can buy them in pharmacies. Legalize production. Make Mexico the biggest goddamn coke producer on earth. And weed. And fentanyl. Legalize everything in the US as well. If people want to do drugs let them fucking do drugs.
Suddenly, all the cartels become legit employers. They start paying taxes. Instead of shooting each other down cartels start suing each other. They are colluding to fixate prices? Let the antitrust authority deal with that.
Let the narco bosses become CEOs and the employees become shareholders. Create a narcotics workers union and give workers favorable conditions. 30 days PTO, sick pay, 6 hour shifts, 4 day work week, night and weekend shift bonuses. Let the cartels hire marketing departments and let them compete through brand strategy and product quality. Give me that nose avalanche 100% purity coke and I’m happy to pay extra.
We have the military industrial complex, nestle privatizing water wells in Africa and the tobacco and alcohol industry. What harm does it do to add another bunch of psychopaths that do whatever they have to anyway?
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Wikipedia about this sourceHang all drug dealers. That’s what we do in SEA. Note, drug dealers, not drug users.
How do you hang people at sea?
I think Chickenstalker probably meant SEA=South East Asia
I think they were being deliberately obtuse but I could be wrong
Oh
This is, frankly, a very ignorant take. What SEA does works because y’all only have drug dealers, not cartels. Mexican cartels are very powerful, more so than the government itself, and trying to cull them by force would throw the country into civil war.
They do have cartels but it’s usually the Chinese wealthy behind it. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you. Right, former president Rodrigo Duterte?
I must have missed the hanging part but you do murder the innocent due to “drugs.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murders_of_Kian_delos_Santos,_Carl_Arnaiz_and_Reynaldo_de_Guzman
Yeah, let’s go live to Duterte now, how’d that plan go for him? Oh, it seems like there were a ton of extrajudicial killings that they couldn’t ever confirm to human rights groups if the people being murdered were actually drug dealers, or just political dissidents.
Aw shucks, unfortunately it seems like empowering vigilante groups to murder anyone they perceived as a drug dealer without requiring investigations was a bad idea after all.
Ah yes, violence famously does not beget further violence
There will be no more deaths if you kill everybody, nuke the cartels.
And that’s gone so well.
/s
I think that Mexico doesn’t presently have the death penalty.
kagis
Yeah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Mexico
Capital punishment in Mexico was officially abolished on 15 March 2005,[1] having not been used in civil cases since 1957, and in military cases since 1961. Mexico is the world’s most populous country to have completely abolished the death penalty.
Previous president of the Philippines had a campaign to kill drug users,
That’s evil bruh
