When I've looked into these cases it often seems that there are additional issues at play like harassment/stalking of ex's. So the prosecutor is thinking they can get an easy plea deal on the "real" case by piling on additional charges.
To mean this would be like saying furniture companies can claim their products are made of 'solid wood' when it is in fact just particle board, mdf, and cardboard because those are all made from wood and are all solids.
Even Cartels know that shooting down civilian aircraft in US airspace would be an escalation that would lead to heavy retaliation. Doesn't seem likely to me.
This is the answer. The cartels would have to be insane to poke that particular bear. They would get crushed like a bug. IIRC they murdered a single US undercover officer in the 90s and the retaliation was so bad that they themselves handed over the perpetrators.
Much as I despise them, I'm not so sure that would be the case. I seem to remember folks saying the same about the Taliban, and the cartels have a lot more money and high-tech kit, than the Taliban.
The Taliban was repeatedly crushed. All of the leadership was killed many times over. The problem is the Taliban is an idea that transcends individual human members and it can always be reconstituted. It also benefited from being able to harbor supporters in Pakistan, which is a nuclear power the US was not willing to also invade.
There isn't a real analogy there because cartel leaders have no official state support anywhere, let alone in a bordering nuclear power, but even if they did, it hardly seems reassuring from their perspective to know the drug trade will outlive them after they all get killed. It's different when you're deeply religious and believe what you're doing is worth dying for and the larger arc of history is more important than your own life and wellbeing. I don't think drug lords think that way.
All this is true. Yet the cartels operate like militarized insurgents. Adopting similar tactics seen in Ukraine fighting so it’s interesting to say the least that they might be utilizing drone technology for their purposes.
I didn’t mean to start this giant thread about Mexican Cartels but here we are. Most think it’s just an isolated problem. Others know it’s more widespread. I simply stated that these murderous thugs are out there in full force with technology and armored vehicles. If provoked, they would lash out. It’s ridiculous because of course going up against the US is a losing proposition but each “generation” of cartel leader thinks they can somehow manage it.
I don’t think the technology matters nearly as much as the asymmetry. Iraq had better technology than the Taliban and their military didn’t last a week.
True enough, but the cartels are also experts at running what is basically guerrilla warfare, against each other. Not sure if the Mexican Army has ever tried to take them on. A lot of cartel soldiers come from the army.
* A conventional military war, on a battlefield: Neither Saddam Hussein's military nor the cartels nor the Taliban would last long against the US.
* An unconventional insurgency: The Iraqis quickly turned to this approach and it worked very well for them, as it did for the Taliban. The Taliban won, and the Iraqi insurgency almost drove the US out of Iraq and was eventually co-opted.
The cartels of course would choose the latter. They, the Taliban, etc. are not suicidal.
The US decided to leave because staying was not politically popular, and left. They were not beaten by the Taliban, they were beaten by the political climate at home.
If someone is actively kicking your ass, then they decide that you aren't worth the effort to keep hurting and decide to walk away, that doesn't mean you "won" the fight even if you get what you want afterwards.
The Taliban control what they and the US and allies fought for. That's winning. Your personal requirement of how it must be won is not important - nobody cares how it was done and it doesn't change the outcome. The Taliban don't care and the US and its allies don't care.
It's also a perfectly common, expected way to win a war: First, wars always end with political solutions. The most well known principle of warfare is that it is 'politics conducted by other means' (i.e., by violence rather than by law or diplomacy). If there is no political solution, the war never ends. That's why the US didn't win the war in Afghanistan after decades - they couldn't create a stable political solution because they were unable to impose one on the Taliban, who in the end imposed one on the US and its allies.
Victory by outlasting enemy resources, including political will, is fundamental to warfare; wars end when resources to fight (for the political outcome) run out, but few end in total kinetic destruction of those resources - someone runs out of money or political will. It's also the explicit strategy of insurgencies. Enemies of the US know it very well and have used it for generations - that is how North Vietnam won, for example. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the Afghans famously told them, 'you have the clocks (the technology), we have the time'.
Annoying your parents until they give you a cookie is still getting a cookie. Just because you didn't leverage overwhelming military firepower to get the cookie does not mean you aren't holding a cookie
I think the key difference between the Taliban and the cartels is that the Taliban were a bunch of ideologues who actually enjoyed being an insurgency and living under siege in caves, with making money from the drugs trade being a mere means to their real purpose of fighting infidels, whereas the cartel leadership sees wealth and power from controlling the drugs trade as an end, crushing local rivals as a means, and would really rather avoid the sort of conflict that's bad for their medium term business prospects.
I mean, some sort of cartels would bounce back after any "war on drugs" because supply and demand, but the people running them aren't hankering for martyrdom or glory over consolidating their territory and accumulating.
How are they not rational? Violence is a tool. They operate an illegal business so they can’t sue other parties for breach of contract. They can't call the police if they are robbed or file an insurance claim for what was taken. Even the over-the-top violence has a rationale. They aren't punishing the victims as much as they are attempting to broadcast that there is a higher price to be paid than any gain from giving information, to reduce their future losses and enforcement efforts. It isn’t moral or ethical, but I wouldn’t say it is irrational.
Lots of organized crime around the world manages to operate without cutting all the limbs off somebody then arranging them like flowers in a "vase" made out of the poor soul's ribcage. The cartels take violence far beyond what is pragmatically necessary. Their system of crime breeds excessive violence and insanity.
This stuff mostly followed after the zetas. It was a very deliberate strategy to compete in a hostile landscape that others eventually copied to survive.
It's notable that a lot of the Zetas came from a military special forces background, making it seem as if their extreme brutality was a strategic choice inculcated during their training.
I would recommend reading the Freakinomics book or listen to their podcasts on drugs.
TL;DR: drug cartels are run like businesses. They are very rational. But, unlike your boss, their boss can also shoot you in the face if you annoy them too much
In any case that was a war against a hardened, experienced, determined enemy fighting for its freedom from any form of colonial occupation, both as a formal military and as an insurgent force in South Vietnam.
I scarcely think the Mexican population would rise up in defense of the cartels here.
A non-aligned population will look out for their own interests and are aware that the attention of the US is temporary but the cuadillismo that lead to cartels are a durable cultural artifact.
The Battle of Culiacán, also known locally as the Culiacanazo and Black
Thursday, was a failed attempt to capture Ovidio Guzmán López, son of Sinaloa
Cartel kingpin Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, who was wanted in the United States
for drug trafficking.
Around 700 cartel gunmen began to attack civilian, government and military
targets around the city, despite orders from Ovidio sent at security forces'
request. Massive towers of smoke could be seen rising from burning cars and
vehicles. The cartels were well-equipped, with improvised armored vehicles,
bulletproof vests, .50 caliber (12.7 mm) rifles, rocket launchers, grenade
launchers and heavy machine guns.
The problem is you can't just target the cartels, the cartels are made up of random Mexican people. There is an almost guarantee that any significant US strikes would be 90%+ civilian casualties.
The destruction of cartels would involve careful policing and corruption controls, the best American administrations have been bad at this. The worst... can barely put its pants on much less dismantle foreign organized crime. You can't shoot a missile at a cartel and poof it's just gone.
They'd probably quickly stop cheering as their own homes and families were destroyed as collateral damage, which is what would happen if the "full force of the US military" were deployed against the cartels.
I don't really think you thought through that one. It sounds like what your saying is that the Vietnamese won and thats the outcome that matters. It does matter but that isn't the issue - it is the cost that everyone is talking about: the amount of destruction that was brought upon the country and people was terrible.
The distinction is those are cases where they are murdering Mexican citizens. If a cartel murdered a bus of people in America I suspect most any administration would retaliate in some form.
“Dude”, murdering a us citizen in Mexico is different than murdering an entire bus of people on US soil.
You say it’s happening all the time but then say it’s .01%.
Looked it up myself, maybe 40 to 300 people annually. Hard to discern how many of those are pure tourism vs visiting family. I suspect you have a greater risk visiting family, especially if it’s a border town.
13.5mm US citizens visit d Mexico in 2024 so .00002% got kidnapped. I bet that number is even lower when you separate pure tourism vs dual nationals or similar going back home to visit.
The point is any action taken on US soil in a large capacity would be seen as an attack by any administration.
Your right anything can happen but any large attack on US grounds or equally blowing up a plane on either side of the border is going to bring the full weight of the US on the cartels. It makes little sense. Cartels have for decades ingrained that into their organizations no matter how violent that may be.
It's a much bigger problem that you all realize. Right now they have authorized attacks on border patrol agents...
I'm not saying that the US wouldn't retaliate, I'm saying our enemies are getting bolder under this administration's pressure. Turns out the closure was because of drones... But it's still a real issue in Mexico that Mexico would love the eradicate.
When did I dismiss the violence? You’re flapping with hyperbole.
When the cartels make their first major attack we can circle back on this until then I don’t think there is much to mention. Cartels are powerful but still not as powerful as a first world military. Air assets work wonders against ground targets. Isolated violence or the memo (has not happened yet) that CJNG has authorized hits on border agents are only memos until it starts happening at frequency.
Of course things happen sometimes. But, the cartels typically do not want to mess with Americans, particularly in tourist areas, because that brings heat they don't want. It's literally bad for business.
You’re missing the point. Absolutely cartel violence impacts all types of people in the US and Mexico but large scale brutal violence that is usually saved for Mexico since unfortunately the Mexican federal government does not have control in most of the regions.
There is a huge difference between a one off gang killing in the US and someone taking a whole grey hound bus and burying the bodies in the desert.
The world obviously doesn't stop st the US border. The point in this thread was that the attacks on buses full of people have, so far stopped at the US border and that it would be a huge, and dangerous, escalation should that change.
No one disagreed it happens. You claimed it happened "all the time". Unless I"m missing it, your links don't provide numbers of how many Americans are kidnapped & murdered per year. Further, it'd be useful to compare that to the overall number of American visitors to Mexico.
I'm going to go out on a limb and claim it's a small fraction of a percent that find themselves kidnapped & murdered "all the time". But prove me wrong.
Merely pointing out that the US administration is operating like a cartel now a days.
I doubt Mexicans see the Mexican cartels as “theirs” in the same way. Cartels have only been interested in paying off politicians and (as far as I’m aware) weren’t interested in being politicians. However, our politicians here… would LOVE to be Cartel members and make millions it seems. Because they definitely don’t give a shit about law and order.
See, Drug cartels over here operate with the blessing and favor of our president. They are tightly connected.
If a cartel dared to ground a US flight. The US government would have a "free pass" to break all hell loose in Mexico, and Sheinbaum wouldn't have a way to stop it.
She doesn't want that in any way, so the message to the cartel bosses would be to be very careful in that respect.
Sure, there have been US citizens killed within Mexico here and there, but those can easily be attributed to local violence. And as retribution, Mexican government sends a couple of wanted criminals to the US.
Yeah, if a cartel actually used anti-aircraft weapons on a US passenger plane in US airspace? It wouldn't even matter if MAGA or the Democrats were in charge. The US would collectively lose its shit and spend the next 10 years and several trillion dollars retaliating against the cartels. The media would be ecstatic, because it would give them a decade of story arcs, starting with "our brave troops in uniform" all the way through to covering the eventual quagmire and anti-war protests. By year 6-8, editorial columnists would be writing columns reconsidering their initial support for the war.
Unless the government is planning an attack on the cartel[s] that is so existential that such action wouldn't be considered an escalation but rather a tic for tat.
A trapped animal will generally use all its facilities regardless of its expected effectiveness.
Remember that there is no "the" cartel, just so many different towns and interests and bribed officials. It makes it a significant (and perhaps convenient) misnomer dont get me wrong, but maybe important to remember.
Extremely good, highly researched book if you want to get angry at me or call me idiot!
Good point. I guess it depends on the force, size, and especially effectiveness of any potential strikes. (i.e. How cornered a cartel might feel and how much flexing an outsized response might stand to gain them.)
Not hard to imagine these days? Wouldn't you hope for an intervention if it were known that a hostile, state-level military planned to down civilian aircraft?
I had a quick check, and there were zero Americans on board this Malaysian aircraft shot down by a nuclear power over Ukraine, so I don't know how you think it's relevant to an American aircraft full of Americans being shot down in American airspace by cartels immediately on the other side of the American border.
EDIT: Unless you think Malaysia not bombing the Kremlin in retribution is somehow indicative of how America would respond to the situation we're actually talking about.
If you just look at how things work in most societies now and throughout history and use the model of 'the purpose of a system is what it does', then you could surmise that the the purpose of society/nation is to make sure the top 0.01% of people have amazing lives. Everything else is just an consumable input to achieve that goal.
Bad faith actors ruin everything good eventually. From small things like return policies for retail chains, to the political process of an entire country.
True. I never used their return, but a lot of my newer ll bean stuff has had problems a couple years out, so I stopped buying from there. I feel like they’re using as an excuse to lower their quality.
(Jacket zipper just broke and the buttons that held the inside insulation of a jacket came off, shoe sole issues).
Yup. I've personally known people who, shamelessly, would get a Keurig from Costco, drink all the sample pods, and then exchange for a new one, repeatedly.
Ringing up expensive grocery items as cheap SKU at Whole Foods self checkout...
Going on shopping sprees and then calling the credit card company to report it as fraud...
Buying a fancy dress to wear for a few nights out and then returning it...
All things people close to me have done, or continue to do on a regular basis
Talking about a relatively "privileged" class of people here- multiple homes, multiple cars, kids in private school- not struggling single moms working double shifts to put food on the table.
You've always had some proportion of con artists/grifters of course but anecdotally it does seem that there is a higher proportion of people in the US who will, if not flagrantly steal, will do things like this especially against corporations that they mentally categorize as being evil.
Society can handle a small percentage of grifters, they've always been there and always will be. The change is that enshittification is mainstream in the corporate world and feels indistinguishable from being scammed. People begin to feel immersed in it and stop seeing the world as mostly honest and instead as mostly scams. Then good faith policies like these return policies get burned by way more people who lost trust in the system. Then we lose those too.
I sort of hate the "enshitification" term that gets thrown around way too lazily. But, for a variety of reasons, people are tending to deal with larger corporations for the most part and--hey--if I get some money on the side because of a mistake? Whatever. In a way I wouldn't have at some local store.
This was a good movie, but what was it up against. Were there 4 or 5 other movies of comparable goodness that any of could have won the oscar? So 'can barely name one good movie' is apt here. There are some, but way fewer and farther between.
How is the NHS very different from the military. Americans love their military and often have propaganda-style bits like fly-overs during football games. American's don't get the option to 'opt-out' of paying for its gigantic costs. Why not have military spending depend on voluntary donations?
They actually should be able to, for the most part.
The original idea of state exists to ensure 3 things:
- Protection of the territory of the state
- Protection of the integrity of the individual citizen
- Protection of the private property of the citizen
This is why people started organizing in societies and allowing the existence of a ruler class. These 3 things.
You will always need some amount of military to be part of the state. But what most countries waste today (the USA for instance), is pornographic. The state should only be allowed (by taxation) enough military to defend their territory, not to exert control over the all planet like the USA wants to do.
EDIT: Yeah, I should have guessed the part of the "integrity of the individual citizen" would, of course, be twisted. No, it's not protection of the individual from disease of from his own stupidity or lack of ability. It just means the role of the state is to ensure the citizen is protected from deliberate harm from another individual.
I would say that in the list 'Protection of the integrity of the individual citizen' is something that a NHS would serve. Individually, people want to know that if they get injured or sick they can be taken care when they can't for themselves. Everyone is at risk of these things. Society as an organism also benefits from having resources dedicated to repair of its components in the same as it does in defense of external threats. 'Protection of the territory of the state' also can be served by an NHS because of the damage and danger of highly infectious diseases.
> 'Protection of the territory of the state' also can be served by an NHS because of the damage and danger of highly infectious diseases.
Let's be honest here. You know the NHS (and various equivalents across the world) go way, way beyond this.
And I'm not even against the existence of a public funded health service within limits. But this is just phonographic. In my country (and from what I've read in the NHS it's relatively similar), in the past 10 years we added more than 90% medical doctors and nurses to the national NHS. The budget for the local NHS increased by 72% in that same period.
And the service has become absolutely terrible and now people (the ones that only benefit from it but don't pay the costs) are asking to raise taxes even more to put even more money into the problem.
Naa, enough is enough. I don't want to support this crap.
Fair enough to complain about the execution, but glad to see you see the logic of its existence. Back to the military comparison, the waste (fraud, corruption, kickbacks, etc, etc) in that part of the public expenditure is pretty massive. Yet there don't seem to be the same outrage or call for reforms in that area. Even when multi-billion dollar programs stagger about for years then produce nothing useful (except for the profits extracted by the defense firms and their investors). Lots of hate for NHS waste, but military spending waste seems to get a free pass. Why is this?
Basically, because the military got a massive budget in WWII and Americans just got used to it because slaughtering the Nazis was the only thing that can convince Americans to buy into that level of welfare.
Now it's mostly a jobs program for poor people plus pork for politicians to throw at their favored contractors/companies. Can't really be eliminated without political suicide because too many mouths are fed off of it and will make it their mission every waking moment to damn anyone who tries to do it.
Since prevention is a lot cheaper than cure we're trying to avoid the same mistake with other things rather than commit political supuku on things that already exist.
Exactly. If you have regular meetings on how to best progress development of the torment nexus, then you can't claim innocence just because you aren't the one deploying the torment nexus for torment-purposes.
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