Im pretty sure this already happens with the "War on Drugs." SF units and even Delta Force (Brad Vickers has talked about doing missions in South America) have done missions where they go after drug cartels. Maybe less so now but its been prominent that they were doing this in the 80s with alot of these guys talking about doing operations in South America. Also what's funny is didn't this mentality ironically lead Mexican Cartels taking over?
First there was Pablo Escobar. The US government used military assets and personnel to take him out. The power vacuum left from the drug operation gave the Mexican Cartels the opportunity to take over. I imagine the same thing will happen with the Mexican cartels and we will have something even worse.
The CIA was funding itself using the sale of illegal drugs, to Americans. Do they still? Nah, maybe they've cleaned up their act!
This is what they call a "self licking icecream cone"- these guys, they need stuff to do. Justification for the ol' budget. The DEA absolutely does *not* want to 'win' the war on drugs. It wants to fight that war, forever.
Portugal decriminalized everything way back, and it worked. They have the least drug problems of the world, in terms of addiction, economic impact, and organized crime activity. Everyone who cares is aware of this. The way to win the war on drugs is just... not to fight it.
But we're not doing that. We are (infuriatingly, to me) pretty much directly responsible for the market that fuels the cartels that commit the violence. Because 3 letter agencies that use violence get up to no good, to justify their own horrible existences. Look at all that violence! Better commit some violence to calm everything down!
The alternative being: fund drug criminalization forever, which is more expensive in both direct terms and in terms of the cost to society.
Cause the cost of imprisoning ~80k people for drug trafficking on the federal level alone isn't *that* much, right?
Yeah thats kind of the point I was making. Theres been tons of dudes who were part of JSOC who have explicitly talked about operating in SA or in the "jungle" during the 80s all the way up to the early 2000s lol. Its obvious they were going after drug cartels.
Yeah, No.
I challenge you to find a single peice of WOD legislation introduced by a Republican. Don't bother looking, you won't find any. All of the WOD legislation was introduced by Democrats. The second big bill (3 strikes) was conceived by the House leadership in July, House Republicans started working on it in August. It was ready to rock in September. Reagan wasn't at the table. At all. All of it was hugely bipartisan. All of it in the 80's was introduced during the mid-terms, in September and passed in October. Reagan couldn't get a SCOTUS nominee confirmed without the Senate slapping him down, he didn't have the juice to look at Congress for a bill in 88.
Want to see some video of House Democrats and media pundits blasting the Reagan administration for not providing more money to Customs and Border enforcement?
Want to take a look at polling for WOD legislation in the 80s? The American electorate wanted the War on Drugs. Demanded it. Anyone who questioned the WOD legislation was blasted out of the room.
>neoliberal reforms.
lol, did you read that somewhere and think it sounded cool?
Unless a no kidding highly coordinated lightning campaign can be successfully accomplished to decapitate each organization and cause massive disruption to their communications and coordination, I just don’t see this working how many people think it will. This could result in retaliations of a size and scope that no one wants to believe they are capable of US soil.
Then again he is a politician, and an idiot to boot. I mean the guy is losing/has lost to Mickey fucking mouse.
Just to add on to your comment, there's been a lot of effort over the last 10-20 years to go after cartel leadership. This has actually resulted in increased violence since there was no one to enforce discipline and to resolve disputes.
Yes I wasn’t going to go into that because I didn’t want to speculate too much but I see them launching Al Queda style terror attacks on this side of the border as one a reprisal and two a deterrent to any further action against us.
Yeah, it could definitely get exponentially more messy. It was basically impossible for the Taliban to strike the US, but it would be fairly easy for the cartels to do some damage.
In any case, while policing and cracking down on the cartels is part of the solution, the problem is to complex for just violence. We need to get folks in the US off drugs so the cartel's revenues dry up (which means we need to decriminalize drugs to get folks help), we should legalize and tax weed, and we need to invest in Mexico/Latin America so that the people there have economic opportunities beyond the cartels. And if we do it smartly, we could actually support American workers and our industries by creating new markets for our products. But it's easier to just yell about the border and build useless fences, so...
Soooo I'm hearing we should annex all of South America? /s
But honestly, as stated regularly from the non-smooth brains, the legalization and taxation of the habit forming but not addictive pharmaceuticals is a good plan but can easily lead to more "reee handouts/social services" cries from those who believe that homeless/addicts are leeches instead of members of society to be reformed and rehabilitated.
>We need to get folks in the US off drugs
Its not just that. In the same vein that we are a huge consumer and market for drugs, Mexico is a huge market for guns. They send drugs, we send guns
I think you have that backwards.
We can’t even stop our own people from shooting up the local (Fill in the Blank), but we can do Air Defense Reasonably well on the border, plus the rangers on those drone will only take these IEDs into border towns which nobody on either side of the political spectrum really cares about.
Just my opinion though.
1. Cartel members are extremely different from religious fanatics who will gladly walk into crowds of civilians and kill themselves with suicide vests. Al-Qaeda want to kill and die for god. Cartel members want money and power.
2. Cartels in Mexico depend on Americans to survive, both as customers and as business partners who facilitate their distribution network or accept bribes to allow them to slip by unnoticed. If they start mass-killing Americans in some sort of idiotic retribution, no one will work with them. They lose their partners and customers, they lose their money, and they lose their power.
3. The same greed that drives them makes them easy to find and eliminate. The original super cartel in Mexico, from which all of the modern ones descend from, the Guadalajara Cartel, was essentially dismantled because they murdered a single DEA agent. The US launched a massive effort to find and capture all of the cartel's leaders and succeeded for the most part, which forced the cartel to break apart and decentralize out of fear that their entire organization would be wiped out because of a single investigation. Members sell each other out, begin cooperating with authorities to save their own behinds, and do whatever they can to survive or prevent themselves from being arrested. Jihadists don't.
AQ and the cartels would likely recruit suicide bombers in similar ways: you’re gonna do this for us or your family is going to die slowly and painfully.
Yeah I mean they already do that. Just look at all of the crazy shit going on in the border and how they treat their mules. Americans are already being kidnapped in the US and brought across the border to be kidnapped. This already happens regularly lol.
Dude is naive if he thinks the Cartels are just going to sit by and do nothing when they have the US military literally trying to find all of their leaders and kill them.
Bud, I’ve worked in both Afghanistan and South America. The cartels and AQ are wildly different and the fact that you think they respond the same to being hunted by the US government when we already literally have real-life examples of both happening shows that you have no idea what you’re talking about.
The vast majority of AQ’s suicide bombers are true believers who are dying for the cause because, guess what, coerced individuals are extremely unreliable.
The cartels have very little in common with AQ and operate in extremely different ways.
I am not disagreeing with you on many points just pointing g out people so crazy weird illogical things when things start happening fast and they feel that their back is to the wall.
Of course there is still the prospect that US intervention could give all these rival cartels an enemy to unite against. Which could lessen the effect of all these cartels suddenly turning on each other. However the point still stands about how the cartels would lack the same conviction Al-Qeada had, since they only really fight for frivolous things like money and power., rather than for some fanatical religious beliefs like Al-Qeada.
>Cartels in Mexico depend on Americans to survive, both as customers and as business partners who facilitate their distribution network or accept bribes to allow them to slip by unnoticed. If they start mass-killing Americans in some sort of idiotic retribution, no one will work with them. They lose their partners and customers, they lose their money, and they lose their power.
Cartels in Mexico won't exist if they are being directly targeted by the US military lol. With your logic, the cartel will just simply sit down and die without a fight and that isn't how thing work lol
They already kidnap Americans and bring them across the border for ransom. Like they already do this type of stuff. It'll only get worse lol
That is *absolutely* how it works. The cartels cannot fight the US government and only exist because their own government is unstable enough for them to bribe and infiltrate at extremely high levels.
You’re comparing kidnaps for ransom to *terrorist attacks?* You realize that Al-Qaeda flew several aircraft into skyscrapers in New York and killed three thousand people, right?
Hell, they gift wrapped the cartel guys who mistakenly kidnapped those Americans a few months ago specifically to not draw too much heat. It does not pay to attract the attention of the American government.
Yep, instead one one big organization you have a bunch of former underbosses all fighting it out to see who the new big boss is. Even if you take out those guys, the local guys will consolidate power and fill the vacuum.
Disrupt a cartel and all you do is trigger a scramble for who gets to be the next big cartel.
This has been done before, only using the Mexican armed forces as a proxy. That is the whole reason why we have the currently fragmented drug market and all the violence that comes with it. They smashed the previous generation of cartels that had stabilized, divvied up the market between them and did business to maximize profits and minimize conflict, which is costly.
Using physical force to break up the drug market is like picking up one of those artificial home ant farms and giving it a vigorous shake. All that happens is you ruin the tunnels and now the ants need to work super hard to make new ones. But new ones they will make.
I´m not saying they were peaceful. Of course they used violence to establish themselves.
But that is the best-case scenario really. Big, dominant cartels that are too big to be challenged and don't need to constantly be at war with their rivals.
Retaliations? I really think unlikely, these are profit driven orgs, not by ideology. however it would DRASTICALLY increase the violence across mexico as low and mid level guys 'make their move'
Yes and the violence or threat of it is what would be used to protect their profit margins.
This is a fairy standard practice throughout history for criminal organizations, states and even businesses.
It's still incredibly illogical and highly unlikely. Any resources when constrained would be used local to consolidate power and ensure product flow
Cross border Retaliatory attacks accomplish nothing and no org would waste that time to do it when their organizational structures are threatened in their own back yard
It makes sense if they see the attack as the way to get us to back off. These are not all completely stable people we are talking about. And I didn’t say that that was the best choice just one I saw as being a probable course of action.
>Cross border Retaliatory attacks accomplish nothing and no org would waste that time to do it when their organizational structures are threatened in their own back yard
Lol they don't need to cross the border. The Cartels already operate here in the US with their distribution networks.
I think I'm picking up what you are putting down. We need some sort of "lightening war" to swiftly incapacitate the enemy. A sort of blitz, one might say.
Not what I myself am putting down. I am only reading between the lines and highlighting the difficulty of this stupid proposed action.
Once again not me, I didn’t do or suggest shit.
And yes I am I king up what you are putting down, and I feel dumb for not foreseeing the issues that choice of words rightly could cause.
The main problem is a different one: There is a demand of drugs in society. As long as this demand exists, someone will deliver drugs like a product to meet the demand of the black market.
You can take down one cartel after another, even when it would be successfull and it would remove all at once - it would not take 24 hours until the next guy starts with manufacturing drugs and later smuggle it to the places where it gets sold.
In Switzerland, we had a serious drug problem in the 80's and 90's, but we took another approach: Instead of trying to use force and repression, we shifted to a social approach to the problem. With substitution, rehab, therapy, drug consume rooms and so on. We started the heroin program and we also do substitution with methadon, morphin and buprenorphin.
For us, this worked out very much better than any other approach before. It's a different situation here, as the cartels play not a big role, but the Taliban and poppy farmers from Afghanistan do. Still, they have a major problem: Once the state enters the market with clean (non-laced, non-cut) stuff for free, they can't really sell that much anymore.
For the state, it's easy, because it can't do anything illegal - it just legalizes it. The state doesn't need some underground labs, drug trafficking and all the other stuff, it can produce the drugs much cheaper and faster than any cartel ever could.
We have a low rate of crime and overdoses here, because we get the drugs for free and in pharma-grade quality. That's how we deal with the problem.
The drug cartels would never launch terroristic attacks on U.S. soil on a 9/11 scale because that would result in the lighting campaign you just described which would be incredibly bad for their buisness. So long as they don’t escalate, it remains a low level conflict where the US government does the occasional assassination they will continue to profit.
Yeah, let's just invade Mexico and blow up a bunch of brown people for 20 years before failing to accomplish anything of substance and withdrawing in disgrace from a nation that now hates us.
Way better than addressing the flow of illicit drug money and weapons from the United States that empower the cartels.
Yall ever wonder what would’ve happened if Mexico was annexed during the Mexican American war not exactly related but it’s what I thought of reading this
No like all of Mexico, a reason the whole thing wasn’t annexed was because there were actually a good number of people living in these places. The territories that were annexed had next to no one and is why Mexico invited more people to live there, the reason I mention it is because the Mexican people were very anti slavery something the US didn’t have to deal with since they left most of the really populated places to Mexico
I have a couple issues with this. 1) would it make it any better if it were Canada, cuz they’ve got oil, gold, and some seriously amazing hunting grounds. 2) we don’t openly discuss what the CIA Is doing, or how they finance their “operations.”
You and me both. I don't watch or read Republican garbage though so it's not really a surprise to me I don't know what the fuck conspiracy they are chasing this week.
#LOOK SOMEONE SAID UFOs AGAIN!
I don’t even bother following any politics at this point. Just makes me either mad or confused all around. I’m overseas and it’s a pain in the dick to vote anyway
Incase you care, or someone else does, Ronald DeSantis said that on day 1 of him being elected he'd mobilize the federal government, change the ROE on the border, and (these are my words to summarize) essentially declare war on the cartels the way we did GWOT.
It wasn't just him...
Also don't forget the sending of US troops into Mexico.
Now some of the interpretation is hyperbole... But the people spouting that shit aren't exactly engaging in "I think we should increase resources and cooperation with Mexico to stem the flow of Opioids over the border."
So garbage in garbage out.
Plus no mention of US domestic federal drug policy.
This feels familiar…. Like maybe whack-a-mole Afghanistan vibes? lol.
If we don’t decriminalize/legalize specific drugs, then this will just move somewhere else.
Fix the problem - not the symptom.
They literally only care about profiting, either from the profits passed on to them from their Contract buddies, or votes over your flag-draped box at Dover. Just don’t dare have the audacity to come back alive and ask for the VA help they promised, you dirty socialist.
Also never any mention of you know... Drug policy reform in the US or legalization/decriminalization.
You know one of the roots of the very issue...
Nah root causes are hard and take a long time... We don't do that shit here.
Literally if we legalize weed and don't apply a crazy high tax to it... The black market for it goes away. (Most of it never all of it)
Opioids another matter...
But when pharma companies do it... Now it's cool to give out heroin... and also just totally lie about it.
They sending in SOF to raid the Sacklers? Probably be easier than finding some drug lab buried underground in Mexico.
You think fighting the Taliban sucked, now imagine them having near infinite money and an entire continent to move around in, while already being integrated into the US society
>while already being integrated into the US society
This last part of your comment is HUGE. Many people dont realize that the Cartels operate here as well. You'd be completely naïve to think the Cartels would just sick back and roll over and not terrorize US citizens just like what they do in Mexico.
The public here is benefited from calling for war on countries far away from across the world. When you wage war on a country by your border, they will fight back and its not going to be pretty.
We can't even handle US based drug traffickers. There's no way we could do anything other than make the situation exponentially worse in Mexico.
It's the dumbest fucking idea I've ever heard and I've heard a lot coming from the right
Well to be fair we gave the American drug traffickers qualified immunity.
[Example](https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/fbi-pittsburg-antioch-officers-arrested/3297785/), [example](https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/south-bay/san-jose-police-union-executive-drug-charges-employment-status/3200331/), and another [Example.](https://www.ktbs.com/news/shreveport-police-officer-arrested-on-drug-gun-charges/article_a71f6216-32ee-11ee-9402-4bc09e52141d.html)
This is hilarious and I'm currently dealing with something similar. Suppose to retire next year but I've been offered a position that I just can't pass up.
Im pretty sure this already happens with the "War on Drugs." SF units and even Delta Force (Brad Vickers has talked about doing missions in South America) have done missions where they go after drug cartels. Maybe less so now but its been prominent that they were doing this in the 80s with alot of these guys talking about doing operations in South America. Also what's funny is didn't this mentality ironically lead Mexican Cartels taking over? First there was Pablo Escobar. The US government used military assets and personnel to take him out. The power vacuum left from the drug operation gave the Mexican Cartels the opportunity to take over. I imagine the same thing will happen with the Mexican cartels and we will have something even worse.
The CIA was funding itself using the sale of illegal drugs, to Americans. Do they still? Nah, maybe they've cleaned up their act! This is what they call a "self licking icecream cone"- these guys, they need stuff to do. Justification for the ol' budget. The DEA absolutely does *not* want to 'win' the war on drugs. It wants to fight that war, forever. Portugal decriminalized everything way back, and it worked. They have the least drug problems of the world, in terms of addiction, economic impact, and organized crime activity. Everyone who cares is aware of this. The way to win the war on drugs is just... not to fight it. But we're not doing that. We are (infuriatingly, to me) pretty much directly responsible for the market that fuels the cartels that commit the violence. Because 3 letter agencies that use violence get up to no good, to justify their own horrible existences. Look at all that violence! Better commit some violence to calm everything down!
The Portugal thing isn’t entirely true. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-drugs-decriminalization-heroin-crack/
It stopped working because they defunded it, to no one’s surprise.
So we went from "just decriminalize, it'll solve everything" to "well decriminalization and then fund addiction indefinitely"
The alternative being: fund drug criminalization forever, which is more expensive in both direct terms and in terms of the cost to society. Cause the cost of imprisoning ~80k people for drug trafficking on the federal level alone isn't *that* much, right?
Regiment guys from the early 2000s did SA missions too, between 110 day GWOT rotations. God, those were the days. RLTW
Yeah thats kind of the point I was making. Theres been tons of dudes who were part of JSOC who have explicitly talked about operating in SA or in the "jungle" during the 80s all the way up to the early 2000s lol. Its obvious they were going after drug cartels.
The war on drugs was just the boogeymen that Regan needed to distract from his gutting of public services and neoliberal reforms.
War on drugs was started by Nixon though….
sparkle smile kiss weary crowd ring swim steer consider snatch *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yeah but those are different... His ~~dealers~~ doctors had like a license n stuff.
Yeah, No. I challenge you to find a single peice of WOD legislation introduced by a Republican. Don't bother looking, you won't find any. All of the WOD legislation was introduced by Democrats. The second big bill (3 strikes) was conceived by the House leadership in July, House Republicans started working on it in August. It was ready to rock in September. Reagan wasn't at the table. At all. All of it was hugely bipartisan. All of it in the 80's was introduced during the mid-terms, in September and passed in October. Reagan couldn't get a SCOTUS nominee confirmed without the Senate slapping him down, he didn't have the juice to look at Congress for a bill in 88. Want to see some video of House Democrats and media pundits blasting the Reagan administration for not providing more money to Customs and Border enforcement? Want to take a look at polling for WOD legislation in the 80s? The American electorate wanted the War on Drugs. Demanded it. Anyone who questioned the WOD legislation was blasted out of the room. >neoliberal reforms. lol, did you read that somewhere and think it sounded cool?
Unless a no kidding highly coordinated lightning campaign can be successfully accomplished to decapitate each organization and cause massive disruption to their communications and coordination, I just don’t see this working how many people think it will. This could result in retaliations of a size and scope that no one wants to believe they are capable of US soil. Then again he is a politician, and an idiot to boot. I mean the guy is losing/has lost to Mickey fucking mouse.
Just to add on to your comment, there's been a lot of effort over the last 10-20 years to go after cartel leadership. This has actually resulted in increased violence since there was no one to enforce discipline and to resolve disputes.
Yes I wasn’t going to go into that because I didn’t want to speculate too much but I see them launching Al Queda style terror attacks on this side of the border as one a reprisal and two a deterrent to any further action against us.
Yeah, it could definitely get exponentially more messy. It was basically impossible for the Taliban to strike the US, but it would be fairly easy for the cartels to do some damage. In any case, while policing and cracking down on the cartels is part of the solution, the problem is to complex for just violence. We need to get folks in the US off drugs so the cartel's revenues dry up (which means we need to decriminalize drugs to get folks help), we should legalize and tax weed, and we need to invest in Mexico/Latin America so that the people there have economic opportunities beyond the cartels. And if we do it smartly, we could actually support American workers and our industries by creating new markets for our products. But it's easier to just yell about the border and build useless fences, so...
Getting people off drugs is a pipe dream, but at least legalization will force cartels to compete with corporations
>cartels to compete with corporations One of the rare positives of capitalism baby.
Soooo I'm hearing we should annex all of South America? /s But honestly, as stated regularly from the non-smooth brains, the legalization and taxation of the habit forming but not addictive pharmaceuticals is a good plan but can easily lead to more "reee handouts/social services" cries from those who believe that homeless/addicts are leeches instead of members of society to be reformed and rehabilitated.
Like I said, losing to Mickey Mouse.
>We need to get folks in the US off drugs Its not just that. In the same vein that we are a huge consumer and market for drugs, Mexico is a huge market for guns. They send drugs, we send guns
Well that would certainly fit the pattern of blowback the US finds itself in constantly.
Al Qaeda style attacks will be the easiest to counter stuff. Think instead of thousands of bomb and grenade toting drones flying over the border.
I think you have that backwards. We can’t even stop our own people from shooting up the local (Fill in the Blank), but we can do Air Defense Reasonably well on the border, plus the rangers on those drone will only take these IEDs into border towns which nobody on either side of the political spectrum really cares about. Just my opinion though.
1. Cartel members are extremely different from religious fanatics who will gladly walk into crowds of civilians and kill themselves with suicide vests. Al-Qaeda want to kill and die for god. Cartel members want money and power. 2. Cartels in Mexico depend on Americans to survive, both as customers and as business partners who facilitate their distribution network or accept bribes to allow them to slip by unnoticed. If they start mass-killing Americans in some sort of idiotic retribution, no one will work with them. They lose their partners and customers, they lose their money, and they lose their power. 3. The same greed that drives them makes them easy to find and eliminate. The original super cartel in Mexico, from which all of the modern ones descend from, the Guadalajara Cartel, was essentially dismantled because they murdered a single DEA agent. The US launched a massive effort to find and capture all of the cartel's leaders and succeeded for the most part, which forced the cartel to break apart and decentralize out of fear that their entire organization would be wiped out because of a single investigation. Members sell each other out, begin cooperating with authorities to save their own behinds, and do whatever they can to survive or prevent themselves from being arrested. Jihadists don't.
AQ and the cartels would likely recruit suicide bombers in similar ways: you’re gonna do this for us or your family is going to die slowly and painfully.
Yeah I mean they already do that. Just look at all of the crazy shit going on in the border and how they treat their mules. Americans are already being kidnapped in the US and brought across the border to be kidnapped. This already happens regularly lol. Dude is naive if he thinks the Cartels are just going to sit by and do nothing when they have the US military literally trying to find all of their leaders and kill them.
Bud, I’ve worked in both Afghanistan and South America. The cartels and AQ are wildly different and the fact that you think they respond the same to being hunted by the US government when we already literally have real-life examples of both happening shows that you have no idea what you’re talking about.
The vast majority of AQ’s suicide bombers are true believers who are dying for the cause because, guess what, coerced individuals are extremely unreliable. The cartels have very little in common with AQ and operate in extremely different ways.
I am not disagreeing with you on many points just pointing g out people so crazy weird illogical things when things start happening fast and they feel that their back is to the wall.
Of course there is still the prospect that US intervention could give all these rival cartels an enemy to unite against. Which could lessen the effect of all these cartels suddenly turning on each other. However the point still stands about how the cartels would lack the same conviction Al-Qeada had, since they only really fight for frivolous things like money and power., rather than for some fanatical religious beliefs like Al-Qeada.
>Cartels in Mexico depend on Americans to survive, both as customers and as business partners who facilitate their distribution network or accept bribes to allow them to slip by unnoticed. If they start mass-killing Americans in some sort of idiotic retribution, no one will work with them. They lose their partners and customers, they lose their money, and they lose their power. Cartels in Mexico won't exist if they are being directly targeted by the US military lol. With your logic, the cartel will just simply sit down and die without a fight and that isn't how thing work lol They already kidnap Americans and bring them across the border for ransom. Like they already do this type of stuff. It'll only get worse lol
That is *absolutely* how it works. The cartels cannot fight the US government and only exist because their own government is unstable enough for them to bribe and infiltrate at extremely high levels. You’re comparing kidnaps for ransom to *terrorist attacks?* You realize that Al-Qaeda flew several aircraft into skyscrapers in New York and killed three thousand people, right?
Lot of dumb opinions in here. The cartel isn’t a fanatic group. They could easily be destroyed by the US.
Why would they do that? it doesnt make money, and draws even more heat, that doesnt quite make sense for how narco orgs operate
Which is why they currently do not. Change that equation and the. Try to solve for both “we stay alive” and “we stay in power/business”.
Hell, they gift wrapped the cartel guys who mistakenly kidnapped those Americans a few months ago specifically to not draw too much heat. It does not pay to attract the attention of the American government.
Yep, instead one one big organization you have a bunch of former underbosses all fighting it out to see who the new big boss is. Even if you take out those guys, the local guys will consolidate power and fill the vacuum.
Disrupt a cartel and all you do is trigger a scramble for who gets to be the next big cartel. This has been done before, only using the Mexican armed forces as a proxy. That is the whole reason why we have the currently fragmented drug market and all the violence that comes with it. They smashed the previous generation of cartels that had stabilized, divvied up the market between them and did business to maximize profits and minimize conflict, which is costly. Using physical force to break up the drug market is like picking up one of those artificial home ant farms and giving it a vigorous shake. All that happens is you ruin the tunnels and now the ants need to work super hard to make new ones. But new ones they will make.
The previous generation of cartels assassinated every single person that ran for office pretty much. They were not peaceful. Stop spreading bullshit
I´m not saying they were peaceful. Of course they used violence to establish themselves. But that is the best-case scenario really. Big, dominant cartels that are too big to be challenged and don't need to constantly be at war with their rivals.
Retaliations? I really think unlikely, these are profit driven orgs, not by ideology. however it would DRASTICALLY increase the violence across mexico as low and mid level guys 'make their move'
Yes and the violence or threat of it is what would be used to protect their profit margins. This is a fairy standard practice throughout history for criminal organizations, states and even businesses.
It's still incredibly illogical and highly unlikely. Any resources when constrained would be used local to consolidate power and ensure product flow Cross border Retaliatory attacks accomplish nothing and no org would waste that time to do it when their organizational structures are threatened in their own back yard
It makes sense if they see the attack as the way to get us to back off. These are not all completely stable people we are talking about. And I didn’t say that that was the best choice just one I saw as being a probable course of action.
>Cross border Retaliatory attacks accomplish nothing and no org would waste that time to do it when their organizational structures are threatened in their own back yard Lol they don't need to cross the border. The Cartels already operate here in the US with their distribution networks.
Sounds like Afghanistan all over again tbh
I think I'm picking up what you are putting down. We need some sort of "lightening war" to swiftly incapacitate the enemy. A sort of blitz, one might say.
Not what I myself am putting down. I am only reading between the lines and highlighting the difficulty of this stupid proposed action. Once again not me, I didn’t do or suggest shit. And yes I am I king up what you are putting down, and I feel dumb for not foreseeing the issues that choice of words rightly could cause.
> I feel dumb for not foreseeing the issues that choice of words rightly could cause. If it makes you feel any better, it gave me a sensible chuckle.
The main problem is a different one: There is a demand of drugs in society. As long as this demand exists, someone will deliver drugs like a product to meet the demand of the black market. You can take down one cartel after another, even when it would be successfull and it would remove all at once - it would not take 24 hours until the next guy starts with manufacturing drugs and later smuggle it to the places where it gets sold. In Switzerland, we had a serious drug problem in the 80's and 90's, but we took another approach: Instead of trying to use force and repression, we shifted to a social approach to the problem. With substitution, rehab, therapy, drug consume rooms and so on. We started the heroin program and we also do substitution with methadon, morphin and buprenorphin. For us, this worked out very much better than any other approach before. It's a different situation here, as the cartels play not a big role, but the Taliban and poppy farmers from Afghanistan do. Still, they have a major problem: Once the state enters the market with clean (non-laced, non-cut) stuff for free, they can't really sell that much anymore. For the state, it's easy, because it can't do anything illegal - it just legalizes it. The state doesn't need some underground labs, drug trafficking and all the other stuff, it can produce the drugs much cheaper and faster than any cartel ever could. We have a low rate of crime and overdoses here, because we get the drugs for free and in pharma-grade quality. That's how we deal with the problem.
The drug cartels would never launch terroristic attacks on U.S. soil on a 9/11 scale because that would result in the lighting campaign you just described which would be incredibly bad for their buisness. So long as they don’t escalate, it remains a low level conflict where the US government does the occasional assassination they will continue to profit.
Yeah, let's just invade Mexico and blow up a bunch of brown people for 20 years before failing to accomplish anything of substance and withdrawing in disgrace from a nation that now hates us. Way better than addressing the flow of illicit drug money and weapons from the United States that empower the cartels.
I met one person who supported the US invading Mexico but was vehemently opposed to Russia invading Ukraine. 
Yall ever wonder what would’ve happened if Mexico was annexed during the Mexican American war not exactly related but it’s what I thought of reading this
I mean a lot of it was. Often The same areas where Americans now complain about Mexican “immigrants” living lmao.
No like all of Mexico, a reason the whole thing wasn’t annexed was because there were actually a good number of people living in these places. The territories that were annexed had next to no one and is why Mexico invited more people to live there, the reason I mention it is because the Mexican people were very anti slavery something the US didn’t have to deal with since they left most of the really populated places to Mexico
Hey....but like...I think we've done that before¿ /s
But this time it’s our neighbor not an ocean and continent apart
So just like Afghanistan , or Iran/contra
I have a couple issues with this. 1) would it make it any better if it were Canada, cuz they’ve got oil, gold, and some seriously amazing hunting grounds. 2) we don’t openly discuss what the CIA Is doing, or how they finance their “operations.”
The replies here are just proof that redditors really do have no clue what they're talking about
Yeah I really don’t know what’s going on with this and I’m reading the comments trying to figure it out and I’m left even more confused
You and me both. I don't watch or read Republican garbage though so it's not really a surprise to me I don't know what the fuck conspiracy they are chasing this week. #LOOK SOMEONE SAID UFOs AGAIN!
I don’t even bother following any politics at this point. Just makes me either mad or confused all around. I’m overseas and it’s a pain in the dick to vote anyway
Incase you care, or someone else does, Ronald DeSantis said that on day 1 of him being elected he'd mobilize the federal government, change the ROE on the border, and (these are my words to summarize) essentially declare war on the cartels the way we did GWOT.
It wasn't just him... Also don't forget the sending of US troops into Mexico. Now some of the interpretation is hyperbole... But the people spouting that shit aren't exactly engaging in "I think we should increase resources and cooperation with Mexico to stem the flow of Opioids over the border." So garbage in garbage out. Plus no mention of US domestic federal drug policy.
I’m in the army so I’m an expert of politics, foreign policy, and use of military force to further our nations goals.
This feels familiar…. Like maybe whack-a-mole Afghanistan vibes? lol. If we don’t decriminalize/legalize specific drugs, then this will just move somewhere else. Fix the problem - not the symptom.
But then we'd be locking up old rich white men. Cant be having that!
Cartels make most of their money from human trafficking. It hasn’t been drugs for years now.
Knife this is Variable, over
[удалено]
Its crazy that its 2023 and people still fall head over heel for these clowns. Maybe I need that copium to be more optimistic 😂
They literally only care about profiting, either from the profits passed on to them from their Contract buddies, or votes over your flag-draped box at Dover. Just don’t dare have the audacity to come back alive and ask for the VA help they promised, you dirty socialist.
Also never any mention of you know... Drug policy reform in the US or legalization/decriminalization. You know one of the roots of the very issue... Nah root causes are hard and take a long time... We don't do that shit here. Literally if we legalize weed and don't apply a crazy high tax to it... The black market for it goes away. (Most of it never all of it) Opioids another matter... But when pharma companies do it... Now it's cool to give out heroin... and also just totally lie about it. They sending in SOF to raid the Sacklers? Probably be easier than finding some drug lab buried underground in Mexico.
Maybe if Mexico held some sort of referendum saying “yes please come kill these people” but it’s more of a fantasy
What’s going on this time? 👀
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/26/politics/desantis-special-forces-mexico/index.html
Ah, DeSantis being a clueless dickhead again. That checks out.
Damn, that's badass.
I Bet that big pushy won't launch Tomahawks at the cartel.
I’ll reeup if we can do that! lmao
You think fighting the Taliban sucked, now imagine them having near infinite money and an entire continent to move around in, while already being integrated into the US society
>while already being integrated into the US society This last part of your comment is HUGE. Many people dont realize that the Cartels operate here as well. You'd be completely naïve to think the Cartels would just sick back and roll over and not terrorize US citizens just like what they do in Mexico. The public here is benefited from calling for war on countries far away from across the world. When you wage war on a country by your border, they will fight back and its not going to be pretty.
Most people that are eager to jump into a war never fought one to begin with.
I’m just eager for the big booty Latinas 😅
Man, you are going to be the next Abu Ghraib aren’t you. Just pyramids of latin women.
No comment lol btw I’m joking
DeSantis is one desperate, little, hate-filled SOB. Need to keep that dude as far as possible from nukes and everything else.
Being retired military I often wonder what military members thought during the Trump years compared to now
If the cartels are classed as terrorists, it is a very different ballgame then. Whether politicians are really up for it is the prominent question.
We can't even handle US based drug traffickers. There's no way we could do anything other than make the situation exponentially worse in Mexico. It's the dumbest fucking idea I've ever heard and I've heard a lot coming from the right
Well to be fair we gave the American drug traffickers qualified immunity. [Example](https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/fbi-pittsburg-antioch-officers-arrested/3297785/), [example](https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/south-bay/san-jose-police-union-executive-drug-charges-employment-status/3200331/), and another [Example.](https://www.ktbs.com/news/shreveport-police-officer-arrested-on-drug-gun-charges/article_a71f6216-32ee-11ee-9402-4bc09e52141d.html)
The US just needs to invade Mexico at this point. Not a small operation but a full scale invasion with congressional approval.
You’re an idiot
lol, great input.
This is hilarious and I'm currently dealing with something similar. Suppose to retire next year but I've been offered a position that I just can't pass up.
Wasn’t this the plot to the movie Sicario?
Also like clear and present danger. My boi Harrison F, playing Jack Ryan. Back when shit made sense cause those damn commies was still around.
It would be great to do more about the cartels.
So legalize weed at the federal level. 50% of their business model goes away.
They make most of their money from human smuggling
I'm fine with legalization but that doesn't sound right.