Civilians under siege by Mexican cartel fight back with AK-47s, grenades

These gangs are states. We can tell this because they have monopolies on violence.

I agree, not all violence is the same.

But further, perhaps our sense of morality atrophies when we concede the idea of just violence (just as in "justice") only to the state.

I presume those fighting the cartels might have more of a developed sense of civic pride and duty than anyone in a more stable place. Perhaps I'm wrong though

Not sure its fair to equate a gang fueled by drug smuggling to a self-defense militia.

> I guess I'd rather have the state maintain a monopoly on violence.

Like the Taliban?

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Mexico has gun laws which are significantly more restrictive than the USA. There is only one legal gun store in the country, they must all be permitted, calibers are limited, and only permitted within the place of residence. "Monopoly on violence" is an illusion that's propped up mostly by the culture of the people who live in a country.

Sweden's gun homicide rate has increased by 400% since 2010 due to nothing other than demographic change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_Sweden

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It's not an ideal situation, but since the Mexican government refuses to do its job and protect their people and uphold the law what choice do they have?

Right now these people are just doing whatever they can to survive but it's just treating the symptom. The source of the problem is the Mexican government who is either incompetent or happy to take bribes to look the other way while their citizens are left the mercy of paramilitary gangs.

What choice do they have?

This is not your usual vigilante group. This is a reaction to an overwhelming force of criminal gangs killing citizens and the government being powerless to stop them.

What other choice ? Politics are yet to give a solution after decades of problems.

Many countries are effectively ruled by gangs and cartels. That’s why kings became kind of a big deal in Europe. The states monopoly on violence was solidified back the

> At some point when your government is so corrupt, you got to take weapon and organize yourself. It's sad.

At that point you might as well point those weapons at the failed government that forced you to have to play soldier instead of protecting you. Not allowing your own citizens to be enslaved by roving bands of criminals is like the single most basic thing a country's government is for. Since the Mexican government has abandoned them and ceded control of that land to hostile armies I hope those poor farmers aren't still paying them taxes.

A characteristic of most of Latin America is that the Police and the Army were created to protect power, not the people, and there hasn't really been an effort to change the mentality.

>> Mexico has been like that for decades.

Back in the 60's and 70's my Dad worked or Lockheed Martin. He made frequent trips to Mexico to work with engineering teams there on projects he was working on. It only took him one trip to realize how corrupt the police were.

He had parked outside of his hotel with his rental car. Came out. It was surrounded by Policia. They told him he couldn't park here. "Sure thing, I'll move it and not park here again." "You don't understand gringo, you have to pay the parking fine now." He caught on, and asked how much it would cost to just park here, you know, rent this spot instead of paying their fine? The cops gave him an amount and he paid it and they left him alone the rest of the week he was there. He told me a bunch of other stories about the corruption there, not just the cops. It was pretty eye opening to hear some of these.

The corruption can't be fixed. Its engrained in the system. It was rampant fifty years ago, there is no fixing it - its completely normalized now. The cartels simply used the system against itself to gain total control and power.

Because of their neighbors to the north having an insatiable appetite and willingness to spend large amounts of money on illicit goods. Mexico should probably legalize and bring these into a regulated state of the United States would not allow it

They make some of them, some of them are sold to them, some are traded to them for other things.

Mexican Cartels have gotten weapons from Russia before in several ways. This year the US took down a network connected to Viktor Bout and a $56mil arms trade for anti air launchers, automatic grenade launchers, rockets, drones, and military explosives.

There's no need to fight.

The proper solution is to end the war on drugs, allowing people to do what they will with their own bodies. Once people can legally buy their drugs, the cartels will starve.

Use the money saved from reducing our prison population by 75% to pay for widely-accessible treatment for addiction as well as mental health problems. Build more affordable housing so homelessness is less of an issue. As an added bonus: roll back the last half-century of disastrous trickle-down economics which gutted the middle class, so there's less incentive to start using in the first place.

Reminder: the Nixon tapes reveal that the war on drugs was started in the first place not to protect the public from harmful drugs but rather as a means to criminalize his political enemies (e.g., hippies and black people) in a way that couldn't be challenged in court on 14th amendment grounds.

The problem, of course, is those solutions are hard, it's a lot easier to get voters to root for building more walls and sending troops to kill more foreigners, and there's a lot of money to be made by the military industrial complex and private prison system by prolonging the problem.

Why should the US be fighting Mexican gangs? Mexico should send their own army to fight the criminal gangs. If we want to send our army after gangs we have plenty of them right here in the US. We could start with the ones in our Sheriff's Departments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangs_in_the_Los_Angeles_Count...

And then we would get to hear about American imperialism forever....

Why should the US fight Mexican cartels? They have their own armies and plenty of ammo.

Maybe after the US annexes Greenland, for some reason.

What’s their choices then? At least they got something to protect them

I'd recommend reading the history of Autodefensas and FARC/FLN in Colombia.

Anti-Drug militant groups have a habit of turning into drug lords as well.

> I think the US should be punishing consumers much, much, much more.

It's scary to think what you could possibly mean by this. The US is already one of the most ruthless Western countries as far as drug use goes. Owning half a kilo of weed in Texas can now get you life in prison, so how much further are you willing to go? Automatic life in prison? Life in solitary confinement? Maybe bring public lashings over from the east? Death penalty or forced hard labor? What else could the US come up with?

The shocking thing is that after decades after decades of this, the Americans just want to keep going. Doesn't matter that drug use continues in spite of harsher punishments, demonstrably showing that more punishment does next to nothing in terms of solving the problem. But at least some internet commenters get really happy imagining people suffering, while the actual producers and distributors run free. "Have fun thinking about those crimes other people committed that they won't ever face any reprecussions for."

I was under the impression ferrying migrants over the border and avocados were almost as big revenue streams as the drugs. Et tu, avocado toast and gardener?

Very sad but true post. When you think about it many of the ones who are downvoting this post are the children and grandchildren of old dopeheads who created the market that the cartels eventually began to fill. None of this happened without the consent of ordinary Americans who chose to consume the illegal drugs. All of these people share responsibility for the deaths of those who lost their lives due to addiction, whether theirs or someone else's. The tens of thousands of people who have died in Mexico and Central America while trying to stay out of the way of these cartels and their violence all died because Americans created and still sustain a market for illegal drugs.

Those with the most blame are the ones highest placed in our system who knew about and facilitated the smuggling, paying Americans along the way to assist, so that drugs could be located by anyone interested no matter where in this country they lived. They helped create the system that would lead to incarceration of people at the bottom of the ladder while those at the top who financed it all and benefited the most from it escape accountability. They created a network of small-town airports, private airstrips, and safe houses where distribution could be managed in a way that shielded the money people from the operations.

If you are a drug user, even a casual experimenter in your own home, your drug use continues to cause death and misery to uncounted other people and that makes you partly responsible for the societal destruction that drugs have wrought.

those that sniff aren't thinking about anybody except themselves, not one little bit

This is true, though.

But please do not say this out loud, you might hurt the feelings of a passing junkie.