What I don’t get is why the u.s is helping other nations fight their wars across the planet, but they won’t deal with cartels on their own continent. If they went full anti terrorism on the cartels, they’d be minced meat in months.
Doubtful. 20 years in Afghanistan bought us nothing. Half a century of meddling in the rest of central America has produced refugee waves. While we could, theoretically, try to assist the Mexican government with funds we’d probably fuck that up too.
Afghanistan was fighting an ideological enemy, that won their last war by waiting it out. Waiting out the Soviets worked and the same approached worked on the US coalition forces.
The cartels in Mexico are businesses. They aren’t the same type of enemy. You only have to make the business unprofitable for it to stop.
Remove the market in the US for drugs. Legalisation of the okay ones and social support for the harder drugs would reduce the size of the market.
If you improve opportunities for people, these gangs have less recruitment leverage.
The rest is just eroding the financial ability of the gangs. Detailed targeting of their finances would reduce the gangs liquidity and thus ability to operate. Continued military engagement would require them to spend more money of weapons and salaries hurting their bottom line. Capturing more of the members would also limit their ability to operate.
These do require long term commitments of a large amount of resources. If the gangs think they can wait it out 2-20 years it won’t work.
In Afghanistan they thought the could win in a few weeks and it would all be sorted. In part they were correct. Afghanistan was defeated before all the troops turned up. It was establishing a long term new order that was the issue. Mexico already has a recognised government that just needs support.
The big issue is this all depends on investing in people and public service. That’s the real solution the military action would just be an accelerant. Neoliberals think investing in people isn’t necessary. However, the free market sells them drugs and encourages murder in pursuit of selling these drugs. The free markets is in the way here, neoliberalism isn’t the answer.
That’s a question that deserves a really big answer but I don’t think I have it in me this weekend, but the long and short of it is that there are no parties in the US that stand to make money from wiping out the cartels and probably several that would lose money.
The CIA wants this type of activity so that the regimes in Central and South America are habitually weakened and always in need of some form of welfare from the USA. Like I know it sounds crackpot and tinfoil hat quality to say this stuff but the last 60 years basically prove it to be so. Any form of advancement that occurs within these countries has an almost direct economic impact to the USA where the cost of things goes up as the quality of living goes up in these countries. Its in the USA's interest to keep these countries poor. How else are they supposed to get cheap labor?
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