The entire reason there is any conflict there is a lack of a monopoly on violence… The monopoly part is significant. It’s not just “doing a lot of”.

Reminds me of when ISIS was at its peak a few years ago and the BBC and all other news in the UK would always prefix it with “the so-called Islamic State”.

Like… no, it was a state. It had borders, it had a monopoly on violence within those borders, it collected taxes, it provided some public services.

Whether it offended the BBC’s sensibilities or not, it was a state

You are completely correct. As much as many people don´t want to hear it, Mexico is a failing state. It´s extremely obvious when you are there that the United Mexican States lost most of the reins some time ago.

It started with the debt crisis, and its causes, but was definitively realized by 1994 when the Zapatistas took much of Chiapas.

Too much emphasis is put on the drug cartels alone, when the problem is much larger. I suspect by the end of the century maps will no longer show Mexico in its current form.

They are not states, but a tool of regional political groups. They do the illegal things politicians in power avoid if they want to maintain the facade. They don't have the monopoly of violence, they're intentionally allowed to act without serious retaliation.

Very relevant book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Cartels_Do_Not_Exist

Idk. I'd probably put it the other way - part of the state turned into gangs.

Most of the core leadership of major cartels who haven't been arrested were mid-level officers in the DFS (Mexico's version of Italy's SID and Turkey's MIT from Operation Gladio days).

And what is interesting isn't the narcos who are arrested and indicted by the DoJ, but those who are arrested and then let go.

The story of Salvador Cienfuegos is a good example of that - arrested by the DEA on drug charges that were sealed while being Defense Minister, but charges were dropped for diplomatic reasons [0] or the DEA's investigation into AMLO in the 2000s and 2010s that was eventually dropped [1]. Meanwhile, giants like El Chapo or El Viceroy were successfully extradited or in the case of El Mencho killed.

To me, it feels like "untouchables" like Cienfuegos, Adán Augusto López, and Marcelo Ebrard or established networks even above them are likely running the show.

Sort of like how the KGB broke bad in the 90s or the Turkish military in the 1980s-2000s or the KCIA before Korea democratized in the 1990s or how leaders in the vice industry in Thailand tend to be associated with military leadership or how both the IRA and Protestant paramilitaries turned into drug cartels in North Ireland.

I also don't think it's a party ideological thing - PRI, PAN, and now MORENA have the same mid- and upper-level people.

[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/08/magazine/mexico-general-c...

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/world/americas/mexico-pre...

> 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

100%. You can either become familiar with violence and temper it, or you are simply subject to violence by anyone that wishes it upon you.

For most of the Western world we grow up as "house cats", but that isn't the case in much of the world.

Without oversight, a self-defense militia may expand beyond its original scope in unfortunate ways. The history of the Italian Mafia can be instructive here.

Apparently, words can just mean whatever people want, so long as it aligns with one's feelings or helps them feel superior to others.

That gang has international arms. They have logistics trains. They have industry analysts! Sometimes maybe they have Pay and HR issues. They're a global business with external trade agreements with elements in other countries. They lease other business services back and forth like B2B.

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The only equating I did was to point out that either way you're stuck having to align with a group of people willing and ready to commit lethal violence with lethal weapons.

Use whatever words you want but I think that's clearly violent and it's clearly a gang, which by definition is "a group of persons working together" or even more specifically, "a group of persons working to unlawful or antisocial ends". In this case the newly formed gang is certainly unlawful.

All states maintain a monopoly on violence. That's literally the definition of a state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence

In the 1990s, I traveled into Tijuana from San Diego County a few times. We usually walked, because of reasons.

For people traveling north into the USA, the border checkpoint included long queues of vehicles and people alike, customs inspections, routine searches of everything, passport checks, and questions by actual Border Patrol officers.

Walking south into Mexico, there was a broad, unsupervised walkway and a one-way turnstile. Large signs read:

  WELCOME

  ¡BIENVENIDOS!

  NO FIREARMS

What can the government do at this point? We are talking about criminal syndicates with basically standing armies. If the Mexican government goes to all out war it will lead to a humanitarian disaster.

> This is a reaction to an overwhelming force of criminal gangs killing citizens and the government being powerless to stop them.

Is the Mexican government, with their tens of billions in military spending, actually "powerless" to stop these gangs? I very much doubt it.

Meanwhile in the US the laws are being changed to protect the wealthy, while the current administration is siphoning value of national assets into their own pockets. The poorer the country, the more likely this is to happen. I wonder how long it will take for warlords to set up shop in Kansas...

That's a characteristic of police everywhere.

Mexico is hardly the only nation where this is a problem.

That is a pipedream coming from some one who supports drug legalization, you think a multi billion dollar enterprise with unique position of having weapons and even armies are gonna pack their bags after USA become a drug haven?

No they will do what they do now:

Expand into other illegal and legal venues and worst case attempt a coup.

If you think the outputs of Mexican cartels stay in Mexico, you're severely underinformed. Do you know how many civilian deaths (to say nothing of human trafficking and more) are directly due to Mexican cartels?

The US absolutely has an interest in the destruction of Mexican cartels.

Also the cartels are funded and propped up by the CIA. We need them to destabilize the Mexican government, launder blood money, traffic children for our rich pedophiles and push drugs into our poor neighborhoods.

No, not really, it's two orders of magnitude smaller overall. Drugs, gold (from illegal mines in the Amazon) and weapons (from US lost military stock/police seizure mostly) drive cartels economy (in that order last time I checked, pre-covid).

Human trafficking and racketeering are for smaller, more local gangs. Most illegal immigrants cross the border legally and overstay, and racketeering have a scale issue. It might have changed recently but I don't see how.