[sigma2015]

Judging from what you read and hear about Mexico it seems to be trapped in a downward spiral degenerating every aspect about its society and government. It's absolutely disgusting and revealing to watch documentaries like "Narco Cultura" and about their eating disorders [http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/news/america-fattest-obese-un-14...].

You want to grab that country by the shoulders and shake it to its senses. But then again you (or whatever is left of your body) don't want to end up hanging upside down from a bridge somewhere ...

[dragonwriter]

> Judging from what you read and hear about Mexico it seems to be trapped in a downward spiral degenerating every aspect about its society and government.

From what I read and hear -- being married to someone who grew up in Mexico and follows the news there pretty closely, and having studied Mexican history a bit myself, it seems that since the end of one-party rule by a party with a fairly stable relationship with the major cartels, the level of violence between cartels and the government, between rival cartels, and between cartels and the populace designed to put pressure on the government, has gone up -- and its visibility has been magnified beyond the actual increase because there is less ability to sweep it under the rug and more genuinely competing interest groups with access to some of the levers of power.

Its obviously not a great situation to be in, but I don't think there was any route from where Mexico was to a good situation that didn't go through something like what they've been going through the last few decades.

I'm also not sure there is any route out of it -- other than back to the where it came from, which is bad in other ways -- so long as the combination of the US market, US domestic prohibition, and US international anti-drug policy is effectively pouring vast stacks of money into both sides of the fight.

[cpursley]

"You want to grab that country by the shoulders and shake it to its senses."

You mean the USA, right? The "Narco Cultura" would not exist if it were not the United States "War on Drugs".

[rayiner]

Those people who are capable of those things and that level of corruption to make a few bucks on illicit drugs would still exist.

I just don't get this line of reasoning. If you take marijuana out of the equation, 80-90% of Americans think drugs should be illegal. They don't want drugs in their communities and in their society. And they're the bad guys for exercising their democratic right to regulate their own society, because some opportunists in Mexico are deranged enough to kill a bunch of people to circumvent those rules?

[dragonwriter]

> Those people who are capable of those things and that level of corruption to make a few bucks on illicit drugs would still exist.

Those people exist everywhere (including, in no small numbers, in the United States), though not everywhere has as much poverty as Mexico combined with as much money being tossed onto both sides of the illegal narcotics trade as Mexico due to its proximity to the US.

> If you take marijuana out of the equation, 80-90% of Americans think drugs should be illegal. They don't want drugs in their communities and in their society.

Manifestly, making drugs illegal has not stopped drugs from being in their community or in their society. So either the unsupported support numbers for prohibition you presented are wrong, or they don't mean that people don't want drugs in their communities and in their society, or the people involved have tenuous grasp between cause and effect. (I suspect all three are involved, to varying degrees.)

> And they're the bad guys for exercising their democratic right to regulate their own society, because some opportunists in Mexico are deranged enough to kill a bunch of people to circumvent those rules?

If your policy choices knowably have negative impacts, and don't achieve the positive ends that you cite to justify them, and you continue for decades to make the same choices, yes, there is culpability there.

That doesn't mean the people making that choice are the bad guys -- responsibility is not exclusive.

[keithnoizu]

It's the difference between how we would well meaning-ly like the world to function and the way in which it actually does.

The war on drugs is responsible for the cartel situation in the same manner that the prohibition was responsible for the rise in prominence of the Mafia during the 20s. Individual individuals decided to go down the path of providing these illicit services but the well meaning legislation provided the substrate on which they could go about making their fortune exploiting.

This is simply the economic reality of what happens under these scenarios. The conservatives Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell correctly predicted many of these negative outcomes decades ago during the start of these policies.

[WorldWideWayne]

I don't buy it. American people do want drugs in their community and in their society or else the US wouldn't be the biggest market for illicit drugs in the world.

[rayiner]

Only about 10% of Americans over 12 use any sort of illicit drugs, and most of that is marijuana. The vast majority of Americans don't use illicit drugs and don't want drug use in their communities.

[wfo]

The most recent two sitting US presidents used cocaine. They certainly wanted illicit drugs and drug use -- and harder drugs than marijuana, which an overwhelming majority of Americans have tried -- in their communities at some point in their lives though they may or may not want that now. I think your statement is very, very far from correct (even if you don't include the enormous proportion of Americans who illegally abuse prescription drugs which are generally much 'harder' than the drugs you get on the street) and just the wishful thinking of a small number of social conservatives for whom drugs have been turned into a convenient bogeyman to blame when anything in society goes wrong.

[rayiner]

As I said, I'm not talking about marijuana. The vast majority (75-85%) of Mexican drug cartel revenues come from other sources: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/05/22/how-can-mari....

And I think you're delusional about the "small number of social conservatives" who think drugs are a problem. Support for keeping drugs like cocaine and heroin illegal ranges from 80-90%: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/17/drug-legalization-p.... Marijuana is the only one that a slim majority think shouldn't be legal.

Also, most people do not try drugs harder than marijuana at any point: http://archive.samhsa.gov/data/NSDUH/2012SummNatFindDetTable.... 70% of people never try an illicit drug other than marijuana, and only 7.5% report using an illicit drug other than marijuana in the past year.

And even if a substantial minority of people do try an illicit drug other than marijuana at some point, what does that mean? 13% of surveyed Americans reported driving drunk in the past year (double the percentage that report doing any non-marijuana illicit drug in the past year): http://www.fairwarning.org/2010/12/more-than-30-million-amer.... How many of them do you think nonetheless believe drunk driving should be illegal? Does the fact that a minority of people engage in conduct that may be hypocritical negate the sentiments of the majority?

[monstruoso]

http://www.gallup.com/poll/163835/tried-marijuana-little-cha...

[tsotha]

10% of Americans over 12 has to be, what, 20-30 million?

[sigma2015]

It takes two to dance Tango ...

The perverted War on Drugs inflicted by the US onto Mexico and other countries could not have evolved as it did without corrupt governments in the first place.

[talmand]

Corrupt governments. Consider this...

You are a middle level government employee that has certain responsibilities. You are sitting alone at a restaurant enjoying your lunch. A nicely dressed man sits at your table with a briefcase. He places the briefcase facing you and opens it to show $100,000 in cash. He then tells you that you can either take the money and ignore certain activities or they'll kill you and your entire family. He then places photos of your spouse and children with addresses/times of their whereabouts. He then leaves.

What do you do?

Sometimes the corrupt government thing isn't as black and white as you may think.

[sigma2015]

The decision is of course that you would comply ... but that's at the end of the day b/c police fails to protect their citizens in Mexico ... even worse, they directly cooperate with the cartels to an extent that they become hardly distinguishable. Think about the dozens of students mass murdered few months ago.

[Nadya]

The power of enforcement is given to those with power. The cartels hold more power (in dispensable cash, manpower, and weapons). They bribe whoever needs to be bribed to look the other way. Those who can't be bribed are threatened and everyone can be threatened. The brave and honest people get turned into examples... and with enough examples, there are no more brave and honest people left.

There are parts of the U.S that operate in the same manner. We have "bad cops" who use their position to help drug traffickers smuggle weapons and drugs. It's no different... you just hear it less in the media.

[talmand]

Police that don't protect citizens. Consider this...

You are a cop in a city overrun by a major drug cartel. You are sitting alone at a restaurant enjoying your lunch. A nicely dressed man sits at your table with a briefcase. He places the briefcase facing you and opens it to show $100,000 in cash. He then tells you that you can either take the money and ignore certain activities or they'll kill you and your entire family. He then places photos of your spouse and children with addresses/times of their whereabouts. He then leaves.

What do you do?

And so on, and so on, and so on.

[jqm]

Mexico is beautiful and amazing place with great food and wonderful people.

It does have problems, yes, the government for one, a culture of corruption, a "caste system" mentality, a lack of focus on community (which leads to awful habits like littering).

The media reports constantly show Mexico's problems, which to be fair it does have, but Mexico has come a long way in the last 25 or 30 years. The average standard of living has risen considerably. I would say the average citizen is more aware of the wider world outside their little community. That's just my experience.

[sigma2015]

> but Mexico has come a long way in the last 25 or 30 years.

Do you really think Mexico made progress during the past decades just b/c they have malls and fast internet? I guess any untouched indian tribe in the Brazilian rain forest offers more original culture than what developed in Mexico during the past twenty years.

[pvaldes]

Two mexican nobel prizes (chemistry, literature) in the last 30 years. One for Brazil or Costa Rica.

And also one point for the indian tribes with Rigoberta Menchu in Guatemala (peace). Not bad, much better than Argentina, Colombia or Spain in the same time in fact.

Enough said.

[_nedR]

Curious about what you mean by'a "caste system" mentality'?