[walterbell]

https://anarchonomicon.substack.com/p/reaper-drones-over-hou...

> The South and Central American drug war(s) is one of the most violent wars in modern history .. Over a million people have died in the conflict since 1970, and that’s not counting the over 50,000 Americans who die every year from opioid-related deaths, or the 20+ thousand American homicides every year, the majority of them in some way related to gangs that fund themselves off drug sales..

US intervention against the Mexican Cartels would be taking on organized forces that have been under arms longer than the Taliban, are better funded than Ukraine, have a population and territory bigger than Saddam had in Iraq, and some of whom, as in the case of the Los Zetas Cartel, are themselves former Special Forces trained by American Green Berets..

America has had a massive advantage in every war it’s fought in the past 100 years: America has always been fighting elsewhere .. America’s population, industry … They’ve all been safely 10,000 miles away across oceans from the enemy and pretty much untouchable .. A military intervention against the Cartels would instantly end that.

[tptacek]

This, again, is a blog that ran within the last few weeks a story suggesting that the Jews were America's "Cossacks", an ethnic group granted special favors and privileges.

Maybe we can cool it with the analysis from this person on HN threads.

[walterbell]

Please feel free to start a thread on that topic. This thread is about Mexican cartels.

Would appreciate pointers to scenario analysis of potential US-cartel conflicts.

[tptacek]

It's nothing personal, I just hate the feeling that I have to interrogate every sentence of someone's writing to find where they're smuggling in the weird fascist stuff. If they're just Orson Scott Card-style LARPing about international conflicts, well, we can do better than this, right?

You're more familiar with this blog than I am (this being the second time you've brought it up here). Is there some qualification they have on this issue that I didn't know about? I'm happy to stop bringing this up if there's some particular reason to take them seriously.

[walterbell]

I'm not a fan of filter bubbles. There are many HN threads where discussion/comments are superior to source article. Often, any weird -ist or -ism source content can be filtered by reason rather than interrogation. My comments cite words, not the person.

> LARPing about international conflicts, well, we can do better than this, right?

Pointers to better material would be greatly appreciated, on the topic of potential US-cartel conflict in the context of US election debates, https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/10/gop-bomb-mexico-fen...

> Republicans suggest everything from terrorist labels to an invasion to decimate drug cartels in Mexico ... U.S. Northern Command assesses that 30 to 35 percent of Mexican territory is ungoverned, giving space for the drug cartels to roam free. Should the U.S. launch military operations in Mexico, a crush of people would find their way to U.S. ports of entry seeking asylum and their claims would be stronger by fleeing an active war zone involving U.S.-labeled terrorists ... There are other complications, such as what the terrorist label would mean for people selling drugs online or shipping them — would a FedEx delivery person be jailed?

Leaving aside election debates on hypothetical conflicts, NYC Central Park is being considered for housing asylum seekers, flowing today into NYC from the US southern border. More and better analysis is needed. https://www.axios.com/2023/08/03/new-york-city-central-park-...

[tptacek]

I'm not a fan of filter bubbles either, as the term is normally defined, but I'm comfortable with the idea that there are limits to the things you can believe and still be taken seriously. If you non-ironically believe that the Earth isn't spherical, and that there's an "atmosflat" rather than an "atmosphere", I'm comfortable disqualifying your science takes. So it goes with The International Jew.

I don't have a better source! If this source is actually good, rather than someone, again, doing the thing Orson Scott Card so notoriously did, of fanfic'ing international politics and military conflicts, that'd be a good thing to point out! Is it?

[walterbell]

> I'm comfortable disqualifying

Client-side kill switches FTW. Hopefully we will also have browser plugins to combine private ignorelists with webs of transitive (dis)trust.

> If this source is actually good

It's the only source I've found on this specific topic, since I don't follow Republican debates. It's full of typos and rambling, but has motivated me to seek more material on the topic.

As for human prejudice, I defer to Steve Martin in Roxanne, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1nYEH6EDwM

[Moral_]

This is such a bad take. Cartels have small arms the US military has drones, satellites, the NSA. A war against the cartel would be much like our participation in Syria.

[walterbell]

See the fictional riff at the beginning:

> “El Coyote” Head of the New Jaurez Joint Cartel, was the man who ordered the attack on the Cactus Lounge and similar massacres on US soil, he would be killed in a US airstrike in 2032. But his Lieutenant and successor, Cartel Boss, Mexican Nationalist Front commander, and Future Mexican President, Jaun Herrera would reveal in his 2054 memoirs Smuggling to Freedom: From Narco to Patriot that the US expansion of the war had been Coyote’s intent, and that the NJJC had been losing members and revenue for months before the wider war and resultant chaos in the US changed their fortunes making recruitment and smuggling operations vastly easier, even as the first American “Free Men” Militias began to fight their own war against the ATF Paramilitaries and FEMA Press-Gangs brought about by the 2030 Gun Confiscation and 2031 Conscription Acts.

and speculation later in the article:

> There’s absolutely no reason for Mexican drug war violence to stay south of the border if US military assets don’t stay North of the Border… which of course means a good chunk of the fighting would be North of the Border… And intensive fighting at that. There’s no reason the Cartel’s playbook of kidnapping the families of government officials, blackmail, and armed militias wouldn’t let them start setting up hidden bases and operations within the US… Hidden bases that would have to be retaken, operations that would have to be subjected to random unconstitutional checkpoint stops and searches to disrupt. Further diluting American civil liberties and risking an American armed backlash…

[michaelmrose]

They are assuming that the US would let it get to the point of cartel operating in the States with impunity kidnapping and murdering their way into effectively owning the government. This seems to be predicated by the understanding that the US has met abject failure in its campaign to hold, reform, and dominate perceptively weaker countries. It's true we couldn't dominate Mexico any more than we could dominate Iraq. It would be a deadly waste of blood and treasure that would work out horribly for all. We don't actually have to however.

We could trivially and in short order destroy Mexicos ability to function as a modern nation by destroying power generation, water, farming, roads, bridges, shipping, trains, airplanes. We could deny all large scale transport in or out and keep this up for years for less than the cost of Iraq. There wouldn't be a drug business there any more than there would be any other kind of business once all the engines that enable commerce are silent.

The logical end game for infinite acceleration is maximum violence on both sides. The fantasy described assumes that the cartel is able to accelerate infinitely while the US is stuck in first gear. I think in fact that the US citizenry are far too bloodthirsty for that to be reasonable. More likely far less acceleration on the cartel's side sees join missions between US soldiers and Mexican authorities leading to a shit ton of dead cartel followed by comparative peace leading to disengagement. Ultimately the drug trade returns to normal and nothing is resolved.

[dragonwriter]

> They are assuming that the US would let it get to the point of cartel operating in the States with impunity kidnapping and murdering their way into effectively owning the government.

No, they aren't.

They are explicitly describing that the US might be forced to take extreme action domestically to avoid the “with impunity” part, because the cartels have the resources and US penetration already to act, if they were no longer constrained by the threat of what the US might do if they did, which they cease to be when the US goes to war anyway.

> We could trivially and in short order destroy Mexicos ability to function as a modern nation by destroying power generation, water, farming, roads, bridges, shipping, trains, airplanes.

What happens to conditions in neighboring countries when the US has done that elsewhwere?

Now, where is Mexico?

> There wouldn't be a drug business there any more than there would be any other kind of business once all the engines that enable commerce are silent.

We destroyed Afghanistan that way.

It didn't destroy the drug business there, quite the opposite. Well, until the Taliban takeover, but I’m not sure that's the win you want to look for in Mexico.

[walterbell]

> There wouldn't be a drug business there any more than there would be any other kind of business once all the engines that enable commerce are silent.

This would conflict with US goal of reshoring manufacturing from Asia to NAFTA/USMCA.

[michaelmrose]

The would be less important than legislators not having their children kidnapped by cartel henchmen and dismembered.

[dragonwriter]

It would acheive both: destroying the goals long sought by US trade policy, and increasing terrorist violence (in the short term by cartels, but once you destroy Mexico, it won't just be the cartel members with motives, opportunity, and a perception of nothing to lose) directed at US policymakers.

[foogazi]

> Hidden bases that would have to be retaken,

This is such a dumb take

It's the Chinese government that actually has secret police stations all over the US right NOW

[walterbell]

https://www.newsweek.com/chinese-chemicals-mexican-cartel-ha...

> Chemicals manufactured in China and bought by Mexico's narco cartels in transactions facilitated by a global network of Chinese criminal groups are fueling the fentanyl crisis, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people in the United States, the world's biggest market for illegal drugs.

[dragonwriter]

> This is such a dumb take

No, its not.

> It's the Chinese government that actually has secret police stations all over the US right NOW

Yes, but that's a complete non-sequitur.

If the US decides to change the “War on Drugs” from a metaphorical war to an actual war with the US military invading Mexico, there will both be actual direct consequences of the type described on the US side of the border, and use of the conflict and those actual consequences as pretexts against civil liberties in the US.

[xkqd]

Why not both the confirmed Chinese policing bases, and hypothetical but strategically advantageous cartel bases in the US?

[foogazi]

Because one is confirmed and the other one is fantasy

Cartels have no nation-state level power

[dragonwriter]

> Because one is confirmed and the other one is fantasy

One is a reasonable prediction of what would happen if there was no longer a marginal threat of US escalation constraining it because the US decided to escalate fully without it, the other is a non-sequitur in this discussion.

> Cartels have no nation-state level power

Nation-state isn't a power level, and if it was, well, the Mexican cartels do have power which rivals nation-states, and in any case international criminal organization don't require the power of a nation-state to do any of the things described, as history has repeatedly shown.

[GauntletWizard]

There's no reason that it couldn't be both. Every administration at the national and state level has been corrupt enough for at least all of my lifetime.

[bullfightonmars]

Is that a tactical advantage? That dichotomy didn’t work out so well in the middle east.

[User23]

Or Afghanistan.

[foogazi]

Has there ever been a shootout with American law enforcement and the Cartels?

Think about how much drugs are smuggled across the border and the seas ?

Where are the border encounters? Where are the National Guard shooting Narcos ? The Coast Guard ? Texas Rangers ? Sheriffs ? FBI ?

How many drugs are being smuggled under Abbott's nose in Texas by the Zetas and what does he do ? Drown migrants on the Rio Grande

[walterbell]

From the article:

> The murder rate in Ciudad Juarez is 103 per 100,000. One of the murder capitals of the world. The murder rate in El Paso, Texas is 4.4 per 100,000. About the US average. These are the same city geographically .. El Paso, and the US in general, are peaceful because the cartels are happy to maintain an unspoken agreement: The US Keeps its military and policing assets out of Mexico, the Cartels keep their violence in Mexico .. they try to keep things quiet or let American based gangs (who understand how to keep heat low) handle the violence north of the border because they don’t want to have to deal with drone strikes and SEAL Teams. If America starts a hot drug war intervention in Mexico that incentive is gone…

[foogazi]

> The US Keeps its military and policing assets out of Mexico, the Cartels keep their violence in Mexico

The US also keeps its military and policing outside of the US

Nothing stops the gangs at the border

[SenAnder]

> America has had a massive advantage in every war it’s fought in the past 100 years: America has always been fighting elsewhere .. America’s population, industry … They’ve all been safely 10,000 miles away across oceans from the enemy and pretty much untouchable

If you want to protect your population in the short-term, that's good. But if you want to win a war, that's a hindrance:

Soldiers in desperate straits lose the sense of fear. If there is no place of refuge, they will stand firm. -Sun Tzu, Art of War https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9551422-throw-your-soldiers...

[yongjik]

Meh, that's a gamble that only rarely works. Japan during WW2 spread propaganda that Americans will kill everyone, and forced even civilians to die rather than surrender.

Look how it worked out for them.

[fallingknife]

The cartels are not motivated guerilla armies. They are made up of 100% mercenaries. I doubt that there would be many encounters between them and US SOF because once that possibility is on the table, most of them will decide it's not worth the paycheck.

Also, guerilla forced that have fought the US have all been dependent on state support. There will be no such support for the cartels as they have no state allies.

[walterbell]

> have all been dependent on state support ... they have no state allies

Do Mexico and China count?

[fallingknife]

If Mexico is a state ally of the cartels, why do they smuggle in their guns from the US?

China providing weapons to cartels is laughable.

[walterbell]

https://insightcrime.org/news/chinese-money-launderers-mexic...

> While the involvement of Chinese money-laundering rings in handling drug proceeds from Mexico is nothing new, a number of recent court cases in the United States have revealed crucial information about how these schemes work ... weekly pick-ups from representatives of Mexican criminal groups, made in cash ranging between $150,000 and $1 million, with an average of $500,000. These were made in large cities including Chicago, New York and Atlanta ... network of Chinese-owned businesses in the United States and Mexico ... transfer a correspondent amount of money through Chinese banking apps. This happened entirely through the Asian country’s domestic banking system.