[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.

[foogazi]

> the Mexican cartels do have power which rivals nation-states,

Not the Mexican state in terms of firepower & resources

> 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

No Mexican drug lords dare show their face in public for long - they operate in the shadows. There are no strongholds, no cities, states out of reach.

The moment they become popular it’s time to lay low

[dragonwriter]

> Not the Mexican state in terms of firepower & resources

Much of the firepower and resources of the Mexican state (not “firepower and resources equivalent to the much of that of the Mexican state”, but “much of the exact firepower and resources notionally attributed to the Mexican state”) are in the hands of the cartels.

Symptomatic of this is the arrest by the US of the former Mexican defense secretary in 2020 on charges related to cartel involvement (against whom charges were dropped under intense political pressure from the Mexican government, including reported threats to expel the DEA entirely and end all anti-drug cooperation with the US) and the subsequent arrest by the US, and conviction earlier this year, of the former Public Security Secretary (and, before that, head of the Federal Judicial Police), also on charges of working within the government for the cartels.

> No Mexican drug lords dare show their face in public for long - they operate in the shadows. There are no strongholds, no cities, states out of reach.

To the extent this is true, the threat within Mexico largely comes from other cartels, whether working through organs nominally in the service of the state or otherwise. Sure, individual high-value targets tend to make some effort at opsec, but the cartels as a whole operate openly, in some areas with enforcers in marked vehicles, with the Mexican Army doing nothing but helping keep the peace between major cartels by enforcing cartel territorial boundaries.

[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.