> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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
> 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.
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.
> 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.