Drugs, Murder and Mexico

there are some halfhearted efforts at eradication and interdiction, but not much

― The Great Jumanji, (La Lechera), Monday, August 30, 2010 2:45 PM Bookmark

Hundreds of millions of dollars a year in military aid to Colombia alone is "not much"? You can call it failed, futile, etc. but we spend a little too much money to call it"half-hearted"

imo: someone should make a meme image transposing gaga quote w/ newspaper headlines on teh violence. harness gaga hate for something more productive

I really didn't think I'd get back to feel "Poker Face" levels of contempt for Lady Gaga but there you go.

Oddly enough I picked up Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo just a couple of days ago...(nothing to do with drug wars it gives the impression of a suffocation of a people/landscape)

we may be throwing money at it, but what we're doing with that money seems pretty halfhearted to me. i have mixed feelings about funding the military in colombia. if we expect the existing structures to know what to do with the money, or to handle it ethically, i would say that's a weak halfhearted attempt.

not that i have any better ideas, mind you, but i would hardly call what we're doing to eradicate/interdict the actual drug shipments a fully invested holistic approach at this problem that is deeply embedded in the global economy.

this is a problem that folks that lady gaga can easily ignore b/c it happens to a class of people who are not on their radar

I don't think there's really such a thing as an adequate plan to eradicate cocaine worldwide. It's just too easy to grow, transport, hide, move, etc. The best thing you can do is de-criminalize to lower the price and minimize the incentive for violence.

cocaine is not easy to grow because it does not grow; coca is easy to grow, but the processing coca --> cocaine is actually pretty complicated iirc

it's way cheaper than it was 20-25 years ago and it's, not surprisingly, all over the place
the violence persists as well

i suppose you can't stop everyone from doing cocaine but perhaps people can have the decency not to brag about it as if it's a badge of honor or a rite of passage, considering the high human cost of the trade.

people? have decency? sadly, this is unlikely.

I really hope I don't derail this thread, but I have a couple of questions:

1) are the Ciudad Juarez murders--which, in my understanding, remain unsolve--counted in the "28000-since-2006" statistics? I thought that those had been happening since the mid-90s and seem to be an important facet of this issue while at the same time being its own phenomenon...?

2) from what I've heard Southern Texas is also being terrorized by gang- and drug-violence, particularly from the MS 13 gang...there has to be some kind of connection between what's going on down there and what's happening in Mexico, right?

i think they do count but they are there own phenomenon. i tend to think the take in 2666 is probably pretty grimly accurate. from everything i have read, it's not like in the u.s. where being snatched off the streets--even in a major city--is so unlikely that you'll likely never meet someone who ends up with that fate. there i think it's a matter of how many women you know have been killed or something. i feel like that was a quote i heard somewhere at some point. when you consider that in a city of 1.5 million, some residents suggest thousands of women have been killed in recent years, that's just its own issue. but i imagine there is considerable overlap with cartel violence. any group who is willing to toss grenades into crowds or kill rehab patients to make a point is quite likely to give in to their worst impulses in other areas, especially in a city where the police are increasingly powerless.

everybody here is strictly-and-only fair trade chocolate right? no "I couldn't resist a snickers" and shit? because child slavery is as bad as anything the cocaine cartels are up to imo

Right. I wasn't trying to say that the situation in Texas was nearly as bad, just that it was bad, and that badness was due to what I figured was cartel violence...but really I know next to nothing about the drug and gang situation in southern Texas...as far as Ciudad Juarez, I was under the strong impression that the cartels were probably esponsible for that as well, but again, that's been going on since I think the mid-90s, so that would kind of clash against statistics that have anything to do with Calderon's rise to power & his subsequent military initiatives...

i don't know if there's been a dramatic increase in the murder of women in juarez during that period or anything, but maybe the open war street violence has been the cause of the rise in the homicide rate and the other murders have remained the same as they ever were?

everybody here is strictly-and-only fair trade chocolate right? no "I couldn't resist a snickers" and shit? because child slavery is as bad as anything the cocaine cartels are up to imo

I generally avoid chocolate because I like other sweets more; I try to be "fair trade" about everything I buy but I don't control all of the shopping.

i don't really eat much chocolate but i usually end up with fair trade chocolate, i don't even have to double check. same goes for coffee as well. i had a milky way bar a few years ago, i guess.

actually haerosmith I think if anything is counterproductive it's the idea that buying "Good" products will keep your hands clean; that's why I am kind of nonplussed about the Gaga-baiting around her...I don't have a problem about coke-bragging turning La Lechera's or omar's stomach, but at the same time, "buying local weed" seems like negative altruism at best; it keeps one's conscience clean, but does fuck all for anyone else. I doubt it truly troubles in the afterlife any of those 72 migrant workers whether or not either Lady Gaga or an unemployed gas station attendant from Homer, Michigan directly contributed to the wealth of the druglords who ordered their deaths.

That being said I might stop eating chocolate. I don't really eat it too much anyways.

all we can do in our lives is try our best not to do things that directly fuck up the lives of people, even if they're people we don't see, interact with, or are thousands of miles away. i'm sure we all do that somehow, the connections between nations and corporations are too complex for that not to occur all over the place. but the least we can do is call it where we blatantly see it happening and stop contributing to it.

^^^ exactly

They don't use kids to make Cheetos, do they?

nah, pretty sure it's like heavily-processed corn and some chemicals

Oh shit, they do contain pork enzymes though. Fuck.

all we can do in our lives is try our best not to do things that directly fuck up the lives of people, even if they're people we don't see, interact with, or are thousands of miles away. i'm sure we all do that somehow, the connections between nations and corporations are too complex for that not to occur all over the place. but the least we can do is call it where we blatantly see it happening and stop contributing to it.

― ('_') (omar little), Tuesday, August 31, 2010 11:38 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah but see if we're going to concern ourselves with this kind of thing then I think there comes a point where not doing cocaine can only be seen as a good first step.

yes

unfortunately all my ideas involve the U.S. annexing northern Mexico, which:

1) is the worst idea ever.
2) is less likely than gettin eveyone in the world to either stop using cocaine or to legalize it.
3) begs the question whether or not the US are really that much more well-equipped to deal with something like this. (again, southern Texas, though one also only needs to look at Iraq)
4) is an impossibly imperialistic way of approaching the problem.
5) does nothing at all for the rest of the atrocities committed worldwide due to the systematic corruption of capitalism and our country's unreasonable demand for creature comforts.
6) ignores the fact that our country has enough problems of its own.

so yeah sorry I got nothing so far.

it's all baby steps which may lead nowhere, especially since a major decrease in drug violence in mexico and colombia might be reliant upon decriminalization of drugs by not just the u.s. but many other countries.

i wonder what percentage of cartel money is made from north and south america? i imagine that while it's not incredibly easy to get drugs across the border, it's probably a lot more difficult to get drugs overseas.

i imagine that while it's not incredibly easy to get drugs across the border, it's probably a lot more difficult to get drugs overseas.

plenty of european/mediterranean/asian syndicates working with the cartels

in a spirit of brotherly cooperation

yeah true

whether it's in the very large historical trends toward capitalization, toward gov't bureaucratization, or toward greater justice, i think in 50 or 100 years it will seem nuts that this huge multinational industry was conducted entirely illegally.

or not, i dunno. it could be the ideology supporting 'the drug war' will hollow out and seem more and more ridiculous to more and more people, but it'll continue on anyway, since no political actor wants to take the risk of tipping it over.

I see this as exactly the kind of thing that politicians would use to prop The Drug War up...

I'm actually for decriminalization, though I'm uncertain as to its impact.

i'm all for it esp. since anyone who wants drugs can get them at any time and the impact of law enforcement is pretty negligible despite the pictures of DEA agents smiling in front of bags of cocaine. i figure they just keep pushing more and more across the border, assuming some of it will get caught, and not particularly caring if it does since they just keep making it and keep pushing it over.

Been reading more about legalisation in Portugal and it's pretty startling and seems like the only rational option-

On 1 July 2001, Portugal decriminalised the possession of all drugs, including heroin and cocaine. You can have and use as much as you like for your own needs, and if you are caught, the police might refer you to a rehab programme, but you will never get a criminal record. (Supplying and selling remains illegal.) The prohibitionists predicted a catastrophic rise in addiction, and even I – an instinctive legaliser – was nervous.

Now we know: overall drug use actually fell a little. As a major study by Glenn Greenwald for The Cato Institute found, among Portuguese teenagers the fall was fastest: 13-year-olds are four per cent less likely to use drugs, and 16-year-olds are six per cent less likely. As the iron law of prohibition predicts, the use of hard drugs has fallen fastest: heroin use has crashed by nearly 50 per cent among the young who were not yet addicted. The Portuguese have switched the billions that used to be spent chasing and jailing addicts to providing them with prescriptions and rehab. The number of people in drug treatment is now up by 147 per cent. Almost nobody in Portugal wants to go back. Indeed, many citizens want to take the next step: legalise supply too, and break the back of the gangs.

Portugal is no fluke. It turns out that wherever the drug laws are relaxed, drug use stays the same, or – where spending is switched to treatment – declines. Between 1972 and 1978, 11 US states decriminalised marijuana possession. The National Research Council found that the number of dope-smokers stayed the same. In Switzerland, a decade ago the government started providing legal centres where people could safely inject heroin – for free. Burglary rates fell by 60 per cent, and street homelessness ended. A study by The Lancet – one of the most respected medical journals in the world – found that the rate of people becoming new heroin addicts fell by 82 per cent. Why? Heroin addicts didn't need to recruit new addicts to sell to in order to feed their habit. The pyramid scheme of heroin addiction was broken.

So the drug war doesn't achieve its goal of reducing addiction. All it does achieve is horrific gang violence – and in some cases the cartels gut whole countries like Mexico and Afghanistan. It does unwittingly press people into using harder and more dangerous drugs. And it does waste tens of billions of dollars that could really reduce drug addiction, by spending it on treatment for addicts.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-accept-the-facts-ndash-and-end-this-futile-war-on-drugs-1818167.html

for the record:
i don't eat much chocolate, but when i do it's fancy fair trade chocolate (but i will eat someone else's choco chip cookies if it means being polite or not) no snickers, thanks. i drink fair trade coffee every goddamn day. it's true that occasionally i stop at dunkin donuts for a cup of blood diamonds, but it's rare.

I don't always eat chocolate, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis.

I just don't get the US at all - it's like, a country with whom you share hundreds of miles of border with is being completely destabilized by your policies and your response is to...do nothing? stick your head in the sand? idgi.

it's not just the US...and it's not just Mexico either...

yeah that's the big problem there. every move is just baby steps in the right direction rather than a solve-all-problems move.

yeah I know. it's just that it's like, you live in a pretty nice house, you have a nice life. the house next door is a crackhouse. what are you gonna do, build a higher fence?

sell yr kids crack so they don't have to fund the ppl nextdoor?

truth, plant coca leaf and marijuana plants in your own backyard.

Looking for the US to make some pre-emptive military strikes in Mexican territory in 2013 or 2017, depending. A "national security imperative," yknow.

http://ezpicshare.com/images/1215ba-1283388187.jpg
http://ezpicshare.com/images/2148xl.jpg

one wonders what the cartels, being so used to power and wealth and the freedom to basically kill and rape at will, would do if there was some mass worldwide legalization movement. i would imagine they would attempt to maintain those in other ways? even if they did, i cannot imagine they would have anywhere near the level of influence or violence.

they would resort to selling pirated DVDs

that would take a while to happen xp

the cartels would rush for windfall profits and probably compete even more violently for whatever markets would remain after legalisation (kidnapping/protection etc, perhaps counterfeit pharmaceuticals)