Meanwhile, the journalist in the article had just published about their extortion racket.
I've lived in Mexico for a long time and I'm about to book a ticket across the country to visit a friend in Playa del Carmen soon. It's just not something that affects me. I'm more worried about getting maimed by a car hopping a curb in the scheme of life, and I still walk with my back to cars.
Reminds me of the sad story of the teacher who was just traveling through mid-northern Mexico a year or two ago and went to a bar and started asking the wrong kind of questions. Cartel caught wind of it and killed him, likely because they thought he was DEA
From everything I have read, challenging the cartels in Mexico is suicide for individuals, and often even for governments (at least it is for politicians). I would "let things go" if I lived there too.
This demonstrates how much media controls our fears. Terrorist attacks in Europe happen rarely when they do happen they are in the news for weeks. While Mexico is being one of the most dangerous countries, people get kidnapped, killed, buried on a daily basis and they barely report the number of people killed properly in local newspapers, it doesn't even make it to national news.
So what do you suggest people do who hate violence, murdering, everything about the cartels? The world is complicated, maybe it could be that by doing certain tourist activities or traveling to certain places that I'm supporting them.
The Netherlands is currently at risk of turning into the Mexico of Europe but nobody is willing to let it go because nobody wants the country to end up like Mexico.
Its really insidious. Everyone has a price and drugs brings in billions of €. Honestly if someone offered me 50 thousand to look the other way I would be tempted.
> The Netherlands is currently at risk of turning into the Mexico of Europe
Perhaps I misunderstood, but what are you basing this on? The Netherlands has one of the lowest rates of intentional homicide in the world (0.5/100.000)[0] and ranks fourth in World Press Freedom Index by Reporters without Borders[1].
With having Europe‘s largest port (Rotterdam), The Netherlands does serve as a gateway for South American drugs, cocaine in particular. The vast amount of global MDMA is also manufactured here[2], but the fallout in the form of violence is nowhere near that of Mexico?
Murder and crime have been growing fast in Quintana Roo since the new state government started in late 2016 or so.
I lived there in 2017-2018. Cancun now has a murder rate above the national average. There are shootings weekly, even in the zona hotelera. A couple of months ago someone threw a grenade into a bar. It’s getting ugly.
Many people are smart enough not to be swayed by fear based news. You’re 100x more likely to die in a car accident on your commute tomorrow than by a cartel member in Mexico as a tourist.
The murder rate in Mexico is >20 per 100K per year. The car crash death rate in the US is around 11 per 100K per year. So you're almost certainly not x100 likely to die in your commute tomorrow. I've been to Mexico and I felt reasonably safe but it's a lot less safe these days and it's just not the safest place in general.
>The murder rate in Mexico is >20 per 100K per year. The car crash death rate in the US is around 11 per 100K per year. So you're almost certainly not x100 likely to die in your commute tomorrow
That would be relevant if the murder rate was randomly distributed across the population, and didn't concern cartel members and their explicit targets primarily. Not to mention that Mexico is a big place, and the murder rate in tourist areas is not the same as in cartel land...
Could you break down the murder rate by places people actually visit? I don't look at homicides in Chicago (19 per 100k) when planning a trip to Austin.
I don't think many people worry about the homicide rate in Chicago when planning a trip to Chicago. Similar thing to Mexico, the homicides are contained within a pretty specific subpopulation.
In whose best interests? Because it's really only the cartels that matter since the law has no grip on them. And the cartel doesn't care about keeping tourists safe and happy.
Of course they care. Every tourist killed brings more attention to them than needed, if the person was high profile enough it can bring enough international pressure for the government to take them down.
To be fair, I think qualifying as a tourist is much less subjective than being called "good". As non-native to Mexico, I really am more interested in the probability "being murdered in Mexico given you're a a tourist", P(m|t), than "being murdered in Mexico", P(m).
> As non-native to Mexico, I really am more interested in the probability "being murdered in Mexico given you're a tourist"...
I think a more meaningful metric for tourists is the probability of getting murdered as a tourist in Mexico vs the probability of getting murdered while on vacation in another country X.
I don't understand the downvotes. If we're talking about tourists doesn't it make sense to look at... tourists?
EDIT: to be clear, my hypothesis was the murder rate of tourists was lower than the overall murder rate, which could plausibly make the "You’re 100x more likely to die in a car accident" statement correct. See hsitz's comment and my response. 100x is likely an exaggeration but you still are probably "more likely to die in a car accident on your commute tomorrow than by a cartel member in Mexico as a tourist".
Mexico has somewhere around 18 million tourists per year, about half of whom are Americans [1]. I can't remember any being murdered, but I suppose a handful have. U.S. media loves to publicize these kinds of things so I'm pretty sure I'd be well aware if it were more than a handful, certainly if it was more than a handful being killed by cartels, who commit most of the murders in Mexico.
So say, 10 tourists get murdered in Mexico each year. That's (very roughly) 10 per 18 million, or 1 per 1.8 million, or 0.06 per 100k.
BTW, adding "per year" to the metric would be misleading, add nothing, because it falls out of the unit analysis in the calculation, which is done based on
10 tourists 10 tourists
1 year murdered murdered
--------------- x -------------- = ---------------
18 mil tourists 1 year 18 mil tourists
This is not that helpful, because tourists stay just a short time, not a full year like local residents. If you want to somehow compare this to a metric of inhabitants murdered per 100k per year then you probably want to do more. Assume the average tourist stays 1 week. Then we need to multiply by 52 to get the number of tourists murdered per year of tourist time in Mexico, which yields result of around 3 (0.06 x 52) per 100k of tourist-years. This is significantly less than the U.S. average of 5 murders/100k per year. So it could be that U.S. tourists are safer in Mexico than they are at home. ;)
Right, I was suggesting the murder rate for tourists might be lower than the overall murder rate, which could make the "You’re 100x more likely to die in a car accident on your commute tomorrow than by a cartel member in Mexico as a tourist" statement correct.
0.06 is indeed 100x less than 11, but to compare to the car crash death rate above you'd need to estimate the amount of time tourists spend in the country per year. If you say 1 week per year that brings it up to 3.12 per 100k per year, so still less than the risk of dying in a car accident (in the US), but not 100x less.
Also, technically the statement was "by a cartel member", so you'd have to know how many of those murders were by cartel members.
Exactly, I think I was editing to add that as you wrote this. Also, my guesstimate of 10 tourist murders/year may be way off. I'm guessing it's lower, certainly if only by cartel members, but not sure.
Mexico, Colombia and Brazil are the most dangerous countries for being a human rights activist or journalist. Meanwhile global corporate media mostly focuses on Venezuela...
Well of course - governments are expected to be better than organized crime or at least stable.
Not to mention the entropic importance of the story being proportionate to the unexpectedness. Snowing in Moscow in the winter isn't news. Snowing in Florida summer is.
Mexican here, I agree it's becoming (if not already) a failed state. Only thing holding it together is that not everyone is a pos and that big capitals do like pretending to have a rule of law.
Not so. Those who actually go across the border from Brownsville to Matamoros see it; those who fly straight to Cancun do not. It used to be a pleasant trip (through the mid- to late nineties) to go for a day or two, at a reasonable price. Good food, and a great place to buy quality vanilla. Not safe any more; sad. I suppose it makes sense that border towns got hit the hardest, but it's sad for people who enjoyed going across for short trips by car rather than going to expensive resort towns.
I am literally living in a border town on the Mexican side, I'm telling you the U.S media and other political entities are spreading fear and propaganda.
The time you describe was the worst time for cartel violence and it is much calmer now.
I believe what you say, but also that it's a sample size of 1. Many areas have became much worse, some perhaps many have become 'calmer.' But blaming it all on 'fake news' is not being truthful...
The sad thing is they are quite obviously a narco state but nobody wants to call it. Same with Venezuela. Just waiting for Forbes magazine to do an article on Narco billionaires for the DEA to swoop in... Thats the Narcos (Netflix) meme right... If Forbes exposes you they shut you down.
Funny isn't it? Mexico is a narco state because of American and European drug habits. Instead of tackling drug use the DEA is fighting cartels in Middle and South America. Cartels that are equipped with America made guns.
The cartel would not be happy. The US didnt allow Mexico itself to legalize in the 60s[0] which actually crippled the cartels market and brought and end to overdozes iirc cause people got cleaner drugs and help from government facilities.
Tough to say what counts as large, but there are lots of articles like this one about avocado growing towns hiring their own militia because the federal government simply isn't relevant in the area:
What is a "swath"? What is "just cartels?" Are cartels providing road and highway construction? Are cartels operating the national healthcare service? Do they do water permitting? Collect taxes? Regulate commerce? Look at my passport when I enter the country? No - none of the above. Your claim is false. They influence parts of the government, not substitute it. You are describing a place more like soithern Somalia.
>Are cartels operating the national healthcare service? Do they do water permitting? Collect taxes? Regulate commerce? Look at my passport when I enter the country?
Considering that they have politicians and legislators in their pocket, yes.
Please read the above comment thread so you don't end up taking things out of context. The original comment claimed there is no functioning government. Your new claim seems to be that even though the government is functioning, it is not because of bribery and corruption.
The state, the drug traffickers, and the paramilitaries have been the same for a long time, with support from the US. Where traffickers have control, the state's working as intended.
You say that as though it's a defined, well proven fact that has wide agreement. The link you refer to properly points out that it's not at all widely agreed upon. Rather, it's a theory by one guy, derived from his reading of fiction that he decided to flip around, and then float in his recent book. He used a universal way to get maximum attention: be controversial.
This is not at all an accurate summation of the author’s purported work and expertise. He is currently a professor in literature, which is why he intros his work/thinking by referring to another author’s “mythological” framing of the drug war. But the author himself was a journalist in Mexico before he became a professor. And throughout the interview he references work/research by other scholars, as well as the work of journalist Gary Webb.
I think this is a bit of a false equivalence- at most I might pay $5 for the cobalt in my phone once a year. That is a very harmful $5 but I'd bet most drug users are on 100x that
Unfortunately the only way to kill the cartels is to legalize drugs and force them into legal industries that we can regulate. That won't stop cartels completely, but it would take away tremendous revenue sources. That being said, I believe I've read that cartels have diversified so much that they now make more money from avocados and other sources than drugs.
Cartels do not only sell drugs, they are systems of diversified private security corporations and paramilitary groups which have emerged out of the previous iterations of violence and loss of governmental order which was a symptom of national narcotrafficking disputes in the previous decade. Basically a large portion of the Mexican Government effectively is infiltrated by cartels which also function with public support, hence the mudering of journalists and politicians...cant have people speak out and show that cartels are bad now can we?
If you had a time machine and could boycott drugs in the 1980s then it would have had an impact...now not as much.
It's very easy for people to convince themselves that they are not contributing to the problem. "It's the government's fault for not liberalizing and regulating the drug trade"
Isn't that really where the blame lies? The idea that addicts are going to prioritize an abstract contribution to some far away problem over maintaining their supply, especially when treatment and legal access is very hard to come by, is highly unrealistic.
When the drug war ends and murder rates in the Americas don’t go down to European levels, maybe some will realize it was never the drugs to begin with: https://mexfiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/murder-rate.jpg (murder rate in Mexico is far below what it was before the drug war started, and has trended down as the drug war ramped up after 1980).
As is universally accepted by everyone who has ever studied the issue, the situation in Mexico became violent when the old hegemonic cartel structure fractured and new groups rushed to fill the power vacuum. The violence is wholly attributable to the drug cartels and the legal status of drugs, even if it doesn't track 100% with how the United States has funded the war on drugs (which, really, why would it).
I've noticed you have a tendency to pop into threads, lob in an out of context chart or factoid, and confidently assert a contrarian opinion. As someone who shares that contrarian impulse, I'd strongly recommend you try to master that urge. You're a very insightful commentator when you stick to what you know.
idk what it's like where you live, but in my city the overwhelming majority of murders are linked to the illicit narcotics trade. maybe they would think of some other illegal shit to kill each other over if drugs were legalized, but I find it hard to believe that the violence wouldn't subside a bit if their main revenue stream were cut off.
also, it seems questionable to extrapolate the outcome of legalization in the US based on data from mexico.
> maybe they would think of some other illegal shit to kill each other over if drugs were legalized, but I find it hard to believe that the violence wouldn't subside a bit if their main revenue stream were cut off.
You might think that but the data doesn’t really support it: http://polyticks.com/polyticks/beararms/liars/uscentury.gif. Homicide rates were spiking in the US long before prohibition. Likewise, after going down post WWII, homicide rates started spiking before the drug war. They had almost doubled from the previous low point by the time Nixon was elected. Nixon coined the phrase drug war, but didn’t really fund it aggressively. That was Reagan. But homicide were near the peak by the time he was even elected.
> also, it seems questionable to extrapolate the outcome of legalization in the US based on data from mexico.
Not really—the cartels supply demand for drugs in the US. And OP was blaming the US drug war for violence in Mexico.
As a non native living in Mexico I'm not surprised by this but on the same hand I would say its actually not as bad as people think here, you see the cartels don't want tourists to stop coming as the locals wouldn't like it and it would effect the cartels bottom line, as long as you stay out their way the cartels will usually leave you alone, just as gangs in Chicago will most of the time.
Mexico is a beautiful place of warm people, brave journalists and contradictions.
> Casualties are often measured indirectly by estimated total deaths from organized crime in Mexico.[253] This amounts to about 115,000 people in the years 2007 - 2018.
I don't believe for a single second that violent assholes wouldn't give me a hard time if they felt like it. They don't live by some kind thieves' code. It's not a Dickens novel.
They're dangerous as shit and anyone who accidentally crosses paths with them might get killed for the hell of it. You ever read Borderlands Beat? That's real news coming out of Mejico. That country is bullshit and it can't keep its act together and never has. But, oh, my quaint villas and excellent tacos. Yeah, right. Drink the water and get back to me.
As far Chicago, that city is a mess, too. I was there just last year. It sucks there for all kinds of reasons.
You know what Chicago and Mexico have in common? Failed liberal policies.
> As far Chicago, that city is a mess, too. I was there just last year. It sucks there for all kinds of reasons.
How long did you spend here to reach your conclusion that Chicago sucks for all kinds of reasons? I've been here for 6 years, and I like it better here than anywhere else I've lived (Detroit, Indianapolis, West Lafayette, and New York City).
>You know what Chicago and Mexico have in common? Failed liberal policies.
Chicago has a bustling tech scene. My rent for a big, nice apartment is only 23% of my take home pay each month. It's a fine place to live. I assume you're saying that it's a dangerous hellscape because we have a lot of homicides annually, but per capita, about 10 US cities are more violent. And the violence is really still a residual effect from the redlining practice codified in the National Housing Act of 1934, which forced black people to live in bad neighborhoods regardless of their income. Redlining was legal up until 1977, which was only about 1 generation ago, which is not long enough for a significant population to save enough to move to better neighborhoods and give their children educations that enable social mobility. And redlining was a racist policy, which is hardly "liberal" (although both major parties supported racism, until the Democrats reversed course).
So I guess I don't see the basis you use to arrive at your conclusion.
> I don't believe for a single second that violent assholes wouldn't give me a hard time if they felt like it. They don't live by some kind thieves' code. It's not a Dickens novel.
I never said they wouldn't, there are crazy cartel members just as there are crazy gang members.
> They're dangerous as shit and anyone who accidentally crosses paths with them might get killed for the hell of it. You ever read Borderlands Beat? That's real news coming out of Mejico. That country is bullshit and it can't keep its act together and never has. But, oh, my quaint villas and excellent tacos. Yeah, right. Drink the water and get back to me.
Im literally living in Mexico, not in a resort but in a border town.
> As far Chicago, that city is a mess, too. I was there just last year. It sucks there for all kinds of reasons.
Agreed but there are nice places as well.
> You know what Chicago and Mexico have in common? Failed liberal policies.
I agree and corruption.
There's a ton of propaganda in mainstream media claiming that Mexico and America are both heaven and hell depending on what you watch but as an outsider (I'm neither Mexican or American) I can honestly tell you it's somewhere in between.
You know, as someone else living in Mexico, these topics always bait me. The kind of people these topics attract that weirdly brag about how radicalized they are by news always blow my mind.
But in the end it's not so bad. It keeps Mexico interesting and unadulterated by tourists.
Some of these commenters you'd think walk around with a helmet on because they might trip and they won't risk that possibility. I'd love to see someone like that look where I've lived for five years in a beach city and tell me how bad I must have it and how much I must fear for my life in this war zone.
Some people need the air conditioned sense of suburban safety that bores me to fucking tears. Other people like a little bit of ruggedness and adventure and maybe even adversity in life. Or something in between. To each their own.
It's so funny when people say this, especially with snark. I mean, you thought you had a real mic drop moment just then. As if there aren't a bunch of Americans who get Sparkletts delivered to their door just like Mexicans.
How would they know? Your local "guy" is just some guy. And even if he weren't, what are you going to do, ask? "Excuse me, are you part of a cartel that murders people?" "Uh...no?"
I think the situation is bad enough now that you should boycott your local "guy" even though it's possible that all his drugs come from humane, sustainable sources.
I agree. I’m sure this will be an unpopular opinion, but it’s bizarre how fashionable it is to advocate vaguely for “social justice” while directly financing gang and cartel violence. Sure, you can blame the government for making it inconvenient to get affordable, conflict-free drugs, but what does that say about your commitment to social justice if you’re willing to bankroll violence because it’s a more convenient way to indulge your leisure activity?
Why are you voting for politicians to save the environment if you arent vegan, keep driving your car and buy stuff packed in plastics? Do you know where the clothes come from you wear?
Its not realistic to get enough people voluntarily stop to destroy the planet, it is however feasible to get a government changing its policies to alter the structures that incentivize pollution.
You're conflating suboptimal decisions about essentials (people need food, clothes, and transport and optimizing for good is a complex problem) with paying for something that you don't need and directly harms the cause you purport to care about.
People don't need leather goods or slave labor or fashion brands.
> transport
People don't need SUVs or Corvettes.
> optimizing for good is a complex problem
This is not a complex calculation: in all cases they're more expensive, worse for you, and worse for the world than readily available alternatives. And yet here we are, because, just like drugs, they're fun.
This whole thread is the worst kind of whataboutism. Trying to justify or normalize the consequences of drug use by equating drug users with consumers who don't know how to optimize for their values (and trivializing the work and special knowledge involved in that optimization process). It's shameful.
- Balancing your family's diet without meat requires specialist knowledge and effort that "not buying drugs" does not.
- Balancing your family's transportation needs with environmental friendliness requires specialist knowledge (chiefly the carbon impact associated with different candidate vehicles) and additional cost (an environmentally friendly vehicle with equivalent capacity is almost always going to cost more) which is also not true for "not buying drugs".
- Assessing every candidate clothing item's working conditions requires lots of specialist knowledge and effort that isn't true for "not buying drugs".
And this is without comparing the marginal impact of an individual's environmentally inefficient consumer choices to a drug user's significant and direct impact on drug violence. You'd have to place a pretty low price on human life (especially the minority communities that are most impacted by drug violence) to make this equivalency.
There are a lot of recreational cocaine users, and they are doing it right under our (or their) noses. They range from billionaires to your local college grad.
See The Social Network Movie, Wolf of Wall Street, etc. The drug use was not as dramatized as you might think.
The set people who care deeply enough about this issue to change their drug consumption habits is probably pretty small. And of the ones that are so motivated by this issue, I assume they're infrequent users that account for a small fraction of the cartels' profit.
If you are purchasing illegal drugs (except something someone could grow in their basement i.e. marijuana) - then you are funding some sort of organised crime
I hate to agree with Trump at all, but the drug trade is largely due to ineffective border controls. An impervious border may well restore relative peace to war torn northern Mexico.
The vast majority of smuggled drugs come in through border checkpoints, hidden in shipments of ordinary goods that are part of the legitimate US/Mexico trade.
There are millions of tons of goods entering the United States every year. How exactly would you intend to enforce this perfectly?
That's like saying that websites shouldn't have copyright violations on them, since every single piece of content uploaded to them can be manually reviewed and approved to prevent violations. Good luck with that.
The drug trade is due to consumer demand for drugs. The violence is due to government prohibition driving it underground. Underground markets tend to elevate the worst, most ruthless and violent actors. Legalizing and regulating recreational drugs will likely put violent drug cartels out of business or force them into legal, nonviolent traditional roles.
That's like saying theft is increasing because of consumer demand for free goods. And that all goods should be free to reduce demand.
The reasonble choice is to make the trade more difficult and raise prices. Cigarette prices have shown demand for some very addictive substances are far more elastic than some would believe.
I think there's better solutions than increasing exposure to addictive drugs. Non-addictive stuff I really don't care about. But they don't drive the drug trade either. I'm also for decriminalizing addiction to encourage people to seek help. Your suggestion is a bit too much anarchy for me
Prices will increase, lowering demand. It will always get in as long as someone is willing to pay the price. But if the price is steep enough, it will be greatly curtailed.
The drug market operates on supply and demand like other commodities
This is the exact same "War on Drugs" logic that's been failing us for decades now. Time to try out solutions based on a better theory, like legalization.
The problem there is "impervious border". It's impossible.
And even with a perfect wall in place, we still let people through it and over it and around it via other channels. The problem isn't really just people physically walking across the border away from checkpoints.
I insist that my local trap car only vend organic, ethically- and locally-sourced fair trade heroine. And an extra dollar from every purchase goes to the Ronald McDonald House.
As a thought experiment, how would violence in Mexico be affected if the Western Hemisphere (Argentina to Alaska) were a Schengen Area (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area).
That is, true freedom of movement: no passport controls, no border controls, and all "illegal" immigrants in the US from Central/South America now immune to deportation.
I'd expect the import of drugs would double or quadruple, but perhaps that is something we in the US could live with in return for implementing a charitable, just, and historically accomodative Schengen-like policy?
Nothing is "always" in economy. Texas had >8% unemployment rate just 10 years ago. And out of the sectors you listed, health care requirements will be quite a bit higher than in other ones.
