The entire reason there is any conflict there is a lack of a monopoly on violence… The monopoly part is significant. It’s not just “doing a lot of”.

You are completely correct. As much as many people don´t want to hear it, Mexico is a failing state. It´s extremely obvious when you are there that the United Mexican States lost most of the reins some time ago.

It started with the debt crisis, and its causes, but was definitively realized by 1994 when the Zapatistas took much of Chiapas.

Too much emphasis is put on the drug cartels alone, when the problem is much larger. I suspect by the end of the century maps will no longer show Mexico in its current form.

I'd put it the other way - the state turned into gangs.

Most of the major cartels had core leadership who were mid-level members of the DFS (Mexico's version of Italy's SID and Turkey's MIT during Operation Gladio).

What is interesting isn't the narcos who are arrested and indicted by the DoJ, but those who are arrested and then let go.

Apparently, words can just mean whatever people want, so long as it aligns with one's feelings or helps them feel superior to others.

I had composed a reply to inigyou, which, if I lined everything up correctly, makes you the parent. I thought inigyou made a fair comment, and seeing that it was flagged, while seeming to me, very reasonable, and primarily in inquisitive format, I am posting an edited version, because I cannot reply to comments flagged by the HN gestapo.

See:

""" inigyou 1 hour ago [flagged] [dead - but why?] | parent | context | >>>un-vouch | favorite | on: Civilians under siege by Mexican cartel fight back...

The American government is also a gang fueled by drug smuggling, isn't it? But that one's considered legitimate.

We know the CIA was caught making money by smuggling cocaine. """

```

History, officially and sorely on the record, confirms the best answer to your fair question, which is a needlessly-emphatic "of fucking course", or for single syllable and more-gentle types; Yes, it is! Have you not seen..x y z ...?

Know Daniel Hopsicker by chance? I am sure you know Gary Webb, and many others.

Yet we watch allusions to truth fade gray, and waste away.

And the takeaway?

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The only equating I did was to point out that either way you're stuck having to align with a group of people willing and ready to commit lethal violence with lethal weapons.

Use whatever words you want but I think that's clearly violent and it's clearly a gang, which by definition is "a group of persons working together" or even more specifically, "a group of persons working to unlawful or antisocial ends". In this case the newly formed gang is certainly unlawful.

Meanwhile in the US the laws are being changed to protect the wealthy, while the current administration is siphoning value of national assets into their own pockets. The poorer the country, the more likely this is to happen. I wonder how long it will take for warlords to set up shop in Kansas...

That's a characteristic of police everywhere.

What can the government do at this point? We are talking about criminal syndicates with basically standing armies. If the Mexican government goes to all out war it will lead to a humanitarian disaster.

If you think the outputs of Mexican cartels stay in Mexico, you're severely underinformed. Do you know how many civilian deaths (to say nothing of human trafficking and more) are directly due to Mexican cartels?

The US absolutely has an interest in the destruction of Mexican cartels.

Also the cartels are funded and propped up by the CIA. We need them to destabilize the Mexican government, launder blood money, traffic children for our rich pedophiles and push drugs into our poor neighborhoods.