Fuck vacationing in Mexico....just sayin.

[shawnsegler]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/lt_drug_war_mexico

[Muad'dib]

The guys killed were all gang members from a neighboring state. The real place not to visit is Venezuela, where there were 17000 murders in 2009.

[Darthwing Teorist]

Guatemalan lynchings, not tourists, but there's a chance that you may see such a "show":
http://www.americasquarterly.org/node/1122

[chud]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/lt_drug_war_mexico

It has gotten very bad Shawn, and a lot of the violence in Mexico is not even making the news. Living in South Texas I see and hear a lot about what's going on. Many of the middle to upper class Mexican nationals have fled the country and are settling here in San Antonio, where they are buying homes (often paying cash). It has kept our local housing market up.
My wife is hispanic and my mother-in-law has many friends from Mexico. I was at the playground in my neighborhood the other day and one of my mother-in-law's friends was saying in spanish that she needed to go back and get the rest of her things to bring to her house here. Another woman started telling her, "No, don't go back, they're just things, you don't need them, it's not worth it".
I've been hearing about the Zetas for years now from neighbors, before they were even being mentioned in the papers here. What you see in the news is only the tip of the iceberg.

There is no doubt in my opinion that Mexico is now a failed state.
Don't even get me started on the Cantarell Oil Field drying up...the worst is yet to come for that country.

[TaoBoxer]

I have an internal document from the Texas State Troopers (DPS) which is an after-action report from a gunfight between drug gangs and the Troopers. I believe that Customs or Border Patrol may have been involved too. It occured at a border crossing in south texas. Thousands of rounds were fired and 17 killed. There is 1 picture of a pickup truck sitting across the front bumper of a school bus with atleast 100 bulletholes in it. I never heard a word on the news about it. Imagine a shootout between 1 guy and the NYPD at Grand Central Station. Or 1 black college student being shot in NY (which is also tragic, dont misunderstand). Those are national stories, but you never once hear about anything on the Border. The US law enforcement are being engaged regularly by these guys, most all of whom are either trained cartel soldiers or even worse, members of the Mexican army. Alot of civillians are being killed, more on the Mexico side, and everyone still says that if yo want to deal with the border you're a racist hillbilly. Open borders = more drug traffic = more violence.

[Chris McKinley]

Being familiar with the area, I wouldn't travel unnecessarily to Mexico, anywhere in central America, and all but Brazil, Argentina and Chile in South America right now. This is quite sad, given the amazing anthropological fascinations of those areas, but as a no-longer-single man, I have to weigh those risks and find them unacceptable. As to Mexico's particular case, it's in the middle of a three-way civil war right now, with two of the interested parties being completely lawless, merciless killers. If Mexico falls, it will domino southward as the cartels aren't known for their lack of greed.

Either the gov't. will mount a huge military offensive and take back the country or the U.S. will likely be forced to do it for them. Either way, it appears more and more likely that somebody is going to have to take these guys out as they seem none to keen to simply lay down their arms and return to a law-abiding, non-murderous lifestyle anytime soon.

[affa]

storms - read also - swarms

[chud]

@TaoBoxer: very interesting. I've heard similar unreported stories from folks on the border; my wife has family in the Rio Grande Valley, and one of my best friends is from Laredo. I heard one story about an assassination in a hospital on the American side of the border that did not even make the Laredo paper the next day.
I also agree with you that it is frustrating talking about border issues with people who have never lived near the border or spent any significant amount of time there.

@Chris M: I understand what you're saying about it being a sad situation; my wife and I used to cross the border and even go further in to places like Monterrey, and enjoyed it very much...but we haven't done that in years.

[Darthwing Teorist]

Speaking of Monterey, two of my colleagues almost went there. They ordered plane tickets for Monterey, CA but the travel agency fucked up and they discovered at the airport that they were being shipped to Monterey, Mexico. They finally fixed the situation, but it was quite funny as one of them freaked out.

[yusuf]

No one seems to have said, well if we legalised and taxed the effin drugs business none of this would be happening

[chud]

Well I think they just tried in California, but it didn't pass.

[Chris McKinley]

yusuf,

Even considering that move in isolation without regard to its cultural consequences, it still wouldn't eliminate the problem. Drug cartels aren't going to just say, "Oh well...it's been a good run, boys....let's all go home and get regular jobs now." They're going to control manufacture and distribution in exactly the same way that organized crime has controlled other legal goods throughout history. They may be downsized just a bit, but they aren't going to go away just because we legalize it.

[Steve James]

Mexicans and C/S Americans are not the causes of the drug problems in the USA. There's plenty more drug traffic and violence connected only to Americans.

[yusuf]

Chris,

no they won;t go away.. but the contagion can be isolated, and any treatment confined to as small a population of participants as possible. Hopefully just the gang members and the state security forces.

Also further instances of drugs fuelling gangs fuellign instability & failed states can be minimised. The Mexican cartel's were born from the environment of that terrain being a safe route into the US, and from the underworld business practice of paying drug runners with a proportion of the drugs, rather than cash. If you take either one of those things away then you still have low level violence but not the nation destroying stuff as we see across central america, and in Afghanistan or Central Asia.

I can't find any alternative. Is there any other solution other than legalising, privatising and taxing the crap out of it

yusuf

[Ron Panunto]

yusuf,

Even considering that move in isolation without regard to its cultural consequences, it still wouldn't eliminate the problem. Drug cartels aren't going to just say, "Oh well...it's been a good run, boys....let's all go home and get regular jobs now." They're going to control manufacture and distribution in exactly the same way that organized crime has controlled other legal goods throughout history. They may be downsized just a bit, but they aren't going to go away just because we legalize it.

Well if you compare it to our Prohibition, once alcohol became legal again the mob moved on to other vices because it was no longer profitable for them to be in the bootleg business. So if we legalize pot in the US then it will no longer be profitable for the Mexicans to export pot, so they will simply shift their emphasis to other illegal drugs like coke.