7 ms·

This is why the cartels should be treated like a military, not a legal problem. Drone strikes, thermobaric bombs and an acceptable level of collateral damage.

• jonathanstrange 8y ago
  Are you a Mexican? If not, would you also consider it okay if the military of your country conducted drone strikes and used thermobaric bombs with "acceptable level of collateral damage" for extrajudicial killings of fellow citizens in your own country? I would find this totally unacceptable. I also find extrajudicial killings by drone strikes in other countries totally unacceptable but in my own country I'd consider such practices even worse.
  • kolderman 8y ago
    So how's the current approach working out for you?
    • 3131s 8y ago
      Your idea is just to magnify the current approach, not change it.
  • yetihehe 8y ago
    If it was bombs against someone who is subverting whole justice system of a country - yes.
    • unixhero 8y ago
      Subverting the whole justice system... Hmm. That sounds comically familiar :)
      • yetihehe 8y ago
        Not to everyone, sadly. Could you tell us more?
        • sakarisson 8y ago
          I think humor comes from the fact that governments bombing people they don't like is subverting the justice system.
          • yetihehe 8y ago
            Or maybe it's a way to take someone out without risking lives of many of your own people. Bringing them to court could just be too hard. But yeah, it's subverting of justice process. We should just send them notices about court cases and they will come if they're respecting law...
        • unixhero 8y ago
          Sure I'll elaborate. From the standpoint of words, about "subverting the whole justice system". So here is why this is comical to me. On the one hand, the original commenter is right. An agent who can destabilize the entire justice and legal system of a country deserve be eliminated by extreme force - at least it would be nice to see that in Mexico, a country so decimated institutionally by the drug cartels. The country has an active insurgency and is not far off from a failed state. Where does the comedy come in? Well the other side of this coin. What is is going on in the US? There is an active agent trying to undermine the justice system and the judiciary. For different reasons, but the result can be said to be comparable. It is the very president of the united states, Donald Trump! That is precisely what the President Of The United States Donald Trump is doing. He is actively trying to undermine the FBI, firing James Comey, bullying the Secretary General in a weird way, manipulating evidence of the Muller investigation. Trump has even gone so far as to say that he will probably do what he can to manipulate and restrain the justice department. I guess also by - by proxy - appointing someone such as Kavenaugh as a judge for the court of supreme justice. Maybe it's not comical...It's tragicomic. I don't know. Maybe we don't even have a word for this. Reddit calls it the "Witnessing events occurring in the Darkest Timeline." I tend to agree, this must be the darkest timeline. For more information on the creation of the justice system and the FBI, I recommend watching the movie Hoover. Although probably brief, biased and Hollywood'ised - I like the way it presents the creation of the FBI. For more information about the charades of the sitting government in the US, watch the entirety of season 04 to season 05 of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. These are my views. I am not american, and beyond a degree in Political Science, I probably don't know enough to make an informed statement about this. One thing is certain, we set on the other side of the pond, gasping while watching th e events unfolding each and every week of the Trump administration.
    • lawlessone 8y ago
      Turns out they live in the house next to you, oops..
      • peteretep 8y ago
        What makes my life special such that I should be allowed to not accidentally lose my life to save my country?
      • yetihehe 8y ago
        I wouldn't want to live next to El Chapo and I didn't talk about typical neighbourhood drug dealer. It's about scale. There are many people I don't like, some of them even politicians but I wouldn't suggest harming them in any way.
        • lawlessone 8y ago
          I'm sorry ,it's just so damn easy for you to volunteer other peoples lives to be collateral damage in an extra judicial killing when you know statistically it won't be you.
          • yetihehe 8y ago
            If I had no other chance but to live near such criminals, I would try to suicide-bomb them, but that would probably be too hard and counter-productive because of layers of security with which those people surround. What would YOU do if you had to live near such criminals?
            • pulisse 8y ago
              > If I had no other chance but to live near such criminals, I would try to suicide-bomb them Your confidence that you'd sacrifice yourself heroically in circumstances it's utterly certain you'll never find yourself in is admirable.
            • lawlessone 8y ago
              >What would YOU do if you had to live near such criminals? Well not kill myself for a start...
  • peteretep 8y ago
    > If not, would you also consider it okay if the military of your country conducted drone strikes and used thermobaric bombs with "acceptable level of collateral damage" for extrajudicial killings of fellow citizens in your own country It would entirely depend on the situation, but without doubt there are levels of crime and depravity I could find myself surrounded by where I'd welcome it. Duterte's extra-judicial killings are far from unpopular. Also: did occupied Western Europe want to be liberated, despite the inevitable collateral damage? I'd expect largely the answer was yes.
    • jpmoral 8y ago
      Anyone who thinks the extra-judicial killings are actually solving any problems in the Philippines is naive.
      • peteretep 8y ago
        Citation?
        • jonathanstrange 8y ago
          Any introductory textbook on moral philosophy or philosophy of law should do.
          • peteretep 8y ago
            Ah, there I was thinking someone had data and not simply their opinion.
            • jonathanstrange 8y ago
              What do you know? I've studied this. The fact that you believe that moral insight can somehow be produced from data about the status quo tells me that you haven't.
        • jpmoral 8y ago
• ainiriand 8y ago
  You must be american, I guess. This is not how justice works.
  • kolderman 8y ago
    You're right, it isn't - and that's why the military solution exists.
    • wnkrshm 8y ago
      Who would command those drone strikes? A neutral party, that would not target specific people who are in the way of some specific interests? I can imagine that if you weild those tools where there are interests, a lot of hands will want to grab the controls and point them at people not involved with the original problem.
  • swarnie_ 8y ago
    I'll admit i wasn't too impressed when the USA started killing British civilians in Iraq and Syria with drones. Murder each other as much as you see fit but can we at least respect the rule of law and have these ISIS members stand trial in the future?
    • grkvlt 8y ago
      People in military uniforms, that are part of a (well-?) organised group armed with small arms and heavy weapons that is currently fighting against other military and paramilitary groups, can not with 100% honesty be called civilians...
      • ainiriand 8y ago
        I think that if you introduce a kind of mechanism that gives so much power in the hands of a selected and unaccountable few, you are on the road of corruption of power.
  • ainiriand 8y ago
    Not for me, because maybe I deserve the downvotes, but in controversial topics like this please try to not downvote other people just because of different point of views. I am seeing good opinions being downvoted... why? The karma system is not a popularity contest.
• fsloth 8y ago
  No, the cartels are an economic problem. Make drugs legal, and the problem will fade away with time. Of course, not immediately. But when the lucrative funding of drug trade is cut off, it will slowly diminish their might.
  • giancarlostoro 8y ago
    They actually made drugs legal in Mexico, then the USA put an end to that: https://www.historyextra.com/period/modern/1940-the-year-mexico-legalised-drugs/ https://www.historyextra.com/period/modern/1940-the-year-mex... The drug cartels were losing out on a lot of money too as a result apparently.
  • Rjevski 8y ago
    I used to believe that, but there was a recent article on here a few days ago about cartels diversifying their sources of profit by dealing stolen fuel, so although I support legalising drugs, I no longer think this will put an end to the cartels.
    • Shaddox 8y ago
      While I understand your point, I don't think there's that much more money to be made from stolen fuel compared to the goldmine of drugs. A kilo of cocaine goes for around $26k in California. How much fuel would you need to sell in order to make that much? In Mexico a liter of fuel goes for about $1.
      • asah 8y ago
        Drugs are also dense: $1mm in fuel is a huge quantity and hard to distribute.
    • fsloth 8y ago
      That's why I wrote 'it will slowly diminish their might.' Without less money they will have less power, and less appeal, reducing the pool of capable candidates for leadership roles and therefore decreasing their effectiveness as an organization.
• pjc50 8y ago
  That's a good way to keep the problem going forever. You can't lift people out of poverty and end the cycle of violence with bombs. That's the lesson the US completely failed to learn from its forever war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  • peteretep 8y ago
    > end the cycle of violence with bombs Worked post WWII most places.
    • pjc50 8y ago
      Really only for Germany and Japan, only because those were state-led wars. Not for any of the subsequent conflicts; Korean war isn't even really over yet.
  • adventured 8y ago
    Your point about poverty is of course correct. You're conflating two very different situations in regards to Iraq. It's not one Iraq forever war. There's the Iraq war (Second Persian Gulf War), and there's the Iraq civil war. The Iraq war, versus Saddam's regime, ended very quickly. That war was won trivially. The US could have optionally left at that point if it just wanted to declare an easy victory. Civil wars can go on forever (and given Iraq was a forced together nation of three major groups that dislike each other, it's likely going to). The US achieved its primary goal in Afghanistan very quickly as well. It wiped out nearly all the organizing and attack projection capabilities that Al Qaeda had in using Afghanistan as a haven. The primary objective was not to kill all the Taliban. The Taliban was a different, optional objective. Afghanistan, like Iraq, is now a civil war between multiple factions that all want power.
    • pjc50 8y ago
      Hence "cycle of violence"; the US launched its second invasion of Iraq, starting the war. It then declared victory and eventually left, having defeated and disbanded the conventional army of Iraq - but that did not stop the fighting. Car bombs are stil regularly going off in Iraq. > wiped out nearly all the organizing and attack projection capabilities that Al Qaeda had in using Afghanistan as a haven It's questionable as to how much they had in the first place ... and yet, Al-Nusra, an AQ-derived splinter organisation, is now fighting alongside US-backed groups in Syria. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/are-al-qaeda-affiliates-fighting-alongside-u-s-rebels-in-syrias-south/ https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/are-al-qaed... We even now have weird indirect US-Iraq-Iran cooperation against ISIS. https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/field/field_publication_docs/INTA91_1_01_Esfandiary_Tabatabai.pdf https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/field/field...
• deleted 8y ago
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• solatic 8y ago
  The cartels are embedded in the local population. If you treat the cartel as a military that needs a military solution, then you end up not just with civilian casualties, but with local hostility to you (for killing friends / family by collateral damage). If there was an effective way to fight a guerilla military embedded in the local population, the US would've already won in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen would've been long defeated, and Hezbollah long forgotten.