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Mexican Cartels Enslave Engineers to Build Radio Network (2012)
- hoozters 12y agoYeah, let's keep drugs illegal, it really seems to work.
- luckyno13 12y agoWhile I agree with you, the illegal drug trade got these guys started and off the ground, I think at this point they would have other avenues to keep themselves in business. I hear the human trafficking business is quite lucrative and booming these days down their way.
- pessimizer 12y agoWe should keep tightening up immigration, too. Send 'em back where they came from! edit: So nobody sees an association between human trafficking and tightening of immigration policy? Good to know.
- luckyno13 12y agoSure, if you are talking about smuggling illegal immigrants INTO the country. But immigration would have nothing to do with the kidnapped individuals that are being taken OUT of the US to be used in the sex, labor and (in this case) engineering trades.
- pessimizer 12y agoIt's insane that conservative Christian marketing and lobbying has made human trafficking synonymous with sex trafficking, which accounts for a miniscule portion of it. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/23/how-mexico-s-cartels-are-behind-the-border-kid-crisis.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/23/how-mexico-... The cartels completely control passage over the southern border, which I'm pretty sure is more lucrative than all of US prostitution combined (although I'd be happy to be corrected.)
- luckyno13 12y agoI dont think it is synonymous at all. It just happens. I am not sure if it is an imbalance of where it occurs, if it is as high in Mexico, as say it is in Russia or Africa. But just a quick search shows that even in 2010 the sex trafficking and crimes were on the rise in California- http://www.fbi.gov/sandiego/press-releases/2014/cases-involving-sex-trafficking-and-exploitation-of-children-on-the-rise http://www.fbi.gov/sandiego/press-releases/2014/cases-involv... I am the last person to be convinced by anything conservative or Christian for that matter. The trafficking situation just seems to have become more apparent to me over the last 5 years or so, whether or not the situation itself is actually worse.
- Spooky23 12y agoMost people need not look further than a local Chinese restaurant to find human trafficking. In one case in my area, waitresses are shipped up from NYC daily on the Chinatown bus (3+ hours) to work for pennies.
- tormeh 12y agoWell, you can't really be a small cartel. Even if the other businesses are profitable, a cartel needs a certain size to pay for constant expenses like bribes, armed forces etc. Politicians and the police don't give you a discount because you're small and people still need to be just as intimidated even though you're doing less shit. Just removing one illegal activity might knock the sum value of dangerous, illegal activities below the threshold where cartels can work.
- eam 12y agoJust to add some more. The legalization of pot hurts cartel's income. I read somewhere, that pot accounts for 60% of the cartel's profit in a multi-billion dollar industry! I mention this because of the recent trends in the US where states are beginning to legalize it. I'm sure they weren't too happy to hear that Oregon and Alaska legalize it as it only takes part of the profit away. Once the US is fully legalized, it won't be a hugely profitable business anymore so they will hurt. This means less profits, which means less power for them. With less power, then perhaps there will be less violence in Mexico?
- jeangenie 12y agoWhat would stop the cartels from investing in legal storefronts and capturing profits regardless? (This certainly shouldn't be construed as an argument for the morass we have now, just an interesting aside.)
- bdavisx 12y agoAccording to this: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-157.html http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-157.html, repealing alcohol prohibition "dramatically reduced crime, including organized crime, and corruption". While organized crime and "the mob" obviously still existed afterwards, they lost a lot.
- ufmace 12y agoThe fight against the cartels seems to be more like a war than conventional police work. One of the main themes of any war is logistics. Anything you can do to disrupt the enemy's logistics is pretty much always good, even if it isn't a perfect solution. You rarely get to completely destroy the enemy at a stroke, but instead you have to keep chopping off bits until they are defeated and discredited. Yeah, legalizing drugs won't make them vanish overnight, but it will remove a hugely profitable revenue source from their arsenal, and that's always worth doing.
- api 12y agoThat's what makes prohibition so ugly. It's like YCombinator for psychopaths. Combine that with the psychological acclimatization that it offers and it gets even uglier. It creates this on-boarding process for hell. Dealing drugs really isn't wrong in most cases -- it's a voluntary activity. It only gets morally questionable when you start "pushing" and doing so with addictive substances. But it is illegal, and doing it lands you in a world of people who flout the law and commit other crimes as well. Once you're in that world you're apt to pick up a taste for other kinds of illegal activity that really does involve hurting people, especially if you are at all psychologically prone to amoral behavior. In some cases this can take people all the way to unspeakable evils like trafficking children for sex slavery or contract murder. Prohibition is an unambiguous social evil. Anyone who still argues for it is either corrupt, ignorant, delusional, or simply hasn't thought about it very much.
- gohrt 12y ago> Prohibition is an unambiguous social evil. So, drugs should be legal, but "pushing and doing so with addictive substances" should be... also legal?
- api 12y agoThey should be regulated and taxed in proportion to their harmfulness, and addiction should be treated as a medical problem not a criminal one.
- jacquesm 12y ago> I hear the human trafficking business is quite lucrative and booming these days down their way. You may be on to something there. How about removing restrictions on immigration at the same time? That should definitely knock the wind out of them.
- SixSigma 12y agoWhile I don't wholeheartedly disagree, I also have trouble envisaging a world where cocaine is legally available. If the actual barbarism of these people was on the regular news ore, I think that would make an impact. People managed to make a difference through boycotting many products because of industrial practices. [1] Maybe it's time to organise a cocaine boycott. [1] http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/boycotts/successfulboycotts.aspx http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/boycotts/successfulboycotts.a...
- thisjepisje 12y ago>I also have trouble envisaging a world where cocaine is legally available. Why? You don't have to use it.
- SixSigma 12y agoI don't understand how my personal non-consumption affects my imagination?
- thisjepisje 12y agoNot just your personal non-consumption, everybody's. I don't think jailtime is the sole reason people don't use coke.
- GregBuchholz 12y ago>I also have trouble envisaging a world where cocaine is legally available. But it was once legal and prominent, and I'm almost sure you've tasted the soft drink whose name was derived from it.
- gohrt 12y agoCocaine consumers aren't the sort of folks who make self-sacrifice for ethical causes.
- paulhauggis 12y agoLegalizing drugs won't fix the problem. The real problem is corruption. The only reason the cartels got this big in the first place is because it got easier and easier to commit terrible crimes with no law enforcement officials stopping them. Hell, it seems like the police are now part of the cartels in many areas.
- gaius 12y agoDisrupting the pharmaceutical industry!!
- hsod 12y agoMeta: this feels like a cheap, lazy political potshot and I wish it wasn't the second highest comment here. It seems like more and more low quality comments are being upvoted so long as they pander to the majority political leanings around here. Are we a discussion board or a platform to push an agenda?
- luckyno13 12y agoI, for one, am always surprised yet impressed by the things the cartels do. All the while not being shocked at all. They would be such an interesting psychological / sociological study if it didn't mean potential torture and beheading of researchers. I mean this level of organized crime makes Al Capone look like a petty pick pocket.
- luckyno13 12y agoI didnt mean I was impressed in a good way, only from an observational point of view. They are terrible, no doubt about that.
- rodgerd 12y agoWant to be really impressed and horrified? See if you can dig out the 90s Wired article on the Colombians using an AS/400 to do analysis of copies of telco records. Whenever they found the logs showing cartel members calling numbers registered to police officers, they'd kill the cartel member. Big data before it was cool.
- aaron695 12y agoNot wired but - http://cocaine.org/cokecrime/ http://cocaine.org/cokecrime/
- gwern 12y agohttp://www.geek.com/news/outclassed-by-technology-in-the-drug-war-549059/ http://www.geek.com/news/outclassed-by-technology-in-the-dru... http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-cartel-supercomputer-of-1994 http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-cartel-supercomputer-of...
- drawkbox 12y agoHoards of money and guns can lead to very powerful unchecked capabilities. That funding has to be cutoff, they are a terrorist organization being funded by policy, concentrating wealth to criminals.
- ChuckMcM 12y agoSad story. Transmitters though are generally easy to find (not perhaps to decode if encrypted but RF energy is easily localized). As a radio amateur we used to do transmitter 'hunts' where we could locate and disable a transmitter hidden in some area.
- logicallee 12y agoThe free market solution is for Mexican engineers to band together and raise a private army with their earnings. You think I'm kidding, but I am actually making a point about rule of law - I literally just named the free-market solution. Think about it the next time you dismiss the state.
- josu 12y agoWell, the state is the one who started the whole ordeal by making drugs illegal. So I would argue that in a real free-market no engineer would have been kidnapped in the first place.
- logicallee 12y agoThat is an interesting point! But in failed states (where de facto nothing is "illegal" as there is no rule of law), life is hardly peaceful. The source of the strife may be drugs in this case, but it's just because that's what pays well enough to approximate a lack of a strong state enforcing rule of law, even in a Western country like Mexico. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Fragile_States_Index http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Fragile_St...
- GregBuchholz 12y agoI'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on John Hasnas' "Myth of the Rule of Law". http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm
- internet_arguer 12y agoI'd like to refute your succinct list by posting this incredibly long essay. If you don't read it fully then you don't get to disagree with my point. Effective!
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- eksith 12y agoAt this point, isn't it more accurate to call them a terrorist organization? They have their own military, communications network and a healthy (seemingly never ending) supply of soldiers to do their bidding and the citizens are sufficiently terrorized. Forget fighting ghosts in far off lands; right next door is where the terrorists are.
- lazaroclapp 12y agoThe goal of the cartels is not terror or using terror to achieve any political or ideological goals. The goal of the cartels is profit in most cases and local political power in some others. They are criminal enterprises for sure and warlords as well in many cases, but they are not terrorists. Whether profit-motivated un-accountable and violent criminal syndicates are more or less harmful than fundamentalist terrorists, well, that's a different question.
- Shivetya 12y agobased on recent stories where they had to track down and arrest a mayor and his wife how are you going to tell friend from foe? With the recent legalization of marijuana in a few more states we might be getting to a tipping point where we reexamine the whole drug war and reduce the influence of these people by drying up their money supply
- pyrophane 12y agoOne would hope. I honestly think that at this point legalization and regulation of all drugs would be the most sensible approach, even when it comes to "hard" drugs like cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. Doing so would not only cut out the cartels, but also allow us to implement harm reduction strategies that are lacking from our current "War on Drugs" approach. Just being able to ensure that what is being sold provides a predictable dose of the drug and is free from unnecessary contaminants would be a huge step forward, not to mention all of the treatment options that would become available to abusers if we were to stop treating them like criminals.
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- joshkpeterson 12y agoLegalize all drugs. Full stop.
- ZenoArrow 12y agoIs it just me, or does anyone else think that dismantling these radio networks is backwards? By using these radios the cartels are giving the authorities free information about their movements and evidence that's useful in their conviction. Even if the traffic is encrypted there are ways around that. The logical thing to me is keep the radios going and listen to them.
- ddrt 12y agoThe sad part is that the authorities are just as bad in SA.
- pizza234 12y agoI'd say more "useless" thank backwards. Having evidence is not really a problem. In Mexico, you will see narcos in the streets with very outlandish behavior. With a functioning judiciary system they would be arrested and jailed easily and immediately. The problem is that drug cartels have control of the everything, including the police and the judiciary system. You should read about the meetings where they show to the policemen what they do to the ones who betray them; it's terrifying.