the Mexican Drug War

Aetius wrote:
gregrampage wrote:

Doesn't seem worth it. I can understand it being cheap if it were also easier/safer but that's not a lot of money to only be around for another couple years.

Remember the context, though. Mexico is not the United States. $1,000 a month is a lot to someone who has little to nothing and no job prospects.

The strange thing is that 1,000 dollars a month is a decent salary, but it's not THAT much.

I mean, a secretary/receptionist or car salesman can earn that much. A cashier might earn around 800 dollars a month. Lowest salaries might hover around 500 dollars, talking about people who clean toilets or something.

I'm not sure why we reached this point. Maybe it's also the "promise" of becoming a boss in the corporation.

Mex wrote:
Aetius wrote:
gregrampage wrote:

Doesn't seem worth it. I can understand it being cheap if it were also easier/safer but that's not a lot of money to only be around for another couple years.

Remember the context, though. Mexico is not the United States. $1,000 a month is a lot to someone who has little to nothing and no job prospects.

The strange thing is that 1,000 dollars a month is a decent salary, but it's not THAT much.

I mean, a secretary/receptionist or car salesman can earn that much. A cashier might earn around 800 dollars a month. Lowest salaries might hover around 500 dollars, talking about people who clean toilets or something.

I'm not sure why we reached this point. Maybe it's also the "promise" of becoming a boss in the corporation.

It makes sense. Freakonomics showed that your average drug dealer made about minimum wage so getting paid about double that would be attractive to folks.

gregrampage wrote:
Aetius wrote:
gregrampage wrote:

Doesn't seem worth it. I can understand it being cheap if it were also easier/safer but that's not a lot of money to only be around for another couple years.

Remember the context, though. Mexico is not the United States. $1,000 a month is a lot to someone who has little to nothing and no job prospects.

Sure, but it's not "live it up so hard for 3 years that it's totally worth it" money.

Leaving money for the family left behind does make more sense.

Not when they find out who your family is and butcher them all as well...

Stratfor's forecast for Mexico in 2012: More of the same sh*t

Mexico

Through the first half of 2012, Mexico will be enmeshed in campaigning for its July 1 presidential election. The country faces the possible end of what will be 12 years of rule by the National Action Party (PAN). Faced with public condemnation of rising violence, the PAN has lost a great deal of credibility over the past five years, something likely to benefit the Institutional Revolutionary Party and the newly unified Revolutionary Democratic Party. We expect no major legislative action under the administration of outgoing President Felipe Calderon as the three main parties compete for public approval. The new president takes office Dec. 1, meaning most of the new administration's major policy moves will not occur until 2013.

Regardless of any change in party, Mexico's underlying challenges will remain. The country's drug war rages on, with Los Zetas having consolidated control over most of Mexico's eastern coastal transportation corridor and the Sinaloa cartel having done the same in the west. Both cartels have a significant, growing presence in Central America and relations with South American organized crime. We expect the cartels to intensify their efforts to extend control over regional supply chains in 2012, although the Mexican cartels will remain dependent on relationships with local organized crime in other transit and producing countries. Despite significant territorial control in Mexico by Sinaloa and Los Zetas, numerous smaller criminal entities are still struggling for access to key transport hubs such as Acapulco. Meanwhile, the two main cartels will continue to attack each other in critical transit cities such as Veracruz and Guadalajara.

Continued inter-cartel competition among Mexico's diverse criminal groups will prevent any kind of alliance between Los Zetas and Sinaloa that allows them to abandon violence in favor of more profitable smuggling conditions. Similarly, the government faces severe constraints on its counter-cartel activities. It cannot afford to be seen publicly backing away from attempts to rein in violence. At the same time, any significant uptick in military offensives against the cartels carries the risk of intensifying the violence. The government will therefore attempt to emphasize social and economic policies while maintaining its current, high-tempo counter-cartel strategy.

This is a really good journalist report about his visit to the heart of the alternate government in Michoacán, the land of the Knights Templar cartel. It's in spanish tho

http://www.m-x.com.mx/xml/pdf/260/20...

"The american customs get paid 5,000 dollars per shipment, 100 dollars per undocumented worker", and "We know we're sowing an evil plant, but if the americans didn't smoke it we wouldn't do it..."

"All I ask is that when they come and kill me, they don't do it in front of my children", from a guy who has been 30 years in the business.

Lots of good quotes but it's too long to translate... And a LOT of details about how the business part works.

It's not even a particularly evil plant. I'd much rather see people stoned than drunk. Drunks can be dangerous and very disruptive. Potheads giggle.

Malor wrote:

It's not even a particularly evil plant. I'd much rather see people stoned than drunk. Drunks can be dangerous and very disruptive. Potheads giggle.

I agree, although the "Evil" part makes sense in the context of that particular cartel.

The Knights Templar (Caballeros Templarios in spanish) are a rather weird crime organization, according to most information, they are a splinter group from La Familia, and were founded and run by a priest, or someone rejected from the priesthood (Nazario), who made his own Bible and ran the cartel as a very strict, quasi-religious organization. People who work for them are forbidden from partaking in drugs and tobacco, and a bunch of other weird sh*t. They have a serious business code, pay taxes to their organization, they have rules for bribery, etc. But they somehow justify the mass killing of people and other stuff. It's really something like out of Fallout.

At this time I'm starting to see the mexican government as just another cartel...

Senator Charles Grassley cites 2009 AP article which says 305,424 confiscated weapons are locked in police/government vaults in Mexico. He also lays out the data on differences between traced weapons being manufactured in the US versus being sold in the US.

http://www.grassley.senate.gov/judic...

A weapon manufactured in the US but not sold by an FFL in the US would indicate sale to a domestic agency/foreign government or possibly theft directly from a manufacturer/distributor.

Ultralight drones are being used now that avoid radar.

http://www.theamericaspostes.com/233...

Edwin wrote:

Ultralight drones are being used now that avoid radar.

http://www.theamericaspostes.com/233...

Interesting. It doesn't appear to be that stealthy though, I think that the only radar avoiding tricks that it has is it's incredibly small size. Couple that with the fact that it can fly pretty low and slow (the software for most radars screens out slow targets automatically to avoid false positives, and once you start actively trying to look for slower objects you have to remove those filters, and then either deal with the false positives or figure out alternative filtering methods) and you would probably have to spend a heck of a lot of money to get our radar coverage along the border thick enough to catch things like that.

Yonder wrote:
Edwin wrote:

Ultralight drones are being used now that avoid radar.

http://www.theamericaspostes.com/233...

Interesting. It doesn't appear to be that stealthy though, I think that the only radar avoiding tricks that it has is it's incredibly small size. Couple that with the fact that it can fly pretty low and slow (the software for most radars screens out slow targets automatically to avoid false positives, and once you start actively trying to look for slower objects you have to remove those filters, and then either deal with the false positives or figure out alternative filtering methods) and you would probably have to spend a heck of a lot of money to get our radar coverage along the border thick enough to catch things like that.

I think I read about this years ago. The technology for this sort of thing has been available for civilians for decades now. Heck, even before the word "drone" was in common usage, folks were talking about flying a model airplane full of stuff to a crash site where they could retrieve illicit stuff.

I think there was even an old T.J. Hooker episode about that.

Anonymous is posting emails they got from STRATFOR and this one was interesting. US bank Wachovia laundered $70b for Mexican drug cartels | http://t.co/OPfFLvrP

Don't forget all that drug war money that's paying for NYC cops to spy on entire Muslim neighborhoods.

I'm going to respectfully disagree with this lady

Fifty thousand dead in Mexico in the last five years. Fifty thousand.

So, that prompts the question: is there any outcome that they would call a failure? If Mexico City were a nuclear crater right now, would that be enough?

Ms Napolitano denied the drug war of the US and Mexico was a failure but rather "a continuing effort to keep our peoples from becoming addicted to dangerous drugs".

Has she seen Celebrity Rehab? The effort isn't working.

Funkenpants wrote:

Ms Napolitano denied the drug war of the US and Mexico was a failure but rather "a continuing effort to keep our peoples from becoming addicted to dangerous drugs".

Has she seen Celebrity Rehab? The effort isn't working.

I guess our government learned NOTHING from the Prohabition Era. Making drugs illegal and treating drug users as criminals is extremely detrimental to society. These cartels and other dealers can only exist and be profitable because of this "war". I say decriminalize drugs (and fully legalize marijuana), release all non-violent users, and start treating drug use as the medical issue that if is. Addiction to these drugs is no different than alcoholism and should be handled in the same manner.

93_confirmed wrote:

I say decriminalize drugs (and fully legalize marijuana), release all non-violent users, and start treating drug use as the medical issue that if is. Addiction to these drugs is no different than alcoholism and should be handled in the same manner.

Maybe I'm way off base here, but I suspect that for most drugs that aren't meth, heroin or crack, addiction is not the issue, and the majority of the market is recreational users. For cocaine and pot at least, both of which are big money for South American producers and smugglers. They are not drugs for which there is a 'medical issue'.

Did anyone else see that someone put out a white paper to convert crystal meth into sudafed because meth is easier to get then sudafed for when you are sick?

We are 'winning' the drug war, eh?

That's why the Texas Highway Patrol is deploying gunboats to the Rio Grande.

Edwin wrote:

Did anyone else see that someone put out a white paper to convert crystal meth into sudafed because meth is easier to get then sudafed for when you are sick?

Related, there was an article recently about how Mexico is the biggest meth producer in the world, and how it's the next step from weed. So much stuff that looked out of Breaking Bad - professional labs, etc.

And the other day they busted a meth lab right next door to where a girlfriend lives, apparently it was one of the largest of the year. Not the largest, that was this one: http://www.elmundo.es/america/2012/0...
- valued at 5,000 million dollars.

They're replacing Marihuana and Heroin, apparently. 1 ton of weed: 300,000 dollars. 1 ton of meth: 24 million dollars.

At some point, with that much money, I just wish they wouldn't just destroy that stuff. I mean, 5 thousand million dollars, what the f*ck. Build schools and stuff.

Never saw this coming, Pat Robertson wants marijuana legalized.

Agent 86 wrote:

Never saw this coming, Pat Robertson wants marijuana legalized.

That was Suzanne Maulvoix. I she was in my graduating class.

Mex wrote:

At some point, with that much money, I just wish they wouldn't just destroy that stuff. I mean, 5 thousand million dollars, what the f*ck. Build schools and stuff.

Huge Quantities Of Primo sh*t Incinerated By Feds

LAKE ARROWHEAD, CA—A ton of people up and down the coast were seriously bumming Monday, when the Drug Enforcement Administration announced the seizure and destruction of huge quantities of seriously primo sh*t.

...

According to DEA statistics, the organization destroys more than two million pounds of marijuana a year in California alone, which is, like, who the hell even knows how many bowls.

"That's so sad, man," said local resident Bob "Midnight Toker" Roker. "I mean, sh*t, that's just a crime."

Security alert in my town, the city is shut down. Government is alerting people not to go out, schools closed, businesses closed, I keep hearing helicopters whizzing by overhead. I guess bad time to go out... City is like a zombie town in this part, at least.

http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/...

edit: English link http://www.guadalajarareporter.com/n...

Some twitter photo, it's scarier this time at least for me because I recognize that street

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/CJU8J.jpg)

Cell phone service is down and I can't reach my girl, although internet works =/

Stay safe Mex.

Holy crap, Mex. I hope you and yours are safe.

Hell, for the matter, I'd like all of Mexico to be safe. It is a pile of bullsh*t that Mexico has turned into a war zone because of our stupid drug policies.

Mex wrote:

Cell phone service is down and I can't reach my girl, although internet works =/

And you're worried that she drinks...

But seriously...be safe and stay that way.

Things seem to be back to normal, here's a slideshow with some photos:

http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/...

It wasn't that bad except for the general panic - 25 vehicles (some civilian, some military) set on fire as blockades, 3 dead, some grenades. A 7 year old girl died due to a random bullet. And most businesses closed, although a lot of people didn't give a crap about it. The city was shut down, pretty much.

Night life was dead.... Anyway, the government says the war is working >_>