Mexico: enchanted land of kidnapping, extortion, corruption and drugs

[MrBishop]

Actually..I prefer option1 - it ain't the USA's problem...they've bought enough problems in Iraq to keep'em a while.

 

[valkyrie]

Why not. You guys are already making a mint selling guns to the cartels...with the money they just got from you selling their drugs.

Where's my share? Someone stole my share!

You can stiffen up the border...but that's damn big and mighty leaky. Doesn't solve the problem over there..just a 'good fences make for good neighbours' idea. Ignores the problem.

This has been a very hard thing to explain to people who live farther away from the border. Most Texans have no problem with the border being crossed. Texas was a part of Mexico until Texans won independence through a bloody war (no help from the USA). So we have always had a friendship with Mexico that other states (and countries) do not understand. There is a big fight from the land owners along the border who do not want the Federal Gov't to put up a fence or even step on their property.

Besides, the killing is across the border... not here. The concern is for Mexico, not for the US. The solution needs to be in Mexico, not here.

You can stiffen up the gun laws - Clinton's trying that but the NRA has their panties bunched up so far up their collective asses that they have frills sticking out their nostrils. - Unlikely to stop outbound guns from going to Mexico anytime soon.

The Mexicans are not buying guns at the gun shops, they are buying guns illegally on the black market. They smuggle them across the border in the walls of refrigerators, trucks, etc. This isn't going to solve the problem either.

You can try and overthrow the current Mexican GVT, put in a puppet and crack down on cartels by proxy. Not likely to happen under Obama.

You can arm the GVT's army/police and let them do their own dirty work...saving you from cleaning up the mess that washes over on your shores.

The police in many small towns are owned by the cartels. You'd be pitting police against the army.

There are only so many options...and all of them are pretty dirty.

Personally..I recommend Mexico calling a state of emergency, suspending habeus corpus, bombing the hell out of the cartels or giving the USA the right to cross-border bomb. Give it a month, poke their heads out of the bunkers and se what's left. Not pretty, but there ya go.

That's not even funny! Dude... there are people (civilians) that live there! On BOTH sides? There's no DMZ along the border.

 

[jimpeel]

If'n we can stop them from sendin' us thet thar mariwanee then we can stop sendin' them all o' them hangurnades that Holder says we're sendin' 'em.

 

[valkyrie]

Huh?

 

[2minkey]

Why not. You guys are already making a mint selling guns to the cartels...with the money they just got from you selling their drugs.

You can stiffen up the border...but that's damn big and mighty leaky. Doesn't solve the problem over there..just a 'good fences make for good neighbours' idea. Ignores the problem.

You can stiffen up the gun laws - Clinton's trying that but the NRA has their panties bunched up so far up their collective asses that they have frills sticking out their nostrils. - Unlikely to stop outbound guns from going to Mexico anytime soon.

You can try and overthrow the current Mexican GVT, put in a puppet and crack down on cartels by proxy. Not likely to happen under Obama.

You can arm the GVT's army/police and let them do their own dirty work...saving you from cleaning up the mess that washes over on your shores.

There are only so many options...and all of them are pretty dirty.

Personally..I recommend Mexico calling a state of emergency, suspending habeus corpus, bombing the hell out of the cartels or giving the USA the right to cross-border bomb. Give it a month, poke their heads out of the bunkers and se what's left. Not pretty, but there ya go.

wow. well, hey, thanks for laying out all those options for us. we'll be sure to telegraph them right to the white house. i think peel said he wants to act as the white house liason for the canadian OTC contingent. something about rubber bands and damp ankles....

 

[valkyrie]

Meh... the simplest solution is to take the cash out of the cartels' hands. No cash, no power. It's the simplest and the easiest on my tax dollars.

 

[catocom]

the cartels take care of their problems, so that solution ends with loss of life,
rather than money.

 

[valkyrie]

the cartels take care of their problems, so that solution ends with loss of life,
rather than money.

I'm interested in ending the loss of life. Although the violence is across the border, it still affects the border states in the US. So the solution would be fine. And since the majority of the "export" business from the cartels is marijuana, it will put a big dent in their funds.

The result will likely be that the cartels will move on to some other racket. Rather than exporting marijuana, they will look to some other profitable (and most likely, illegal) business to take on.

 

[catocom]

My scenario looks different, but good luck with that.

 

[valkyrie]

Short of more violence and interfering with a sovereign nation I see now alternative for the US. It is impractical and costly to build a fence along the entire border to shut them off completely. Then there's under the radar air traffic... it's not going to stop so long as there is no other way of getting it here. People aren't going to stop smoking marijuana... just like when alcohol was banned people didn't stop drinking, they just did it illegally.

Make it legal, let farmers grow it here, if they want. Let people grow it in their backyard... who cares? But at least the government will be able to regulate the legal sale of it (just like alcohol and cigarettes) in stores.

 

[Gato_Solo]

Legalizing and regulating pot may not stop the illegal flow from Mexico, but it will put a huge dent in the traffic.

A very small dent. The smuggling of seeds, however, would skyrocket.

Back when liquor was banned ("Prohibition") it was expensive to buy real liquor. It became fashionable to go to the "Speak Easy". This became a very profitable period in our history for organized crime. It was also a very violent period of time as well.

I think that if we legalize marijuana it will stop most of the violence that is happening across our border. I think it will also end some of the mystique and cool-ness for teens that is associated with doing something illegal and something that your parents would never approve of.

Or we could just go Singapore on the drug flow...

 

[2minkey]

A very small dent. The smuggling of seeds, however, would skyrocket.

*psst*

seeds aren't particularly hard to get these days...

 

[MrBishop]

wow. well, hey, thanks for laying out all those options for us. we'll be sure to telegraph them right to the white house. i think peel said he wants to act as the white house liason for the canadian OTC contingent. something about rubber bands and damp ankles....

Will do...but I would like a 2minkey annex to add on. So..how would you solve a problem like Maria (the drug-mule)?

 

[2minkey]

the answer is clear. lobotomize her, wash her real good, and sell her as a sex slave to a pudgy middle-aged guy in new jersey.

 

[Gato_Solo]

the answer is clear. lobotomize her, wash her real good, and sell her as a sex slave to a pudgy middle-aged guy in new jersey.

And that would be different, how?

 

[valkyrie]

A very small dent. The smuggling of seeds, however, would skyrocket.

Hell, I could get seeds if I wanted them. It's not hard.

Or we could just go Singapore on the drug flow...

I love this sentence...
For unauthorised consumption, there is a maximum of 10 years' jail or fine of S$20,000, or both.
So apparently you can get authorization to consume drugs.

No way. We already have enough people on death row. We don't need more. The average time on death row before execution is 10.26 years. I don't want to have to support a drug smuggler for 10.26 years with my taxes. Can you imagine the drain on the budget?

 

[randomJACKASS]

Not to mention that heavy punishment has been proven, over and over to be no deterrent to crime.

There is considerable controversy over the effectiveness of punishment in reducing crime. For example, most researchers have failed to find any systematic relationship between crime rates and imprisonment rates: it is equally probable for regions with high imprisonment rates to have high or low crime rates, while increases or decreases in rates of imprisonment are equally likely to be followed by increases or decreases in crime, and so on. Thus, the “three strikes” legislation passed in many U.S. states in the 1990s, which imposed mandatory prison sentences after three convictions, was found to have no effect on crime rates. Even the death penalty, as noted above, appears to do little to reduce murder rates, since most jurisdictions that use it (including several U.S. states and various other countries) have substantially higher murder rates than jurisdictions that do not. Among Western industrialized countries, the United States has the highest murder rate and is virtually alone in using the death penalty. The state of Texas accounts for a very high proportion of all executions within the country (roughly half in the early years of the 21st century), yet it has continued to experience relatively high rates of murder and violent crime. In general, criminologists believe that severe punishments are not particularly effective in reducing high crime rates.

 

[valkyrie]

Yeah, I'd forgotten about that business with the 3 strikes and you're out.

The whole "War On Drugs" has been a fiasco... they're really fighting a "Civil War On Drugs" because the customers keep buying (and using) these drugs. As long as there are customers, there are going to be smugglers.

I don't condone the use of these hard drugs, but marijuana is not a hard drug. It's about as bad as liquor.

 

[MrBishop]

On a recent evening in Reynosa, a border town in northern Mexico, a Mexican army patrol found an abandoned farm house that had been used by drug traffickers. Hidden deep in the brush outside was a plastic barrel filled with guns. The authorities believe that the traffickers were taking drugs to the United States and using the money to return with guns.

<snip>

Federal agents say about 90 percent of the 12,000 pistols and rifles the Mexican authorities recovered from drug dealers last year and asked to be traced came from dealers in the United States, most of them in Texas and Arizona.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30217992/

 

[catocom]

Federal agents say about 90 percent of the 12,000 pistols and rifles the Mexican authorities recovered from drug dealers last year and asked to be traced came from dealers in the United States, most of them in Texas and Arizona.

msnbc? really?