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Why Did a Drug Gang Kill 43 Students? Text Messages Hold Clues
- mortureb 3y ago[flagged]
- ChumpGPT 3y ago[flagged]
- LorenzoGood 3y agoI remember seeing a vice video where a cartel soldier said that every level of government in Mexico is paid with cartel money.
- danielheath 3y agoWho is giving the cartel that money?
- chrischen 3y agoAmericans. But it’s more like the head-end of Americans paying cartels for drugs and in order to pacify the ass-end from complaining they, in collusion with Mexico, have to make it “look like” they are doing something about it.
- hx8 3y agoExcuse me. Are you suggesting that rich individuals are subsidizing the importation of illegal drugs that are consumed by average Americans?
- danielheath 3y ago… you know the CIA imported and sold drugs in the USA? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_drug_trafficking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_drug_traf...
- sublinear 3y agoThe entire world. The drug trade is global and the USA is a huge market, perhaps the biggest. Also worth reminding people that the whole point of money laundering is to keep the operations going without having to keep big secrets or make anyone unnecessary complicit. It's not about corruption, shady business, or legislation. Those are all lies told to get normal people to believe even uglier lies. No, it can all be completely reformed, swamp drained, and regularly audited to be squeaky clean and still the money and drugs will continue to flow unimpeded. This is outside the scope of individual governments. Even if the USA and Mexico cooperated perfectly, the money is already clean before it hits their domestic banks and the smuggling is less about avoiding getting caught and more about overwhelming the system. This is why it's called a "war" on drugs.
- LorenzoGood 3y agoThe world drug trade.
- standardUser 3y agoI don't know whose opinion I value less on the matter, a random soldier or Vice.
- azinman2 3y agoExcept it came out a few years ago Fox was on the payroll. We know it’s gone all the way to the presidency.
- diogenes4 3y ago[flagged]
- decremental 3y ago[dead]
- hedora 3y agoThis is a direct consequence of US government policy: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/dec/08/mexico-war-on-drugs-cost-achievements-us-billions https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/dec/08/mexico-war-on-d... I picked a story from 2016, so you can read with the benefit of hindsight, but it’s been the same story since the 1970’s (and arguably since the tail end of the prohibition days, when the US made the Mexican government choose between destabilizing itself or not having anesthesia for its hospitals). Since the US’s continuous morally-reprehensible actions created and then propped up Mexico’s narco-state for about a century, and people keep voting in the US politicians that perpetuate the cycle, I can only assume things are working as intended.
- SenAnder 3y ago> This is a direct consequence of US government policy Which policy do you mean? Not legalizing drugs? Because the US is no exception in that regard.
- heavyset_go 3y agoYou're right, prohibition funds organized crime all over the world.
- hedora 3y agoThe US forced countries to criminalize the export of drugs to the US, even though though no country (the US included) has the resources necessary to enforce those laws. The result is shadow economies, then corruption and finally narco states. This profits corrupt actors in the US government, so they perpetuate the cycle. There are basically two sides in the war on drugs: almost everyone (non-users, users, small-time producers), and para-military syndicates that control distribution, enforcement agencies, and government policies. If you read the article I linked, and also the one this thread is about, it is clear that the US decided to back one of the cartels with military aid and support in the local election. That caused a transfer of power that left 100,000’s dead, including the 43 students that were murdered by US-backed Mexican government officials.
- 3y ago
- MrDunham 3y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20230902090426/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/02/world/americas/mexico-iguala-students-kidnapping.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230902090426/https://www.nytim... In case you get paywalled
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jdkee 3y agoPerhaps we should end the fifty years long "War on Some Drugs" in the US that funds the cartels.
- anonym29 3y agoLet's be honest, it was never a war on drugs, it was a war on drug addicts - a group that already had enough problems on their plate before they had the full force of a police state hunting them down.
- voisin 3y ago> war on drug addicts No, ir was a war on political opponents, not necessarily addicts at all. The War on Marijuana and Acid was to go after hippies, and the War on Crack was to go after inner city blacks. The idea being all of these groups would have voted liberal and the Republican base supported punishing these groups. This was all assumed for decades but made explicit as the strategy by one of Nixon’s top lieutenants in recent years.
- lazide 3y agoThere was at least a token attempt to crack down on Cocaine though, and that’s about as WASP a drug as is humanly possible.
- true_religion 3y agoAren’t hippies majority WASPs too?
- lazide 3y agoUsually more like counter culture ‘trying to not be a WASP since Daddy was a WASP and he was a jerk’. So depends on how you define it.
- nvm0n2 3y agoWhich would be a great explanation if there weren't drug wars in every other part of the world too, including left wing dictatorships like China.
- walterbell 3y agohttps://anarchonomicon.substack.com/p/reaper-drones-over-houston https://anarchonomicon.substack.com/p/reaper-drones-over-hou... > The South and Central American drug war(s) is one of the most violent wars in modern history .. Over a million people have died in the conflict since 1970, and that’s not counting the over 50,000 Americans who die every year from opioid-related deaths, or the 20+ thousand American homicides every year, the majority of them in some way related to gangs that fund themselves off drug sales.. US intervention against the Mexican Cartels would be taking on organized forces that have been under arms longer than the Taliban, are better funded than Ukraine, have a population and territory bigger than Saddam had in Iraq, and some of whom, as in the case of the Los Zetas Cartel, are themselves former Special Forces trained by American Green Berets.. America has had a massive advantage in every war it’s fought in the past 100 years: America has always been fighting elsewhere .. America’s population, industry … They’ve all been safely 10,000 miles away across oceans from the enemy and pretty much untouchable .. A military intervention against the Cartels would instantly end that.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Moral_ 3y agoThis is such a bad take. Cartels have small arms the US military has drones, satellites, the NSA. A war against the cartel would be much like our participation in Syria.
- bullfightonmars 3y agoIs that a tactical advantage? That dichotomy didn’t work out so well in the middle east.
- walterbell 3y agoSee the fictional riff at the beginning: > “El Coyote” Head of the New Jaurez Joint Cartel, was the man who ordered the attack on the Cactus Lounge and similar massacres on US soil, he would be killed in a US airstrike in 2032. But his Lieutenant and successor, Cartel Boss, Mexican Nationalist Front commander, and Future Mexican President, Jaun Herrera would reveal in his 2054 memoirs Smuggling to Freedom: From Narco to Patriot that the US expansion of the war had been Coyote’s intent, and that the NJJC had been losing members and revenue for months before the wider war and resultant chaos in the US changed their fortunes making recruitment and smuggling operations vastly easier, even as the first American “Free Men” Militias began to fight their own war against the ATF Paramilitaries and FEMA Press-Gangs brought about by the 2030 Gun Confiscation and 2031 Conscription Acts. and speculation later in the article: > There’s absolutely no reason for Mexican drug war violence to stay south of the border if US military assets don’t stay North of the Border… which of course means a good chunk of the fighting would be North of the Border… And intensive fighting at that. There’s no reason the Cartel’s playbook of kidnapping the families of government officials, blackmail, and armed militias wouldn’t let them start setting up hidden bases and operations within the US… Hidden bases that would have to be retaken, operations that would have to be subjected to random unconstitutional checkpoint stops and searches to disrupt. Further diluting American civil liberties and risking an American armed backlash…
- hackermailman 3y agoborderland beat covered this and it was a combination of the students stealing a cartel bus used for smuggling and the corrupt local government asking for favors of the cartels they work for to teach a lesson. Btw there is many more terrible things surfacing from mexico these days like everyday plebs having to post identifiers on their vehicles to indicate tax was paid to some cartel then rivals posting videos of killing these same plebs saying you better not get caught paying our rivals. It's just lose/lose for anyone trying to lead a normal life in certain disputed states which is growing all the time basically 19 of 32 states now. Much insanity happening in places like Veracruz I deleted because ppl won't believe it until the see it and these idiot thugs livestream their crimes every week.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- justin66 3y ago> students stealing a cartel bus used for smuggling That sounds rather irrational of them. Also, not what the NYT reported.
- foogazi 3y agoHow I heard it reported before is students in that part of Mexico have the custom of commanding buses for free rides to nearby towns Local cartels know and use students to smuggle drugs, weapons, people on these rides Police and another local cartel were aware buses coming into their turf
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- MaxfordAndSons 3y agoYea idk, I think that version is an attempt at a (pathetic) post hoc justification for the crime (not saying it was made up by gp, but rather the cartels or their apologists). I had read that they were public municipal buses, which I guess could conceivably be used for smuggling, but would seem like an odd choice, as it doesn't seem like they would have much need to "smuggle" within the the municipality where they already operate with impunity, and driving the buses out of the territory would seem impractical/surreptitious.
- walterbell 3y agoHN ranking history for this thread: https://hnrankings.info/37367115/ https://hnrankings.info/37367115/
- dang 3y agoYes, the flamewar detector does that.
- MaxfordAndSons 3y agoSomething that occurred to me reading this article, is how corrosive the cartels' hold on Mexican society is on market efficiency in small markets - the article mentions half a dozen small businesses in Iguala that are run by cartel members or associates. All those businesses, some of which may be fronts in the classic sense but others are likely semi legit "day jobs" for cartel members, are effectively able to operate outside of a fair market. A square competitor pops up? They can just threaten them or kill them to shut them down. A customer complains about service? Shake them down and kick them out, and black list them at every other connected business in town. The effect of cartel corruption on the legal and judicial systems is more well documented and fretted about, but I imagine this dimension of corruption has more impact on the everyday lives of Mexican civilians, especially in the small cities and towns like Iguala where the corruption is complete.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoI see reports like these and think that Mexico is a failed narco state. And yet you see reports of NAFTA trade and the fact that Mexico is now America’s largest trading partner. Hard to reconcile the two. A state without law and order is also a leading trading partner with tons of complex, large scale manufacturing. What gives?
- xordon 3y agoMexico isn't the USA's largest trade partner, it isn't even the largest one in NAFTA.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoNope, its Mexico. https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/statistics/highlights/topcm.html https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/statistics/highlights/t...
- glimshe 3y agoOne thing HN commentators have in common with LLMs: the ability to say completely wrong things with total confidence.
- jasonm23 3y agopossibly attempted astroturf...
- Incipient 3y agoI'd say it's because the US can get cheap stuff from Mexico, and corporations can take advantage of incredibly lax (absent?) labour laws to get things done quickly and cheaply.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoOTOH Europeans read reports that the US has an average of more than two mass shootings per day and think that the US is a failed state