I find it more than a little appalling that U.S. is spending billions in its efforts to “liberate” the Middle East and Afghanistan while doing little to address the failed state that is Mexico. In fact, we’re making it worse . . .
We’re transferring tens of millions of dollars in small arms and military equipment to our neighbors to the south. And I’m not talking about the piss-ant number of straw purchases that head south, used as an excuse to promote civilian disarmament.
I’m talking about U.S. sanctioned arms sales.
When we last checked-in two years ago, Mexico had purchased some $2b worth of U.S. military equipment from the U.S. That doesn’t include the arms and support equipment (including Black Hawk helicopters) funded by U.S. taxpayers.
The Washington Post dutifully reported that the spending “shows Mexico’s aggressive push to modernize its military in the face of powerful drug cartel adversaries.”
Adversaries? Only in the sense that any cartel that doesn’t pay off the Mexican government — local, state and federal — is an adversary. And the general population when it gets in the way.
The Post only parenthetically mentioned this downside:
Researcher John Lindsay-Poland wrote for the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) that the “massive militarization” is “bad news for the many Mexicans devastated by the abuses of police and soldiers.”
The only people not getting U.S. guns, ammo and support equipment are the Mexican people, banned from owning firearms not purchased (and approved) by the country’s ONE government-run gun store. A store that views the right of armed self-defense as a threat to the status quo, and acts accordingly.
The result of this one-sided arms trade is entirely predictable: Mexico’s disarmed populace are being extorted, raped, tortured and murdered. By the cartels, the police and the military. Brutalized in their tens of thousands. Every year. For decades.
How bad is it? I invite you to click over to borderlandbeat.com, a website that somehow manages to chronicle the suffering of Mexican men, women and children. Like this (with the accompanying picture at the top of this post):
During the funeral of Cristian Peralta Rendón, there wasn’t just crying, there was also anger, despair, rage and calls for justice to the government on the part of their relatives and friends.
They boy was 14 years old and was studying his second year of secondary school in Chilapa, where gunmen kidnapped him on Saturday, March 4 and on Monday, March 6, he was found seriously wounded in a neighborhood east of Chilpancingo next to the corpse of another boy.
Cristian only had on a pair of boxers and had a bullet in the head. He was transferred alive to the hospital Raymundo Abarca Alarcón where he died Wednesday morning.
After midday on Thursday, Cristian’s body was transferred from his home on Calle 8 Sur de Chilapa to the cemetery where his relatives, friends, and neighbors buried him.
Mexico’s suffering is buried in the news, whereas we get daily dispatches from the Middle East. In an ideal world, the Trump Administration would use its power to lobby for a restoration of Mexicans’ gun rights. In the real world, U.S. – Mexico trade trumps human rights.
Meanwhile, the civilian militia — autodefensas — do what they can to protect the people from the cartels, police and military. As long as the Mexican and American governments ignore their plight, the effort is doomed.
Mexico. England. France. Civil rights mean squat in all of them. 3rd world crap holes.
Big freaking surprise. They’ve been disarmed since 1972. This gave rise to the brutality of criminal organizations.
Fools
Yet we have vacationers in Mexico for Spring break saying build that wall but no1 got murdered fake news design on race don’t be fooled guy’s like if America don’t have gang violence and crooked cop’s none senses be real folks every country has a problem others are worse like the middle east or Africa now those are not developing countries but 3rd world countries know the difference don’t become brain washed by this morons….
You can’t just put all of your periods at the end of your post. It doesn’t work that way.
Dude. WTF? Do you even English?
Holy nonsensical run-on sentence batman. WTH, RJ?
I doubt that proper punctuation would make his comment any more intelligible.
Someone should tell RJ that meth is bad for you.
Could there be a nation on the planet that WE aren’t responsible for?
The US.
We’re not responsible for creating the failed state of Mexico, where human rights are a laughable concept and tens of thousands are slaughtered by criminals, both cartel and government-controlled.
When Mexico curtailed its citizens’ gun rights, in response to rioting in the 70’s, the results were inevitable.
But we are responsible for aiding and abetting the cratered country’s decline into utter lawlessness, both by our failed War on Drugs and our part in the country’s militarization.
Or at least we should man-up for doing nothing to fix it and start taking a close look at what we can do to improve matters. ‘Cause if Mexico fails big style — say a cartel-sponsored military coup — millions of Mexican will head north. Wall or no wall.
>We’re not responsible for creating the failed state of Mexico
Right, and the Mexican government volunteered to fight a drug war on behalf of Washington politicians, not because they were threatened with economic and political sanctions. 🙂
Mexico was a failed state long before the drug wars……..id say it was a failed state from Iturbide forward…..Revolution after revolution, strongmen rise and fall, Comanche raids devastating the countryside, central federal control over all parts of the country never really takes place, communist infiltration, ect……
Mexico managed between 3% to 4% increase in GDP per annum from the 1940’s to the 1970’s which required civil institutions and domestic tranquility. The 1980’s saw an economic crisis which lasted until the mid-90’s. In 1996 Mexico seemed to be well on its way to economic recovery but the US government decided to force other sovereign nations to fight their wars for them.
As usual the US government dindu nuthin crowd is woefully uneducated, or deliberately mendacious. Probably both.
Tell Mexico to arm the autodefensas first, and then we’ll talk about any future aid.
After the aid has paid for the wall.
FYI The Mexican government responded to the “threat” of the autodefensas by creating the Fuerza Rural, a new rural police force. Then they laid down the law: disarm and join the rurales or we will come after you. And you don’t want that.
Not only did the Mexican government under-equip this sham, government-controlled “police force,” they did nothing to stop it being corrupted by the usual suspects.
An effective civilian militia is controlled by civilians. As if you didn’t know.
Repeal the CSA. Watch the cartels and terrorists collapse overnight.
The confederate states of America were repealed. In 1865.
Face. Palm.
The cartels aren’t going anywhere. We could legalize every single drug known to man and theyd simply find other ways to rake in the cash. Probably by straight up enforcing taxes. They already make allot of money doing other nefarious enterprises.
True, but there is NO other illicit industry worth anywhere near as much as the drug trade. The other two big ones, arms and people (in that order) trail FAR behind the drug trade in terms of sheer size. Would they go away overnight? No. But they would lose a HUGE amount of money, and thus power. They’re already involved in pretty much every criminal enterprise imaginable, so it’s laughable to claim that if all drugs were legalized, they would be able to make up the lost income elsewhere.
Well, there are plenty of leftist billionaires and anti-gun types who are trying their darndest to change all of that!
If they could just make guns illegal in the United States, the drug trade would be instantly eclipsed by the arms trade.
In fact, in 2018 it would not surprise me if there are thousands of illicit sales of “unregistered ammunition” in California alone conducted out of the backs of Mexican “Scooby vans”.
You saw it here first! ?
Wrong. Human trafficking. Better margins. Less risk: The product is self-ambulatory.
If the “war on drugs” ended, we would see similar results to the years after alcohol prohibition ended. Violent crime would plummet and the gangsters would restructure their businesses. The rich gangsters would try to use their money and influence to get elected. History would repeat itself.
While it is true that our current drug laws aren’t perfect, it’s also true that simply legalizing drugs would mean that a large portion of the US population would be even worse off than it is now.
People do not use drugs because they are illegal, they use drugs because they feel good, and offer an escape from real life. Just like alcohol.
Yes, our war on drugs is expensive; figure all the money spent on enforcement, and you’d have enough to provide a college education to every US citizen who wanted one. And that’s just enforcement. Add in the money we spend on the attempt to keep people off drugs, and that’s a lot more. Then there are the lives ruined by punishment after conviction, including families torn apart, and children put into the government care system.
But the drugs, when used, have a horrible effect on the person using them. While there are some who claim the drugs have no bad effects on them, that’s just a lie, like saying alcohol has no effect. It they truly have no effect, why use them?
It’s a dilemma that we, so far, have not been able to solve, and I doubt there’s one coming down the pike any time soon.
Total legalization of drugs is not the answer. De-criminalization combined with legalization will work. America spends in excess of one billion taxpayer dollars annually in the attempt to reduce the amount of drugs being brought in to the country [FAILURE]. Federal prisons are full of non-violent drug offenders and the cost to the taxpayers is in the range of 700-900 million annually [FAILURE]. If the money being wasted today was to be funneled in another direction I believe there could be a drastic change in the current direction of America.
OK, I give up.
Which CSA do you mean?
I am going to assume it’s not the usual Community Supported Agriculture.
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit…..its the only way to be sure.
Repeat after me: no standing armies! (Yes, a government police force is a standing army.)
http://www.borderlandbeat.com is a fairly well known website that covers the activities of the Mexican cartels. It can be pretty graphic at times but the info is up to date and the reporting is first hand.
There really isn’t much we can do other than build the wall. Could we support an autodefensa insurgency to rise up against the cartels and government? Perhaps. Launch a blockade/ no fly zone of all Mexican ports to help break the government? Maybe that as well.
There’s WAY too much money at stake for us to encourage a violent overthrow of the Mexican government. Not to mention that Mexican revolutions are a REALLY messy business.
We should work through diplomacy and, why not, stop that whole War on Drugs thing.
I don’t disagree. But this corruption has gone far beyond simply ending the war on drugs. Yes, that would help. But the cartels are far to powerful now to just give up and go home because we legalize weed. They’d likley start extorting money out of the populace another way. Also, they already have other ways of making cash, through human trafficking and what not. Personally I think the only way they’re ever going to be defeated, both them and the government is through force of arms.
I think that would depend on how the WoD was ended and what our regulatory/tax scheme on the subject became.
Done right there would still be billions of dollars up for grabs with the cartels in prime position to “go legit” and start paying taxes. For now there are no taxes so they make hay while the sun shines.
The real problem with the cartels is that they operate outside the law in the black market. They do it on a large scale, but the rule in the black market is that the rules are unwritten and breaking them results in violence because there is, quite literally, no other way to resolve a dispute between two parties. That’s the root of the problem. You can see how this worked pre-Prohibition, during Prohibition and post-Prohibition.
This ain’t hard to figure out but it goes against a lot of people’s interests and wishes. Prosecutors, LEO’s, the DEA, Coast Guard and the anti-drug right wing nutters (to name a few) all hate the idea of ending the WoD. None can give you solid, concrete reasons why it’s a bad idea but they’ll scream from the rooftops that it is. Of course the last group there will also scream about how terrible Civil Asset Forfeiture is, but generally they won’t do anything to actually stop it as soon as the word “drugs” comes up, they’re mostly on board.
The problem with that is, whenever taxation is imposed, folks put in some serious effort to dodge the tax.
It really is a kinda sport here in the USA. Just ask Steve Earle… 🙂
“I take the seed from Columbia and Mexico
I plant it up the holler down Copperhead Road
Well the D.E.A.’s got a chopper in the air
I wake up screaming like I’m back over there…”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvaEJzoaYZk
We already spent God knows how much to train the Mexican military- specifically their Spaciel Forces. You remember them as Los Zetas. The Cartel head honchos.
Oh I’m aware. We yet again face an adversary that we helped arm and train. We never seem to learn from that. I just personally think the situation is so far down the rabbit hole that the option of climbing back out went long ago. The only way out is dig through the SOB to the other side. A break up of Mexico into multiple nations could be positive result. Who knows. I don’t like it anymore than you do.
I am wholly in sympathy with the notion that one of our two major neighbor nations is in terrible shape. I think there is, though, an under-appreciation of the role US investors/corporations have played and do play in the degradation of the Mexican people.
US interests directly or through foreign trusts control a very large amount of Mexican agricultural land. We used to control their oil-rich lands. We switched to the exploitation of their factory (assembly) and other low-skill labor, and that continues.
A significant quantity of money flows out of Mexico and into offshore accounts. The facilitators of this flow, the preservation of the graft and extortion, are largely US firms including US banks and US attorneys. This has been demonstrated many times.
It isn’t a bug that we fail to break the Mexican government and push for a new arrangement, is it? It is a feature. 100 years ago fears of Bolshevism coming to the New World were key. Castro only heated up the power of US arguments for a heavy-handed government. Then came the drugs, the facilitation of drug routes to the US by leftist regimes, and the US intelligence/police agency reliance on The War on Drugs as their principal budget theme, joined to anti-terrorism. We did, after all, put the sea-borne drug traffic out of business, forcing the business into Mexican land route hands….
It seems forces are still aligned against the people, which is the price they pay, frankly, for falling into the grips of leftist propaganda so reliably, repeatedly. 1972. Students. Build the wall first. then arm the people against the state and federal forces. End of rant. US interests are still bitter about the Cuban confiscations. They are not about to encourage another round of that!
We fight in the Middle East to prop up Israel and to protect US corporate interests in the region. If there was money to be had in Mexico, they would have been a part of the republic for over 100 years.
Mexico is rich in oil. They could have a rich nation like the Persian Gulf oil countries. But mexico is even more corrupt than the worst Arab country.
Pretty well sums up the situation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48npxvVAzH8
Making drugs legal will not stop the cartels. Nor will it hurt them. The best way to help the Mexicans is to force them to return to mexico. Because of President Trump their are self-deporting by the thousands now. America has become a pressure relief valve for mexico. Forcing Mexicans to change the status in mexico is the best solution. They can start a revolution and hang their leaders from lamp posts. Mexicans need to fix mexico.
I did a lot of business in Mexico and vacationed there many times over the years. I loved Mexico and Mexicans. But that was then and this is now.
Now, every day is the Mexican version of the Mariel Boatlift, as Mexico ships its riffraff to the US by the hundreds of thousands. Let Mexico die — I don’t give a sh!t about Mexicans any more.
We should have annexed Mexico after the Mexican-American War.
My understanding of the situation is that Congress didn’t want ‘that many’ Mexicans in the country. America was getting plenty of Mexicans both from the recently annexed Texas and basically all of the southwest. Also, every state that came into the Union would have been a free state, and the southern states did not want that.
How hard would it have been to secure the border with Guatemala?
“. . . the right of the People . . .”; it’s not just for Americans anymore. I offer no simple solution; only a cry for intellectual honesty. Do we, American PotG, really believe that the the RKBA is natural? That it is endowed by our Creator? If so, then why do we suffer our governments to arm only other governments but not their subjects? The Feds license export of arms to Mexican military and police. F&F facilitated running guns down to Juarez for the Sinaloa cartel. But no campesino from Michuacan may patronize a gun shop in El Paso that he might return to defend his home and community from lawless cartels, police or military. The Feds – our elected government – forbids it! Lest guns should fall into the wrong hands.
This policy applies world-wide. We armed the Iraq military; who let its arsenals fall into the hands of the Islamic State. That was just fine; observe that IS is a legitimate state – see, that critical word is in the name. But, the Feds forbade arming Iraq’s minorities – Christians, Yazidis, Kurds – were left to be defended by their legitimate government.
Can we see what is wrong-headed about our Federal policy against arming the masses in other countries? If so, then perhaps we will see more clearly what is wrong-headed about our Federal policies against arming the People of our own country.
It isn’t the job of the American tax payer to guarantee rights to the serfs of other nations.
Build the wall and deport all Mexican nationals on our soil, even those who were born here. Nothing in Mexico is any responsibility of the American tax payer. Bring our troops home from the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Europe and use them to guard our border. Problem solved.
“Build the wall and deport all Mexican nationals on our soil, even those who were born here. Nothing in Mexico is any responsibility of the American tax payer. Bring our troops home from the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Europe and use them to guard our border. Problem solved.”
This may be news to you, Chris, but if a person of Mexican heritage is born here in the US, that person is not a Mexican national.
Sorry to burst your bubble.
A person born to Mexican citizens is a Mexican national. That’s why John McCain and Barrack Obama are American nationals no matter where they were born. So there are in fact Mexican nationals who were born here.
Now, the children of illegal immigrants born in America are most likely American citizens under the 14A. There is an argument supported by at least one respected jurist that these children would not necessarily be citizens.
“A person born to Mexican citizens is a Mexican national.”
It would seem that Mexican law differs with you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_nationality_law
“Mexican nationality entails several obligations set forth in the 31st article of the Constitution, namely:[3]
to take their children or pupils to public or private schools to receive preschool, primary and secondary education; as well as military education as and if required by the law;
to present themselves in the days and hours designated by the municipalities in which they reside to receive civic and military instruction;
to enlist and serve in the National Guard to defend the independence, territory, honor, rights and interest of the nation;
to contribute to the public expenditures through their taxes;”
Unless a person born in the US wants to do these things, that person, by law, is not a Mexican National.
You cited the duties of a Mexican national, not the requirements for nationality.
“Article 30. Mexican nationality is acquired by birth or by naturalization:
A. Mexicans by birth are:
I. Those born in the territory of the Republic, regardless of the nationality of
their parents:
II. Those born in a foreign country of Mexican parents; of a Mexican father and
a foreign mother; or of a Mexican mother and an unknown father;
III. Those born on Mexican vessels or airships, either war or merchant vessels.
B. Mexicans by naturalization are:
I. Foreigners who obtain letters of naturalization from the Secretariat of
Foreign Relations;
II. A foreign woman who marries a Mexican man and has or establishes her
domicile within the national territory.”
“Build the wall and deport all Mexican nationals on our soil, even those who were born here. ”
You’re right, I cited the duties of a Mexican national. If a person doesn’t do those duties, they ar enot Mexican nationals.
You miss the point, though: if someone is born here, they are US citizens, no matter who their parents are, or what nationality they happen to be. That’s the law. We can’t deport US citizens who are born here. That’s because there is no mechanic in place to do so, because they didn’t “come here” to become a citizen, so they have no place to “go back to.”
My point on birthright citizenship in America is that there is a reading of the constitution put forward by a respected jurist in which the law does not grant birthright citizenship. I disagree with that reading, but based on from whom I heard it put forward, I don’t just dismiss it as ridiculous.
Generally, violating/not fulfilling your duties as a citizen doesn’t revoke your citizenship. You would have to point out a specific part of the law that states that before I would agree with you. I have never studied the Mexican Constitution, so I’ll admit that I am just guessing here.
“My point on birthright citizenship in America is that there is a reading of the constitution put forward by a respected jurist in which the law does not grant birthright citizenship. I disagree with that reading, but based on from whom I heard it put forward, I don’t just dismiss it as ridiculous.
Generally, violating/not fulfilling your duties as a citizen doesn’t revoke your citizenship. You would have to point out a specific part of the law that states that before I would agree with you. I have never studied the Mexican Constitution, so I’ll admit that I am just guessing here.”
We weren’t talking about citizenship, but a person being a “Mexican national.” The two are not the same, according to Mexican law, which is why I quoted what I quoted.
Whether or not the US constitution grants citizenship to someone born here is settled; what some jurist believes isn’t really germane. I note that there are several jurists (including, obviously, some on the SCOTUS) who simply do not understand what the 2A says, too. That is a discussion held elsewhere, but it shows that jurists of all levels simply do not actually understand the laws they are asked to rule on. I say this because I’ve heard a lot of opinions about birthplace and citizenship over the last 8 years, and undoubtedly will for a lot more, but that question is already settled.
Until it isn’t, of course; I have no doubt, that in the future (hopefully, the far future, so I won’t be around for it), some court will decide that the constitution doesn’t really say what it says about that, too.
Google results for “national definition”:
“noun
1.
a citizen of a particular country, typically entitled to hold that country’s passport.”
So the terms citizen and national are generally interchangeable.
“Whether or not the US constitution grants citizenship to someone born here is settled” – citation please. Show me a Supreme Court case in which the court decided that the 14A means that the child of foreign nationals who is born in the U.S. is a citizen. Then I’ll agree it is settled law. Until then, it would be a case of first impression.
True stuff. Mexico is a $hit hole and any country where the population is disarmed is nothing but an easily accessed collection of victims. Look at Europe. The incidents is France and Briton demonstrate how stupid it is to disarm the public, and even the police. The IQ is low indeed around the world.
There are a lot of folks making money off the drug trade besides the obvious beneficiaries. Corrupt government officials, law enforcement, etc., in both Mexico and the US are on the take.
Legalizing drugs would have the same effect that legalizing alcohol after Prohibition did. It would pull the rug out from under the entire operation and eviscerate the income source for the criminals. It did not get rid of alcoholism then and would not eliminate drug addiction now, but human vices will persist in either case.
But there are too many people profiting from it in both countries for that to ever happen.
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