• Nuke_the_whales@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Trump is an idiot but I’ve always wondered why the u.s and mexico don’t join up and use the same force on cartels that they do on middle Eastern militants. If they went after cartels the way they do jihadists across the planet, there wouldn’t be cartels left

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          It’s easier to fight a gang than an ideology.

          When Bush first went into Iraq, he described it as a Crusade. For some crazy reason, people in the Arab world weren’t thrilled with this language.

        • Olgratin_Magmatoe@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          Not really. Just as killing a person doesn’t kill an ideology, killing a person also doesn’t kill the profit motives for cartels.

          If anything it makes the problem worse. Because you’ve suddenly freed up territory in a very lucrative black market.

          The solution to the drug problem is to instead kill the motivations people have for doing the drugs in the first place:

          https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/what-does-rat-park-teach-us-about-addiction

          This means fixing the housing crisis, guaranteeing people jobs, food, water, shelter, and medical support. It means embracing harm reduction policy. It means ending the war on drugs.

          Drug use is a symptom of an unhealthy society. Fix the health of society and the symptoms will disappear, and with it the cartels as well.

    • PugJesus@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      We’ve lent Mexico military assistance before. The issue is that the cartels spring from a fundamental lack of control and governance in the areas in question, which means that foreign military means simply can’t fix the problem. At best, it can suppress open symptoms for a few years.