Astonishing how a bunch of foreigners could be so moved by a four-cent increase in metro fares in another country, isn't it?
Elsewhere (H/T: Instapundit), I read this morning a shocking account of how a cartel military force in the city of Culiacán, the capital of the Mexican state of Sinaloa, forced the national government to free one of the sons of "El Chapo" who had been captured by security forces (another one managed his own escape, also with the assistance of highly trained cartel "troops"). Lots of fascinating insights in the article, for example:
“Drug War” is a misnomer for reasons the Culiacán battle lays bare. This is not a mafia-type problem, nor one comprehensible within the framework of law enforcement and crime. This is something very much like an insurgency now—think of the eruption of armed resistance in Culiacán in 2019 as something like that in Sadr City in 2004—and also something completely like state collapse. The cartels may be the proximate drivers but they are symptoms. Underlying them is a miasma of official corruption, popular alienation, and localist resentments—and underlying all that is a low-trust civil society stripped of the mediating mechanisms that make peaceable democracy both feasible and attractive.I'm seeing very little in the mainstream press about either the riots in Chile or the insurrection in Mexico. I guess President Trunp's Tweets and Nancy Pelosi's temper tantrums are simply more newsworthy.
Note as an aside that the cartels are not even necessarily drug-trafficking-specific entities. There have been ferocious and bloody cartel battles—against one another, against the state—for control of economic interests ranging from port operations to the avocado crop to lime exports. Illegal drugs supercharge their resources and ambitions, but absent them and that illegality they would simply assume another form.
5 comments:
I don't agree with Berlisnki's schtick though, which colors her interpretation. It's a kind of hysterical paranoia, she claims that without the US standing guard everywhere 'we're doomed'.
I have similar qualifications as her (except I dropped out of PhD as it seemed useless) - she specialised in Turkey, me in India and China. Yet there are simple things about Turkey she misses: both modern Turkey and India were ruled by a liberal modernist elite but now democracy and mass education have moved power away from elites to the rural masses, peasants who are more religious (Islam in Turk, Hindu in India). So we get 'right wing' religious democratically elected nationalism. This was inevitable, not something to start screaming about as she does. As everywhere, 'civil state' has to have some roots in the local culture, otherwise it is tyranny. She imagines the opposite.
"not a mafia-type problem" - again she misses the point that the 'mafia' were successful because for centuries they were an efficient form of local government. See how she works herself into a tizzy over something natural and pretty normal in the long view? The mafia *were* the 'civil state' not some foreign imposition.
No surprise that Chile is being invaded by foreign agitators -- the commies can't get the natives to sign up for tyranny, so they bring paid thugs.
The failed state of Mexico is surrendering to the cartels after outright combat operations by the cartels.
And the democrats are shrieking about Syria and Turkey. They want to take away combat forces from our border, it seems. Imagine that.
Something we can't see is going on in Mexico. I saw a picture of an armored 1 ton pickup with a 50 cal mounted in the bed. A compact car swerved and collided with it. All the guys in the truck ended up dead. That doesn't sound like Mexican military or police action to me. If that's what happened, who ever was in the car was ballsy and competent.
There's 50 years of Cartel supremacy in Culiaco, just browsing Wikipedia. What were the Mexican police thinking, holding the leader's son in a suburban house?
I'd call that cartel a separatist movement with a hold on territory. But that should have been pretty obvious for 50 years. You don't send police into enemy territory.
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