from Hacker News

Why Did a Drug Gang Kill 43 Students? Text Messages Hold Clues

by elijahparker on 9/3/23, 2:08 AM with 100 comments

  • by spaceman_2020 on 9/3/23, 5:50 AM

    I 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?

  • by MaxfordAndSons on 9/3/23, 5:40 AM

    Something 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.

  • by walterbell on 9/3/23, 4:23 AM

    HN ranking history for this thread: https://hnrankings.info/37367115/

  • by MrDunham on 9/3/23, 2:51 AM

  • by hackermailman on 9/3/23, 3:32 AM

    borderland 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.

  • by jdkee on 9/3/23, 3:13 AM

    Perhaps we should end the fifty years long "War on Some Drugs" in the US that funds the cartels.

  • by walterbell on 9/3/23, 3:17 AM

    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.