“Donald Trump went on national TV last week and proposed bombing Mexico.
Asked by Fox News’s Jesse Watters if he’d consider strikes against drug cartels operating in the country, Trump said yes — and framed his answer as a threat against the Mexican government. “Mexico’s gonna have to straighten it out really fast, or the answer is absolutely,” the former president said.
This is not a one-off answer to a stray question. Trump suggested firing missiles at Mexico during his presidency, asked advisers for a “battle plan” against the cartels last year, and recently proposed sending special operators to assassinate drug kingpins. The idea of war in Mexico is popular among the Republican elite; a Trump-aligned think tank even drew up a broad-strokes plan for how such a war might work.
There is every reason to take Trump’s proposal seriously. Presidents tend to at least try to deliver on campaign promises, and they have nearly unlimited war-making power nowadays. As unthinkable as it may sound, there is a reasonable chance the United States will be at war on its southern border in the coming years if Donald Trump returns to office.”
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“This is part of a bigger pattern. If you actually look at Trump’s policy agenda, he’s called for some wild stuff: policies so extreme that, had they been proposed prior to 2016, would have defined the entire course of the campaign. Today, a few get some coverage, but mostly feel like sideshows — with policy as a category taking a backseat to personality and polling.
Recently, the lack of policy focus is partly due to a remarkably chaotic stretch of American political life. One candidate, the incumbent president, bungled his debate performance so badly that his party replaced him with his vice president. The other almost got killed on national television by a would-be assassin.
But even in more normal times this is a general problem with the media: Policy is technical and boring, while horse-race reporting is exciting and easier for audiences to grasp.
Elements of Trump’s persona also make policy reporting a lot tougher. The combination of habitual lying, flip-flopping, and personal disinterest in detail can make it tough to know what’s an actual proposal and what’s something he said just for the hell of it.”
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“Before I started writing this story, I asked my colleagues at Vox what stood out as Trump’s signature policy proposals in this election — the equivalent of “Build the Wall” in 2016. We came up with two big answers: Trump’s proposal for a general 10 percent tariff and his plan for “the largest deportation in American history.”
Each of these policies is genuinely extreme.
A 10 percent blanket tariff isn’t just putting a tax on specific imports to protect a particular industry, or to retaliate against a country like China engaging in unfair trade practices. It’s a blanket attempt to make all imports from every country, including from neighbors like Canada and allies like the European Union, 10 percent more expensive.
This is a radical shift from the way that trade policy typically works in the United States — one with huge and predictably negative implications for US consumers and the economy.
The tariffs mean that people will either buy American-made goods that cost more than their current foreign competitors, or they will keep buying foreign-made goods at a 10 percent markup. That’s inflation basically by definition: an odd proposal for a candidate running against inflation as his central issue.
The center-right Tax Foundation estimates that the tariffs would shave nearly 1 percent off of US GDP growth annually, costing roughly 684,000 jobs. This estimate did not take into account retaliation from other countries, who almost certainly would impose their own tariffs on American goods in response. A second estimate, from the centrist Peterson Institute, finds that every group of Americans — from the poorest to the wealthiest — would see drops in their annual income.
Neither of these estimates takes into account the all-but-certain retaliation from the affected countries, especially China (who Trump wants to hit with a special 60 percent across-the-board tariff).”
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“No one is exactly sure how many people are going to be targeted for deportations: Trump never sets a specific target, but often implies he’s going to deport every undocumented immigrant in the United States (there are currently around 11 million). A group of four NBC reporters tried to figure out how deporting so many people was supposed to work, and ended up concluding that it was such a break with the way immigration enforcement typically works that it was near-impossible to grasp the scope of the effort.
Typically, police don’t go out looking for undocumented migrants currently residing in the United States. They find them by accident, during a traffic stop or criminal arrest, and then discover that they are undocumented and notify ICE to begin deportation. Targeted enforcement raids happen, but they’re comparatively rare and make up only a fraction of annual deportations.
For Trump’s “mass deportation” policy to work, he would need to devote extraordinary resources — state, federal, and local — to finding and apprehending undocumented immigrants. Once found, they still pose a massive logistical challenge: current law does not allow ICE to deport longstanding US residents without a hearing (or the migrant’s consent), posing a huge burden on the legal system. The government would also need to figure out the travel logistics for deportation, including negotiating with home countries that might not be very happy to receive large numbers of functional refugees.
During all of this, the US government would need to house millions of people — which ICE currently lacks the capacity to do. Hence the now-infamous Trump proposals for keeping detained immigrants in camps: there’s literally nowhere else to put them while they await deportation.
All of this is not only a human rights disaster, but an economic and law enforcement one. The cost of devoting police and judicial resources to this task, in terms of trade-offs with addressing actual crime, would be significant. So too would be the financial cost of building immigrant camps and providing them with food and medical care.
Removing so many people from the workforce would also be inflationary, far outweighing any (questionable) increase in wages for native-born workers. One estimate suggests that, all told, mass deportations would cost the American economy $4.7 trillion over a 10-year period.
The point, in short, is that Trump is proposing sweeping changes to the way the US economy and legal system operates — ones with consequences for every American — and we’re barely even talking about what they would mean.”
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“there’s a difference between Trump’s random utterances, or what he might do about some obscure policy issue, and his consistent instincts on the issues central to his political identity — like trade and the southern border. And there, he could not be clearer: across-the-board tariff, mass deportation, and waging war on the drug cartels.
Even if we set aside everything else we know (or think we know) about what Trump would do, these three items alone would have the potential to transform life in America as we know it. It’s time to start covering Trump like he means what he says.”
https://www.vox.com/policy/363146/trump-policy-war-mexico-trade-deportation-border
“The cartels are now engaged in activities that make control over territory and local authorities a business imperative. Politicians and policemen are reluctant to stand up to them or are in their pockets. That helps explain why the Catholic Church stepped in to end the violence here. And Chilpancingo is the seat of the regional government, on the surface at least with the evident trappings of state authority. In the more remote hills around here and down to the Pacific coast around Acapulco, there are places run fully by the cartels. In nine municipalities they pick the mayor and police chiefs, according to a local security consultant who, out of fear for his safety, insisted we not use his name. Resistance is dangerous. Two years ago, in San Miguel Totolapan, the mayor and 20 other people were gunned down at his house and the town hall after defying a local cartel.
“The gangs love territorial control,” says Eduardo Guerrero, a former senior government security official who runs a consulting business. “You can do many kinds of business once you control territory. They seek political support. They intervene in elections aggressively. At the local level, we are losing sovereignty.””
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“Mexico’s criminal networks and their ability to whittle away at state power here present a national security threat to both Mexico and the U.S. These groups are growing in sophistication, corrupting state institutions and people, arming up and seeping into communities on both sides of the border. They pose a challenge to Mexico’s still fledgling democracy, at the federal level just 24 years old, and hence the stability of America’s southern neighbor. They have enabled a record number of migrants, mostly from other countries, to get north through Mexico. They’re responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in both countries. Some 26 per 100,000 people are killed in Mexico every year, the highest homicide rate among the world’s larger countries. Fentanyl, recently the most lucrative drug that the Mexican criminal groups traffic into the U.S., is responsible for the deaths of some 70,000 Americans every year.
Seen through the prism of violence there and its impact on the U.S., Mexico is the rich Afghanistan next door, a place where the central authorities have lost control over key territory to armed groups. Imagine if al Qaeda were killing that many Americans? “It may be the most important national security issue facing America, with the least amount of attention,” says Hank Crumpton, who ran the CIA’s covert operations in Afghanistan after 9/11 and works in security out of Texas. “I think of [the cartels] as enemies that exhibit in structure and behavior the same characteristics of terrorist networks and of an insurgency.”
Mexico’s narco-state problem matters for larger strategic reasons. Security is the biggest hurdle to Mexico fully becoming part of North America in more than a geographic sense — an economic and demographic engine for the region, and a strong and stable American ally in the global competition against China.
This more hopeful vision of Mexico can give you whiplash. The country is a daily contradiction. But put aside preconceptions and look even more closely at Mexico. The last couple decades have brought stunning violence — and stunning economic gains.”
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“If there was an easy solution, it would’ve been tried by now. The security expert Eduardo Guerrero, like some other experts on both sides of the border, says the Mexican authorities alone can’t handle the challenge from the cartels. “If we don’t stop them they will take over several key Mexican states at this rate,” he says. “We need help. We aren’t able to control these groups alone.”
Some polls in Mexico show support for U.S. help, including even the deployment of troops, which won’t be politically workable with the current government. Its critics are trying to nudge the option on the table.
What’s indisputable is that this isn’t only the Mexicans’ problem.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/06/01/us-mexico-border-drugs-immigration-00160725
“Ecuador, according to its president Daniel Noboa, is now “in a state of war.” Earlier this week he had announced a state of emergency after the leader of one of the country’s top two gangs escaped from prison. The following day, armed gang members stormed the TC Television news program, broadcasting their hostage-taking and violence live to make an announcement of their own.
It was far from the only act of shocking violence the country has suffered this week.
In what appeared to be a coordinated campaign Tuesday — and one with a brazenness that recalled Mexico’s cartels in the mid-2010s, or worse — armed men stormed hospitals, businesses, and universities. Prisons were taken over in violent riots, bombs were set off in multiple locations, and police and prison guards were kidnapped and murdered. At least 10 people were killed in gang attacks, including police, and over a hundred prison staff were taken hostage.
It may seem like an inexplicable turn for Ecuador, a country that many experts, including Felipe Botero, a program head at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, told Vox used to be an “island of peace” in an often-troubled region.
But this turn to violence in an upper-middle-income country of 18 million didn’t happen overnight.
While there are factors that accelerated a spike in crime over the last couple of years, experts say this is a story nearly a decade in the making. Ecuador’s security crisis is the product of years of growing impunity enjoyed by gangs, the influence of transnational crime groups, shifts in global cocaine consumption, and, above all, increasing institutional corruption.
That means even with President Noboa’s promised military crackdown, this chaos won’t be solved overnight.”
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2024/1/11/24034891/ecuador-drugs-cocaine-cartels-violence-murder-daniel-naboa-columbia-crime
“As Cato Institute Policy Analyst Daniel Raisbeck has written for Reason, Plan Colombia’s aid did initially “help the Colombian military to severely weaken the once-formidable [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)]. But Plan Colombia’s anti-narcotics element was an unqualified failure.” Per Raisbeck:
“By 2006, “coca cultivation and cocaine production levels (had) increased by about 15 and 4 percent, respectively.” In 2019, there were more hectares cultivated with coca leaf in Colombia (212,000) than two decades earlier (160,000).
The so-called FARC “dissidents,” thousands of fighters who did not demobilize in 2016, still control large swathes of the cocaine business. They wage constant combat over production areas and export routes against other guerrilla groups and criminal organizations, including several with links to Mexican drug cartels.”
American counternarcotics efforts yielded similarly bad results in Afghanistan. The U.S. spent about $9 billion to tackle Afghanistan’s opium and heroin production, only for the effort to be “perhaps the most feckless” of “all the failures in Afghanistan,” according to The Washington Post’s analysis of confidential government interviews and documents. By 2018, Afghan farmers were growing poppies on four times as much land as they were in 2002. Operation Iron Tempest, meant to cripple Afghanistan’s opium production labs, folded within a year. “Many of the suspected labs turned out to be empty, mud-walled compounds,” noted the Post.
The war on drugs has helped turn Latin America into the most violent region in the world. Criminalization has led to the proliferation of black market activity, a boom in many countries’ prison populations, and increased corruption across Latin America. It’s also contributed to a huge number of homicides: At least half of the violent deaths in Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, and Venezuela are estimated to be drug-related, according to the World Economic Forum.
Despite those failures, many Republicans still want to use war on terror tactics to fight Mexican cartels.”
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“The increase in overdose deaths among Americans is tragic and obviously a problem. It isn’t one that will be solved by fighting the war on drugs just a little bit harder. It certainly isn’t one that will be solved by bombing a neighboring country against its wishes, risking further escalation. It requires being realistic about the policies that have made drug use more dangerous. “That starts with bipartisan support for prohibition,” writes Reason’s Jacob Sullum, “which creates a black market where the quality and potency of drugs are highly variable and unpredictable.”
Simply stopping the supply of drugs into the country is an impossible task, as decades of prohibition show. Republicans would be far better off embracing harm-reduction strategies rather than pushing for another episode of military adventurism that is destined to fail.”
I used to support legalizing all drugs. Then the opioid epidemic happened. German Lopez. 2017 9 12. Vox. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/20/15328384/opioid-epidemic-drug-legalization Dopesick Reinforces These Pernicious Misconceptions About Opioids, Addiction, and Pain Treatment Jacob Sullum. 2021 11 17. Reason. Two Courts Debunk Widely Accepted Opioid
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“The bulk of the illegal synthetic opioids that reach the U.S. are sourced in China by Mexico’s Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels. They buy from legitimate and illicit Chinese suppliers through “purchases made on the open market, smuggling chemicals hidden in legitimate commercial shipments,” the 2020 DEA National Drug Threat Assessment noted.
Successful bilateral cooperation in combating the fentanyl flow peaked in May 2019 when Xi responded to U.S. pressure by making all forms of fentanyl subject to production controls and anti-trafficking measures. That prompted a drastic reduction in direct shipments of fentanyl and related compounds from China.
But Mexican cartels and their Chinese suppliers quickly pivoted to the export and processing of unregulated chemicals that can be processed into synthetic opioids. The Chinese government moved to block that trade in June by adding six fentanyl precursor chemicals to the list of substances requiring government approval. Chinese suppliers responded by marketing the unregulated raw materials for precursors.
“Drug trafficking organizations adapted to the PRC’s [regulatory controls] of all fentanyl-related substances, and now appear to have increased the purchase of fentanyl precursors from the PRC to manufacture fentanyl in Mexico, indicating a pronounced shift in how fentanyl is trafficked into the United States,” a State Department spokesperson told POLITICO.
The response from Chinese chemical producers and exporters underscores the challenges of regulatory fixes that don’t keep up with the ability of the industry to skirt those laws.
“[Chinese suppliers] are acting like water, they’re just finding the gaps and cracks in the law,” said Bryce Pardo, drug policy researcher at RAND Corp. “They have gone on to [synthetic opioid component chemicals] that are used in all sorts of other medications and other commercial applications that can never be controlled because it would be way too burdensome for industry and genuine consumption purposes to control these other kinds of chemicals.”
On the Hill, China’s role as a drug chemical supplier for illicit synthetic opioids has become a political lightning rod, particularly for lawmakers from states such as Ohio that are suffering soaring increases in synthetic opioid-related overdose deaths.”
“When the Mexican legislature meets this fall, it is poised to pass a marijuana legalization bill. The legislation will legalize cannabis for all uses—recreational, medical, industrial—and will create a Mexican Cannabis Institute to grant licenses for the cultivation, processing, sale, import, export, and research of marijuana. The country’s president and ruling political party have both endorsed the initiative, and it has already been approved by three Senate committees.
The bill’s backers hope it will curb the influence of Mexico’s drug cartels. Marijuana accounts for upwards of half of the cartels’ revenues, which are estimated to range between $20 and $50 billion dollars annually.
The past year has been the bloodiest yet in Mexico’s war against the cartels. When security forces in the city of Culiacan tried to arrest the son of drug lord El Chapo Guzmán in October 2019, they found themselves outnumbered and outgunned by the Sinaloa Cartel. In June, gangsters ambushed Mexico City’s police chief with 400 rounds of ammunition from semi-automatic rifles; in July, cartel gunmen massacred 26 residents of a drug rehab center in Guanajuato.
In the past decade, Mexico has suffered 250,000 homicides because of the drug war. Whole swaths of the country are now controlled by organized crime, including the states of Guerrero, Michoacan, Morelos, and Tamaulipas. The Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) has killed more than 100 officials in the state of Jalisco alone, including federal, state, and local policemen, soldiers, mayors, and city council members. In June, it killed a federal judge and his wife. A U.S. Army Intelligence report estimates that over a six-year period, 150,000 of the Mexican army’s 250,000 soldiers deserted, finding higher wages in the drug industry.”
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“When Prohibition ended in 1933, so did much of the criminal violence that haunted the United States during the Prohibition era. Latin Americans have good reason to think the same thing will happen in their countries if they end narco-prohibition.”