More than 170 attacks have been committed against politicians in the lead-up to the June elections. This violence has put campaigns under tension and is sowing doubts about governability in several regions. Specialists warn that the line between the Mexican state and organized crime is increasingly blurred
Electoral violence is going unchecked in Mexico. Noé Ramos Ferretiz, a candidate for the municipal presidency of Mante, a city in the state of Tamaulipas, was campaigning last Friday when he was stabbed several times. The politician, who is a member of the National Action Party (PAN), died in the middle of the event, to the shock of his supporters. Overwhelming images of blood-stained leaflets circulated afterwards.
The main suspect fled without a trace, in broad daylight. He would be arrested by the end of the weekend. Hours after the crime in Mante, the body of Alberto Antonio García, a mayoral candidate for the ruling party, MORENA, was found in the city of San José Independencia, in the state of Oaxaca. His wife, a councilor in the town of fewer than 5,000 inhabitants, was released alive after being kidnapped for two days.
The murders of Ramos Ferretiz and Antonio García are the latest two cases to be registered during the 2024 electoral process. So far in this election cycle, 30 candidates have already been murdered, according to data from the think tank Laboratorio Electoral (“Electoral Laboratory”).
The problem is systemic. You kill one cartel, another one pops up. It’s because there’s a demand for their products. Get rid of the demand and you’ll dry up the supply. Do it in a smart way, not by destroying people’s lives which inevitably throws them back in the cartels’ hands.
I bet it isn’t all sunshine and roses but hasn’t El Salvador quite a bit of success by going absolutely crazy against the cartels?
Well, last time I checked El Salvador was 93 times smaller than Mexico. Besides that, the cartels are part of the civilian population, hiding in civilian dense areas. Do you really recommend Mexico going scorched earth on their own people or what? Are you also aware of the dire human rights violations in El Salvador? When all you’ve got is a hammer everything starts looking like a nail.
Unfortunately, that’s what’s necessary when you let your nation be run by gangbangers.
There is no perfect solution when things get this bad. At some point, they’ll have to ask themselves if it’s preferable to live under gang members who rape their children as intimidation, or take a more heavy-handed approach like El Salvador so they don’t have to live in fear.
Results speak louder than any ideology. Right now, El Salvador’s results are something Mexico should be learning from.
I don’t think they will, though.
Oh, how nice that you’re okay with killing innocents from another nation in the process because your country is drug thirsty and can’t get its shit together.
I’m fine with new ones, less skilled, popping up till we kill the lot of them. It’s better than doing nothing and appeasing them.
And how would you implement such a thing? Sure, on the internet it sounds all nice and dandy, but we don’t live in lala land. How do you separate civilians from the cartel when most of these cartels exist in populated civilian areas? Do you want the military to go scorched earth on the civilian population or what? Or do you create a police state to deal with the fact that the state is too incompetent to give people actual opportunities so they don’t end up making drugs for a living?
How about you give people in Mexico proper financial opportunities so they don’t have to grow crops for drugs to feed themselves and their families? And on the other end, how about you deal with mass homelessness and poverty in the US so people don’t have to take drugs to cope with their situations? How about not incarcerating every single drug user, then throwing them on the streets after spending 5 years in prison around actual criminals, and then wondering why they go straight up back to using drugs?
These “opinions” are just armchair expert discussions. If it was that easy to deal with this shit, it would’ve been solved a long time ago.
I’ve been around long enough to know that your pie in the sky version of fixing things through social programs is NEVER going to happen. Ever. So your solution equals doing nothing. Not to mention that people are forced to grow cartel crops, it has nothing to do with programs. No social assistance is gonna counter a guy with a gun to your family.
Go to the homes of known cartel leaders and drop precision missiles right up their ass and tell me it wouldn’t be effective in ridding the world of a cartel leader. One will take his place? Sure, take him out too, they’ll replace them with even less competent leaders till they’re nothing but a street gang. Go ask el Salvador how they’ve fixed their gang problem and dropped crime by 95%. Ask them if it was hugs and social help, or brute force.
You should watch less action movies
I can assure you that there are regions within the European Union where people are even less poor and not trying anything criminal to get rich. I’m referring to parts of Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and southern Italy.
Not to mention Third-Party-Members like Albania, Moldovia, Bosnia or Macedonia who are partially Third-World-Nations.
You won’t find poppy plants there. And while there is some organized crime - surely more than north of these countries - they are more or less under control and operate in the shadows.
But then the EU is also relaxed about giving work visas. Lots of people from those nations do some seasonal work within the EU, earning good money. We have all sorts of Ukrainians, Albaniens and even Tunesiens around Germany doing such jobs. Usually they earn enough money within two years to return home and start a family and a business.
I’m Romanian. I’ve also been to Mexico. I highly suspect that you have no clue what you’re talking about. The poverty in Mexico is a lot worse than in any part of Romania. Besides that, being poor in Romania means getting a job 50km away from your village, in the next city at most. Jobs are fairly easily accessible.
Are you also aware that Albania has the most drug traffickers in Europe? They import pretty much all the heroin here.
If you are living in Romania you might also remember how life was there 20-50 years ago. The stories my buddy told me about his time over there are… wow. The story how his Grandpa as a major of a small village during communism stole enough money from the communist party until he could bribe his way to the West - and actually nobody minded him stealing like 90% of all money going to his village… In the late 1990ths my buddy was robbed at gun point twice. By Highway-Police. When he invited his Uncle to a good restaurant in the capital the simple farmer didn’t dare to step through the door because “I am not worthy”… Nowadays… it is a lot more relaxed. Not perfect but the really big shit is gone. Still he thinks most Romanian youngsters are kinda crazy but most Europeans are, just in a different way. And the tourist regions are actually quite nice.
The Albanian Government ist pretty well aware of their lack of control and gave full control over shipping lanes to FRONTEX around ten years ago.
That by the way is the main reason nowadays drugs mostly arrive in Rotterdam again. Easier to hide between millions of metric tons of cargo than in a single fishing boat.
Gun point robberies are no longer a thing in Romania nowadays. Do you think we drone striked those that did that or do you think that by giving people better opportunities they just stopped doing that shit?
Besides that, I think life was okay back during communism if you lived in the city. People had jobs, crime was low. Most crime came after the revolution after the entire country was deindustrialized and people had no opportunities left to make a living.
My buddy said the police really laid Ambushes for the corrupt cops and the arrests sometimes escalated. So, well, they didn’t got struck down by a drone but they really were at risk of getting taken out by 5.54mm bullets. Sure not everyone was corrupt and violent but still quite a lot.
If you say violent crime was low I am gonna believe that. Corruption and theft though were everywhere in the Eastern Block really bad, I know it myself from my visits in East Germany and Czechoslovakia and the simple casualness everybody took possession of government property was insane. A fellow of my uncle build his whole house in East Germany with stuff people he stole from the communist government. It was straight forward insane. Violence on the other hand was rather low and mostly because the cops were not shy about getting very violent you up just because they could. I remember when two border guards beat up a class mate in Berlin in 1989 because he had long hair. He stood in a queue waiting for being checked, the two border guards walked by, grabbed him, punched him a couple of times and send him back into the queue. My whole class was starring like “WTF what just happened”…
I know at least two Soviet/Russian Vehicles in my Munich neighbourhood straight forward stolen from the Soviets/Russia. One 60 year old Ural Truck which an East German buddy used to flee from Iraq in the 1980th to West Germany, another also pretty old GAZ used by a team of Russian soldiers fleeing from Ukraine through Turkey to Munich last Year.
While I once have been in Communist Romania it was during a holiday when I was eight and in a fenced hotel area. I can only remember it was kinda boring because no kids of my age were around. I should definitely visit the place again when I do my Europe tour after retiring, I guess it changed a lot.
That sounds crazy. While I am too young to have experienced such things in the 90s after the revolution, my parents, grandparents, and older friends never mentioned any of that. And I do talk extensively to people about the times before and after the revolution. Not even once have such things been ever mentioned and I can’t find much of any of that in any archives.
I do have friends from the ex soviet block (Ukraine, Repulic of Moldavia) and they indeed had a lot of gun violence, I even met people that have been shot or have had family members shot, but that was never the case in Romania. No shootings or any of those things. Hell, even nowadays Romania has less gun violence (and guns altogether) than pretty much any other country in all of Europe.
Stealing government property? Sure, but people do that even nowadays. Systemic corruption stems from the lack of opportunities and checks and balances. But again, comparing any of that to Mexico is straight up bonkers to me. Most crime is very petty crime. Like stealing minor things. Most people just get a job in the city and go on with their lives.
El Salvador is doing a great job of cleaning up a way worse gang problem.
The results speak for themselves.