California home of freebies for illegal immigrants

[*TheLeonardLeap*]

(02-06-2024, 01:06 PM)SunsetBengal Wrote: It seems like the only way to successfully cut off the drug supply, would be to show the producers another way to make a better living.  That, and well, dry up the demand for those products.  But we all have seen how successful that endeavor has been over the course of my lifetime.. 

We spent absurd amounts of money over literal decades paying Afghani farmers to grow food instead of poppies. They're right back to growing poppies. Without heavy subsidies, growing food with never pay as much as drugs.

We've also gotten to the point that countries (China, Iran) are using exporting drugs as a form of warfare. Flooding our streets with fentanyl and heroin is more cost effective for them in hurting us than pretty much anything else they could do, and still lets them keep the ability to at least pretend to be innocent rather than it being an outright and undeniable direct attack on us. Even if it ends up killing more people and destroying more communities than a bomb or missile ever could.

(02-06-2024, 01:49 PM)KillerGoose Wrote: I'm saying that I believe the only way to actually de-fang the cartels would be something that drastic. They are too large and powerful at this point for anything else to work unless I have overlooked something over the years. 

The only real way for Mexico to defeat the cartels (without us helping them in a fully fledged no-holds-barred war of eradication) would involve a lot of questionable steps that bring a lot of worldwide condemnation.

El Salvador had one of the highest murder rates in the world due to gangs at 53 per 100,000. Gangs basically ruled areas killing and kidnapping people, openly extorting people and businesses. 2 years after basically suspending a lot of their rights and turning into a "temporary" de facto military dictatorship they're down to 2.4 per 100,000. They also made a gigantic super-jail specifically for gang members and now have the highest % of their population in jail in the world.

https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2024/02/06/1226991801/el-salvador-state-of-exception

It's nothing I would ever want in the US, but it also seems to have worked for them and I guess if the alternative is you can't walk out of your house from fear of gang violence it could seem a tempting option. I have a sneaking suspicion that the measures will become permanent  and they'll slide away from democracy.

They just re-elected their president who did all this in a landslide. He's apparently very popular. He was at 83% of the vote with 70% of the vote counted, and it's not being called a Putin-83%, but an actual 83%.

Now Ecuador looks like they might be doing something similar and there's some 13 Latin American countries who have a majority of the populace open to non-Democratic government if it means cleaning up gangs and cartels...
https://www.latinobarometro.org/lat.jsp


Sadly it seems like once your problem gets past a certain level, reasonable and easily palatable solutions aren't really enough anymore. Would love for a country somewhere in the world to prove that belief wrong by solving it while still respecting rights, working within the previously outlined laws, and maintaining a strong Democracy. Just not sure how you do that when they keep corrupting government and military officials and the ones they can't corrupt they kill. Sept '20 to May '21 88 politicians either holding or running for office were killed in Mexico. That's not a reasonable solution type problem.