Josh Treviño regarding the Mexican cartels:
“It is evil Amazon, really. They’re logistic firms with small armies attached that will profit from whatever they can and increasingly take on the characteristics of insurgency.”
I think the Amazon comparison is apt, but Treviño pulls up a bit short because it’s more than just logistics. Amazon has proven to be a master of leveraging existing capabilities in order to exploit new markets. There is of course its e-commerce transformation from an online bookstore to selling just about everything under the sun. Then there was its leveraging the last-mile delivery and now using its expertise in data centers to develop AWS and enter the AI market.
The same with the Mexican cartels. What started as smuggling routes for Colombian cartels needing to send product into the US has evolved as the Mexican cartels leveraged that capability into a wide array of international supply chain services from drugs to people and avocados. In addition, the cartels have used the cash flow from those endeavors to prevent the local government from exerting sovereign control over both vast swaths of Mexico and the country’s northern border. This “liberated” geographic area then becomes the new base for launching additional products and services with foreign partners such as the Chinese and drug labs.
The focus on the Biden Administration’s refusal to defend the southern border has been on the impact of illegal immigration. However, there is also an economic dimension in that with the cartels taking over the Mexican-side of the border, the Biden Administration has allowed a parallel free-trade zone of the black-market type to emerge alongside the traditional USMCA. Just as CEMEX and Alfa leverages the USMCA and its proximity to the US market, so too do the cartels take advantage of the free-trade zone offered by the Biden Administration to enter the US. The wealth of the US market and easy entry into it spurs their growth.
The problem is the new markets that the cartels will seek to enter next, given both the cartels’ cash flow and their competencies in supply chain, violence, and political subversion. Note that these competencies are synergistic. By controlling the Mexican side of the border and the human-trafficking trade, the cartels can dictate where and when to surge “traditional migrants” in order to overwhelm the Border Patrol, forcing American law enforcement to pull resources from other border sectors. These now-lightly-guarded border sectors become prime avenues for the “gotaways” or those illegals that cannot risk contact with the Border Patrol.
New areas for growth aren’t limited to Mexico. In an ironic twist, Mexican cartels have entered the country of their former partners, Colombia, in order to largely seize control of the cocaine industry there, financed by their existing operations.
Mexico is, maybe, a couple of baby steps away from becoming a failed state on the order of Somalia. Despite all the palaver about immigration, this remained the unmentioned elephant in the room throughout the campaign. Just what happens when all the entities that wish us ill have free and unfettered access to our long, undefended, land border?
The vaguely LatinX actress Eva Longoria just announce that she was decamping, with her family, the “dystopian” U.S. and would henceforth be splitting her time between Mexico and Spain.
https://nypost.com/2024/11/14/us-news/eva-longoria-says-she-moved-her-family-out-of-dystopian-us/
I hope, for all their sake that she has been successful enough to pay for and has budgeted for such Mexican necessities as trained, armed and hopefully trustworthy personal security. Abduction for ransom has become one of the leading “services” in Mexico. While the bigger players in the field, the cartels, practice some due diligence and selectivity in choosing their “clients”, entry level practitioners may be satisfied with payoffs in the low tens of thousands of dollar range. A certain number of the clients fail to survive the acquisition process, getting caught in the cross fire between their security and the kidnappers. The ever enigmatic and fickle Mexican police mix in at random and on either side of the transactions for a bit of added uncertainty.
She has disclaimed that this exit is about Trump although she was an outspoken, minor advocate for Kamala. So assuming dystopia is code for the only other possible issue of importance, I took a quick look and discovered that abortion is limited to the first 12 weeks in Mexico and 14 in Spain. Since it’s still unlimited in California, she must be planning on taking her advocacy international.
she left crazy California, but Cartel riven Mexico of course there is a certain cursed logic, to events in Mexico, for example, the government had waged a war against largely the Sinaloa cartel in the 00s, that went disastrously wrong, there was some consolidation under Guzman Loera, but that was scuttled with his capture in 2012, the Zetas who came from the Mexican Special Forces GAFE, and the New Generation cartel, battled to seize the vaccuum now we discover in retrospect, that the Mexican Defense Minister Cervantes had been firmly in the pocket of the former group, AMLO sought a truce of sorts, that didn’t work out very well,
there is a certain circling back principle, the Federation was sort of an extention of the Medellin Cartel, even though they developed independently in the 60s and 70s
we thought then the removal of Pablo Escobar would solve the problem, but the Cali Cartel filled the vaccuum, eventually even the guerillas got a piece of the action,
Under Uribe, most accounts were settled, after his predecessors, Pastrana had surrendered to the Guerillas, Santos who had been his protege, betrayed Uribe’s enterprises, and well we find ourselves back to ground zero, with a former?? guerilla in Petro, who knows nothing of Government management,
Just what happens when all the entities that wish us ill have free and unfettered access to our long, undefended, land border?
They already do. In fact they have for decades. The real question is just why the US government allows that.
there’s another lesser noted part of this business model, Finance meaning the money wash,
which is carried by many counterparts but among the lead ones were Banamex, HSBC and Deutsch Bank, it was reputed the lesser known Banamex had laundered tens of billions, they were acquired by Citibank in 2017, they were fined a paltry 100 million, by the DOJ, curiously the year before they had rewarded the former FBI director Robert Mueller with 50 k honoraria,(was that a gratuity for not noticing Whitey Bulger’s operations in the 80s when he was deputyUS Atty) Similarly HSBC which was noted in all but name in Clavell’s Noble House, was involved in other business, curiously no officer was every prosecuted, and they paid a pittance, to keep operating, the former judge Gleason didn’t really seem to mind, an associate of Andrew Weissman from the get Gotti days, similar things can be said about Deutsche Bank which is as discriminating,
We had an interesting discussion regarding risk yesterday and part of it comes from both the perception of risk and the perceived ability to accurately calculate it. There is a folk psychology to risk, people can have intuitive sense of how and where it exists for example in certain life choices in smoking and driving. That doesn’t mean they properly act on it, but perhaps we can call that intuitive perception of risk prudence. Then there is the ability of accurately calculating risk in order to balance the trade-offs, especially in investment decisions which demands a higher degree of analysis
However there is another element of risk, which is the ability to have a conversation regarding it. We see this with the border crisis, but with in the dimension of immigration. People have an intuitive sense that allowing millions of people to walk across the border and flood the interior is a risky or just plain bad idea, but no one was willing to take that up in for a lack of a better term public discourse. That has changed in large part because we just went through an election campaign and Trump/Vance were willing to go with it and there were a number of discrete events that highlighted the risks; the murder of Laken Riley, the takeover of apartment blocks by Venezuelan gangs, and Trump/Vance highlighting the impact on local communities of dropping in thousands of people from very different cultures (see Springfield, OH) Trump has that ability to make people talk about things that have been otherwise been avoided by our so-called betters
There are other risks to throwing open the border, besides the human trafficking and crime, that aren’t being discussed. Opening up the American market to the cartels has granted them resources which they have invested in new capabilities, we don’t discuss the risks that comes with that especially when those capabilities come with controlling parts of Mexico independent of the local government. The risk is in a world that has become more hostile and countries wanting to disrupt the US and global system, to what extend are the cartels willing to offer support to such governments? In on sense they already are through fetanyl smuggling that is financed and supplied by Chinese interests and whose operations can be seen in the context irregular warfare. You would think there are limits to such cooperation, but there are still still options both lucrative to the cartels, damaging to us, and can be kept below a threshold.
Yet there is little public discussion of the risks outside of certain circles. That’s going to change because of Trump, which is part of his superpower.
As to why it isn’t discussed, a large part is due to that it distracts from the Left’s support for illegal immigration. Any focus on the dimension of the cartels involved in that immigration or acquiring new capabilities from exploiting that business is inconvenient. Another one more dark, that perhaps Trump’s buzzsaw to the Deep State might uncover, is the extend to which there is corruption/criminal activity involved on the US government part. There’s too much money involved and too little virtue in DC to think otherwise
Risk and prudence are two things we should be talking more of. Ironically risk is discussed in Left circles, climate change.
Another one more dark, that perhaps Trump’s buzzsaw to the Deep State might uncover, is the extend to which there is corruption/criminal activity involved on the US government part. There’s too much money involved and too little virtue in DC to think otherwise.
There is yet no buzzsaw cutting into the Deep State- alas- and I must note that Trump has not yet taken office. Considering how much corruption is plainly evident and how much more will quickly be found if motivated people start searching we should be lucky that some more dramatic measures to prevent him from taking office do not occur.
You don’t have tens of billions of dollars expended for EV chargers or rural broadband access which manage to produce neither without massive fraud, nor does California spend yet more billions more on a single high speed rail line which goes nowhere and is decades from possible completion without more of the same.
The country is being looted, in broad daylight- and the people with the power to stop it have been busy fighting against the guy who objects to it.
That tells me all I need to know.