A drug cartel just defeated it in battle.
The situation south of the border is more serious than Washington seems to act.
23 thoughts on “The Mexican Military”
Comments are closed.
A drug cartel just defeated it in battle.
The situation south of the border is more serious than Washington seems to act.
Comments are closed.
Wasn’t it during the Bush years that more people were dying from cartel violence than people died in Iraq? And with Obama, we had a President running guns to the cartels.
Our media wont report on the goings on in Mexico but they will smear anyone who talks about it as racist.
This is totally impossible! Mexico bans assault weapons for mere citizens! Those people are perfectly safe. Must be the work of Russian operatives.
As usual the Brits have the most complete story. Looks like initially the Mexican government were going with “a routine patrol came under fire from a house”. Then they admitted they were indeed attempting to detain Guzman Jr. With a force of 35 officers, with the easily predicted result.
Two other factors further muddy the waters: one video clip shows troops and cartel gunners giving one another high-fives after the former were surrounded and neutralized.
The NYT is hilarious (admittedly the Guardian does the same thing), tying itself in pretzels attempting to state the Mexican police force is hampered because so much resource is tied down in preventing innocent refugees from peacefully entering the US. So it’s another version of Orange Man Bad.
One would think this is related. With Canadian legalization of pot there’s a huge glut of the stuff, to the point where it’s getting dumped:
Aurora Cannabis plans to expand its production capacity from 150,000 to 500,000 kilos per year by mid-2020. Canopy Growth is also on track to produce 500,000 kilos of pot per year.
Think about it… you could roll over 4 billion joints with the pot from these two companies alone. And many more pot producers will have the capacity to produce millions of kilos of pot in a year from now. The thing is, the market doesn’t need millions of kilos of pot. Pot producers are already making more pot than can ever be smoked.
Makes it tough for an honest, hard-working Mexican narco outfit to do business I suppose.
I’m not sure the cartels ever made as much money off pot as they did their other products. Maybe in the 80’s. Weed from Mexico was always inferior to stuff grown in the Sates and Canada.
The Forbes article knocks the grower for selling weed at wholesale but ignores what this means for the extracts and edibles markets. There is the old vertical/horizontal integration decisions at play. Processors of weed may like the control that comes with vertical integration but when they don’t have to focus on seed to stem, they have more resources to devote to expanding their product line, assuming buying at wholesale is cheaper than growing their own.
A lot of these weed factories do it all, so it is surprising that they would sell the excess rather than just turn it into other products. Rather than building more grow outs, they should have built a commercial kitchen.
The Guardian link was an interesting bit of speculation. Rather different take on things than the Federalist. Neither gives us a good picture of what is going on. Just another sign of how poor our media are these days.
One account by an hombre-sin-nombre has the cartel army employing armored vehicles and “heavy weapons.”
The picture I saw, however, was of two masked men with assault rifles standing in what looked to be a Dumpster. So they were either using a stationary Dumpster as a pill box, or they were using a Dumpster on a track chassis as a kind of a “technical.”
According to Wikipedia, “Technicals are not commonly used by well-funded armies that are able to procure purpose-built combat vehicles, because the soft-skinned civilian vehicles that technicals are based on do not offer very good protection to their crew and passengers.”
Are the sides of a Dumpster proof against the ammo calibers and powder loads used in arms carried by police forces?
Depending on the dumpster, it could range from 12 to 10 gage steel (a bit thicker than 1/8″ for 10 gage), or quite a bit more for the heavier solid-waste truck-bed types. To reliably stop close-range pistol rounds you’d probably need 1/4″.
But the dumpster still looks like an innocuous dumpster even if you line the inside with brick, steel, or scrap metal. Screw another piece of 1/8″ steel on the inside, spaced from the outer wall by 2x4s with gravel poured into the gap, and it should be pretty effective against most small arms fire.
But it’s probably overkill considering that the vehicle will be crewed by Mexican drug cartel members eager to prove their bravery and manhood. They don’t need no stinkin’ cover.
If these cartel “soldiers” are that brave and manly, what are they doing inside a Dumpster?
“more pot than can ever be smoked”?
Challenge accepted.
Paging Willie Nelson
The market situation for pot should have been obvious years ago when pro-pot liberals were saying marijuana taxes would pay for vast swaths of government. A weed that can grow just about anywhere, in massive quantities, will have a free-market bulk price comparable to common spices like basil, thyme, or oregano, probably $1 to $2 a pound instead of $200 to $300 an ounce.
Even at this early market stage, this past July Canada apparently harvested about 20 years worth of product and stuck it in warehouses. They’ll probably end up burning it in boilers and claiming it as a green energy tax credit. But on the bright side, it means Canadians won’t have to empty their wallets to stay high enough to keep Justin Trudeau in office.
Having recently read the news about one of the dollar chains getting fined a couple mil for selling expired meds I went through my own medicine cabinet and found myself throwing out a not insignificant quantity of Claritin and Pepsid. Is it even possible to store weed for that long? Wouldn’t its efficacy degrade to zero long before 20 years?
To find that out, we’d have to dig under the front seats of Woody Harrelson’s 1988 Toyota Corolla.
“Even at this early market stage, this past July Canada apparently harvested about 20 years worth of product and stuck it in warehouses. They’ll probably end up burning it in boilers and claiming it as a green energy tax credit. But on the bright side, it means Canadians won’t have to empty their wallets to stay high enough to keep Justin Trudeau in office.”
Also explains why I am losing my shirt on my Canadian pot stocks like Supreme Canabis.
This is why in WA, they limit the number of growers and outlawed people growing their own. A government partnered cartel creates artificial scarcity to keep prices in an acceptable range to fleece addicts of their money. It is one of the best regressive tax schemes Democrats have come up with next to punitive taxes on heating oil, alcohol, gasoline, and cigarettes.
Nothing says you care about the poor than punitive taxes that have the largest impact on poor people.
“This is why in WA, they limit the number of growers and outlawed people growing their own.”
Which should create and incentive for local “growers” to acquire their pot up in Canada “wholesale” and then sell it in the states retail. Canada gets rid of their excess supply the growers in the state can effectively expand their sales (without having to increase their onn production) and maybe my Canadian stocks will rebound.
“With Canadian legalization of pot there’s a huge glut of the stuff, to the point where it’s getting dumped”
Wonder why they just don’t sell it to the US in states where pot is legal? Of course it is likely illegal to transport it across the border.
A new Hollywood remake of “Smokey and the Bandit”?
Wait, the Smokey term may confuse viewers, particularly the ones that see police as bad guys.
I guess rewatch “The Mule”.
Democrats are totally committed to securing the border. The Syrian border. Ours, though, they don’t care about. They don’t even want to deport cartel killers.
Has it occurred to anyone (I’m pretty sure it has here) that policies allowing/encouraging those people with enough pluck and gumption to leave their homes and make their way to the US are in reality robbing these countries of the very people who most likely have what it takes to help keep their countries of origin from slipping into failed state status? What of those left behind – are they just supposed to suck it up as their homelands descend further into chaos?
Been pointing that out for years. On the second point, I had an amusing exchange with “SandSanta” at Quillette a few month back (when you could still carry on a conversation there). I proposed moving “those left behind” in Guatemala to the US (at our expense) and turning the country into a large nature preserve. Strangely (to me anyway) that particular progressive seemed to be triggered by the whole idea of “nature preserve”. Couldn’t figure it out.
I think anyplace that’s controlled by warlords in their natural state could be called a “natural preserve”. It’s not like violent humans arrived from another planet or something.
Yes. Just look at the UK; seventy years of Brain Drain has gutted the intellectual capital of the country until it really is on the verge of becoming a failed state.
Most of the people I went to university with there have emigrated since.
“Homicides in Mexico this year are on track to surpass last year’s record total of more than 29,000.”
Wow! The official FBI statistic for U.S. homicides in 2018 is 14,123. So Mexico has 5.2 times the homicide rate of the United States “despite” having only one gun store in the entire country, and some of the most onerous restrictions on the law-abiding owning firearms. Who’d have guessed those two things would go together?