Used to date a girl from Honduras (Tegucigalpa), and heard some real horror stories about the day-to-day crime. One day a gang knocked on her parents door (they owned an apartment) and pretty much gave them a 2-day notice to get out.
They packed their stuff, and left. Their senior neighbor did not - she ended up getting killed. Apparently gangs like that just seize apartments, and use them for criminal activities (prostitution, drugs, kidnappings, torture/executions, etc.).
Her parents eventually managed to get to the US, but her uncle died on the way - victim of some kidnapping scheme, where gangs/cartels snatch up immigrants on the way, and blackmail their families in the target countries.
Suffice to say, we never visited Honduras - but it's pretty surreal to know that this is the everyday stuff a lot of people go through, in Central America. One day everything is normal, the next day you're a refugee, just like that - and there's no justice in sight, because that would mean getting yourself or your family killed.
It's worth mentioning that the violence in Honduras is, in no small part, part of the US State Department's bipartisan foreign policy from which we benefit. Fast fashion, which Americans consume, is enabled by the precarious situations we've foist upon the Hondurans by destabilizing their government, and installing leadership sympathetic to our colonial interests. Your ex-girlfriend's uncle died for my t-shirt.
> Ten years ago, on June 28, 2009, a general trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas arrived with troops at the home of the president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, and forced him at gunpoint onto a plane bound for Costa Rica. An interim president was appointed by his political opponents who was quickly legitimized by United States.
— [The Hill](0)
> There was a 1950s-style coup in Honduras in 2009 backed by the government of the United States, and things appear to have been unremittingly messed up ever since. Let me emphasize this one more time. If Honduras is in shambles, it is not because Hondurans are any less resourceful or fundamentally decent than anyone else, or even because its rulers are any more wretched and callous than our own. It is because the structure of the North American economy has made any other outcome impossible.
— [No Wall They Can Build](1)
Something I find interesting is how we get bombarded all the time about the bad conditions in Venezuela, but we heard very little about, for instance, Honduras and El Salvador.
Various US Army academies and schools are broadly open to members of the military in the United States’ allies. It’s like saying the general when to an American university—that doesn’t imply any American endorsement of his actions.
At least in El Salvador, things are getting better.
The Salvadoran president, Najib Bukele, a 39 year old businessman is effectively controlling gang activity. He is a pretty cool guy, and serves his country without collecting his salary.
Gangs in Central America extort people with jobs, so that in the end it's too inconvenient to have a job, and more convenient to be a gangster. If you have a honest job, some random armed guy shows up to collect most of your money.
It's a self-reinforcing phonomenon that kills the economy and turns everyone into gangsters.
Left the US(A) in early 2019 for this exact reason (SFBay) after 18 years. Now back in my native Iceland comfortably retiring. And kids no longer need to practice for active shooter situations at school. And I don't worry that a trigger happy cop gets too excited at traffic stop either.
Me too, which is "funny" when it comes up in conversations, because people assume you left to earn more money, and then you tell them that you actually earned more in Brazil than you do now, but you have the constant fear of random violence.
As someone who is from the US but lives in a poor country, it's hard to imagine what it would be like to take the already dire situations of place like this and then add in 2-3x the drug trafficking violence compared to the US.
Legalizing most recreational drugs around the world is absolutely imperative! If it is not done sooner than later then the largest drug trafficking organizations will be so entrenched that it may become impossible.
Many lives would be saved if these drugs could be purchased in consistent doses with standardized labeling and packaging.
Legalizing recreational drugs may help, but it won't solve the problem; hard drugs are still a thing, the cocaine trade is booming (read an article that the amount of cocaine intercepted in the Rotterdam port has gone up 10x in the past three years, and that's just the stuff they catch; wouldn't be surprised if that represents only 10% of what comes in. The article mentioned that the interception doesn't seem to have any effect on the 'street price').
If for example the US manages to somehow curb the drug crisis, they'll find other buyers easily. Or switch to other products in demand, like insulin.
If the drugs become legal who do you think will be making and distributing them in the US? The same cartels and criminal organizations who traffic drugs today.
The end users will have a different experience but selling and trafficking drugs will remain illegal.
Important to note that her own cousins helped set up the kidnapping and there is no drug transaction or service mentioned. Was done purely for money. Also, this isn’t a story about just one event. A much broader story is laid out. A quick search shows ~1300 confirmed kidnappings per year with 70000 reported missing. A kidnapping ending in death may just get reported as a murder. These numbers indicate a systemic problem.
So much that it is a consumer industry now:
“To pay the first ransom, Mrs. Rodríguez’s family took out a loan from a bank that offered lines of credit for such payments.”
I find this style of storytelling dizzying. As a non-native english user, the interleaving of narrative confuses me. Is it a desired style of journaling?
I recall reading an article on HN the other day which revealed there's even an insurance policy against ransom kidnappings, and that there are companies specializing in dealing with them - particularly, in business settings, they'd pay off the kidnappers and then bill your company for "consulting" (this is so that your company doesn't look like it's supporting organized crime by paying ransom).
What alternative would you prefer? Not giving any loan at all for people in such circuimstances? Or give out money for free to anyone who pretends to be in this situation?
> Legalise the drugs and allow legal production - and the cartels will have to find an honest way to make a living like the rest of us have to do.
This is magical thinking. Organized crime can make money in other ways. This story is about kidnapping, for example. Organized crime exists in many places where it’s not funded by drug trade.
You serious think that taking away the stream of income that has put trillions of usd in the hands of cartels / organized crime won't have a huge impact?
> Organized crime exists in many places where it’s not funded by drug trade.
Organized crime will likely never truly go away, but it has flourished because of the war on drugs (just as it did in America during the prohibition era).
But if organized crime didn't have the resources to buy off the government, military, and police wholesale the magnitude of the problem would be much smaller.
Organized crime can make money in other ways, but fundamentally it profits from regulatory and legal arbitrage: the difference between what is in demand and what is legal to supply. Decriminalization directly attacks the fundamentals of that arbitrage, whether it's drugs or prostitution, or more prosaic like fuel taxes or tobacco duty (smuggling both has been a source of funding for IRA in Northern Ireland, historically).
Kidnapping is more of a capital arbitrage situation. I don't think it scales like drugs. For it to be really worthwhile, it relies on people with a lot of capital coming into the area. If you scale up kidnapping, people simply don't come, or invest a lot more in security.
None of these has the absurd profit spans of drugs, though. You need about ~600-800 US$ worth of raw coca leafs to produce 1kg base cocaine (https://www.businessinsider.com/from-colombia-to-new-york-ci...) - and make ~25-27k US$ once it's on US streets. A vertical cartel that controls everything from the leaves to the sellers can capture all that 41.000% profit margin for themselves!
When the biggest markets US and EU "dry up" for illegal sales of cocaine, the gangs literally don't have anyone any more to extort for money - the population of South America is dirt poor. And also, they can't afford running militia that are more capable than some nations' armies or bribing the utter majority of the political class any more once these tasty US dollars vanish.
Given that, according to your profile, you're an appellate lawyer, and the more crime there is, the more work there is for lawyers generally (though maybe not for you personally) that seems like an instance of
>“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Sugar and opioids are also legal, legality doesn't solve everything, it's also up to the consumers and the regulator to work on better ways to consume those products.
You would need to regulate doses, make sure it's not coupled with other substances to reduce ill effects on consumers, which isn't easy. It's obviously better than letting cartels thrive, of course, but legalizing drugs isn't a silver bullet, it's also a lot of work.
Remember how prohibition went into action: women were tired of their drunk husbands.
But isn't aren't drugs de-facto legal in Mexico anyway? The cartels are thought to control the police, judges and politicians enough that they do not fear the rule of law much. If drugs were legalized in Mexico, wouldn't the cartels do what cartels do anyway and prevent everyone else from producing?
Or do you mean make it legal at the destination - the US?
The issue is deeper. War on drugs has created many little cartels, many of them don't make much money off of transporting drugs to USA. These local criminal gangs are there to extort money from businesses, kidnapping, selling drugs locally.
When PRI was in power, politicians and plaza bosses had mutual understanding: "you can transport drugs, but don't mess with locals who have no connection with drugs". Whenever USA tries to get rid of a kingpin, it will create more splinter factions, whose only way to fund themselves by kidnapping, ransoms, extortions, etc.
The solution is to use the Rico law to prosecute everyone involved all at once as a gang instead of one person at a time. It worked successfully on the 5 mob families of New York.
Really? I consider it one of the three worst films I've seen: just a celebration of excessive violence and gratuitous avoidance of due process/checks and balances, made to seem defensible only because of unrealistic movie-protagonist ultracompetence. It's a worse case of Tom Clancy syndrome than the man himself ever did.
As someone who has been living in Mexico for a couple of years now to save money, these types of stories terrify me.
I am seriously thinking of moving back to the United States. The only problem is that I cannot really afford to live there.
I have some unresolved health issues and for many years have been working exclusively online because I could not handle commuting. But for me it has not been easy to find high-paying programming jobs online. There are just many more low-paying contracts and often I run out of money before I find a high-paying one which seems like it will have a workload that's manageable for me.
So now so I have something which is totally fine in a way in that it's about $2000 per month (to handle all of the programming and servers for an automated cryptocurrency trading system that seems to be going nowhere but has been a steady income for several years) and I have Thursday and Friday to work on my deep learning classes. And I can easily manage to get by in Tijuana on that much.
But this kidnapping thing is terrifying.
Maybe Rosarito will be safer than Tijuana? I mean my neighborhood here in Playas _seems_ very safe. I would have to move to a ghetto or something in the US. Which I would not really quite be able to afford.
>> For a functioning democracy, everyone must do politics, even if it's unpleasant.
I've been voting and voicing my displeasure regularly for the last year at my governor and elected officials, down the to the local ones, and nothing has changed. Actually that's not true, the majority of the decisions made have changed quite a bit and have further ruined my small business and my children's education.
Can't imagine how much worse it would get if I didn't waste hundreds of hours writing to my officials while they feed my concerns into a shredder.
Here in the US the media effectively controls who people vote for, and the DNC/RNC is quick to "aggressively interject itself" if that tactic fails; so it seems to me that democracy as we know it is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. The media stopping opining about politics would not change that, even though it will never happen.
Well, a lot of feel-good "one person fought the system/the mob/etc" stories are effectively political by giving the impression the way to deal with these huge problem is individual initiative.
And indeed, a lot of purely repression based solutions to different social ills lean heavily on the "heroes can fight the bad guys" trope. This reinforces the "drug war", which is in many ways the source of the orgy of murder this woman confronted and this isn't going to be solved by more heroics of her sort.
Did anyone read to the end? Some of the people she put into prison for kidnapping and murdering her daughter were part of a prison escape and then murdered her.
The other victim in this story was kidnapped like her daughter and like her daughter was found dead. Furthermore, they later found out that it was relatives who planned the kidnapping and murder of the other victim in the story.
There's a reason that we don't have quite this level of random violence in the US -- even in areas where drug traffic is high. Our politics have a lot to do with it. Ignore it at your peril.
I found the pointed reference to 'Born Again Christianity' political, and in line with NYT political philosophy.
The NYT will go to great lengths to point out alignment with right-side politics in such matters. Left-side alignments seem not to get much mention, at least as far as I can tell.
In the context of the sentence (contrasting the banality of the roles the murders tried to take with the crime) it didn't seem political at all:
"In three years, Mrs. Rodríguez captured nearly every living member of the crew that had abducted her daughter for ransom, a rogues’ gallery of criminals who tried to start new lives — as a born-again Christian, a taxi driver, a car salesman, a babysitter."
As a subscriber to the New York Times, that's exactly the opposite of what I've observed. A frequent criticism, in fact, has been interviewees not being identified as GOP political agents.
Readit News
They packed their stuff, and left. Their senior neighbor did not - she ended up getting killed. Apparently gangs like that just seize apartments, and use them for criminal activities (prostitution, drugs, kidnappings, torture/executions, etc.).
Her parents eventually managed to get to the US, but her uncle died on the way - victim of some kidnapping scheme, where gangs/cartels snatch up immigrants on the way, and blackmail their families in the target countries.
Suffice to say, we never visited Honduras - but it's pretty surreal to know that this is the everyday stuff a lot of people go through, in Central America. One day everything is normal, the next day you're a refugee, just like that - and there's no justice in sight, because that would mean getting yourself or your family killed.
> Ten years ago, on June 28, 2009, a general trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas arrived with troops at the home of the president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, and forced him at gunpoint onto a plane bound for Costa Rica. An interim president was appointed by his political opponents who was quickly legitimized by United States. — [The Hill](0)
> There was a 1950s-style coup in Honduras in 2009 backed by the government of the United States, and things appear to have been unremittingly messed up ever since. Let me emphasize this one more time. If Honduras is in shambles, it is not because Hondurans are any less resourceful or fundamentally decent than anyone else, or even because its rulers are any more wretched and callous than our own. It is because the structure of the North American economy has made any other outcome impossible. — [No Wall They Can Build](1)
- 0. https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/foreign-policy/45046...
- 1. https://crimethinc.com/books/no-wall-they-can-build
The Salvadoran president, Najib Bukele, a 39 year old businessman is effectively controlling gang activity. He is a pretty cool guy, and serves his country without collecting his salary.
Gangs in Central America extort people with jobs, so that in the end it's too inconvenient to have a job, and more convenient to be a gangster. If you have a honest job, some random armed guy shows up to collect most of your money.
It's a self-reinforcing phonomenon that kills the economy and turns everyone into gangsters.
Some say that this is due to... shady deals with gang leaders: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-54033444
Bukele is also under fire for attacking freedom of the press: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-06/el-salvad...
Day-to-day violent crime was the #1 reason that I wanted to leave the country.
Legalizing most recreational drugs around the world is absolutely imperative! If it is not done sooner than later then the largest drug trafficking organizations will be so entrenched that it may become impossible.
Many lives would be saved if these drugs could be purchased in consistent doses with standardized labeling and packaging.
If for example the US manages to somehow curb the drug crisis, they'll find other buyers easily. Or switch to other products in demand, like insulin.
The end users will have a different experience but selling and trafficking drugs will remain illegal.
Legalise the drugs and allow legal production - and the cartels will have to find an honest way to make a living like the rest of us have to do.
This is magical thinking. Organized crime can make money in other ways. This story is about kidnapping, for example. Organized crime exists in many places where it’s not funded by drug trade.
Sure they aren't going to disappear overnight. But cutting out their most profitable product lines would make a huge dent without a doubt.
We have a real-world example of that from Prohibition so it isn't entirely theoretical.
Organized crime will likely never truly go away, but it has flourished because of the war on drugs (just as it did in America during the prohibition era).
Kidnapping is more of a capital arbitrage situation. I don't think it scales like drugs. For it to be really worthwhile, it relies on people with a lot of capital coming into the area. If you scale up kidnapping, people simply don't come, or invest a lot more in security.
None of these has the absurd profit spans of drugs, though. You need about ~600-800 US$ worth of raw coca leafs to produce 1kg base cocaine (https://www.businessinsider.com/from-colombia-to-new-york-ci...) - and make ~25-27k US$ once it's on US streets. A vertical cartel that controls everything from the leaves to the sellers can capture all that 41.000% profit margin for themselves!
When the biggest markets US and EU "dry up" for illegal sales of cocaine, the gangs literally don't have anyone any more to extort for money - the population of South America is dirt poor. And also, they can't afford running militia that are more capable than some nations' armies or bribing the utter majority of the political class any more once these tasty US dollars vanish.
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>“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Upton Sinclair ~ 1934
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge...
You would need to regulate doses, make sure it's not coupled with other substances to reduce ill effects on consumers, which isn't easy. It's obviously better than letting cartels thrive, of course, but legalizing drugs isn't a silver bullet, it's also a lot of work.
Remember how prohibition went into action: women were tired of their drunk husbands.
But somehow this opportunity for personal action is never brought up.
Or do you mean make it legal at the destination - the US?
When PRI was in power, politicians and plaza bosses had mutual understanding: "you can transport drugs, but don't mess with locals who have no connection with drugs". Whenever USA tries to get rid of a kingpin, it will create more splinter factions, whose only way to fund themselves by kidnapping, ransoms, extortions, etc.
Dead Comment
A few more pivots like that, and the cartels will be toothless.
Also, one of the subplots in the excellent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel_(film) is in Mexico.
Babel is by Mexican directors and writers. See the previous two in the triptych too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_on_Fire_(2004_film)
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt13206564/
I am seriously thinking of moving back to the United States. The only problem is that I cannot really afford to live there.
I have some unresolved health issues and for many years have been working exclusively online because I could not handle commuting. But for me it has not been easy to find high-paying programming jobs online. There are just many more low-paying contracts and often I run out of money before I find a high-paying one which seems like it will have a workload that's manageable for me.
So now so I have something which is totally fine in a way in that it's about $2000 per month (to handle all of the programming and servers for an automated cryptocurrency trading system that seems to be going nowhere but has been a steady income for several years) and I have Thursday and Friday to work on my deep learning classes. And I can easily manage to get by in Tijuana on that much.
But this kidnapping thing is terrifying.
Maybe Rosarito will be safer than Tijuana? I mean my neighborhood here in Playas _seems_ very safe. I would have to move to a ghetto or something in the US. Which I would not really quite be able to afford.
I did a 5 month road trip through Mexico and there are so many cheap beautiful safe spots to live.
So I ended up respecting politised people, regardless of their views.
For a functioning democracy, everyone must do politics, even if it's unpleasant.
I've been voting and voicing my displeasure regularly for the last year at my governor and elected officials, down the to the local ones, and nothing has changed. Actually that's not true, the majority of the decisions made have changed quite a bit and have further ruined my small business and my children's education.
Can't imagine how much worse it would get if I didn't waste hundreds of hours writing to my officials while they feed my concerns into a shredder.
And indeed, a lot of purely repression based solutions to different social ills lean heavily on the "heroes can fight the bad guys" trope. This reinforces the "drug war", which is in many ways the source of the orgy of murder this woman confronted and this isn't going to be solved by more heroics of her sort.
The other victim in this story was kidnapped like her daughter and like her daughter was found dead. Furthermore, they later found out that it was relatives who planned the kidnapping and murder of the other victim in the story.
The NYT will go to great lengths to point out alignment with right-side politics in such matters. Left-side alignments seem not to get much mention, at least as far as I can tell.
"In three years, Mrs. Rodríguez captured nearly every living member of the crew that had abducted her daughter for ransom, a rogues’ gallery of criminals who tried to start new lives — as a born-again Christian, a taxi driver, a car salesman, a babysitter."