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Politics : The View From the Centre -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: average joe who wrote (973)	7/14/2011 12:17:19 PM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1134

The Econo-mist is about 7 or 8 years too late on the drug trade in Central America. Guatemala is effectively a narco-state. I have good friends who live there. Life is much worse than in Mexico, though the nature of the violence is much more horrifying there. Not satisfied with decapitations, the Mexican narcos are now dismembering their enemies. Also, gird yourself, faces are being surgically removed while the 'patient' is conscious. There were things done by Comanches and Apaches which were worse, but I won't mention them. The horrible things done by the Mexican narcos are sensational, of course, and designed to terrify. But at the end of the day, they are more or less isolated and do not affect the bulk of the population. What does affect the population is the lack of civil order. Though Mexico has been corrupt for a very long time, during most of the latter part of the 20th century, there was a political structure that, for all its problems, worked. The country saw tremendous economic growth as a result. I am not so sure that is the case any more. Kidnappings of the wealthy and the middle class have increased tremendously. Many businesses have to pay a 'cuota' to the narcos and other criminals to remain as going concerns. The Mexican drug cartels are global businesses now. And of course the profits are enormous because they are untaxed and the margins in the drug trade are huge and I do mean huge. Drugs may have overtaken tourism as the largest part of Mexico's GDP. Take the profits out of the drug trade and seize their money and the narcos are out of business. Whatever moral issues anyone has with legalization, it seems to me that it makes sense. Otherwise, we are going to be facing an enormously wealthy group of cartels in the next 10 years or so which will have unimaginable political and economic power. And if you think European economic problems are a source of 'contagion', imagine the cartels' contagion of our society as their enormous and untaxed profits keep growing at increasingly large rates.