Comment by reactordev
4 days ago
Coming from groups that just pickup busses of people to murder, I wouldn’t be so sure that firing back at the US would be out of the question.
4 days ago
Coming from groups that just pickup busses of people to murder, I wouldn’t be so sure that firing back at the US would be out of the question.
Murdering buses of people doesn't bring the full force of the US military on them. The difference is the risk not the depravity.
This is the answer. The cartels would have to be insane to poke that particular bear. They would get crushed like a bug. IIRC they murdered a single US undercover officer in the 90s and the retaliation was so bad that they themselves handed over the perpetrators.
> They would get crushed like a bug.
Much as I despise them, I'm not so sure that would be the case. I seem to remember folks saying the same about the Taliban, and the cartels have a lot more money and high-tech kit, than the Taliban.
Asymmetric warfare is a tough gig, on all sides.
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You are right rationality is their strongest character trait.
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How did that full force of the US military work out in Vietnam?
Millions of dead Vietnamese.
In any case that was a war against a hardened, experienced, determined enemy fighting for its freedom from any form of colonial occupation, both as a formal military and as an insurgent force in South Vietnam.
I scarcely think the Mexican population would rise up in defense of the cartels here.
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It was never used, there.
Pretty badly for both sides
I don't really think you thought through that one. It sounds like what your saying is that the Vietnamese won and thats the outcome that matters. It does matter but that isn't the issue - it is the cost that everyone is talking about: the amount of destruction that was brought upon the country and people was terrible.
The distinction is those are cases where they are murdering Mexican citizens. If a cartel murdered a bus of people in America I suspect most any administration would retaliate in some form.
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“Dude”, murdering a us citizen in Mexico is different than murdering an entire bus of people on US soil.
You say it’s happening all the time but then say it’s .01%.
Looked it up myself, maybe 40 to 300 people annually. Hard to discern how many of those are pure tourism vs visiting family. I suspect you have a greater risk visiting family, especially if it’s a border town.
13.5mm US citizens visit d Mexico in 2024 so .00002% got kidnapped. I bet that number is even lower when you separate pure tourism vs dual nationals or similar going back home to visit.
The point is any action taken on US soil in a large capacity would be seen as an attack by any administration.
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Of course things happen sometimes. But, the cartels typically do not want to mess with Americans, particularly in tourist areas, because that brings heat they don't want. It's literally bad for business.
I think the GP was referring to buses on US soil rather than Americans on buses in Mexico.
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> Dude, Americans are getting kidnapped and murdered in Mexico all the time
Dude, can you put some numbers with a citation behind that? Then we can extrapolate a risk ratio and see if it really merits the "all the time" claim.
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who are we (the US)? People who wantonly murder people on fishing boats, etc.
I’m not saying our cartel is any better…
Your use of "our" makes me wonder if the people of Mexico see the drug cartels as "theirs".
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This is different.
See, Drug cartels over here operate with the blessing and favor of our president. They are tightly connected.
If a cartel dared to ground a US flight. The US government would have a "free pass" to break all hell loose in Mexico, and Sheinbaum wouldn't have a way to stop it.
She doesn't want that in any way, so the message to the cartel bosses would be to be very careful in that respect.
Sure, there have been US citizens killed within Mexico here and there, but those can easily be attributed to local violence. And as retribution, Mexican government sends a couple of wanted criminals to the US.
Yeah, if a cartel actually used anti-aircraft weapons on a US passenger plane in US airspace? It wouldn't even matter if MAGA or the Democrats were in charge. The US would collectively lose its shit and spend the next 10 years and several trillion dollars retaliating against the cartels. The media would be ecstatic, because it would give them a decade of story arcs, starting with "our brave troops in uniform" all the way through to covering the eventual quagmire and anti-war protests. By year 6-8, editorial columnists would be writing columns reconsidering their initial support for the war.
Please, let's not do this.