An important piece on Alternet:
So far this year, roughly 3,500 murders have been directly attributed to the drug war in Mexico, surpassing last year’s estimate of 2,500. (These numbers include the murders of at least 500 soldiers, cops, judges, politicians — and their family members — in nearly two years. The drug war rages across Mexico’s urban and (mostly) rural terrain, and murders are usually targeted toward pronounced rivals, but increasing numbers of victims are innocent bystanders, including women and children who were previously considered off-limits where acts of drug war-related retaliation were concerned.
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A sad, completely unnecessary – and yet entirely predictable – outcome of a policy of drug prohibition.
There’s also an increasingly growing kidnapping industry, that literally destroys small businesses when family members are snatched from the street and business owners have to liquidate everything in order to get them back. Most kidnappers are terribly brutal, most of the time mutilating, raping or simply killing their victims. Most kidnappers are ex-cops, ironically enough. Since constitutionally Mexicans are forbidden from protecting themselves with guns (unless well connected politically or very rich), most Mexicans are just targets, or fodder.
Luke, I concur. However, I would go further. Murder, violence, and general societal disorder are a few of many byproducts of prohibition. We’ve seen it with the Volstead Act (alcohol), guns, and drugs. In fact, alcohol prohibition rise and credence to Italian and Irish organized crime.
It should not be assumed that drug prohibition turns otherwise productive people into criminals. Rather, drug prohibition puts the drug trade into the hands of criminals. Violent sociopaths who would otherwise be exiled (or killed) by decent society become wealthy and well-armed drug lords.
Where government monopolizes civil defense, the result is eventually Sam Francis’s anarcho-tyranny: the government is unable or unwilling to protect the social order at the same time it enthusiastically tyrannizes the law-abiding. If Mexicans could assume their own defense, and businessmen rather than sociopaths dealt drugs, then kidnappers would be seen hanging upside down from utility poles, and that would be the end of the “kidnapping industry.”
Incidentally, cross-border kidnappings from the US to Mexico are already taking place. Eventually, we will read about such incidents in Virginia and Georgia. Government is importing a terrible social problem, and will argue for its own expansion to protect citizens from the problem it has imported. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
The vast majority of working police officers (not administration) support legalizing anything you can grow in your living room or garden.
Follow the money. The “war on drugs” must be making money for our politicians. At the least it is creating hundreds of thousands of mostly government, mostly union jobs. Confiscating property from drug users has replaced speed traps for financing your local police department.
Can anyone explain to me how drug prohibition leads to turf wars?
I can see how it can lead to murders (because contracts are so difficult to enforce). But that’s within the supply chain But why snuff out your rivals ie people outside the supply chain?
Patrick Crozier,
In all cases people attempt to obtain protection from violation of rights and arbitration of said violations. Since the actions of the drug dealers is in the black market, they can not resort to the usual forms of protection and arbitration, in the form of the police and the court system. Instead into this void the criminal enterprise expands its operation. Like a state, the criminal enterprise has a monopoly of protection over its jurisdiction. Like the state, the criminal enterprise always desires to expand its sphere of influence. To obtain a greater slice of the black market, the criminal enterprise wages battle against its rivals. Unable to resort to peaceful means of arbitration, the gangs must resort to violence. The stronger gangs gaining territory and resources from their vanquished rivals. Just like the state, just on a smaller scale. Unlike the state in that one can pay off the gangs for a much lower price.
When trade isn’t peaceful, it is violent.
In a division of labor market economy that uses a medium of exchange, the universal psychic profit motive usually becomes a motive for money profits. This doesn’t change with the introduction of government or prohibitions.
In peaceful trade, the competition for scarce customers, suppliers, and resources, leads to individuals seeking the monetary profit by doing their best to please the market. In violent trade, the competition for scarce customers, suppliers, and resources, leads to individuals seeking the monetary profit by doing their best to eliminate their competition. Turf is a ground for work.
“Unable to resort to peaceful means of arbitration, the gangs must resort to violence.”
This is misleading. Gangs operating in the black market are perfectly able to set up their own tribunals and allocate territory and arbitrate disputes peacefully. The Mafia did this in more propitious times. Gangs are violent because they consist of violent people. Where the peaceful are armed, gangs can’t compete and their members are reduced to beggary and petty theft.
Byzantine,
organized crime like the state has a situation where there can be no resolution of the problem. This is the case were the group with the monopoly on force is itself involved as a defendant in a dispute. It has placed itself in the situation where the claimant can not receive a fair hearing, the bias is too obvious. In that situation, there are two alternatives for the claimant, drop their complaint, or attempt to bring the dispute under their own jurisdiction. Since dropping the dispute would weaken the claimant, depending on the size of the organizations in question, the best option may be to attempt to enlarge the jurisdiction to encompass the dispute in question. These problems are inevitable whenever there is a monopoly on justice and arbitration in a given domain. It can only be truly resolved with a free market in courts and protection agencies and with the enforcement of property rights as the utmost goal of said institutions and society as a whole. Arming the populace is one step towards approaching this goal and as you pointed out, has great benefits.
One of the many silver linings to a collapsed US dollar would be an inability (or at least greatly reduced ability) of the US to keep bribing other governments to keep up this insane behavior.
Why do these gruesome events take place on a regular basis in Mexico, but not the US, where drugs are likewise illegal?
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