The GOP/Conservatives are Scared and Maybe up for a war in Mexico.

No doubt about that, but that's a whole 'nuther story.

But it's not just Mexico...Argentina is one of the most poorly run countries I've ever seen, and they're not drug-dependent.

 

Look, this thread is about Mexico. You dragged the whole of Latin America into it. Case by case basis, but Mexico has everything in the world to be a major economic power. No cartels and then they can chip away at other issues. Starve out the cartels and they would be well on their way to a bright future.

 

Yes I did, because I've been all around there and it's all so ****ing sad.

 

not like the Gringos had anything to do with how Mexico and the rest of the Americas ended up right? no American involvement right? lulz...*shrugs, maybe AMLO was right, the gringos need more hugs

 

jacobin.com is an interesting source, but it's glynch so there's that

It was a group effort, and continues to be.

 

I would like some factual backup for this claim, if you don't mind.

But while we wait, there's this:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fentanyl-seizures-rise-u-s-mexico-border-heres-why/

 

Americans need their cheap tummy tucks
Without the fear of getting shot by the cartel
@Salvy

 

https://www.timescolonist.com/bc-ne...fter-a-familiar-cast-plus-new-players-4658593


https://bc.ctvnews.ca/3-men-accused-of-running-drug-super-lab-wanted-by-b-c-rcmp-1.6235123

 

Nobody disputes that things happen north of the border, I mean ****, Quebec was long famous for biker drug running gangs, but "most" was the claim, and it's just not true.

 

so many TOP Republicans

I would normally not take this at all seriously. But we have a very abnormal GOP party.

Why Trump and other Republicans want to go to war in Mexico - Vox
An astonishingly bad idea that’s gotten popular very quickly.
Apr 21, 2023

One of the hottest new ideas in Republican politics is, apparently, launching a war in Mexico.

Three recent articles — in Rolling Stone, Politico, and Semafor — traced the rise of the proposal from obscurity to the party’s highest levels, finding ample evidence of the idea’s popularity in the GOP ranks. Former President Donald Trump, for example, has been asking for a “battle plan” to “attack Mexico,” specifically targeting drug cartel strongholds in the country. Every single declared Republican presidential candidate has endorsed treating cartels like terrorist organizations. And in both the House and the Senate, leading Republicans have proposed authorizing the use of military force in Mexico to fight cartels.


The real reasons Republicans are proposing war with Mexico
It’s tempting, given the thinness of these proposals, to simply dismiss them as political nothings: empty gestures of being “strong on crime” and “strong on border security.”

Many of these proposals conflate drug trafficking, undocumented migration, and violence as various different problems caused by cartels that could be solved with sufficient amounts of American ordinance. That makes little sense as a policy matter — each has different contours, even if the cartels have a hand in all of them — but makes perfect sense as a political matter, as it conjures a picture of a lawless border that the Biden administration is failing to secure out of sheer fecklessness.

But dismissing this rhetoric as purely political would be a mistake.

For one thing, ideas like this have a tendency to go from absurdities to policy. When Trump first called for a “total and complete shutdown” on Muslim immigration to the United States in 2015, it was widely rejected by Republicans and Democrats alike. During his presidency, Trump repeatedly tried to do it — at first causing chaos at American airports and, ultimately, successfully implementing a version of it.

Given that the former president is once again the prohibitive favorite in the 2024 race, and that he is reportedly asking for “battle plans” for a war on the cartels, the proposal needs to be taken at least somewhat seriously.

Moreover, the fact that these ideas have gained so much traction in the past month — accelerating after another brutal murder of Americans by cartels — illustrates some profoundly important things about the state of the Republican party.

Dara Lind, a senior fellow at the pro-migration American Immigration Council (and my former Vox colleague), sees the vogue for using force as an outgrowth of broader Republican ideology: “the ongoing conflation of migration with invasion” and “the idea that fentanyl importation is a deliberate plot to weaken America.” On these theories, cartels and the Mexican government (through its inaction) are facilitating nothing less than the broad-based destruction of American communities.

This kind of apocalyptic picture of the United States, a country whose middle class is being destroyed by drugs and undocumented migrants driving down wages, is an archetypical Trump-era Republican theme. Again and again, the populist right mentions drugs and immigration — along with the decline of manufacturing and the rise of “wokeness” — as some of the root causes of terminal American decline.

But as well tailored as “invade Mexico” is to the Trump era, it’s not a wholly new impulse. Waging literal war on drugs outside of America’s borders is a very old idea, one with significant bipartisan support. For Republicans in particular, casting themselves as tough on drugs and crime — in contrast to weak Democrats — predates Trump’s rise by decades.

So too does a willingness to launch a unilateral ground invasion in the name of fighting non-state actors that allegedly threaten American national security.

Trump, in theory, was supposed to be a break with that kind of hawkishness: he ran in part on his (false) claim to have opposed the war in Iraq. Yet time and again in his presidency, we saw that the strangely widespread idea of “Donald the Dove” was essentially false: Trump was no less willing to use force than other post-Cold War presidents, just willing to do it for somewhat different reasons.

A new Mexican-American war would be every bit as reckless as the Iraq war, quite possibly more so, since Mexico is literally America’s neighbor. That it’s become popular again shows both how the focus of the Republican party has changed in the past 20 years — and the ways in which its essential hawkishness has not.