Rejecting a renewed “war” against drug traffickers, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Tuesday unveiled her strategy to battle organized crime in a nation where each day brings word of new assassinations, gang wars, massacres and other bloodshed.
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Instead, she outlined a four-point strategy that emphasized intelligence-gathering, troop deployment, improved federal-state coordination and providing opportunities to dissuade impoverished young people from joining organized crime — which is among Mexico’s major employers.
A centerpiece of the plan is doubling down on the often-criticized “hugs not bullets” strategy of Sheinbaum’s predecessor and mentor, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
I guess crime exists due to two reasons:
- poverty exists. as long as poverty exists, people seek a way out.
- organized crime exists. it draws people in.
So, pacifying the country needs a two-sided approach. On the one side, you must show people how to live a good life without being reliant on crime for basic necessities. People must be able to support themselves without falling back on criminal organizations.
On the other hand, probably the bigger issue, is that these crime organizations have a lot of money, and demand for labour-force. that means that they actively recruit new people, and draw people in. organized crime mostly exists because there’s too much money being made on the black market by selling/trafficking drugs. So I guess that it would make sense to legalize drugs (at least to a certain extent), because every $1 spent legally when buying drugs is a $1 you take away from the black market, and therefore crime organizations.
