I’m not sure that strategy will work with every audience, but I bet it’s worked before and will again.

Street-level cops I knew in Chicago had a different take on the whole thing–The violence really started ramping up when the politicians and the gangs became allies. The “top drug dealers” Corgan referred to were the former competition that was unfortunate enough to have bosses who didn’t get on board with the politicians, and who didn’t get the protection from them. The legal system was utilized to take them out, while the connected gangs and their members took over. The killings were of those who resisted the “connected” takeover and who “didn’t get the word”.

At this point, you’ve got a better chance of being arrested for self-defense during a mugging than you do for gang activity. Chicago street politics, at this point, is the product of an unholy alliance between the political class and the gangs. Much as it was during the Capone era, although without quite the same class of criminal. I doubt we’re going to see the Crips and Bloods (and, whoever else is there…) eulogized and memorialized the way we do the Italian mafia of Capone’s era. The food isn’t as good, either–What’re they going to serve at the gang-theme restaurants? Spaghetti-O’s? Bologna sandwiches?

I heard an interview with Billy Corgan, of Smashing Pumpkins group, who was friends with cops in Chicago. He said that the top drug dealers were all put in jail and the city rapidly ramped up to high levels of murder. They started fighting over territory.

You’re a Puritan fantasy.

In all seriousness, you’re whipping a strawman; read a book.

No government can solve all problems. Government is management. It manages the human condition. Law and order are inherently artificial, not organic.

Criminal gangs and terrorists have this in common: They arise out of a failure of governance. You have to deal with the underlying condition effectively, and that means dealing with all of it. Remove the leaders, remove the members, and then deal with the conditions that allowed their rise. You have to cut it all out, in order to cure it. Lopping off the most visible parts don’t help–Take out the leaders, new ones will arise. Eliminate the members, the leaders will recruit more. Eliminate both, and then fail to deal with what motivated them in the first place? You’re going to get a new and different set of criminals/terrorists to replace them.

And, yes, if you really want to “solve” a problem like that in Mexico, you’re damn near going to have to perform a curettage on the scale of Cortez, which would probably get you blamed for conducting a genocide. I’m not sure what the hell you do, once the infection/cancer is allowed to metastasize the way it has in Mexico, but… I can say it’s going to be a huge job, and is probably going to damn near kill the patient.

Good Christ, they’re criminalizing the lime and avocado industries, now. Pretty soon, you buy a lime, and you’re gonna be subsidizing the cartels the same way a dope user was. Which is probably the point past which you don’t go back to “normal”, and have to acknowledge that the entire country is a pesthole of crime and malfeasance.

God help the honest Mexican, because their government and our sure as hell won’t.

What about the long term trend? Is the uptick in violence a permanent change, or just the last hurrah of a dying mob?

Or… perhaps it’s part of the process by which a new leader is chosen.