World Politics

[MetalCaveman]

That was a stupid decision, not surprising given who is in charge but still, you don't pull something like that without consequences, both short and long term.

 

Also, Chile is on fire, literally:

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-50119649

 

Korea too, Spain, everywhere really.

[TheMightyEthan]

It's almost like there are massive structural problems with the way the world is organized that those in power have been ignoring for decades.

[MetalCaveman]

Oh boy, it gets worse.

 

Someone should tell out president that one of they keys to a successful dictatorship is to keep the army on your side, and you don't get that by throwing them under the bus at every chance you get and then putting them and their families in danger by doing the shit he just did.

 

During a press conference he washed his hands, denied any wrongdoing on his part during the Culiacan siege, placed all blame on the army and then proceeded to have the secretary of defence name the Colonel who was in charge of the operation. In other words, he painted a HUGE fucking target on that guy and his family, without giving a shit.

 

Then, when confronted about all the lies, inconsistencies and other BS that was said via official channels, he proceeded to claim that he and his administration did nothing wrong, that they responded with truth and in time to all questions and when a journalist pointed out how this wasn't true, the president tried to shift the topic to other things.

 

Except this guy was having none of it and kept pressing, kept asking about all that, eventually other journalists joined in and the president, not able to take the pressure got pissed, said that journalists were "biting the hand that feeds, the hand that removed the gag placed on them by previous administrations". Funnily enough, the journalist that started that whole thing announced that his credentials had been removed and he was banned from attending further press conferences.

 

When other journalists asked about it, the president resorted to his usual thing of blaming the opposition, the conservative media, the Thing, anyone and everyone is to blame, except for him.

 

Earlier in the week, a speech made by a General was "leaked" to a newspaper, in it, the General is addressing other officers, soldiers and defence officials, saying that he and others are dismayed, offended and angry at the way things are being handled, that the army has enemies in the administration, ensuring they are not allowed to serve their duty, he ended by asking for support for another General, who "was fighting hawks that threaten to sink the country into chaos". The president responded by saying "Of course that guy would disagree with our approach, he was secretary of defence during a previous administration, he misses those old days".

 

In other news, the Dos Bocas refinery, a project of dubious legality, was shown to have essentially destroyed the shit out of the surrounding area, turning it from a green place full of life into a fucking barren desert. Cool.

 

In Chiapas, Lacandones are worried about a possible war with the Tzeltales and the Choles, because, while the Lacandones honour their traditions and live in harmony with nature, protecting the jungle and basically never taking more than needed, the Tzeltales and Choles have burned down their parts of the jungle, destroying everything to make room for farms. Now the're trying to take over the land that belongs to the Lacandones, who, though outnumbered, claim they will do everything they can to defend their land. BTW, this land is pretty much the last remaining "lung" of Mexico, home to a huge number of species of plants and animals and where some important archaeological sites are located. Of course, because there's no political or economical advantage to doing anything for them, it's unlikely the government will step in, which may also lead to the extermination of the Lacandones, ethnic cleansing, to call it what it is.

 

Oh, and to top things off, MORENA, the party of our current president, is slowly taking over the INE, the institute in charge of elections and all the stuff related to them, essentially ensuring they'll remain in power for as long as they want.

 

The president: Introduces the concept of impeachment, promising to make it so that if a president does not act with the benefit of the people in mind, they can be removed from power.

 

Also the president: Ensures he and his party control every possible institute/office/secretary/cabinet/system that could be used against them.

 

[TheMightyEthan]

That's just...

[MetalCaveman]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-50299562

 

Women and children shot and burned, some, according to their relatives, burned alive. There was a tweet by one of the family members showing one of the vehicles they were travelling in, shot and burned, but twitter took it down.

 

While the official version states that they were attacked because the cartel mistook them for a rival gang, it's dumb to ignore that the LeBaron family and their mormon community have a long history of standing against the cartels, defending their lands and in general, refusing to bend their knee against them. Further, they had official protection from the PF, until our current president disbanded them in favour of the  National Guard which is currently acting as Trump's wall, beating the shit out of immigrants trying to cross into Mexico to then try and get into the US.

 

Meanwhile, in one of his (in)famous press conferences, the president, instead of facing the issue, claimed that he had defeated violence, that murders are going down and nothing bad happens anymore, then he used this incident to engage in one of his favourite pastimes, blaming previous administrations for everything and ignoring everything going on right now.

 

In terms of the Selva Lacandona, now they're proposing splitting it into thirds, with one third going to each of the groups fighting over it, this means the destruction of two thirds of one of the most important natural reserves the country.

[Mal]

That's quite the flip. Mind, from what I hear the number of representatives gained is rather low since far from every seat is directly voted on by regular citizens. It's actually a pretty bizarre system which actually sounds like some version of representation that you see from like the 1700-1800s (e.g., only landowner can vote but this case landowners have their own representatives or something like that...). Might be why one of the five demands of the protests is for universal suffrage. 

[TheMightyEthan]

From my understanding they elect all the local council people (that map is the local councils), but in the legislature they only elect half and Beijing appoints the other half. I saw a thing that in the legislature 17 out of the 18 elected positions were pro-democracy.

[Mal]

I had to hit up Wikipedia since it's just too foreign to me.

 

a) This past election was for the District Council which has 479 seats with 452 directly elected between 18 districts. Pro-democracy group went from 124 seats to 389 seats. Pro-Beijing went from 300 seats to 58. The remaining 27 non-elected seats is from Rural Committees in the New Territories (areas to the north) who are basically the natives of the area (I believe this group is the Heung Yee Kuk).

 

b) Then there is the 70 seat Legislative Council (LegCo). 35 seats are directly elected from five geographical constituencies. The remaining 35 seats are from interest-group-based functional constituencies (FC). The FCs is what I referred to as the "some version of representation that you see from like the 1700-1800s".

 

There does seem to be a growing wave of pro-democracy sentiment from the 18 districts, the 5 geographical constituencies (which are in the same areas of the 18 districts) and the FCs. With that said, a key figure of all this drama is Carrie Lam, the Chief Executive.

 

The Chief Executive is elected from a 1200 member Election Committee which is composed of...

Quote

1) Industrial, commercial and financial sectors: 300 members

2) The professions: 300 members

3) Labour, social services, religious and other sectors: 300 members

4) Members of the Legislative Council, representatives of members of the District Councils, representatives of the Heung Yee Kuk, Hong Kong deputies to the National People's Congress, and representatives of Hong Kong members of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference: 300 members

1-3 is a much larger version of FCs. 4 has part of the above a and b and other groups noted in the quote.

 

I think it's glaringly obvious why the protestors never really focused on ousting Carrie Lam. It's basically a fool's errand to try to replace a chief executive without the backing of a supportive Election Committee which honestly seems impossible. 2020 seems to be the LegCo elections so that will be a good signal of the general sentiment of both the people and FCs. I personally wouldn't count on the FCs... when it comes to business, looks like Beijing is the gate keeper. You live or die by their grace which isn't unlike how Beijing can treat other countries.

 

[TheMightyEthan]

Okay, so the thing I saw that said they took 17 of 18 positions must have meant they took 17 of 18 districts. That was not how it was made to sound at all. Being generous, I'm guessing whoever wrote the article honestly didn't understand it all that well either.

[MetalCaveman]

Well, this is going to be a thing:

 

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-mexico-cartels/trump-says-u-s-will-designate-mexican-drug-cartels-as-terrorists-idUSKBN1Y02NJ

 

Can't help but feel that if our current government had done something, anything, rather than just keep with the "hugs not bullets" approach maybe this wouldn't have happened.

 

Who knows how/where things go from here, our politicians are trying to change or prevent this thing from going through, while some people are afraid of the possibility of military intervention.

 

I wonder what this means for our government and well... Pretty much every industry/company/business entity, it's a well-known "secret" that many politicians receive money from these groups, that they have their hands on several companies, and that they finance several others.

 

I'm not expecting drones to be flying around bombing shit everyday, not yet at least.  

[TheMightyEthan]

It's the kind of thing that could actually be helpful to Mexico in battling the cartels if the US uses it intelligently, instead of just using it to drive toward military force.

 

That is a massive "if" though...

[MetalCaveman]

How much of that depends on the way our government reacts? I assume a more reasonable government would try and get some form of cooperation going on, relying on intelligence and other methods. Our government on the other hand has shown they're willing to outright deny reality for the sake of protecting/ignoring/allowing/etc the cartels. So I wonder if the US could just go "Well, we could do things peacefully, but they don't give a shit about it, so let's just bomb the crap out of everything, turn Culiacan into one big ol' crater".  

[Mister Jack]

I'm curious. How do you, a native Mexican, feel about the possibility of military intervention from the US to deal with the cartel? Is part of you relieved that someone might finally do something about the problem or are you dreading the possibility that US involvement will only make it worse?

[MetalCaveman]

On one hand, there's that sense of desperation, of wanting someone, anyone to step in and do something, when shit like this:

 

 

and much, much worse, becomes a daily occurrence and the government is unwilling and/or incapable of responding or doing anything to ensure the safety of those of us who are just trying to get by, it does breed that feeling of "hey maybe if they step in, something will finally get done". I mean, if you told me that special forces will carry out surgical strikes against the cartels, with minimum damage to civilians and civilian property, or that drone strikes will only target their bases and hideouts, I'd go all "HELL YEAH! DO IT!".

 

But like I said, that's not likely.  We already know what happens when the US army gets involved, and it hardly ever ends well or without severe losses, though I wonder how they would act being so close to home and all.  

 

That said, we have thousands of murders, mutilated corpses being dumped on the streets, mass graves with hundreds of unidentified corpses popping up everywhere, bodies hanging from bridges with warning messages carved into them, kids being shot, kids that have already killed dozens of people and are proud of it, cities under control of cartels where even expressing a negative opinion about them leads to you and your family ending up dead, cities turning into warzones because of cartels fighting each other or against the army, etc. It's a situation of "how much worse can it get?".

 

The more I think about it though, the more I do feel relieved, there's always that part of me that looks at how things have gone elsewhere and is worried about what will happen,  but looking at how things are now, how social change is so unlikely to happen because certain attitudes and beliefs are so ingrained that it's nigh impossible to change them, and how the government, both past and present has failed in many ways, and yeah, I do think that it was about time for someone else to step in, we couldn't fix our shit ourselves, now we got to deal with the consequences and hope for the best. If things do end up going tits up well then... Honestly we have no one to blame but ourselves. We'll look back at the last election and think about what could have been.  

[TheMightyEthan]

Well, if they want to show restraint, it does stuff like make it illegal for US banks to handle their money, and if a US bank discovers they have money linked to the organization they have to freeze it and notify the government, and it makes it a US crime to provide aid and support to the organization, etc. Basically a bunch of stuff that just makes it a lot more difficult for them to operate.

[Mal]

That would probably be the best way to deal with them as far as the US is concerned.

 

No boots on the ground be they the US military or CIA/DEA. Nor any air assets like drone strikes. The US does not have a good track record when it comes to involvement in Central and South America. Like sure, the United States can absolutely crush the cartels' armed forces. All you need to see is how we dealt with the Taliban, Al Qaeda and even ISIS when it comes to open combat. Though, once they blend in with the general populous then we're shit out of luck*. Plus they're on the same continent as us. It seriously cannot be understate how having two large oceans helped the United States in so many ways... shit will just turn ugly with so many unintended consequences if the US start to swat the cartels. I hardly think the Mexican government can fill the void so... probably a non-state entity will take hold. And again, the US have a poor track record when it comes to replacing governments in Latin America.

 

* Seriously, the cartels and the likes of Al Qaeda and ISIS aren't that different. The cartels are just a business (I hardly see them wanting to actually rule as a state entity) while the likes of ISIS and Al Qaeda just have religious fundamentalism... theocracy spin to them. Al Qaeda produced a shit ton of heroin and the like. ISIS had their oil.

 

Edit: Also to any side that fights with US backing... don't believe the US lies. You'll probably be left dry in some way. Ask the Hmong, Vietnamese and the Kurds.

Edited November 29, 2019 by Mal

[MetalCaveman]

On 11/28/2019 at 10:18 AM, TheMightyEthan said:

Well, if they want to show restraint, it does stuff like make it illegal for US banks to handle their money, and if a US bank discovers they have money linked to the organization they have to freeze it and notify the government, and it makes it a US crime to provide aid and support to the organization, etc. Basically a bunch of stuff that just makes it a lot more difficult for them to operate.

 

How would this affect Mexican politicians that help them, can the US government go after them too? There are currently some governors, and other officials that in the past were arrested or were being investigated for money laundering, requesting the support of certain cartels to "deal with" their opponents, and more, what happens to them given that they are government officials?

 

Also, one thing that's been brought up, does this designation include ALL cartels or just some of them. Of the top of my head we have:

 

La Union de Tepito

CJNG

Los Zetas

Sinaloa

del Golfo

de Juarez

Los Caballeros Templarios

 

and many more. Would this policy encompass all of them or just the ones responsible for the attack against the LeBaron family which is what triggered this whole thing AFAIK?

 

Marcelo Ebrard, Foreign Minister has already said that they will not allow any military intervention of any kind, but they're willing to cooperate in other aspects, so he says at least.  

[TheMightyEthan]

7 hours ago, MetalCaveman said:

How would this affect Mexican politicians that help them, can the US government go after them too? There are currently some governors, and other officials that in the past were arrested or were being investigated for money laundering, requesting the support of certain cartels to "deal with" their opponents, and more, what happens to them given that they are government officials?

 

That's a good question, I don't know if you have to be committing these crimes in the US, or if it's something that applies worldwide.

[MetalCaveman]

 

 

Here we go again.

 

As a side note, it pisses me off when media refers to them as "armed civilians", sounds fucking stupid.

[TheMightyEthan]

Stay safe.

[MetalCaveman]

So now the government is going to start monitoring every purchase everyone makes with credit/debit cards. They're going to tie your card to your SAT data, and if they find that your purchases don't match your income you'll be in trouble.

 

Beyond the obvious privacy concerns, there's the issue that this new policy does NOT take into account savings or other such sources of income you may have. So if you make, say 2K a month, you've been saving for a while, and then you decide you'll buy a house, put down 10K for it (I'm pulling numbers out of thin air, bear with me  ) SAT will be on your ass for that discrepancy. You'll have to prove that you have enough savings to make that payment and THEY have to be satisfied with your answer, otherwise you'll be in deep shit, specially because the punishment for not declaring certain income, or not paying taxes is worse than what you get for  murder.

 

Some people, including my father, an accountant, are saying we should all just use cash, avoid banks, avoid cards, avoid anything that they can monitor. So yeah, that's a nice break from all the bloodshed and terror.  

[MetalCaveman]

Looks like the terrorist designation has been delayed/cancelled(?):

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50697635

 

I wonder what they get out of this, if I put my tinfoil hat on for a moment, it is curious that, after our president welcomed him with open arms and offered him a "new home" in Mexico, Evo suddenly left for Cuba after this announcement was made.  

 

*Tinfoil hat off*

 

As if they didn't have enough control already:

 

https://politica.expansion.mx/congreso/2019/12/02/legisladores-afines-a-amlo-integran-frente-anuncian-buscar-control-total

 

MORENA and their supporters have announced they're looking to establish complete control over every political, military and social system to stop "the right" and ensure the 4T can progress unimpeded.

 

Quote

le enviemos un mensaje al presidente diciéndole: 'aquí estamos, éste es tu ejercito, leal, comprometido y valiente'", solicitó.

 

"We'll send the president a message: we're here, we're your army, loyal, brave and committed". 

 

That's some scary cult shit.

 

So yeah, this is going to be a fun ride.  

[MetalCaveman]

 

I love that yellow/increased caution is the lowest level.  

[TheMightyEthan]

That's not looking good. Although I will say that the current administration has so heavily politicized basic government functions that I don't really believe anything they say about anything anymore. It's almost to the point where the National Weather Service says it's going to be cloudy and I'm like "or is that just what Trump wants them to say...?"

[MetalCaveman]

I mean, as someone living here I can say that some parts should be red, way more red, there's this place, Ecatepec, that makes Mordor look like Rivendell.  Other parts should be slightly less yellowish, but overall it is kinda accurate.