Reuters) - Mario Ramos thought it was a bad joke when he received an anonymous email at the start of this year demanding $15,000 a month to keep his industrial tubing business operating in Monterrey, Mexico's richest city and a symbol of progress in Latin America.Read the rest here.
Sitting in his air-conditioned office looking across at sparkling office blocks dotting the mountains on that morning in January, he casually deleted the email as spam.
Six days later, the phone rang and a thickset voice demanded the money. Ramos panicked, hung up and drove to his in-laws' house. It was already late and he had little idea what to do. Then, just after midnight, masked gunmen burst onto his premises, set fire to one of his trucks, shot up his office windows and sprayed a nearby wall with the letter "Z" in black paint, the calling card of Mexico's feared Zetas drug cartel.
"They were asking for money I could never afford," said Ramos by telephone from San Antonio, Texas, where he fled with his family the next day. "I should have taken the threat more seriously, but it was such a shock. I couldn't quite believe this could happen in Monterrey."
In just four years, Monterrey, a manufacturing city of 4 million people 140 miles from the Texan border, has gone from being a model for developing economies to a symbol of Mexico's drug war chaos, sucked down into a dark spiral of gangland killings, violent crime and growing lawlessness.
HT: T-19
I addressed Mexico in a post back on January 2nd.
8 comments:
Anarcho-capitalism in practice: Austrian economics for everyone!
Actually, it's what Sam Francis termed 'anarcho-tyranny.' It is the next step after social democracy.
I knew Sam reasonably well and had many opportunities to discuss his views on things in private: whatever one thinks of those views, I don't ever recall him describing Mexico as a social democracy.
Look at virtually any example of a failed state - the aftermath is horrific. That is anarchy in its only really human, incarnate, historical form: a living nightmare. Good luck, though, with that Austrian stuff: something he was fairly dismissive about, incidentally.
I think Austrian Economics has little to do with this given that neither Mexico nor the US are anywhere even close to such an economic system. So let's drop the straw man shots. If Mexico goes under the consequences will indeed be horrific. It will be a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions and the US will not be left unaffected. See my post from Jan 2nd linked at the bottom of this post.
Yes, I admit it was a gratuitous wise crack: Austrian economics per se obviously has nothing to do with the tragic situation in Mexico.
Austrian economics provides an analytical framework for charting the course of a failed state. Keynesian pump-priming doesn't create capital; it consumes capital. (Marx is hopeless of course, but I assume we all know this). As real savings disappear and the country resorts to debt-financing, the social democratic paradise proceeds apace to outright socialism, anarcho-tyranny, and complete collapse.
This is not a strictly linear model. The US remains relatively free and prosperous but even here it can be seen that most of our laws are not for the lawless but mostly for the purpose of bullying the law-abiding, as Sam Francis pointed out.
Deficits do matter, as any Austrian school economist will tell you, and when members of the US military realize their pensions cannot be guaranteed by printing money, we'll all be Austrians.
John,
As well founded as your interest is, your post is lacking statistical support. Your argument is that Mexico is failing as a state because of its high crime rate. Yet as a nation it has a comparable murder rate to the US. What's more the rates of murder, theft, rape, etc in Monterrey are all significantly lower than in cities across the border in Texas such as San Antonio or Houston.(EG: in 2009 the murder rate in Monterrey was 0.007% while in Houston it was practically double that, 0.014%) And this is not to compare it with places like DC where its over 0.030%.
By your logic places like New Orleans, Los Angeles and others already are "a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions."
I don't want to speculate as to why violence in Mexico is so much more frightening for people in the US than their own substantially more violent regions, but it would behove you as a reasonable guy to look into the facts before ringing the panic button.
RG
rabidgandhi,
You are actually right, but probably not in the way think. Black males in the US (6% of the population) commit 50% of violent crime. As their victims are mostly other blacks, Americans can afford to take a rather sanguine view of crime in the US. After all, middle class whites can always move to the suburbs (for now).
Otherwise, it does not take much to push cities like New Orleans and Detroit into "failed state" status. A hurricane, globalism, and the true nature of those places becomes clear. New Orleans survives only because of its heavily-policed port and tourist district. Detroit, lacking even that much, survives only due to federal transfer payments.
For Americans, it is a lesson in priorities: our government spends billions of dollars protecting the borders of Iraq, Israel, South Korea, Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina et al. and ignores the burning house next door.
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