I love his attitude, but this would be house to house fighting. We can’t stop the mafia here, how are we going to stop the cartels there. I mean, the CIA/NSA could offer intelligence intercepts and resources to take out some of the cartel leaders and make life difficult for them, but new ones will just spring up in short order.
The problem is not the supply, but the demand. As long as 10-20% of Americans are drug addicts funneling money to the cartels just as fast as they can, there will be cartels to fill them. The harder we hit them, the worse their violence will be.
This looks like just another endless war to me, unless we go nuclear, which would be simply to assassinate everyone in the Mexican drug trade that we can find as fast as we can find them. I mean, everyone. You kill a Mexican and his brother will do everything he can to kill you. This would be like another war on terrorists, but we can’t bomb Mexico.
I don’t have my own solution to this.
Hire honest cops at $100K per year, boot out the corrupt ones and allow them to share a percentage of all confiscated cartel money. Things would look much different in a year.
Actually, the problem is also supply because growing drug crops is how a significant portion of the peasant population make a living. The culture of noblisse oblige has existed since Cortez. Before that, the Aztec master-servant/slave relationship was, shall we say, a bit more direct and visceral.
Regardless, the way it's worked for hundreds of years is the ruling class lives in opulent, dissipated luxury. The low collective IQ and paltry work ethic condemns MX economy to be exactly what it is and has always been: low tech, low skill, under developed "manana" land. Growing drugs is what they do best - it really is pretty much the entire economy.
So, you have this bifurcated society with Spaniards living easy, controlling government, media, finance and business. In return for impoverished lifestyles, the 90% mestizo population gets a lazy, poor existence in return for being left alone. All they have to do is put low effort into growing some crops, don't get involved in the distribution side, and the cartel ops leave them alone.
The cartel business brings in $billions, which keeps the government happy as the banks remain solvent. As long as the government can continue to subsidize basic foodstuffs like tortillas, then they don't have to worry about the underclass ever rebelling. Better, personal firearms (and ammo) are illegal to own, so the peasants have no way of ever mounting a rebellion, even they got charged up enough to do something about it.
Which they won't because the bottom line is that it's a very easy, relaxed lifestyle for everyone involved. The battle lines are drawn between cartels fighting over the spoils by the more ambitious MX citizens seeking to gain a little wealth. The ones already at the top and the ones permanently in the lower tiers seem pretty content.
The solution is to legalize and let people make their own bad choices. It’s the only solution that would end the cartels.