Thread by @gauravsabnis

Oh yeah totally, plus we have come at a very happening and tense time. We landed and heard Chapo's son had been arrested in a HUGE gun battle that killed 30. And Biden and Trudeau are here.

In fact the general opinion here is that he was arrested with the summit in mind. /1

https://twitter.com/phlip_side/status/1612273688455565312

Ovidio had been arrested years ago, and Sinaloa cartel responded by unleashing violence. Lopez-Obrador released him in 2019 to ostensibly reduce the violence. And it worked.

So this operation annoyed many common folks cos it seems designed to tout it to Biden. /2

Mexicans have a VERY different (and in my opinion correct) take on the drug war and the so called border problem than Americans.

They think the real problem isn't drugs going north but guns & dollars coming south. America has a huge appetite for drugs that are taken voluntarily.

Mexico is the one that has lost almost 100K lives since this "war" was started by Calderon and the DEA. All to American weapons and cartels fattened by the dollars earned by selling coke to wall street bros who can't destroy companies with being jacked up. /4

And just like in Colombia, there is legit constitutional & ethical debate on extraditing these dudes to US just cos supermax prisons are the only way to contain guys who have been made billionaires by American demand for drugs. That America does nothing about. /5

When India said extradite David Headley who worked in the biggest terrorist attack in our history, US said no we can't cos he's facing charges here and has been convicted here and he is a US citizen so our legal system takes precedence.

See the hypocrisy? /6

First with Colombian cartels and now Mexican ones, US says no no, extradite them to us even if they have committed crimes in your country too. Cos they keep escaping from your prisons. They won't escape from ours.

Which is a utilitarian argument, not a principled one. /7

Politicians in LatAm as well as courts totally see that on this one issue, Escobar was right on principle as are the Guzmans. But at the end of the day, it just is convenient to ship them off to ADX Florence type impregnable jails.

Problem is, wall street bros need cocaine /8

So it has now been 30 years of whack a mole. Pablo is killed, Cali takes over. Cali guys extradited, Norte takes over. They are neutralized, Mexico takes over. Em Chapo is finally extradited and his son takes over.

The core problem is US keeps buying drugs. 🤷🏽 /9

Not only does it keep buying them by the billions, but it then also spends billions on this weird armed gang called DEA which just goes cowboy around the world giving not 2 hoots about collateral damage to civilians, 99.9999% of whom have nothing to do with the drug trade. /10

People take coke or heroin or fentanyl voluntarily.

People don't take bullets voluntarily.

So really, who is the victim in the drug war and who is the villain?

And what is the endgame?

Mexicans are exhausted and pissed off at America. They didn't create this "war". /11

Like one fella said to me, it's nice of US liberals to say #AbolishICE and #DefundThePolice but where are the demands to #AbolishDEA? Why exactly is this agency acting like a 2nd CIA around the world? Which other country has this kind of a bizarre agency? /12

There is also a lot of anger against President Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador cos he campaigned in 2018 as a Mexican Bernie. But after winning, he started kowtowing to Trump.

And now this Ovidio arrest.

30 people killed just so Biden has one less point to scold AMLO tomorrow. /13

Don't the American people and politicians see that 30 years after DEA gunned down Escobar claiming this will really stymie narcotics, we still keep creating new Escobars every few years, and the US drug market is bigger than ever. There will always be a new Escobar. /14

US makes the world think that Mexico exists just for cartels to operate.

But Mexico is a bustling $1.5 trillion economy. It's not a "rich" country but nor is it a basket case it's made out to be. Its per capita income is 4 times that of India's. Only 5% unemployment. /15

And of course it's an open secret that right from Reagan days, the DEA played a role in boosting the Sinaloa cartel from a ragtag bunch of street thugs into multi billionaires, cos Chapo was thought as the least of all the evils. But the media portrayal is different. /16

Of course all these cartel guys are bloodthirsty greedy cruel people even if Pablo and Chapo liked to pretend like they were Robinhood. But who has given all this money and all these guns to these evil folks?

It's not Finland or Vietnam, is it?

It's America itself. 🤦🏽‍♂️ /End