Latest update April 30th, 2024 12:59 AM
Dec 06, 2012 Letters
Dear Editor,
Let’s say there is a poor, corrupt country run by malcontents and incompetents. Drug cartels hold immense power in that country. How did the cartels get this much power and influence?
Well, cartels grow because of corruption, spinelessness and immorality in the leadership of the country. Some leaders who have no clue how to build a fast growing economy actually believe that allowing drug trafficking to flourish will bring in lots of revenues to the government.
The backwardness of these leaders gets exposed for missing the boat on basic commonsense. Anyone with a barely functioning brain knows that illegality such as drug trafficking does not create wealth except for a few who traffic the drugs and who collect the bribes and payoffs.
Drug traffickers and money launderers evade paying taxes. The wealth from drug trafficking ends up in the hands of the few cartel members and those they pay off. The vast majority of the country gets nothing. Drug trafficking leads to massive inequality.
These cartel members spend most of their money abroad. While drug traffickers give nothing to the country, they cost the country a lot in terms of murders, deaths, crime escalation, addicted children, broken families, crippled legitimate businesses and terrorized communities.
Government has to fork out massive sums to rehabilitate young drug addicts, pay for more policemen and policing equipment, and offer more tax incentives for failing businesses and industries competing against drug laundering companies.
That money does not come from the criminals and cocaine cartels. It comes from the poor, working class people, who are crippled by more taxes to pay for these social costs.
Drug cartels and crime enterprises can use their blood money to dominate and kill legitimate businesses. They can out-compete legal businesses. They bid for government contracts, the same contracts paid for by taxes collected from working class taxpayers.
When these criminals kill legitimate business and competition, they not only shrink business but destroy jobs, leaving tens of thousands of young people unemployed.
The success of untouchable drug cartel kingpins and the bandits in power who facilitate them and get rich doing so, inspire poor and unemployed youths to aspire to a life of crime.
Drug cartels poison society’s children every day. Inviolability for drug kingpins emboldens criminals to unmask themselves. They compromise governments and the populace by bribery, corruption, coercion, intimidation, influence peddling and blackmail. The get-rich-quick syndrome leads to a violent escalation of crime.
Criminals bring more illegal weapons into society, which end up being used to kill even more citizens. Crime becomes a better investment than education for some in society. Honest business practices are discarded. Cocaine is shipped in remarkably unique ways, using advanced manufacturing techniques to exotic markets, while legitimate manufacturing and trade of legal products is neglected.
Turf wars erupt causing serious collateral damage to society. Then there are the drug gangs, phantom killers, private armies, vigilante groups and paramilitaries that are funded by criminal organizations to kill, maim and destroy. Corruption escalates.
The few decent men left in public life and government are threatened, killed or coerced by drug kingpins or their own corrupt cabal to bow down to the criminal killers of society. Poor people like sugar workers have to do without pay increases because more has to be found to pay for the rising cost of law enforcement caused by a small band of brigands who terrorize and command the entire country.
Foreign investors refuse to set foot in the country. The best and the brightest continue to flee, exacerbating the brain drain.
Law and order breaks down and people believe violence is the only response to conflict, so senseless blood-spilling surges. Fear grips the land. People refuse to venture out at night. Businesses are closed because of a lack of customers. Selfishness becomes a cancer as every man focuses on his own survival. Apathy takes charge.
Self-preservation leaves the country without a sense of duty and community. Families are separated and torn apart over crime, drug addiction and other evils. Drug cartels and their handful of conspirators and lackeys spend like drunken sailors, driving prices up for the working class man and woman who are now struggling to get by.
Greed, envy and covetousness become the template for getting ahead. The greatest evils of drug cartels and criminal syndicates dominating a country are the theft of democracy, the demise of the rule of law and the creation of a puppet state.
Indecent, dishonourable and squalid men in power become yes-men to cartels and criminal overlords. Drug cartels spy on them, film them and blackmail them taking bribes, molesting young girls, engaging in homosexual rape, cheating on their spouses and all manner of immorality.
These tainted characters get elected by the people only to become controlled by the cartels and crime industries. This is how a nation becomes controlled by criminals. The bandits now not only own the politicians, they can fund election campaigns to ensure they continue to get the vagabonds in power.
This is how criminals and drug cartels come to dominate countries. It is how they can determine the outcome of elections.
It is how the people’s votes end up not mattering at all because the cartels or foreign government that control the corrupt politicians make a mockery of the electoral process.
An election might as well never be held because the people are voting for those already handpicked by the drug cartels. Voters are not voting freely or fairly anymore. Democracy becomes a joke and a lie. Elections are just a facade and pretence for a dictatorship controlled by criminals.
M. Maxwell
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