Alexiev wrote: ↑Tue Dec 02, 2025 3:33 pm
Rodrigo Duterte (former president of the Philippines) has been indicted for the extra-judicial killing of drug dealers. We can hope (probably fruitlessly) that Hegseth, Trump, and their minions are next. It's bizarre that a president of the U.S. wants to emulate a third world thug.
In Colombia where I reside, and in every city, but specifically in my city, there is a sort of ‘mafia’ that controls the local drug trade. It is well known who the dealers are who benefit from the drug trade. But no one goes after them because there is a protection-racket.
So drug addiction, and attendant crime, not to mention the suffering for the addict, simply goes on perpetually. There is even a known figure, a specific man with a name, and a family, with known business interests in many areas, who is or represents a sort of shadow government existing behind ‘government’.
Government is a façade (fachada) because of the level of corruption and how it has penetrated so deeply into all institutions. People know all of this, of course, but accommodate it. And yet when the present situation is compared to 15+ years ago, the general economy is so much better than in the early 2000s. There is high attendance at the universities and, for many (excepting perhaps the ultra-poor), people can advance and are advancing.
Here of course there was a certain sympathy for the extra-legal (paramilitary) assassination of drug dealers in the Philippines. (I admit to having a cold-hearted attitude about it). If
here it were to happen that 1,000 such dealers were murdered very few would lament it. Somewhat the opposite, in fact.
First because “the system’ protects them and, as is usually the case, the powers behind the drug sales are not in the poor classes but in the upper classes.
For larger reasons I do not understand Rodrigo Duterte went after the drug trade generally using brute power which is, in fact, the real power. The institutions are ineffective. His was “populism” in motion. (I wonder if it really had much effect).
Now, when you have had a pistol pointed at your head during a petty robbery by young delinquents and drug addicts, or in other instances knives at your throat, I
guarantee you that your politics will experience unique transformations. That is what happened to me. Not that I could no longer sympathize with the condition of the ultra-poor, in fact my sympathy turned to empathy and I resolved to participate in contributing to projects of economic melioration. But I developed an absolute intolerance of the criminal, especially those who pick up weapons and use them. I have a friend who was kidnapped and spent 2 days locked in a car trunk as they tried to extort money from his family. It was by an accident that they ended up not killing him.
Trust me, your ‘sympathy’ is quite shallow when you yourself face the violence.
However, here is the upshot: The real facts are that the real criminals and the ones doing far vaster harm, are not among the poor but rather in the upper classes. These are the ones who “get away with murder” figuratively and actually. You can never get at them.
So what is needed is a truly
democratic project of mass-assassination. You need to go after and eliminate possibly as many as 200,000 people all across the country. But it has to be sort of like in
The Usual Suspects. Keyser Söze not only assassinated the perpetrator but annihilated his entire family and even distant relatives. Then, their heads need to be placed on pikes in the main plazas.
If you are going to go after criminality you have to be motivated by truly democratic principles, you see, and you must be unrelenting.
See, it would be actually great if they really want after the Mexican (and Colombian and Ecuadorian etc.) mafias. Totally extra-judicially. Targeted assassinations, absolute destruction of compounds, apartments, I mean Gaza-level strikes. They should round up at least ten thousand in Mexican government with ties to the trade. There is really no way to carry this out by way of the existing institutions. It will
never happen that way.
You see, it could really be beautiful and lead to wonderful outcomes. It just has to be done
fully.
