Coffee, avocados, and oil aren't illegal. But I'm pretty sure if you banned coffee it would spawn criminal gangs that made 1920s prohibition look tame.
There's no substitute for the margins you can get in the illegal drug trade. Take away the primary source of funding and you make it much easier to break the gangs. We've already gone through this. Just legalize it already.
They already extortion every single producer. Any coffee and avocado coming from South America has an extortion tax somewhere in the supply chain whether it’s to the farmers, shipping companies, distribution center warehouses at port or whatever you imagine.
The extortion comes as placing gang members as part of security, real threats or just bribes to unlock to keep moving towards the consumer.
Illegal goods have better margins but extortions provide a platform for power and money with less effort.
They could set a 1000% tax on the coffee produced, if they can consolidate control. Latin America is 50% of the world coffee production. What will Starbucks / Nestle do? They will just pay up. They can even go against the families of the execs to make their case about the new price.
They tried this before with fruit. The US companies just sold their interest in production and have plenty of other options for acquisition if they try to tax beyond the relative ease of South America verse anywhere else in the global south.
I would agree that letting black market bs continue will eventually lead to groups that could threaten global control on random other commodities but that's no reason kick the can further down this road.
Part of the reason such a large percentage of coffee is grown there is because it's cheap. The cartels can (and do) make profit on legitimate crops, but they can't magically rewrite the rules of capitalism.
Coffee beans are notoriously picky about their environment. But with modern technology, it wouldn't surprise me if large companies would resort to growing it in artificial greenhouses, or putting more stock in breeding plants that can be grown elsewhere.
>They could set a 1000% tax on the coffee produced.
No they couldn't. That'd just mint another cartel run black market that they don't control and that cartel would tax the black market coffee at substantially less.
You can kind of think of the current drugs situation as a "so big the number doesn't matter, it's a non stater" percent tax.
Exactly. These cartels are basically competing governments. They're in the drugs industry in the same way that there's state oil industries. The only choose crime because that activity has to exist outside the existing government system.
Applies to corporations as well but they do it legally and we consider part of our 'economy'. Heck we even subsidize them and give them the power to lobby and legally be a 'person'.
- Problem? What Problem? I don't see no stinkin' Problem!
They'll probably move onto mass producing weaponry, which, depending on the sophistication and scale, could be big issues for the rest of the world. They already partner with terrorist groups and other unsavory orgs as-is. Any group worth mentioning these days interfaces with the cartels
I don’t think weapon production is in their wheelhouse. Arms dealing maybe but not manufacturing. Facilities like those are permanent locations. Permanent locations tend to get raided and attacked.
I think controlling municipalities like they are is working fine for them. No need to mass produce weapons when you can just buy them.
They do have expertise in manufacturing and managing manufacturing facilities and logistics though. Likely the production equipment is not very sophisticated/ hard to reproduce if destroyed. I don’t expect them to produce state of the art F35s anyway.
Building a couple of small boats isn't the same as mass producing weapons. I can build cars in my garage, but I'd need a machine shop full of extremely heavy equipment and tons of metal stock to build guns.
You severely underestimate the capability that they possess, both intellectually and materially. The skill(and more critically, engineering environment) that went into manufacturing the boat shows a lot
Ehh, im not sure I agree that arms production is that difficult. Yes you need machine shop equipment, but machine equipment from any time in the last 75 years would be more than capable and there is plenty of unused equipment sitting around and new cheap chinese equipment you can buy that would be workable even if it isn't great. Even the US where guns are about as legal as they get, there are illegal gun manufacturing shops busted basically every week. Half of them are probably just making trash that is super easy to do like giggle switches and mostly publicized as pure propaganda for police departments, but that still leaves a significant number of people producing working illegal arms even in a market where guns are dirt cheap.
And now you got an entire online community dedicated to 3d printing firearms and sharing models and designs, and it is REALLY easy to go from 3d printer design into sintered or casted metal parts that require little to no actual machining to operate.
In my opinion, 99% of the barrier to obtaining firearms in this era is purely a lack of desire and them already being so cheap to get. It doesn't require a craftsman of 20 years to produce working fierarms nor even specialized or unusual equipment or materials. But even if someone did order more specialized machinery from China to produce say cold hammered barrels at a factory scale, a chinese tool making company isn't going to think twice about shipping it and taking the money, and if the producers can run it for just a few months it would have paid for itself.
This is a multi billion dollar ecosystem with no regulators but themselves. Basically state level capacity. Guns are small time for them if they decided to enter the arms market fully. My biggest guess is that the threat of having the biggest military in the world as their neighbor is the only thing stopping them (missiles are much bigger priorities than narcotics)
There’s making a gun and making weapons. I’m sure they are capable of making AR style rifles. Can they manufacture mortars? RPGs? IEDs and Landmines and drones are about as sophisticated as they can get.
Not really, the competition with the existing governments will significantly limit the amount of replacement cash they can demand, so they won't be able to sustain the same scale of man/firepower
When you have accumulated so much power you can demand cash from the world around you.