So you're forced to join a gang and fight their rival gangs, or you form your own gang equipped with rifles and grenades ready to commit violence, so that you can fight against joining that gang, or any other gang. Either way you're in a violent gang.

I guess I'd rather have the state maintain a monopoly on violence.

These self defense groups sound great until you think about all the problems with vigilante groups. Also they have a history of turning into cartels.

That and all things being equal I suspect most of the people in these groups would rather not be fighting.

Mexico has been like that for decades, I believe it's top 1 priority for most Mexicans yet it's still not fixed. What gives ?

At some point when your government is so corrupt, you got to take weapon and organize yourself. It's sad.

the real war the US should be fighting

About 30% of Mexico is gang-controlled

I'm glad that ordinary Mexicans can find ways to arm themselves against the violence of the cartels. I don't care that they have to cross the line and do illegal things to preserve their own lives, their families, and their communities. In my life I have worked with many Mexican men and they are some of the funniest, happiest people that I have ever known. They are also the hardest working people that I have ever worked with and many are multi-skilled so asking them to change tasks on a project required no training. They just stepped in and went to work. If those guys went home and found their villages and homes under siege by cartels then I would want them to be well-armed so that they could protect the families that they worked so hard for up here north of the border.

Drug problems in Mexico are a result of issues here in the US. Cartels were inconsequential when I was a teenager but gained power as the War on Drugs ramped up. If you are naive enough to believe that smugglers bypassed all those border protections in a cat-and-mouse game against detection for decades then you should understand the reality. In real life it was wealthy Americans and elements of the government who funded the import of drugs across the border using a network of private airstrips and small community airstrips that were unmanned most of the time. Shipments came through when "the coast is clear" and were dispersed across the US with the assistance of local people who were happy to help because they got paid. Many of these people were prominent in their communities and made appropriate donations to political interests which gave them the ability to remain in the background, unmolested by law enforcement, even from the federal level agencies.

Many of you young people have spent parts of your lives experimenting with drugs that currently are illegal and wishing that you could just walk into Walmart and buy it OTC. You wish laws would change to make it easier for you to use your drug of choice. Many people my age have been in the background, paranoid all their lives that someone - an employer maybe - would discover that they took a few tokes or got busted way back when and occasionally today. There is too much money in drugs being illegal for wholesale legalization to happen. That business is too big to fail. Those who are benefiting now and who have benefited over the last decades would lose a valuable income stream and all y'all HN types who spend hours prompting your AIs to create new SaaS apps understand income streams so you know how it sucks to have to conjure new prompts because your old ones flopped or were found to be too predatory.

I think as Americans we bear most of the responsibility for the formation of these cartels and for their continued dominance in so much of Mexico's economy.