The US will respond to violence inside of the US with extreme and unlimited violence that is fully supported by the population. If your goal is to get the US to go ape shit, attack the US. If your goal is to get the US to back off of something, seriously, don’t fucking attack American soil. This has been proven so many times that you would think this would be up there with “don’t invade Russia during the Winter”*. Intimidation really doesn’t work. Slowly grinding away American troops on foreign soil works. Attacking the US has Americans happily handing in freedom in exchange for a gun enmass with a mandate for unlimited war.
The US will happily turn the Mexican cartels bases into craters. The drug lords will get to enjoy the rest of their lives hiding in a jungle. The US population will cheer and not give a damn about body count. Everyone but folks who collect a paycheck from or through the US government’s military industrial complex, from normal Mexicans, to the drug cartels, to Americans should be violently opposed to the drug cartels getting violent in the US and attacking political infrastructure. Buy protection from cops to move drugs all you want, kill the occasional illegal immigrant informant quietly, but start killing cops and politicians and you are fucked.
All of this said, I think the cartel realize this fact. They don’t want to spend their gains on camping gear to live in the jungle, trying to avoid drone strokes. Send the shit across the border. Bribe it past authorities when you have to. Rout around people who won’t take bribes. Build the distribution to take some busts and people turning informant without the operation going belly up. Avoid holy war with America.
*unless you are Finish
