According to this report in @DWnews (which I’m not sure I buy) Mexico’s drug cartels have been hit hard by the virus + are struggling to get their product to market + facing supply chain problems

I have a feeling the story is a little more complicated https://m.dw.com/en/mexico-drug-cartels-turn-charities-in-coronavirus-pandemic/a-53222555

The really interesting thing here is author’s argument (and that of their main source) that the cartels’ medical and charity work is a cheap pr stunt, something a corporation would do

To me that shows that they just don’t get the cartels or how these guys see themselves

Sure there’s ego involved

But calling this pr misses the point

And misses how integrated (in some ways) these groups are with their communities

One interesting parallel is hezbollah, the shi’ite faction active in Lebanon and areas of the Middle East

If you’re an Israeli this is a loaded topic, so to be clear this is not a right/wrong thing

This is just poking around

Many Western analysts could never quite get what was going on with hezbollah. Like the cartels, hezbollah does a lot of charity medical work and runs schools

Analysts (like the cartel analysts above) wrote off the things they did as public relations and missed the fact that something else was going on

They consistently underestimated the group’s reach + influence

Lot of similarities here

And that tells me something.

The cartels are probably much stronger than the analysts understand

That’s probably because they’re looking at the cartels as criminal organizations, instead of as economic powers + political rivals to Mexico’s failing center