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How is that working out for Mexico? War and 100k+ missing people a year is preferable to legalizing drugs?
South America is uniquely violent compared to old world countries with similar markers for instability. Almost all of it boils down to the manufacturing and selling of drugs.
I think you are strawmanning my argument.
Which was that a sufficiently potent band of criminals and a government is indistinguishable because the cartels in Mexico display the ability to govern and in some cases the consent of the governed, I would go as far to posit that if a cartel becomes sufficiently powerful and entrenched within an economy, they would very much allow people to vote.
If you legalize it, how much is that going to cut down on the violence? Moreover, it's not as if they're only supplying domestically. I doubt the US is going to let Mexico wash its hands of efforts to prevent the export of those drugs, and this is one of those things the gangs and government fight over.
I'm not straw-manning the argument, I understand that your point is about perceptions of sovereignty. My point is that we should not forget that a system in which a person's vote does nothing is not the ideal for a democratic government, whereas there is no reason to think the cartels give a damn in the first place. We see real-life dictatorships which control more than the cartels do of their own countries and they don't give people real voting power either.
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