Radio War Nerd EP #380 — Pancho Villa & The Punitive Expedition

Maybe you guys know this already, but it came as a surprise to me that fentanyl "contamination" of various drugs is actually a feature, and when someone ODs, other junkies come running to buy whatever brand proved to be fatal. The optimal strategy for a sales-maximizing dealer would be to kill a user every now and then. (From Dopesick by Beth Macy.)

For god’s sake john - VEE-yuh

When Republicans talk smack about bringing Plan Colombia to Mexico, they leave out the actual Plan Mexico that started under Bush -- the declaration of a new war on drugs in 2006 by Calderon, with massive US armament of Mexican anti-drug and military forces, setting off years of drug war, massacres, and what look to be many death-squad killings disguised as "cartel" fighting. Something like 100,000 killed. That's the lower end of a figure that's hard to estimate. You see a lot of numbers because the high general murder rate cannot easily be separated from drug business killings. This is what AMLO is trying to wind down!

Great episode, and love to hear that about Sammy 🥹 I agree with other comments though that a whole war nerd treatment of the Mexican revolution is needed. Another thing you guys would do an amazing job with (if you haven’t already) would be a history of the bin laden family. and now that we have some hindsight, an evaluation of bin laden’s strategy regarding provoking the US to get them bogged down. China owes him a lot, they were able to make money and build infrastructure for 20 years while the us was distracted blowing up civilians in west Asia.

You should give John Reed a chance. Ten Days is quite good.

Like the song says, Twas better to die beneath an Irish sky, than at Suvla or Sud el Bar

Also, the story about Sammy was really touching. Glad he's doing well.

Fentanyl sucks you can't even do meth any more it's like when disco got so big every band had to make a dance album

Wonderful, would love to see Porfirio Diaz discussed someday!

@john and mark, check out “Duck, You Sucker!” for the silver screen adaptation you seek!

"Invade Mexico" sounds like the GOPniks pussing out on war with China, but still needing to direct all that bloodlust somewhere else. It may also have to do with how they see the Ukraine war; they see Russia "protecting its border" and go "why aren't we doing that!!" and then remember the last 20 years they spent impotently whining about mexican drug trafficking.

“And Staring Pancho Villa as Himself” small made for HBO movie starring Antonio banderas. Not focused on the battles but on the silent screen pictures that he made at the time. I rented it from blockbuster 20ish years ago. The only thing I remember is that there is a tag at the end of the movie that said most of the film that was made of him has been lost to time. It was also cool how well they recreated old silent film filmmaking.

Does anyone have any good resources about the prevalence and availability of fentanyl? Everything I see from some casual googling just blames China and Mexico.

Started reading Zavala's book after hearing him on TrueAnon. One point he makes is the contradiction of constantly hearing that areas of northern Mexico are completely controlled by the so-called cartels and are essentially failed states, at the same time the actual state of Mexico is auctioning off rights to the massive shale reserves in those areas to foreign companies. He speculates the drug war is allowed to rage so out of control in those areas to displace peasants from the shale-rich lands and give the government the excuse to brand any poor peasants getting uppity as narcos and shoot them. The book is a few years old so it doesn't cover AMLO and the GOP's new insane invade Mexico agenda, but I wonder how much of that agenda is a reaction to AMLO potentially not giving away the country's natural resources on a platter.

No mention of this Pancho Villa movie? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0337824/

Pancho Villa was a Chad.

One episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles covers this: https://indianajones.fandom.com/wiki/Spring_Break_Adventure It features Pancho Villa, Pershing and Patton. I was able to find the full episode on YouTube.

Unpublished followup to “Pleasant Hell”??! Hold the presses!!

Would be very surprised if people without quite good background could follow this discussion on Villa. Is it more well known in USA? I think this was really missing a "setting the scene" pre-segment.

Good episode. It would have been even better with a bit more context on why Mexico was at war. Perhaps that's another episode altogether.

It's worth noting re: the Patriot and many other systems is that it has developed a lot since its combat debut. The system has missiles designed for intercepting ballistic missiles (apparently based on SDI tech, of all things) that were introduced in the late 90s. Apparently they're still upgrading the thing, too. It's also worth noting that, as I said, many other modern weapons systems have changed significantly since their introduction. It seems like these days, if a system truly is a lemon, if you have the resources you can make your lemonade. It may be that this can only go so far though- air defense systems are especially easy to upgrade, given that things like software and radar can have a big impact on the performance of the system, and most air defense systems use different missiles for different targets, so you can just pull something off the shelf from SDI and bolt it onto Patriot. Maybe for something like the F-35, all the money in the world couldn't save it. Only time will tell, I guess.

I had my face in my hands during Bashō/lascio mixup, because I did the same thing in Japan. Japanese has a lot of homophones, so it’s difficult to keep track as a foreigner, and I got a lot of puzzled looks when I thought I was calling a dog “kawaii” (cute) but pronounced it “kowai” (scary)

I’m kind of under the impression that the U.S. invading Mexico in 2023 would go pretty similar to the Iraqi invasion of Iran in the 80s. Would love to know what the community’s thoughts on it are!

Absolutely loving the episode. My girlfriend comes home from work to me screaming at my computer, at the DOTA game and along with the commentary "Honey are you OK?" haha absolute pleasure