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To me, it's clear you have a strong belief that poverty causes crime, and that if poverty is reduced enough then crime will also decrease to tolerable levels. I used to have that belief too, but from my personal lived experience I have evolved away from that core belief.
In my view, people usually turn to crime not because they are destitute (stealing bread) but because it has the potential to allow someone to leapfrog to high social status. The cartels offer the promise of high social status, even for the most raw recruits. They look down upon foreign aid unless they are stealing it, because stealing successfully is a demonstration of intelligence and boldness. They look down upon middle class jobs because civilians are like peasants to them, to be taxed for protection and exploited as if they were feudal lords.
Your 8 of 10 men who try to lead middle class lives live in fear of the remaining 2 of 10 men who embrace the cartel life. They try to keep their head down and avoid entanglements, they pay whatever shakedowns are necessary to avoid violence. Maybe 1 in 10 men try to take a principled stand against the cartels, but when the cartels find out they decapitate him and leave his body parts in public so that his friends and family are chastened for his act of insubordination.
You are hoping that the 1 in 10 men eventually becomes 9 in 10 men opposing cartels, so that the cartels crumble naturally from lack of recruits and civilian tolerance. I'm saying the cartels are aware of this risk and the beheadings will continue to prevent this from ever happening.
And on disease prevention like Ebola, I'm all for aid to minimize pandemic outbreak risk. Even if the people getting medical help are too stupid to understand it. I'm even for strict quarantines. But this kind of aid is fundamentally different from attempting to use aid to reduce terrorism and cartel violence.
To me, crime is to some degree a personality type. Your common thug is a guy who equates respect with fear, and he demands respect. Who thinks playing by the rules is a sucker's game. Who tends to not think ahead. Once you get higher up, crime is a business, just a horribly brutal business. Different environments tend to produce different personalities. Any traditional conservative will tell you a two parent home with loving but disciplined parents will usually produce healthy and productive kids.
Middle class kids generally do not become gangstas, because their parents drilled into them healthy visions of respect and success. The parents themselves share those values because those values enabled them to become middle class. You do the right thing, you get rewarded. You do the wrong thing, you get punished. A successful society does that, in part because it has the resources to reward people for doing good. A failed society is one where doing the bad thing gets rewarded instead, because bad people have power. In a successful society, even amoral people at least feign doing the right thing. Trump also loves respect and power, but even as someone who hates him, his vision of respect and power is very different than a cartel member. Even when committing crime, middle and upper class people usually commit white collar crime.
As far as the Mexican cartels are concerned, sure they can intimidate people into not opposing them. But I'm talking about recruitment. You can't intimidate someone into becoming a loyal thug. Would you join the cartel? No you wouldn't. Your moral compass and personality makes that life disgust you. A successful society isn't just one that has a lot of money; it's a high-trust place that produces fewer people in total that would have the personality that makes them want to go into that kind of life. And if fewer people want to go into that life, then by extension the cartel has less manpower, and less reach.
I'm not talking about 8 of 10 men who want to live middle class lives and whether they fear the other 2. I'm imagining 10 children, and how many of them would ever develop the personality the leads to them being willing to join the cartel, and how many of them could have parents actively involved in their lives, who can lead them to develop a personality that would be disgusted by the thought of ever joining the cartel.
On personality, we come back to the old argument on how much of personality is shaped by nature vs nurture. How much of personality is shaped by the enviornment vs genetic determinism. In the past, I was willing to hope that it was at least 20% nature / 80% nurture, but it is nothing even close to that. It's something like 95% nature / 5% nurture.
Unfortunately, according to studies of identical twins raised apart, genetic components of personality consistently prevail over environmental factors:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886922001477
We can hope all we want that a better environment makes better children that instinctively reject cartel violence, but this is a false hope, because the violence is likely due to genetics. So, the foreign aid spent to improve the environment is wasted, and is probably better spent on policing, military action, and/or other soft eugenics policies that improve the genetic pool slowly over time.
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