> If they weren't, they'd quickly got kicked out from the market by someone who was.

It's pretty naive to imagine that black market cartels are competing in anything like an idealized free market. In the lawless environments being talked about, a worse businessman can always beat a better competitor simply by being better at violence.

Gang warfare and mass killings are rife down their. This isn't some naive libertarian fantasy market where La Familia is just another scrappy silicon valley startup.

The abstract structure of a market seems to be the same, just the rules are different. Companies operating legally fight in courts, drug cartels fight on the streets with guns. In both cases, it's part of the rules the environment sets. So the competitor better at violence is a better competitor, by the rules of the market they operate in.

> Like some enterpreneurs are much different.

Speak for yourself. I'm not.

BTW, I didn't assume anything, I just read the news and talk to people that have been through the fear of losing their lives by these crooks hands.

I don't understand what you're trying to rationalize here, probably you've never had someone determined to take your life away for nothing.

Corporations have had entire armies and countries at their command (not to mention that there is no clear dividing line between corporations and the government). The lives lost due to turf wars waged by drug cartels are not even a drop in the ocean compared to the lives lost in real wars waged for profit.

Let's see. The current Mexican drug war seems to have taken about 50k lives.

The Nicaraguan counter-revolution backed by the CIA took an estimated 29K lives.

The two seem comparable. And the comparison in this case is reasonable because the Mexican war stepped up when mercenaries who had fought in Central America joined the cartels.