Now Joining the Fight Against Coronavirus: The World’s Armed Rebels, Drug Cartels and Gangs

Now Joining the Fight Against Coronavirus: The World’s Armed Rebels, Drug Cartels and Gangs by Kevin Sieff, Susannah George and Kareem Fahim – Washington Post

In Afghanistan, the Taliban has dispatched health teams to far-flung provinces to confront the coronavirus. In Mexico, drug cartels are offering aid packages to those feeling its economic impact. In Brazil and El Salvador, gangs enforce curfews to prevent its spread.

As governments around the world have responded to the coronavirus, so too have armed insurgents and terrorist groups and drug cartels and gangs, a parallel underworld of public health policy and strategic messaging.

It is hardly the first time such groups have attempted to fill the role of government. But few crises in modern times have tested the limits of the world’s nation-states as the coronavirus has, providing an opening for armed groups to step in where presidents, police forces and parliaments have failed…

Read on.