Abstract
A dramatic increase in criminal violence in Mexico since 2007 has resulted in an estimated 60,000–70,000 “additional” homicides, often of an especially brutal form, related to drug trafficking and other organized-crime activities. This violence has been accompanied by a steep increase in rates of kidnapping and extortion and has targeted participants in the narcotics trade as well as government officials, journalists, and civil society activists. Despite the magnitude of the violence and enormous public concern about it, scholarly literature on this topic has been scant. This issue offers some of the most promising analyses conducted thus far on the trends in violence and their causes, focusing largely, though not exclusively, on the role Mexico’s government has played in the business of illegal drugs and the violence that accompanies it. In this introduction, we discuss the challenge of deriving reliable statistics on drug-related violence, its spatial and temporal patterns, prevailing explanations, its relationship to organized crime in general, and differences between this violence and substate political violence.
Overview
Following its 1910 revolution and the postrevolutionary political violence of the 1920s and 1930s, Mexico underwent a steady decline in violent crime, especially homicide, into the 1970s. The 1980s brought periodic increases in violent crime, however, amid significant economic and political turmoil. By the mid-1990s, homicides resumed a downward trajectory, dropping from 16.9 per 100,000 in 1995 to 8.1 in 2007, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), Mexico’s national statistical agency. However, homicides jumped 57 percent in 2008 and continued to grow dramatically through 2011, when the rate reached 23.7, a trebling from the 2007 nadir (see Figure 1). Although Mexico’s rate remained below the average of about 27 for Latin American countries in that time period, and several other countries in the region had considerably higher rates (see Figure 2), no other country in the Western Hemisphere experienced as large an increase—in absolute number or in percentage increase in rate—over the last decade (Shirk 2011; see Figure 3). Moreover, national rates do not convey the extraordinary concentration of violence in certain Mexican regions and cities, with some, like Ciudad Juárez, having peak rates greater than many war zones (Williams 2012; Rodríguez Ferreira 2014).
Homicide rate in Mexico per 100,000 inhabitants, 1995–2013. Source: National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI).
Homicide rates in the Americas, 2010. Source: UN Office on Drugs and Crime.
Total homicides by country, 1995–2011. Source: UN Office on Drugs and Crime. Adapted from Heinle, Rodríguez, and Shirk (2014).
The scholars in this collection endeavor to explain these developments, which have garnered enormous media coverage but far less scholarly attention than warranted, considering their human toll. Each study is predicated on the understanding that the growth in Mexico’s violence comes not from proportionate increases across the various situational categories of homicide but primarily from a spike in the fraction of homicides that are associated with organized crime, and in particular the trafficking of illicit drugs (Molzahn, Ferreira, and Shirk 2013; Heinle, Rodríguez, and Shirk 2014). The articles herein focus primarily on homicide, the most serious crime and the most reliably reported.
Understanding how, when, and why illicit enterprises employ violence is now of vital importance for Mexico and other Latin American countries. Contrary to common belief, not all illicit enterprises entail more violence than legal ones typically do. The sale of counterfeit art and stolen antiquities, trafficking in endangered species, smuggling of untaxed cigarettes, online music piracy, and trade in knock-off designer labels are largely free of violence. And the level of violence associated with the sale of a given illicit commodity varies markedly. Contrast the high level of violence associated with cocaine production in Colombia with the low level in Bolivia, or the carnage attending street selling of this drug in the United States in the 1980s with the relative lack of it in Amsterdam.
Still, it is safe to assert that, in general, illicit businesses utilize violence more readily than legal ones do (Andreas and Wallman 2009). The explanation requires little elaboration: actors in organized illegal enterprises lack recourse to legal remedies to rectify violations of business agreements and to protect against those who would impinge on their activities or prey on their proceeds. Instead, they must rely on informal means of resolving conflicts, including violence. In addition, the use of violence to redress perceived violations of the moral order is more common within social strata in which limited financial means and social influence mean limited access to legal resources (Black 1983; Cooney 1997), strata that are the origin of most of those who make their living through organized crime. An exception to these observations—particularly with regard to Mexican drug trafficking—is that some of these actors are government employees who do, in fact, use the law and their positions within the state in the service of their illegal activities. This category of participants and, more generally, the role of government in both containing and stimulating drug-trafficking violence, figure prominently in the articles that follow.
Defining Drug Violence
Showing that the recent increase in homicides in Mexico consists mainly of killings related to organized crime requires a detailed consideration of crime data in Mexico. Despite widespread use of such terms as “narco violence” and “drug violence,” it is not a straightforward matter to identify and tabulate murders that are specifically related to drug trafficking (Ríos and Shirk 2012). While Mexican Federal Criminal Code contains a category of crimes connected to organized criminal groups—and drug trafficking is defined as a species of organized crime—for a criminal event to be properly designated as an organized-crime–type infraction, a perpetrator must be identified, investigated, tried, and convicted. Fewer than 25 percent of crimes are reported, and perhaps 20 percent of those are even investigated. An estimated 2 percent of crimes ultimately result in prosecution and sentencing (Zepeda Lecuona 2007). Thus, the number of homicides in Mexico that result in a conviction is trivial. Moreover, though homicides are the most reliably registered crime, the large numbers of “disappearances” and mass graves believed to be associated with Mexican crime groups raise questions about the reliability of even homicide statistics.
Nonetheless, the killings that have become a hallmark of Mexican drug-trafficking organizations have diagnostic characteristics that, while not wholly distinctive, can credibly be used to identify these crimes. These groups use specific types of weapons (AK- and AR-style rifles, grenades) and tactics (assassinations of law enforcement agents and journalists and street gun battles), extreme forms of violence (torture, dismemberment, decapitation, and corporeal inscription), overt messages to authorities and rivals (narcomensajes), and intentional public evidence of their violence, such as bodies hanging from bridges. Perhaps more than the sheer number of homicides, the spectacular and grisly nature of gangland murders sustains the widespread fear that characterizes Mexico’s ongoing “public insecurity crisis” (Bailey and Chabat 2002). For this reason, researchers have made an effort to isolate and analyze violence linked to organized crime as a distinctive criminological phenomenon in Mexico.
Data Sources: Measuring Drug Violence
The challenges of measuring, analyzing, and understanding “drug violence” are further complicated by the limitations of available data sources. There are both government and independent entities that compile statistics on homicides, at least in recent years, some of which provide estimates of the numbers of organized-crime killings. The Mexican government’s official registrar of statistics, INEGI, is independent of any law-enforcement agency and provides mortality data, including deaths by homicide and other forms of violent crime, dating back to 1990. The Mexican National Public Security System (SNSP) has periodically released data on cases where there was a formal finding of intentional homicide and a conviction for the crime. This information dates back to 1997. In addition, various agencies operating within the SNSP subcategorize homicides by type, including organized-crime-type killings, though these have been reported only sporadically. In attempting to determine whether there is a connection to organized crime in a particular case, analysts utilize the characteristics of organized-crime violence listed earlier as well as additional facts about the victim, such as whether the victim was carrying a particular class of weapon, transporting drugs, or under investigation for organized-crime activities.
The availability of data on organized-crime–style homicides from the Mexican government has been limited and inconsistent. 1 INEGI has never provided tallies of organized-crime–style homicides. The first official data on drug-related homicides were initially compiled by the Mexican Attorney General’s office and reported by the Mexican human rights ombudsman, the National Commission on Human Rights (CNDH), covering the period from 1997 to 2008 (Moloeznik 2009). Subsequently, SNSP sporadically provided data on organized-crime–style killings but did not use the same set of categories in classifying them at different points in time. As a result, data from the Mexican government have been of limited availability and utility in studying the type of violence that has been epidemic in recent years. 2
Attempting to close the data gap, media organizations and individual researchers have developed their own tallies of organized-crime–style homicides, using varying terms, such as “drug killings,” “narco-ejecucciones,” and “organized-crime homicides.” Deriving these totals requires sustained, labor-intensive efforts—monitoring government and media sources for all reported homicides—as well as decisions about the characteristics and contextual circumstances that will be used to identify the possible involvement of organized crime in each case. Media tallies involve painstakingly tracking reported organized-crime homicides one at a time.
The most useful nongovernmental sources are national periodicals that have systematically reported on organized-crime violence, especially the daily newspaper Reforma and the weekly news magazine Milenio. However, these figures have been published with varying regularity, and their data sets are not open to public scrutiny, making it difficult to assess their validity. The earliest data available from Reforma begin in 2006 and those from Milenio in 2007. Complementing these approaches is the use of automated web-based tools that estimate the frequency of violent events by tracking references to violence on the web or in selected web domains (see Coscia and Rios 2012).
The challenge of merging the information from these sources into a consensus picture of drug-trafficking violence in Mexico lies not just in the inconsistent availability of official data. No two data series cover exactly the same period of time. In addition, the data sets vary in the geographic level of data aggregation, with government sources reporting data at the municipal level and most media sources aggregating it to the state level. Finally, these sources vary in how much detail they provide on the circumstances of homicides and attributes of victims.
A Snapshot of Drug Violence in Mexico
Despite the methodological challenges of tabulating organized-crime homicides, the sources described earlier provide a compelling and relatively consistent picture of the nature of Mexico’s recent drug violence. Here we outline the general patterns in the level, distribution, and types of drug violence that Mexico has experienced in recent years.
The Magnitude of Violence
The first and most obvious trend is the absolute increase in homicides since 2008. Given variation in their methodologies, it is not surprising that the alternative sources show differences in their annual counts of drug-related homicides. However, for reasons we consider subsequently, two of the three available sources for the period prior to 2007 are strongly correlated, and after 2007 all five available sources are univocal in testifying to Mexico’s elevated levels of violence in recent years (see Figure 4).
Comparison of homicide and organized-crime homicide tallies, 1990 through 2013. Source: National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), National Public Security System (SNSP), National Commission on Human Rights (CNDH), Reforma, Milenio. Adapted from Heinle, Rodríguez, and Shirk (2014).
The national picture shows a general decline in homicide from the 1990s to the mid-2000s. The average annual decline in homicides from 1990 to 2007 was 2.6 percent, according to INEGI; had this pace continued, Mexico’s rate today would be 6.7 per 100,000, not far above the US rate of about 5. However, even amid this decline, Mexico’s human rights commission (CNDH) documented a growing number of drug-related homicides from 2000 to 2007, suggesting growing conflict among organized-crime groups during this period.
After 2007, the number of intentional homicides documented by all sources noted earlier climbed sharply. INEGI figures show increases of more than 58 percent in 2008, 41 percent in 2009, 30 percent in 2010, and 5 percent in 2011. According to INEGI figures released in late 2013, 2012 marked the first decrease (about 4 percent) in the number of homicides since 2007. Data from both INEGI and SNSP for 2013 suggest that overall homicide declined significantly—by as much as 16 percent—during President Enrique Peña Nieto’s first year in office, and independent tallies similarly show significant decreases in organized-crime–style homicides.
The Distribution and Quality of Violence
In addition to the sheer magnitude of recent violence in Mexico, changes in its geographic distribution and character should be noted. First, over time, there has been significant subnational disparity in the distribution of violence, as illustrated by Figure 5. The highest rates of homicide have been concentrated in areas associated with the production or transit of illicit drugs. In addition, violence has tended to spike quite suddenly in certain locations and time periods. The areas with the highest concentrations in recent years are Mexico’s “Golden Triangle” region, where the northeastern states of Sinaloa, Chihuahua, and Durango meet, as well as the Ciudad Juárez area adjacent to Mexico’s border with the United States. Beginning in 2010, high rates of homicide occurred in northeastern Mexico, particularly in the states of Tamaulipas, Veracruz, and Nuevo León, including Monterrey and nearby cities in Coahuila. It is also notable that violence has subsided unevenly in geography, abating to a greater degree in some of the cities and regions that experienced significant spikes and even prolonged periods of violence in recent years, notably Tijuana, Monterrey, and, more recently, Ciudad Juárez.
Distribution of homicides by municipality, 2005–2012. Source: National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI). Adapted from Heinle, Rodríguez, and Shirk (2014). Maps generated by Theresa Firestine.
Second, and as mentioned earlier, the quality of violence has changed importantly in recent years. A significant proportion of homicides have been very high profile and spectacular in nature, with decapitated heads and other body parts rolled into bars or strewn about public places, bodies hanging from bridges, public assassinations of government officials, running gun battles in the public square, online posting of videotaped murders, and messages carved into flesh. And although the great majority of victims—frequently estimated to be at least 90 percent—are themselves thought to be participants in illegal activities, it is also clear that long-standing organized-crime mores regarding acceptable kinds of target have eroded, with neither women nor children nor nonparticipants of any category wholly safe from violence (Blitzer 2010; Bremer 2010).
Such killings arguably constitute a form of communication, an attempt to terrorize rivals, government officials, and the public. The message is clear: “We are powerful, we are ruthless, you could be next.” Yet other killings have been deliberately concealed from the public eye, with thousands murdered and dumped into mass graves or simply “disappeared” and never heard from again. These deaths may constitute a kind of internal communication—the killing of disloyal members of one’s own organization—or may instead be a by-product of predatory business practices that organized-crime groups prefer not to advertise, such as kidnapping, extortion, and human trafficking. Duran-Martinez (2015) analyzes the factors criminal groups consider in deciding whether to advertise or hide their violence. She finds that the frequency of their violence is related to the degree of competition over market access in a given location. The visibility of their violence, however, seems to reflect a calculus weighing its benefits (chiefly intimidation) against the likely government response; where law enforcement is coordinated and effective, groups can expect either repression or protection, rendering visible violence either risky or unnecessary, respectively.
The Players: Organized-crime Groups, Drug Trafficking, and Violence in Mexico
Depending on the data sources used, organized-crime killings are estimated to make up 30 to 60 percent of homicides in recent years and to explain a large share or most of the increase in total homicides (see Heinle, Ferreira, and Shirk 2014, 24). Even the most conservative estimates suggest that organized-crime violence in Mexico has been greater than the violence in any contemporary violent conflict involving non-state actors (see Sundberg and Kreutz 2012; Rodríguez Ferreira 2014). Thus, any effort to understand Mexico’s violence requires consideration of organized crime and especially drug trafficking (Astorga Almanza 1995, 2005; Campos 2012).
The illicit traffic in drugs in the Americas began, by definition, when the United States and other countries moved to regulate and eventually outlaw the free trade in psychotropic substances (opium, heroin, and cocaine), beginning in 1914 (Bertram et al. 1996; Campbell 2009). 3 Mexican smugglers developed networks for trafficking alcohol into the United States soon after the imposition of prohibition in 1919 with the Volstead Act. Later, with the prohibition of heroin and eventually marijuana, Mexican producers and smugglers became important suppliers of these commodities, with operations in states that are currently centers of violence, notably Chihuahua, Durango, Guerrero, Sinaloa, and Michoacán.
Until the 1970s, Mexico was a low-level supplier of heroin, since the US market was well provisioned by Italian and French organized-crime groups. By the 1970s, though, Mexico was becoming an increasingly important producer and supplier to the burgeoning US market for drugs, the result of a confluence of circumstances. In the early 1970s, the United States succeeded in forcing Turkey to curtail its opium production and France managed to shut down the “French Connection,” the pipeline through which the opium processed in France was delivered as heroin to the United States. As a consequence, Mexican heroin production expanded severalfold, making Mexico the largest heroin supplier to the United States by the mid-70s (Reuter 1985). During the 1980s, Mexican smugglers began to move into the lucrative cocaine market as counter-drug efforts staunched the flow from Colombia into South Florida. Gradually, Mexican smugglers initially serving as couriers working on commission for Colombian traffickers were able to assume increased responsibility for bankrolling and coordinating major trafficking operations.
Well into the 1980s, many top cartel operatives—virtually all with roots in Sinaloa, the cradle of Mexican drug trafficking—operated largely undisturbed within a loosely knit alliance that controlled several trafficking routes, or plazas, for smuggling drugs into the United States. 4 The main trafficking organizations during this period were based in Guadalajara and the Gulf of Mexico and functioned as large umbrella outfits for various smugglers moving product into the United States. The Guadalajara Cartel acquired tremendous wealth through its pioneering efforts in transporting Colombian cocaine. The extent of its operations became quite evident in 1984, when the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) helped Mexican authorities organize a raid on its massive marijuana-growing operations at El Bufalo ranch in northern Chihuahua, in what is widely viewed as the largest marijuana bust in history. 5
That bust led to the retaliatory torture and murder of DEA agent Enrique Camarena in 1985, by several accounts a crucial event in the history of the drug war in Mexico (Shannon 1988; Kuykendall 2005). Under intense US pressure, Mexican authorities arrested the Guadalajara Cartel’s top leaders over the next four years. By the early 1990s, conflicts among the remaining leaders within the cartel resulted in a fissioning into three groups, the Juárez, Sinaloa, and Tijuana Cartels. Each was headed by a new generation of drug traffickers raised under the tutelage of previous Guadalajara leaders. Amado Carrillo Fuentes, head of the Juárez Cartel, became the most powerful trafficker in Mexico on the strength of his aerial trafficking routes from Colombia and his strategic alliance with Sinaloa Cartel leaders Joaquín (El Chapo) Guzmán Loera and Ismael Zambada. After Carrillo’s death in 1997, an alliance between the Sinaloa and Juárez Cartels and some associated groups began to gain the advantage against the Tijuana Cartel.
The Gulf Cartel also underwent a violent restructuring after the arrest of its leader, Juan García Abrego, in 1996. Osiel Cárdenas, a “lieutenant” vying for leadership, murdered his rivals within the organization and seized control. To consolidate his power and defend against other groups intent on access to the transport route connecting Nuevo Laredo to Laredo and then Houston and Dallas, in the late 1990s Cárdenas recruited elite Mexican military personnel to form an organization of paramilitary enforcers that would come to be known as the Zetas. Their introduction of military tactics and extremely brutal forms of violence imparted a much greater viciousness to Mexico’s drug war.
In the early 2000s, the Tijuana and Gulf Cartels each suffered the arrest of its top leader, Benjamin Arellano Felix and Osiel Cárdenas, respectively. Subsequently, toward the end of the 2000s, each experienced a significant schism, leading to the emergence of newly autonomous organizations, including the Teodoro García organization, the Zetas, La Familia Michoacana (LFM), and the Beltran Leyva organization (Grayson 2009). Violent conflict spiked in 2009 and 2010 precisely as these smaller, more regional organizations challenged the established groups that had previously dominated them or from which they derived. Further splintering and factional conflicts led to the emergence of the New Generation-Jalisco Cartel and the La Resistencia organization, which both emerged from the Sinaloa Cartel, and the Knights Templar, which broke from LFM.
By the time the violence crested in 2011, the least disrupted organization appeared to be the Sinaloa Cartel, whose chief leaders—Guzmán and Zambada—remained at large and still in charge. The Sinaloans’ apparent triumph gave rise to ample speculation that this organization was better protected than its rivals by corrupt government authorities (Burnett, Meñaloza, and Benincasa 2010). Whatever the case, by late 2013, even as major conflicts between the Sinaloa organization and its rivals subsided in key trafficking territories, such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, Mexican authorities turned their attention to ongoing violence in rural production and transit areas like Michoacán and Guerrero. In May 2013, President Peña Nieto committed federal police and military personnel to the state of Michoacán, echoing the similar deployments, discussed subsequently, that had launched President Felipe Calderón’s counter-drug efforts six years earlier. And in Guerrero, rising levels of crime and violence triggered the activation of local self-defense forces, some bearing the vestiges of guerrilla and social movements of the 1960s (Bargent 2013; Flores Contreras 2013).
Driving Factors: Tracing the Causes of Drug Violence
Understanding why Mexico provided a fertile context for organized crime is an easier task than explaining why these organizations became so violent, so suddenly. Providing such an explanation, the task of the articles in this collection, is as challenging as explaining any other case of massive social violence—and then some. The actors engaged in illicit industries are cloaked in secrecy and myth, the perpetrators of violence are likely to go unknown and unpunished, government initiatives, successful or not, are often “classified” matters, and pervasive corruption frequently obscures the actions and agendas of both government officials and civilians.
One factor inarguably facilitating the proliferation of drug-trafficking organizations in Mexico has been the complicity of government and law enforcement personnel, as well as the cohesiveness and strength of the overall state apparatus, especially since the 1940s. Political power in Mexico was arguably more unified, hierarchical, and centralized than in any other Latin American country in that period. From 1929 onward, Mexico was governed by a single political party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional [PRI]), which controlled virtually every political office across the country through the end of the century. High-level corruption created a blanket of protection throughout the political system. The illicit arrangements between Mexican drug traffickers and state authorities might be better understood not as criminals corrupting the state but criminals as subjects of the state (Flores Pérez 2009, 2010). Thus, the frequent references to drug traffickers having “penetrated” the government mischaracterize the power dynamics at play during the era of one-party government in Mexico.
From the moment drug trafficking became profitable, Mexican officials were involved. A 1916 US Customs investigation, for example, found that the governor of Baja California was deriving enormous sums from the smuggling of opium into California (Astorga Almanza 2003). At least as early as the 1940s, police were selling drugs seized in raids and allowing jailed traffickers to conduct business, practices that continued down to the present (Knight 2012). Understanding the spate of violence after 2007, a profound reversal of the decadelong downtrend in Mexican violence, thus requires an appreciation of the essential role in drug trafficking played by government officials during the PRI’s nearly hegemonic reign of seventy-one years.
The articles in this issue cover the predominant explanations for the surge in violence, adducing a variety of lines of evidence to support or call into question those accounts. In almost every explanatory model, the role of government—its structure and its actions, whether colluding with or combatting organized crime—is key to understanding shifts in trafficking activities and patterns of violence. Of these accounts, the two most frequently invoked can be called the democratization model and the kingpin model.
Democratization
The top-to-bottom domination of politics and government by the PRI began to give way in the 1980s (Cornelius and Craig 1991; Molinar Horcasitas 1991). Even while the PRI still held a firm grip on the presidency, candidates of other parties were gaining mayoralties and governorships in small but increasing numbers, due in part to political and electoral reforms that made electoral processes more fair (Beer 2003; Magaloni 2003; Eisenstadt 2004). The chief beneficiaries of declining PRI hegemony were the conservative National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional [PAN]), the country’s oldest opposition party, and the left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution (Partido de la Revolución Democrática [PRD]; Bruhn 1997; Mizrahi 2003). Bolstered by public frustrations over the country’s economic difficulties and revelations of PRI corruption, the political opposition ate away at the ruling party’s majority status at the subnational level. This culminated in July 2000, when Vicente Fox, the PAN candidate, took the presidency from the PRI. His term was followed by a narrow 2006 victory of another PAN candidate, Felipe Calderón, who greatly stepped up Mexico’s counter-drug efforts.
As the consequences of democratization—electoral competition, political alternation, and mixed-party government—coincided with the reorganization of Mexican drug trafficking, a number of scholars have suggested that Mexico’s drug violence has been an unintended consequence of democratization (Astorga Almanza and Shirk 2010). The basis for this line of reasoning is that the PRI’s political monopoly had created a hospitable environment for trafficking organizations. Government by the same party at all levels conferred nearly total impunity on corrupt state actors, with few checks and balances against the abuse of power by PRI officials (Morris 2009).
Thus, some scholars have portrayed corruption in the era of the PRI as a massive protection racket by a rent-seeking single-party regime (Astorga Almanza 2000; Flores Pérez 2009; Snyder and Duran-Martinez 2009). As mentioned earlier, this characterization differs significantly from the widespread assumption that it was the crime bosses who held the upper hand in a devil’s bargain of plata o plomo: literally “silver or lead,” figuratively “a bribe or a bullet.” Both mechanisms—control from above by corrupt government agents and corruption from below of government agents—were probably at play. In any case, there is substantial evidence that the evolution of trafficking networks in Mexico benefited from protection by high-level government officials. 6 Single-party rule meant that well-placed bribes at the highest levels guaranteed a “trickle down” effect of government protection and made it possible for criminal organizations, each assigned to its own plaza, to operate unmolested by competition. The traffickers, in turn, delivered a fee to their government protectors. They also obeyed an unwritten prohibition on domestic drug selling and on blatant, public violence. Trafficking-related violence did occur, but it was minimal compared to what would develop toward the end of the 2000s. 7
Those who see Mexico’s democratization as an indirect cause of conflict and violence among traffickers argue that political change unsettled the negotiated arrangements between corrupt state officials and criminal organizations. Some go further, asserting that the PRI was more inclined than Mexico’s other parties to sustain the peace through corrupt bargains. 8 PAN and PRD politicians, by contrast, came to power untainted by such ties and were therefore less likely to offer protection to criminal organizations and more likely to try to enforce the law. A predictable outcome would be a violent response by criminals—killing the local police chief, for example—at least until a new bargain could be negotiated. At the same time, to the extent that mixed-party government impeded state-protected monopolies in a given plaza, it might be expected to result in encroachment and violence between rival groups.
The appearance of what Rios (2015) calls “non-coordinated” government and Duran-Martinez (2015) calls “fragmented” government dates to the late 1980s and early 1990s—the first opposition governor since 1929 was elected in Baja California in 1989. Whether PRI politicians were more favorably disposed than members of other parties to participating in organized crime, political alternation and mixed-party government alone may have resulted in more violence by creating fissures within the structure of governance. Political pluralism made it harder for authorities to govern, in part due to the well-documented difficulties of “opposition governance” in Mexico, including sabotage by outgoing PRI governments (e.g., removing official records, leaving behind massive indebtedness) and the inexperience of incoming opposition officials (Rodríguez and Ward 1994, 1995; Espinoza Valle 2000). Officials from different parties act under incentives that are not always identical: officeholders lower in the government hierarchy and of a different party from the president may be less motivated to implement policy dictated from above, as their party affiliation limits their prospects for ascending in government.
Although PRI political figures still handily predominated at the local and state level into the 1990s, the inroads into government by opposition parties meant that the president was no longer able to ensure that PRI practices—both official and covert—would be followed in every state and municipality. Non-PRI officials were not insured of a portion of the tax on traffickers or were opposed to participating in the protection racket. Traffickers, in turn, were no longer confident in their immunity from enforcement and protection from encroachment by rivals. The eventual result was rising violence, as traffickers resorted to their own, violent means to fend off competitors. Violence was deployed also against government agents, mainly local police but also officeholders, to deter those who evinced a willingness to enforce the law—whether with an even hand or against one group on behalf of another. As well, the long-standing implicit prohibition on domestic drug selling could no longer be consistently enforced. Rios (2015) provides evidence that domestic cocaine markets appeared first in “non-coordinated” municipalities, that is, those in which the mayor was of a different party from the state governor. Taking a municipality’s first hospital emergency visit for a cocaine overdose as an indication of local cocaine selling, she finds that municipalities with non-coordinated governance in a given year are more likely to have domestic drug selling the following year. (No such relationship was found for caffeine overdoses, which addresses certain alternative explanations for the finding.)
Even after the PAN took power at the national level in 2000, the problem of cooperation across different levels of government persisted, since the majority of state and local governments, still controlled by the PRI, were now part of the political opposition. This created the possibility of new permutations of corruption, where contending bargains of state protection could pit state agents against traffickers, traffickers against traffickers, and state agents against each other. Potentially, one group could buy protection from PRI municipal authorities, while another could buy it from the PRD governor’s office, even as a PAN president presided over the country.
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the reestablishment of consistent party affiliation of government officials from top to bottom would result in a return to relative quiescence. For even in areas where a single party controls government at every level, we should expect differing implications for organized crime and its violence depending on the policies pursued by that party. If PAN mayors were more inclined than non-PAN mayors to hew to Calderón’s anti-trafficking position, it would be reasonable to predict a difference between the two types of municipality with respect to law-enforcement practices and the responses of criminal groups. Dell (2015) compared municipalities in which a PAN candidate won a close mayoral election with those in which a PAN candidate lost a close race to look for a difference in rates of violence following the election. Her analysis covered the years 2007 and 2008, when President Calderón’s counter-drug campaign was in full swing and also the period in which rates of drug violence turned sharply upward. In municipalities with a PAN victory, the average likelihood of a drug-related homicide for each of the five months after inauguration was 9 percent greater than in places with a PAN loss. There was no such difference in non-drug-related killings. Dell interprets this pattern as reflecting increased conflict between rival trafficking groups, a response to the weakening of the resident group as PAN mayors enlisted federal forces to combat local trafficking. This reading is supported by the finding that this 9 percent difference increased to 53 percent for PAN-victory municipalities that had a single resident trafficking group and were bordered by a territory controlled by a different group.
In 2012, the PRI returned to power at the national level, gaining control of the presidency and a slight majority in the Congress. Even as violence had subsided in some parts of the country, such solidly PRI-governed states as Guerrero and Sinaloa continued to suffer from high levels of violence. Thus, whether or not democratization started the fire, it is not certain that the genie could be put back in the bottle by a return to single-party governance. PAN municipalities during the PAN presidency of Calderón saw increased violence, at least in the months after local elections, and yet the resumption of PRI rule at the top, which meant a return to all-PRI government in most areas, did not entail a general reversion to pre-Calderón levels of violence. Organized-crime groups may be too numerous and too autonomous for a return to the state-sponsored protection racket of old, regardless of the crime-control intentions of the new PRI president.
Kingpin Removal
Almost immediately on taking office in December 2006, President Calderón launched a very public campaign against drug trafficking, with large military incursions and the incapacitation of cartel leaders, or “decapitation,” as major tactics, complemented by asset seizures. This effort continued throughout Calderón’s tenure. By the end of his term in December 2012, all of the major cartels had experienced major arrests or losses that appeared to compromise their operations or at least their relative freedom from competition.
Because this campaign coincided with the period of massive drug-related violence, its possible role in causing that violence is a second major approach to explanation. This model is clearly related to the democratization account, as the implementation of a militarized anti-trafficking policy is unlikely to have come about if the opening up of the political system, culminating in the ascent of a non-PRI president, had not occurred. Nevertheless, the causal effects of political pluralism and non-coordinated government, on the one hand, and Calderón’s anti-trafficking activities, on the other, are in theory separable, even if measuring the independent effects of each is a challenge. The case for the government assault on trafficking as a cause in itself of the spike in cartel violence has timing on its side, whereas timing is more of a problem for the democratization model, as the erosion of PRI hegemony and even the PRI’s loss of the presidency (2000) occurred well before the steep rise in violence.
Calderón’s deployment of army, navy, and federal police forces reflected a recognition that local police lacked the capacity or the integrity, or both, needed to root out trafficking. An estimated 45,000–50,000 troops were sent into at least twelve (Hope 2013) and possibly as many as sixteen (Guerrero Gutiérrez 2011), or half, of Mexico’s states. Although by far the largest such anti-trafficking military initiative in the country’s history, this was not the first. The military has been deployed intermittently since as early as the 1930s, though in the past forces were primarily involved in eradication of poppy and marijuana crops (Astorga Almanza 2003). Under Calderón, military officers also took on positions in civilian criminal justice agencies, with large numbers of soldiers serving as police.
The simplest approach to assessing the impact of military incursions and kingpin removal is to see whether rates of violence changed in the areas where these events occurred. 9 In the case of military deployment, this exercise does not yield a favorable conclusion. For example, in 1976, the federal government launched Operation Condor, combining aerial defoliation with the insertion of 10,000 troops into the states of Sinaloa, Chihuahua, and Durango, the heartland of drug production in Mexico. Although trafficking operations and violence were reduced during the two years of this campaign, another consequence was the decamping of traffickers from their mountain habitat to the cities, including the country’s second largest city, Guadalajara, in neighboring Jalisco, thus increasing the geographic distribution of traffickers (Astorga Almanza 2002). This is only one of numerous examples of the “balloon effect” in the annals of government drug-suppression efforts: squeeze it here and it expands elsewhere. In 2005, President Fox sent troops into the cities of Baja California, Sinaloa, and Tamaulipas, suspending the entire 700-member police force of Nuevo Laredo in the latter state as part of an anticorruption sweep. There is little evidence that this undertaking tamped down violence in these locations and some evidence that, again, it spread the trafficking and associated violence (Serrano 2012). 10
For the massive deployments of the Calderón era, the evidence points beyond mere inefficacy to an exacerbation of violence. Escalante Gonzalbo (2011) showed that homicide rates rose much more in states that saw military operations than in those that did not. Merino improved upon that demonstration, using propensity score matching to compare states that did and didn’t experience joint operations but were comparable in homicide rates in the preceding year (Merino 2011). He found that the military campaign stimulated large numbers of homicides.
These analyses of the effects of military invasions are fairly coarse, with temporal units of years and geographic units of states. Studies of the more molecular component of the Calderón strategy—incapacitation of high-level operatives and seizures of cartel assets—look for violence effects over shorter terms and often at the level of just the municipalities within the domain of the cartel that experienced the capture, killing, or seizure.
There are several reasons for predicting that the capture or killing of the head of a trafficking organization (a “capo”) or someone from the next tier down (a “lieutenant”) would impair that organization and, in the process, reduce the violence it commits. To the extent that a person ascends to leadership by virtue of his skills in the business of drug trafficking, removing him from his position should reduce the group’s business competence. Even where a leader occupies that position for reasons other than superior business acumen—such as unmatched ruthlessness—depriving a hierarchically organized group of its decision-making apex should, at a minimum, temporarily impair its effectiveness.
Unfortunately, there are at least as many reasons to expect that, whether or not leader removal is bad for business, it will tend to promote, rather than reduce, violence. If the business efficiency of a trafficking group declines because of the removal of a high-level member, so, too, might its capacity to defend itself against efforts by other groups to wrest away its share of the trafficking business. Thus, we might expect increased violence between cartels as an accompaniment of takeover attempts. Even where another group is not motivated by the prospect of increased market share, the instant demise of any modus vivendi between leaders of two groups resulting from the removal of one might motivate a preemptive attack by the other; the security dilemma characterizes the underworld no less than the anarchic world of international relations.
It is also reasonable to predict an increase in violence within organizations after the loss of a leader, a “war of succession” (Guerrero Gutiérrez 2011) as lieutenants vie to fill the vacancy at the top. And such self-promotions to the top of an otherwise unchanged organization are not the only likely internal consequence. An aspiring leader might instead initiate a split, with clusters of members sticking with one or another lieutenant as employees of one or more new groups. As neither (or none) of the resulting groups would be inclined to depart for an entirely new territory, violent contention for the original territory would be likely. At a minimum, even in the case of a group that had not yet lost any senior personnel, it is reasonable to predict that the well-publicized likelihood of such arrests under an aggressive law-enforcement campaign would heighten distrust within the group, as arrests would certainly be followed by authorities’ efforts to extract damning information about the identity of colleagues and their activities. 11
Predicting the effects of asset seizures, the third prong of the Calderón strategy, is less straightforward. If these losses were ascribed to betrayals from within or informing by outsiders, violence in the form of punishment or retaliation might increase. However, the effect of seizures on violence might vary depending on what was taken. The loss of weapons or cars, even if believed to be the result of information passed to authorities, could reduce a group’s capacity for mayhem. But a loss of money or drugs, especially one of calamitous proportion, might stimulate violence as punishment or retaliation or simply because such a major confiscation motivates predatory behavior against rival groups to compensate for a significant financial blow.
The analysis by Dell of the association between close PAN mayoral wins and increased likelihood of violence provides at least prima facie support for the violence-exacerbating effects of the government’s anti-trafficking efforts. The finding that the effect on violence was especially strong where a PAN municipality with one resident cartel abutted the territory of a different one is interpreted by Dell as reflecting incursions by nearby rivals against a resident group weakened by coordinated government activity. However, even if we accept this reading, it cannot be determined which part of the PAN campaign—military occupation, leader removal, or asset confiscation—produced the enfeeblement of the local group.
The Dell study provides some support also for the suggestion that the PAN strategy would engender more violence not just between groups but within them as well. Even in PAN-victory municipalities that had a resident cartel but were not bordered by a rival, the probability of a drug-related homicide in the post-inauguration months was elevated by about 15 percent, possibly indicating internal turmoil in the wake of government successes.
There is indirect evidence that the kingpin strategy caused a proliferation of trafficking groups through fissioning. In early 2007, at the start of the Calderón administration, there were five major cartels in Mexico: the Sinaloa, Tijuana, Juarez, and Gulf Cartels and LFM. 12 By 2011, every one of these groups had suffered the capture or killing of at least one capo or lieutenant. And by 2011, fully sixteen groups could be identified, most of which were offshoots rather than replacements of one of the originals (Guerrero Gutiérrez 2013). 13 Again, the coincidence in time of the government’s assaults, on the one side, and, on the other, changes in the dynamics and structure of the trafficking industry—here the multiplication of groups, with attendant violent competition—suggests that one or more components of the former, most likely leader removal, caused the latter. However, a stronger case would require an account linking the two in specific instances, that is, demonstrating how government moves brought about the splitting of a particular cartel.
Guerrero Gutiérrez (2011) estimated the effect of sixteen different kinds of law-enforcement action (subtypes of arrests, seizures, and crop eradication) on drug-related homicides in municipalities within the domain of influence of the cartel that suffered the action. The outcome window was three months after the event. Eight actions increased the probability of at least one homicide occurring and six, including seizure of long guns, cash, and vehicles and arrests of first- and third-level personnel, were associated with the number of homicides.
The most methodologically sophisticated and fine-grained assessment of these causal associations is the work of Osorio (2015) and of Calderón et al. (2015), both in this issue. Using quite different methods, both find profound exacerbating effects of government actions on drug violence in the municipality of the intervention as well as in adjacent municipalities. Osorio used machine coding of 42,000 documents—government reports and national and local newspaper articles—that report incidents of violence between government and traffickers or between traffickers, encoding who did what to whom, and when and where, covering all municipalities (2,456) in the eleven-year period from the start of 2000 through the end of 2010. Analysis of the resulting database of 250,000 such incidents with spatial econometric tools shows that each of a range of possible government actions—violent assaults, arrests, and seizures of certain assets—has a substantial positive effect on the incidence of violence between members of trafficking groups the following day in the municipality where the intervention occurs. The strength of the effect is a function of both the number of interventions and the number of trafficking groups present in the locality (as well as, independently, the interaction between those two variables). He also finds a clear contagion dynamic: fifty-one additional violent events by traffickers in one municipality causes one additional incident in adjacent localities four weeks later.
Calderón et al. measure the effects of arrest or killing of a first- or second-tier trafficking “official” on violence within that municipality and in neighboring ones for the period from the end of 2006 through the end of 2010, which covers most of President Calderón’s anti-trafficking campaign. They employ both difference-in-differences and synthetic-control-group methods to control for both constant and time-varying unobserved characteristics of municipalities where interventions occurred. Dividing effects into homicides among those presumably involved in the drug trade and those among the general population, they find a complex pattern. For example, in the first six months after a leader is captured (or killed), homicides in both populations increase by about 34 percent in that municipality, whereas the neutralization of a lieutenant has no such local effect. Like Osorio, they find substantial evidence of spillover, although mainly into municipalities well connected to the transportation network—for example, located on a major highway or possessing an airport. Leader capture results in homicide growth of 30 to 34 percent averaged across all neighboring municipalities, but only in the general population and only in the second six months after the event; lieutenant capture, again, has no significant effect when measured across all neighboring locations. Contagion is much more dramatic in strategic neighboring municipalities. Leader captures more than double homicides among those involved in trafficking over the entire twelve months following an event. Lieutenant captures increase drug-related homicides by 25 percent and 52 percent in the first and second half-years and increase homicides in the general population by 33 percent, but only in the second half-year.
Profitability
It should go without saying that neither democratization nor leadership disruption alone is a wholly adequate explanation for the explosion of drug violence in Mexico. A full account would almost certainly require elements of both as well as other, less commonly invoked factors. For example, the profitability of the business of moving cocaine from the Andes into North America has increased for Mexican trafficking organizations in roughly inverse relation to its decline for the organizations controlling cocaine production in Colombia. As Colombia’s cartels were waning in power in the 1990s, Mexican organizations acquired greater leverage in their arrangements with the Colombians, evolving from mere couriers to purchasers controlling the sale and distribution of the product. Their proceeds grew accordingly. It is estimated that Colombians’ profit per kilogram of cocaine declined from about US$16,000 in the late 1990s to about US$5,000–6,000 today (Rico 2013); most of their loss was gained by Mexican traffickers.
The rising returns for Mexican traffickers over this period can be assumed to have stimulated both desirability of market entry for newcomers and resistance to such interloping by veteran trafficking groups as well as heightened competition for market share among the latter. Evidence for such an inference can be found in the Colombian case. Government efforts in the middle 1990s to take down the air bridge delivering coca from Peru to Colombia succeeded in suppressing coca growing in the former but resulted, per the balloon effect, in expanded production in Colombia. The price of coca paste increased as well, and so did the rate of homicide in growing regions of Colombia, presumably reflecting increased conflict among trafficking groups as cocaine production became more profitable (Angrist and Kugler 2008). Castillo, Mejia, and Restrepo (2013) found that Mexican cartel violence increased in periods of reduced cocaine supply caused by Colombian government seizures. Consumer demand for cocaine is essentially inelastic with respect to price, so when supply declines, the selling price increases. Castillo, Mejia, and Restrepo found that the number of cartels present in Mexican cities near the US border increased during periods of reduced supply and increased price. They interpret the violence in these cities coinciding with the supply shocks as reflecting increased contention over these key transport points. It is interesting that a sustained period of reduced throughput in the Colombia–Mexico pipeline began at the same time that Felipe Calderón assumed the presidency.
Without reliable information about changes in sales volume, it is as plausible to argue that a correlation between supply shocks and violence reflects not a greater profitability due to price increases but rather intensified competition because of a reduction in sales volume insufficiently offset by any increases in selling price. Trafficking groups may have become more given to violence in an effort to increase their share of a shrinking pie. The increase in the number of cartels operating in border cities, however, argues in favor of the interpretation of Castillo, Mejia, and Restrepo. In any case, it is reasonable to think that drug violence in Mexico is driven, at least in part, by changes—whether positive or negative—in the financial return on drug trafficking.
Organized Crime in Mexico: Mafia, Insurgency, or Civil War?
While Mexico’s situation has distinctive attributes, violence by organized-crime groups and gangs is a major challenge for many other societies. How we characterize and understand this phenomenon and the motivations for violence among these groups has enormous implications for policy. Here we contextualize Mexico’s experience by considering the nature of the criminal organizations described earlier relative to violent groups more generally.
The Nature of Mexico’s Mafia
In commentary on the crime scene in Mexico, “mafia” is frequently used to refer to a drug-trafficking organization or to all such groups as a whole. It is worth considering how well organized crime in Mexico conforms to the general features of mafia-involved business.
An organized-crime group can be defined as an enterprise deriving its income by unlawfully controlling the production and sale of a certain commodity or service. The product or service it controls may or may not itself be illegal. A mafia is a subtype of organized-crime group that endeavors to control the market in more than a single thing and sells “protection” to crime groups against competition and possibly law enforcement as well (Varese 2010).
Given this conception of mafias, it is fairly clear that historically the Mexican picture differed from the classic mafia cases in that the entity selling protection was not, as in the case of the Sicilian mafia or triads in Hong Kong, a private entity but rather the state itself. But if traditionally the locus of the mafia in Mexico was the government, and drug-trafficking organizations were prototypical organized-crime groups, dealing primarily in the sale of a single illegal commodity, or class of them, it is clear that the newer groups are operating under a different business model, deriving their income from a diverse suite of economic pursuits beyond running drugs. The Zetas, the Gulf-derived breakaway group, are a particularly rapacious example. Although they claim to provide businesses with protection against other cartels, their operations consist essentially of frank extortion of every enterprise, from banks down to street vendors (Grayson and Logan 2012). It could be said, therefore, that the proliferation of extortion by the Zetas and other groups means that two levels of mafia expropriation are identifiable in Mexico: businesses, legitimate or not, are subjected to taxation by criminal organizations, and these groups, in turn, deliver a fraction of their proceeds to government collectors. 14
Is Mexico’s Drug War More Than a Metaphor?
Mexico’s violence is a constellation of conflicts involving competition among heavily armed criminal organizations, state combat with these groups, and increasingly predatory violence by these groups targeting ordinary civilians for extortion, kidnapping, and robbery. In the absence of a clear conceptual framework, government rhetoric, media accounts, and even some scholarly assessments have characterized Mexico’s violence as a war. President Richard Nixon’s declaration of the “War on Drugs” was a metaphor for an all-out effort to suppress Americans’ consumption of illegal drugs, but for some commentators, the use of war terminology is literal. For example, the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research (2012) identifies the conflict between Mexican drug-trafficking groups and the government as one of eighteen around the world reaching the level of intensity it designates as “war.” The Calderón administration argued forcefully that organized-crime groups constituted a direct threat to national security. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referred to the Mexican situation as an insurgency. The US House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security held a 2011 hearing entitled “A Call to Action: Narco-Terrorism’s Threat to the Southern U.S. Border” (House of Representatives 2011). The US military and intelligence strategists have taken an intense interest in Mexico’s violence, providing both training and technical assistance drawn from the playbooks of more than a decade of counterinsurgency efforts in the Near East.
Those who gloss the Mexican situation as insurgency or terrorism or war are—quite reasonably—influenced by the scale of the violence and the frequent targeting of representatives of the state, tactics common to both druglords and warlords. But there are significant hazards in conflating criminal and political violence. The distortion of definitions and typologies leads to imprecise analysis, inaccurate conclusions, and potentially harmful policies. The use of heavy-handed tactics by Mexico’s military has exacerbated criminal violence, as demonstrated by Osorio (2015) and Calderón et al. (2015) in this issue, and also has entailed serious human rights abuses by military personnel (Daly, Heinle, and Shirk 2012). Getting the analysis right is of no small consequence.
In this issue, Lessing (2015) and Kalyvas (2015) address the similarities and essential differences between organized-crime violence and political violence. Lessing distinguishes the objectives of political insurgents from those of criminal actors and draws examples of each from Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. Efforts by organized crime groups to assert territorial control are primarily directed at rival groups, while insurgents try to supplant the state in governing. When criminal groups violently engage the state, the intention is to limit government interference in illicit activities; criminals have no political agenda other than freedom from the law. Lessing considers two forms of antistate violence employed to that end: violent lobbying, intended to induce formal policy change, and violent corruption, directed at law enforcement to compel complicity.
As noted, conceptual stretching beyond what is illuminating conduces to muddled analysis. Kalyvas observes that making money via drugs or natural resources makes certain rebel groups appear less purely ideological in rationale, leading some scholars and journalists to characterize civil wars as of a piece with organized crime. Others stress the enormity of the carnage wrought by Mexican organized crime and its violent attacks against authorities in stretching the notion of organized crime toward civil war. That there is overlap in the structures and strategies of crime groups and insurgent movements is undeniable, and Kalyvas shows that both fit a mold of network-based operations and asymmetrical tactics in combat. But their crucial difference is that political violence is driven by ideology, or at least a mix of ideological and acquisitive motives. The same cannot be said of criminal violence.
Concluding Remarks
The question facing Mexico is how the newly restored PRI will confront the problem of organized-crime violence. One possibility, broached by pessimistic longtime students of Mexican politics, is a restoration of the corrupt modus vivendi between government and traffickers that prevailed through most of the twentieth century. However, the trend toward increasing transparency in Mexican society, robust political opposition, and the slow improvement in Mexico’s criminal justice system militate against the reemergence of massive corruption. In addition, the proliferation of competing organized-crime groups and the diversity of their illegal activities may make such a restoration logistically unworkable. On the other hand, the head-on military strategy is now almost universally recognized as having been, at best, unsuccessful, so that a continuation of that policy is also a low probability.
Any thorough discussion of the problems created by illegal drugs includes a consideration of the effects of reducing the demand for these drugs through prevention of new users and treatment of current ones in order to reduce consumption. Even if drug treatment were far more available than it is and far more effective when it is, it is not obvious what effect reduction in demand would have on trafficking in Mexico (and elsewhere) and its associated violence. Declining demand might reduce the amount of money to be made in trafficking and therefore the number of participants and attendant violence. It is conceivable, though, that, as discussedearlier, demand reduction would intensify competition among traffickers, at least in the initial market shakeout, and thus exacerbate violence as groups vied for control of a shrinking market.
Decriminalization—permitting possession of modest amounts of a drug while keeping its sale illegal—or outright legalization are possibilities that, like demand reduction, are perennial options in drug-policy debates. Both have been advocated by, among other participants in these debates, a number of current and past presidents of the Latin American countries most beset by trafficking violence. The main argument in favor of legalization is that it would eliminate the black market for drugs and, as a consequence, trafficking violence. It is likely, however, that even under legalization, governments would endeavor to control the market in these drugs, some of which are undeniably dangerous to users, through taxation and restrictions on sale and consumption. In that case, there would still be incentives for criminals to subvert controls and sell drugs at a discount or to prohibited buyers.
Moreover, if legalization occurred without the bolstering of law enforcement capability in Mexico, crime groups starved of drug revenues would be more likely to diversify their sources of income than to disband. Hence it is not self-evident that legalization would eliminate or even reduce the problem of organized crime in Mexico. And though some countries—including the United States—have begun to legalize marijuana, the possibility of full legalization of “hard” drugs in the United States remains very remote. The prospects for legalization in Mexico are nearly as dim, as officials there appear reluctant to flout the US prohibitionist regime.
What seems certain is that future governments in Mexico and perhaps elsewhere in Latin America will favor an approach to control of traffickers that shifts the emphasis from staunching trafficking to reducing violence. In other words, decisions about which groups will receive the greatest law-enforcement attention will be made on the basis of their record of violence rather than the volume of their business or simply what tactical possibilities seem most promising at a given moment. If this tack—or any other approach to organized-crime violence—is to succeed, it will need to incorporate insights about the sources and dynamics of that violence from systematic, authoritative research. Hence this special issue.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.