Abstract
Abstract The effect of leadership decapitation—the capture or killing of the leader of an armed group—on future violence has been studied with competing conclusions. In Mexico, leadership decapitation has been found to increase violence and in-fighting among drug cartels. However, the causal pathways between leadership decapitation and in-fighting are unclear. In this article, it is hypothesized that leadership decapitation will weaken alliances between armed actors, lead to greater preferential attachment in networks of cartels and militias, and result in greater transitive closure as cartels seek to expand their power. These hypotheses are tested with a stochastic actor oriented model on a network dataset of episodes of infighting among cartels and the militias formed to opposed them between the five years before and after Joaquín, “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, was arrested in 2016. The results show that alliances have virtually no effect on the decision of cartels and militias to fight each other; weaker organizations faced a higher reputational cost after El Chapo’s detention; and post-arrest cartel in-fighting did not increase as a result of uncertainty about the relative balance of power among cartels.
Highlights
The effect of leadership decapitation—the capture or killing of the leader of an armed group—on future violence has been studied with competing conclusions
Effects are estimated via a stochastic actor oriented model (SAOM), it would be possible to utilize relational event modeling (REM) or a temporal exponential random graph model (TERGM)
In this article I investigated the change in cartels’ and militias’ decisions to engage in infighting before and after the arrest of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, the leader of Mexico’s most powerful drug cartel, in 2016
Summary
The effect of leadership decapitation—the capture or killing of the leader of an armed group—on future violence has been studied with competing conclusions. It is hypothesized that leadership decapitation will weaken alliances between armed actors, lead to greater preferential attachment in networks of cartels and militias, and result in greater transitive closure as cartels seek to expand their power These hypotheses are tested with a stochastic actor oriented model on a network dataset of episodes of infighting among cartels and the militias formed to opposed them between the five years before and after Joaquín, “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, was arrested in 2016. The effect of such operations on the infighting network of criminal and vigilante organizations has not received much attention Addressing this gap, I model the changes in the decision of drug cartels and militias in Mexico to attack each other between the 5 years before and after Joaquín, “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, was arrested in 2016. Atuesta and Ponce (2017) find that major security operations against Mexican cartels and their resulting fragmentation led to more violence
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