Mexico's Drug War Research Articles

The problem of criminal charisma: State authority and the politics of narcocultura in Mexico's drug war

AbstractThis article examines Mexico's “war on drug trafficking” through its affective and ideological dimensions. By ethnographically exploring two sites of official representations of organized crime in Mexico City—the Secretariat of Defense's Drug Museum and the Institute to Give Back What Was Stolen from the People—I analyze the strategies through which the Mexican state acknowledges and addresses criminality's charisma as a key challenge to its authority. In these official representations, the drug world becomes visible in partial and selective ways, such as through drug traffickers’ confiscated possessions, which project ideas of extravagant capitalist consumption and transgressive social mobility. The state's inevitable failure to contain or redirect this criminal charisma is a symptom of a deeper problem. Such charisma is a key element constituting organized crime as a political actor that menaces state power. It does so not only through violence, but also by means of its capacity to align and organize publics ideologically by doubling and mimicking the state's forms of meaning‐making and valuation.

Gender Justice and Feminist Politics: Decolonizing Collaborative Research

The most prominent social effects of the drug war in Mexico are the criminalization of poverty and increased rates of feminicide. Feminist academics and community leaders have been developing and working hand in hand to find the most appropriate methods to document gender-based violence and feminicide to shed light on the impunity that hides the systemic dismissal of women’s lives. This essay presents a critical analysis of my own positionality as a feminist and academic ally in building a collaborative research alliance with indigenous women leaders who are politically engaged in the production of knowledge from an intersectional perspective that adequately reflects the matrix of violence that affects the lives of indigenous women in urban and rural areas. This process has been fruitful and promising, although it has also entailed challenges and contradictions arising from disparate meanings of gender justice and the lack of encounter of feminist/indigenous politics of resistance.

COVID-19, asylum seekers, and migrants on the Mexico-U.S. border: Creating states of exception.

The COVID‐19 pandemic illuminates possibilities for creating states of exception while simultaneously destabilizing the Mexico–U.S. border through the politics of fear. Specifically, the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), Zero Tolerance Policy (ZTP), COVID‐19 CAPIO, Asylum Cooperative Agreements (ACA), and Title 42—using the pandemic under an arcane section of U.S. law to immediately expel asylum seekers and refugees, in particular—highlight the formation of a state of exception consistent with the work of Agamben. They also document how the politics of fear is used to reinforce hegemonic narratives targeting asylum seekers while attempting to reinforce political agendas that lean toward a specific brand of nationalism using the lens of public health as a context. The U.S. government under the Trump administration, and the Biden administration to a lesser extent, constructed these policies aimed primarily at refugees and asylum seekers from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico, thereby violating laws and international treaty obligations.Related ArticlesCorrea‐Cabrera, Guadalupe. 2013. “Security, Migration, and the Economy in the Texas–Tamaulipas Border Region: The ‘Real’ Effects of Mexico's Drug War.” Politics & Policy 41(1): 65–82. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12005.Duman, Yoav H. 2014. “Reducing the Fog? Immigrant Regularization and the State.” Politics & Policy 42(2): 187–220. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12065.Garrett, Terence M. 2020. “The Security Apparatus, Federal Magistrate Courts, and Detention Centers as Simulacra: The Effects of Trump's Zero Tolerance Policy on Migrants and Refugees in the Rio Grande Valley.” Politics & Policy 48(2): 372–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12348.

Conflict and risky health behavior: Evidence from Mexico's drug war

Risky health behaviors contribute to a large share of disease in developing countries, yet few papers have studied the effect of conflict on these behaviors. The canonical health capital model predicts that conflict should increase risky health behaviors: as the likelihood of survival falls, incentives to invest in preventive measures also fall, increasing risk-taking. However, recent findings from various violent contexts, including the drug war in Mexico, suggest the behavioral response to conflict may reduce risk-taking. In this paper, I identify the effect of insecurity on sexual risk-taking using unique panel data on female sex workers in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. I show that more intense conflict generates a large reduction in risky sex transactions. I rule out several alternate explanations, including compositional changes in sex markets and changes in drug use. The results suggest that the behavioral response to insecurity can mitigate the negative effects of conflict on health.

Insurgent Vigilantism and Drug War in Mexico

The proliferation of armed, anti-crime self-defence groups ( autodefensas) in Mexico since 2013 has sparked renewed scholarly interest in vigilantism and the politics of collective violence more generally. Whilst most of this recent scholarship attempts to explain where and why such groups emerge in the first place, very little attention has been paid to the micro-foundations of vigilante organisation and behaviour. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Mexico in 2018, and incorporating theoretical insights from the social movements, civil war, and organised crime literatures, this paper examines the political strategies and collection action regimes of contemporary vigilante mobilisation. I argue that vigilante groups in Mexico employ the tactics of popular insurgency both as a negotiating tool to influence government behaviour or policy, and as a primary mechanism to overcome collection action problems in high-risk environments.

Complex Impact of Insecurity on Business

The post Cold War Era has been characterised by the globalisation of terrorism and organised crime with major negative effects on business environment worldwide. The Islamic fundamentalism has targeted not only political and military assets but also businessmen-citizens of the “Evil”, “Infidel” West. The organised crime, on the other hand, while generating dynamic and lucrative black markets especially in weak states, has ignited violent internal feuds (e.g. the ongoing Mexico Drug War) that destabilise countries even more and annihilate prospects for investments or tourism. At the same time, an increasing number of geopolitical conflicts (e.g. Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, Vietnam-China oil rig disputes) have triggered widespread popular violence and distortion of the economic output, seriously affecting the regional markets. Nonetheless significant is the cyber-crime, its unconventional insecurity challenging the very foundations of competitiviness, technological progress and modern power prominence.

Mexico’s Dirty War on Drugs: Source Control and Dissidence in Drug Enforcement

This essay focuses on the local effects and unintended consequences of the US drug war in Mexico. Mexico’s internal divisions and political challenges go beyond its role in the regional drug traffic. US drug-control policies intersected with and exacerbated many of Mexico’s domestic problems, including what activists and scholars have begun calling la guerra sucia (Dirty War), a period from the late 1950s to the early 1980s during which Mexico’s ruling party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), violently put down dissidence. Whereas a rather clean and organized image of United States–Mexico narcotics diplomacy emerges at the upper echelons of policy making, a focus on drug enforcement actors in Mexico charged with executing drug control and carrying out the PRI’s concurrent policies of domestic repression during the 1960s and 1970s reveals a very different picture. Using materials from Mexico’s Federal Security Directorate (DFS), a PRI intelligence agency, this essay demonstrates how the PRI’s actions against leftist threats shaped the Mexican government’s response to US drug issues, especially in rural, drug-producing areas already prone to political instability. As drug enforcement collided with the PRI’s efforts at domestic repression, it empowered certain state actors at the expense of others and led to a number of violent abuses.

Kingpin approaches to fighting crime and community violence: Evidence from Mexico's drug war

This study considers the effects of the kingpin strategy, an approach to fighting organized crime in which law-enforcement efforts focus on capturing the leaders of criminal organizations, on community violence in the context of Mexico's drug war. Newly constructed historical data on drug-trafficking organizations’ areas of operation at the municipality level and monthly homicide data allow us to control for a rich set of fixed effects and to leverage variation in the timing of kingpin captures to estimate their effects. This analysis indicates that kingpin captures cause large and sustained increases to the homicide rate in the municipality of capture and smaller but significant effects on other municipalities where the kingpin's organization has a presence, supporting the notion that removing kingpins can have destabilizing effects throughout an organization that are accompanied by escalations in violence. We also find reductions in homicides in municipalities surrounding the municipality where kingpins are captured.

Violence and migration: evidence from Mexico\u2019s drug war

The effect of violence on people’s residential choice remains a debated topic in the literature on crime and conflict. We examine the case of the drug war in Mexico, which dramatically increased the number of homicides since late 2006. Using data from the Mexican Census and labor force surveys, we estimate the impact of violence on migration at the municipal and state levels. To account for the endogeneity of violence, we use kilometers of federal highways interacted with cocaine supply shocks from Colombia as an instrument for the annual homicide rate. We argue that highways are good measures of pre-existing drug distribution networks, and the interaction with supply shocks arising in Colombia captures the time-variant nature of the value of these routes. After controlling for observed and unobserved area level heterogeneity, we find little evidence that increases in homicides have led to out-migration, at the domestic level. We also find little evidence of international migration at the municipal level, but some evidence of it at the state level. Our results show a muted migration response that is incompatible with a story of wide-scale displacement from the violence.JEL Classification O12, K42, O54, J11

Violence, kinship networks, and political resilience

Previous literature has shown a link between violent victimization and pro-sociopolitical behavior. This study asks why victimization is shown to increase the likelihood of political participation in regions of ongoing armed conflict. I argue that previous answers to this question have overlooked a key variable for predicting civilian behavior: individual-level social context. As a step forward in connecting social networks to behavior outcomes, I present the kinship network as a novel measure for proxying an individual’s valuable and private social interactions. Building on previous victimization literature, I suggest that to comprehensively understand the effects of victimization, scholars should account for social context. Specifically, I examine the hypothesis that as kinship ties strengthen, victimization positively influences the likelihood of political participation. To test this argument, I turn to the Mexican criminal conflict. I use original survey data of 1,000 respondents collected in July 2012 from the ongoing drug war in Mexico, and in doing so, I find that kinship plays a key role in motivating political participation during armed conflicts in that survivors of criminal violence with strong ties to kinship networks are the most likely to participate in political groups; these results are robust to state-level fixed effects and are unlikely to be driven by victimization selection bias.

Income inequality and violent crime: Evidence from Mexico's drug war

The goal of this paper is to examine the effect of inequality on crime rates in a unique context, Mexico's drug war. The analysis exploits an original dataset containing inequality and crime statistics on more than 2000 Mexican municipalities over a 20-year period. To uncover the causal effect of inequality on crime, we use an instrumental variable for the Gini coefficient that combines the initial income distribution at the municipality level with national trends. Our estimates indicate that a one-point increment in the Gini coefficient between 2007 and 2010 translates into an increase of more that 36% in the number of drug-related homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. The fact that the effect found during the drug war is substantially greater is likely caused by the rise in rents to be extracted through crime and an expansion in the employment opportunities in the illegal sector through the proliferation of drug trafficking organizations (DTOs), accompanied by a decline in legal job opportunities and a reduction in the probability of being caught given the resource constraints faced by the law enforcement system. Combined, the latter factors made the expected benefits of criminal activity shift in a socially undesirable direction after 2007.Sector Board: Poverty (POV)

US–Mexico border tourism and day trips: an aberration in globalization?

We examine the influence of two distinct regime changes in US border security on the number of persons traveling from the US into Mexico on day trips. In contrast to increases in overall US tourism to Mexico and rapidly growing trade linkages, day trips to Mexico fell by over 20 % between 2000 and 2012. In the popular press, the reduction in short visits is widely attributed to a rising tide of violence in the Mexican border states, more specifically to a rise in the rate of homicides as a result of the emergence, or radical transformation, of a drug war in Mexico. We show that changes in the US border regime caused a large reduction of day trips and border tourism, and in doing so had a large negative effect on the Mexican border. We situate this result within the literature devoted to analyzing the effects of changes in international documents on tourist flows.

Moving Beyond Immigration Reform: A Call for Social Inclusion and to Change U.S. Foreign Policy

Moving Beyond Immigration Reform:A Call for Social Inclusion and to Change U.S. Foreign Policy Esther Portillo-Gonzales1 (bio) During the Summer of 2014 we witnessed the dramatic and heartbreaking images of unaccompanied children and entire families from Central America turning themselves in to the U.S. Border Patrol. Most did so citing persecution by criminal organizations, which are a product of the U.S. Drug War in Mexico and Central America, as well as inhumane immigration policies, and decades of U.S. intervention in those countries. These migrants are pleading for asylum from the U.S. government and rightly so. Violence has rapidly spread in Mexico since 2008: over 100,000 people have been murdered and 25,000 disappeared.2 In Honduras between 2008 and 2012, the homicide rate went from 58 to 85 murders per 100,000 residents, making it the country with the highest murder rate in the world. And since the 2009 coup, femicides, the targeted killing of women, have increased by 62%.3 In Guatemala, femicides went from 213 reported in 2000 to 707 in 2012.4 The highest rate of femicide in the world is in El Salvador, where 12 women out of 100,000 are murdered.5 The increase in femicides in Central America explains why migrant women are making the journey to the U.S. alone or with their children. Despite mounting evidence that its policies fuel migration, the U.S. denies over 90% of asylum claims from Mexicans and Central Americans.6 Violence in Mexico and Central America is directly linked to the U.S.-led war on drugs and the logic of neoliberalism.7 The U.S. is directly implicated in this violence. Since 2008, it has spent $800 million on the Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI) and $2.4 billion on the security cooperation agreement, Plan Mérida.8 As a result of this aid, violence has only escalated and criminal organizations have become more powerful, better organized, and linked to corrupt government forces. Recently at a Central American regional forum, U.S. Vice President Joe (Joseph) Biden announced more support for military and public security forces and called for the consolidation of trade pacts such as the trade agreement DR-CAFTA to address development.9 While experts contend that corrupt security forces have eroded the human rights of its citizens, the U.S. continues to support military and security forces. The recent disappearance of 43 students in Ayotzinapa, Mexico and the bodies of many others discovered in mass graves are further evidence of indiscriminate repression against civilians at the hands of criminal organizations that collaborate with U.S. funded state forces. Despite the vast evidence of state violence in Mexico and Central America, the U.S. government has continued to systematically deport noncitizens to countries plagued by such organized violence. Under President Obama’s tenure, over two million people have been deported, including many parents of U.S. citizen children, throwing more than 5,000 children into the foster care system.10 The U.S. government incarcerates 34,000 people in privately managed immigration detention on any given day. Green card holders are mandatorily detained for past criminal convictions, deported, and barred from reentering the U.S. for at least ten years and often for life. In 2014, the practice of family detention returned to the U.S. immigration detention system, after being eliminated in 2007, and has grown by over 1,200% in the last six months.11 After hundreds of marches, sit-ins, and demands from grassroots groups, President Obama announced executive action on immigration in November 2014. The President’s executive action will not provide any form of permanent status for migrants, just temporary relief from being deported and only after taxes and fees are paid, and background checks come back clean. Executive action also calls for 20,000 more border patrol agents. There are still over six million undocumented residents who will be completely left out from any form of relief, and most of the migrants coming to the border seeking asylum will likely face mandatory detention. But most importantly, the immigration detention and deportation system will remain intact; there are...

Mental Health Outcomes of Drug Conflict Among University Students at the U.S.-Mexico Border.

The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to investigate to what extent young adults with close ties to Mexico were at greater risk for self-reported negative mental health outcomes than comparison groups during drug-related armed conflict from 2008 through 2012, and the effect of type and number of traumatic events on mental health outcomes. Using the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire and the Hopkins Symptom Checklist, 202 university students living in the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez border region were surveyed for symptoms of depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress. Students with close ties to Mexico reported symptoms of anxiety and posttraumatic stress at significantly higher rates compared with those without connection to Mexico, but there was no significant difference in rates of depression. Although more than a third of participants reported experiencing 5 or more traumatic events connected with the drug war, being confined to home had the most significant effect. Frequency of traumatic events reported by students as well as rates of anxiety and posttraumatic stress symptoms were higher among students with greater connection to Mexico. Rates of clinically-significant depressive symptoms among all students were higher than expected for U.S. adults but comparable with all U.S. college students. This study presents important new data on the mental health effects of Mexico's drug war.

From Surveillance to Securocracy

From Surveillance to Securocracy Tony Cella (bio) Campo de guerra (Battleground) Sergio González Rodríguez Editorial Anagrama www.anagrama-ed.es/novedades 168 Pages; Print, $17.07 Campo de guerra (2014) is Mexican journalist and novelist Sergio González Rodríguez’s third non-fiction work in Spanish on violence in Mexico. Its predecessors are Huesos en el desierto (2006) and El hombre sin cabeza (2013). Huesos documents the systematic torture and murder of young women in Juárez during the 1990s while El hombre—part memoir, part anthropological study, and part visual critique—examines the semiotics of dismemberment and human sacrifice to la Santa Muerte, or Saint Death, by Mexican drug cartels. Campo de guerra continues in the vein of the author’s earlier works while addressing new topics that reach far beyond Mexico’s borders. The main purpose of the book is to propose a new approach to the Drug War in Mexico, one that ceases to see it strictly as a criminological phenomenon and focuses more on the US’s geopolitical interests and strategic use of Mexican security forces. Another goal is to explain, contextualize, and ultimately denounce the move towards a new global model of control and surveillance: a “Securocracy.” Winner of Anagrama’s award for best essay in 2014, Campo de guerra is 168 pages long and comprised of four chapters and an epilogue. Throughout the book, González Rodríguez explores the social, political, and economic factors that have contributed to an increase in drug-related violence in Mexico since the 1990s. He also reflects on global topics such as ultracontemporary battlegrounds— including cyber warfare, espionage, and other militarily-driven technologies—and planetary transhumanism, or the displacement of the human subject from the center of modern life by machines. Among the questions the author raises we find: what factors have led Mexico to be considered a “Narco-state,” and is it accurate to classify it as such? Where do Mexican citizens turn for justice given the prevalence of political and judicial corruption? How can we contest the paramilitarization of the police and the cyber-meddling of unchecked government agencies? And finally, how might human welfare be reprioritized in a world increasingly centered on the profits of financial institutions and militarily-induced technological expansion? González Rodríguez does not leave these questions open ended, nor does he try to eschew controversy. As in past works, he intends to both inform and spur activism. In the first chapter, González Rodríguez addresses his concerns about the future of privacy, human rights, and sovereignty in the post 9/11 world. Later, he proceeds to argue that the US has orchestrated the Drug War, in large part, to force Mexico to adopt a number of productive, intelligence, penal, and security reforms. These reforms, he contends, have led to major spatial and symbolic transformations in Mexico but failed at making the country any safer. The target of his criticism is the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) signed by presidents George W. Bush and Vicente Fox Quesada, an agreement whose aim, according to the author, is to pressure Mexico’s armed forces into protecting US national security interests in Central America and the Caribbean. This may sound like a conspiracy theory, but González Rodríguez goes to great lengths to cite official documents from the Pentagon, the State Department, the Office of the Mexican Attorney-General (PGR, in Spanish), and the United Nations to support his claims. He also provides information given to him by former intelligence operatives that worked with American and Mexican officials in the War on Drugs. González Rodríguez does not forget about internal politics. In the second and fourth chapters, he explains how former Mexican president Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa’s efforts to eradicate drug trafficking began without any regard for, nor previous consultation of, the Mexican people. According to the author, Calderón encouraged Mexico’s armed forces to take a more proactive role in policing the country, despite their duties being restricted to specific areas and tasks by the Mexican constitution. Here, González Rodríguez explains how Mexican authorities...

Kingpin Approaches to Fighting Crime and Community Violence: Evidence from Mexico's Drug War

Kingpin Approaches to Fighting Crime and Community Violence: Evidence from Mexico's Drug War

Symptoms of anxiety on both sides of the US–Mexico border: The role of immigration

Home to about 15 million people, the US–Mexico border area has suffered stresses from increased border security efforts and a costly drug war in Mexico. Whether immigration patterns add to increasing levels of anxiety for the Mexican population and the Mexican-origin individuals living in the US–Mexico border and near the border is unknown. We used the US–Mexico Study on Alcohol and Related Conditions (UMSARC), a cross-sectional survey (2011–2013) of individuals living in border and non-border cities of the US (n = 2336) and Mexico (n = 2460). In Mexico respondents were asked if they ever migrated to the US or have a family member living in the US (328) or not (2124), while in the US respondents were asked if they were born in Mexico (697), born in the US with no US-born parents (second generation, 702) or born in the US with at least one US-born parent (third generation, 932). The prevalence and risk factors for symptoms of anxiety using the Beck Anxiety Inventory (>=10) were obtained. Mexicans with no migrant experience had a prevalence of anxiety and adjusted prevalence ratio (PR) within the last month of 6.7% (PR = reference), followed by Mexicans with migration experience of 13.1% (PR = 1.8), Mexican-born respondents living in the US of 17.3% (PR = 2.6), US born Mexican-Americans of 2nd generation of 18.6% (PR = 3.3) and finally US born 3rd + generation of 25.9% (PR = 3.8). Results help to identify regions and migration patterns at high risk for anxiety and may help to unravel causal mechanisms that underlie this risk.

Violence on the “Forgotten” Border: Mexico's Drug War, the State, and the Paramilitarization of Organized Crime in Tamaulipas in a “New Democratic Era”

This article explains the high levels of violence on the Mexican side of the Texas–Tamaulipas border. The study finds that the recent violence increase in this region—referred to as the “forgotten border” in this writing—has been the result of the following factors: a new configuration of organized crime in a new democratic era, the separation of the Zetas from the Gulf Cartel, the security strategy of the Mexican government, a stagnant economy, and rampant corruption. These conditions have contributed to the gradual loss of the “monopoly” of the legitimate use of violence by the State in some regions of Mexico, particularly in Tamaulipas.

The Criminal Subversion of Mexican Democracy

Threats to the integrity of electoral democracy are manifold. The comparative literature has focused on "vertical" threats: the manipulation of elections by central governments. This article, by contrast, draws attention to "horizontal" threats: the societal subversion of democratic elections by criminal violence. It analyzes the so-called drug war in Mexico to illustrate the chilling effects private organized violence has on electoral democracy. After tracing the origins of Mexico's new internal war, the article documents the damages it bears on the democratic integrity of elections as well as on surrounding rights and liberties.

Violence and Migration: Evidence from Mexico's Drug War

The effect of violence on people's residential choice remains a debated topic in the literature on crime and conflict. We examine the case of the drug war in Mexico, which dramatically increased the number of homicides since late 2006. Using data from the Mexican Census and labor force surveys we estimate the impact of violence on migration at the municipal and state level. To account for the endogeneity of violence we use kilometers of federal highways interacted with cocaine supply shocks from Colombia as an instrument for the annual homicide rate. We argue that highways are good measures of pre-existing drug distribution networks, and the interaction with supply shocks arising in Colombia captures the time-variant nature of the value of these routes. After controlling for observed and unobserved area level heterogeneity, we find little evidence that increases in homicides have led to out migration, at the domestic level. We also find little evidence of international migration at the municipal level, but some evidence of it at the state level. Our results show a muted migration response that is incompatible with a story of wide-scale displacement from the violence.