High-Profile Criminal Violence: Why Drug Cartels Murder Government Officials and Party Candidates in Mexico

Abstract

This article explains a surprising wave of lethal attacks by drug cartels against hundreds of local elected officials and party candidates in Mexico, 2007–2012. These attacks are puzzling because criminal organizations tend to prefer the secrecy of bribery over the publicity of political murder. Scholars suggest that war drives armed actors to attack state authorities in search of protection or rents. Using original data on high-profile attacks in Mexico, the authors show that war need arguments underexplain violence. Focusing on political opportunities, they suggest that cartels use attacks to establish criminal governance regimes and conquer local governments, populations and territories. The study presents quantitative and qualitative evidence showing that cartels took advantage of Mexico's political polarization and targeted subnational authorities who were unprotected by their federal partisan rivals. Cartels intensified attacks during subnational election cycles to capture incoming governments and targeted geographically adjacent municipalities to establish control over large territories. The findings reveal how cartels take cues from the political environment to develop their own de facto political domains through high-profile violence. These results question the widely shared assumption that organized criminal groups are apolitical actors.

To Vote or Not to Vote

“…The use of violence for the establishment or reshaping of state-sponsored protection rackets is most likely when there are multiple criminal organizations fighting over potential protectors (Snyder and Durán-Martínez 2009). Within a context of criminal competition, criminal groups are likely to exert violence against political candidates and public officials (Ríos 2012), particularly as elections approach and they fight against each other for the government's protection (Trejo and Ley 2016b). This is what Sberna (2011) has called "criminal-electoral violence," any organized act or threat by criminal organizations that occurs during an electoral process, from the date of nomination for political office to the date of elections, to intimidate, physically harm, blackmail, or abuse a political stakeholder.…”

“…As the assassination of Mayor Guzmán shows, the timing of these criminal attacks against public authorities and party members is crucial. According to Trejo and Ley (2016b), it is during local electoral campaigns-in states where OCGs fight over the control of territory-that criminal-electoral violence is used the most. The cyclic nature of criminal attacks against politicians reflects the strategic use of violence by organized crime during electoral processes.…”

“…Finally, these violent events are not only frequent but also quite graphic. According to the data gathered by Trejo and Ley (2016b), in 77 percent of such attacks, criminal groups fired multiple gunshots with high-caliber arms. Sometimes, as many as twenty bullets were fired against a single politician, as in the case of the mayoral candidate José Mario Guajardo Varela, shot two dozen times with nine millimeter semiautomatic pistol during his electoral campaign in Valle Hermoso, Tamaulipas.…”

The Unintended Consequences of Democratic Reforms: Electronic Voting and Criminal Violence in Brazil

“…Thus our second outcome is a count variable that measures the intensity of criminal electoral violence for each municipality-year.Contrary to other previous literature that solely focus on attacks against mayors (e.g.,Ríos, 2012), Albarracin's data allow us to extend the analysis to a broader range of state authorities and public employees. As noted byTrejo and Ley (2019) in their work These data also allow us to avoid the bias found in some studies that exclusively focus on successful assassinations, which significantly underestimate the degree of violence OCGs can employ.We analyze the effect of electronic voting in the whole territory but in four states, where the new technology was introduced in every municipality regardless of their electorate size: Alagoas, Amapa, Rio de Janeiro, and Roraima. Municipalities in these four states represent only 4% of the total number of municipalities.…”

“…Other works suggest that democratic transitions may trigger unexpected waves of violence. For example, political changes in Latin America expected to deepen democracy, such as political and fiscal decentralization in Colombia or subnational party alternation in Mexico, have led instead to an upsurge of violence against citizens and state officials (Blume, 2017;Trejo and Ley, 2019;Chacon, 2013;Taylor, 2009). Our findings, however, support an alternative explanation: reforms that improve the quality of democracy can also diminish levels of conflict.…”