Drug Cartels, Politics, and Violence in Mexico
Ernesto Truqui 
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The strategic decision by Mexican drug cartels to assassinate local government officials and politicians in the past 15 years has been surprising, to say the least. Since the 1990s cartels understood that their success depended on remaining out of the spotlight, a position from which they could co-opt government authorities by sharing the profits of the trade with them. The alternative was confrontation, which would have disturbed cartels’ operations and hindered their economic growth. Despite the negative repercussions it would bring, drug lords broke with their modus operandi in 2007 and began to attack local elected officials and political candidates. What explains drug cartels’ decision to forego the secrecy of bribery for the publicity of political murder?
Many scholars of large-scale criminal violence point to the federal government’s decision to declare war against cartels in 2007 as the main explanation for the change in behavior. They offer three main hypotheses as to why war would drive drug cartels to come out of the shadows and publicly target government representatives and political candidates. The first, known as the repression hypothesis, explains cartels attack on government officials as self-defense in response to fierce attacks launched first by the state. The second, the competition hypothesis, claims that cartels engage in violence against officials and candidates when they fail to provide protection to the cartel, and instead seem to favor a rival group. The last is the rent-seeking hypothesis, which explains that the attacks against local government agents are motivated by a need to extract rents to finance wars against the state or rival gangs.
In a recent paper, political scientists Guillermo Trejo and Sandra Ley reject these hypotheses as insufficient, claiming that they under-explain the number of attacks witnessed in Mexico over the past 30 years. Instead, they put forth the criminal governance hypothesis, which posits that cartels actively seek to establish criminal governance regimes at the subnational level by subduing local governments. Why? Because exercising such control over local jurisdictions yields “invaluable resources to control the criminal underworld, to regulate violence and taxation, and to take control over multiple licit and illicit economic activities”.
To achieve this goal, drug cartels seek vulnerable municipalities to attack, knowing that violence will have the strongest effect there. The researchers argue that the least protected municipalities are in states where elected officials belong to a party that is ideologically opposed to the President’s party. Municipalities in opposition states are generally granted less federal protection and resources to combat drug-trafficking organizations so that higher levels of violence can be blamed on opposition governors, who are depicted as incapable – or unwilling – to solve the issue. Such tactics seek to augment the standing of the President’s party by discrediting the opposition.
The data confirms that cartels exploited partisan rivalries and took advantage of the lack of protection provided to opposition-governed states in the period of observation (2006-2012). Using negative binomial regression models, Trejo and Ley find that attacks were 4.3 to 4.8 times more likely in municipalities where local and state authorities opposed the President’s party, compared to municipalities from states governed by his party. Even municipalities from the President’s own party were 2.8 times more likely to suffer attacks if they were within opposition-controlled states.
The researchers also show that, given the presence of cartel wars in a municipality, the more ideologically opposed local, state and federal officials were, the more likely the local politicians were to experience violent attacks. Even in municipalities with no cartel fighting, partisan fragmentation increased the likelihood of suffering an attack by 21%. On the other hand, municipalities experiencing heavy cartel infighting saw an 84% decreased likelihood of being attacked if they were aligned politically with the state and the federal government.
Trejo and Ley also find that cartels time their attacks during electoral cycles, which is when violence has the greatest potential to affect the shaping of incoming governments. This can mean deterring unfriendly politicians from running, co-opting potential winners, and guaranteeing the appointment of favorable cabinet members. Municipalities across the board were at least 61% more likely to suffer an attack during local election cycles, indicating cartels’ desire to influence political outcomes. Even in the absence of cartel wars, a municipality during a local election cycle is 62% more likely to suffer an attack. It is worth noting that for federal election cycles, attacks against federal officeholders and candidates actually decreased by 44%, demonstrating that cartels are not interested in contesting power nationally, but rather locally.
To capitalize on successful attacks against vulnerable local officials and politicians, and to establish territorial regimes of criminal governance, cartels need to control more than individual municipalities. That is why they attack neighboring clusters of municipalities rather than isolated entities. Trejo and Ley find that for every additional attack in a given municipality, neighboring municipalities became 41% more likely to suffer an attack the following year. This suggests that cartels had bigger aims than controlling individual municipalities and is consistent with their ambitions of political control.
The results presented by Trejo and Ley are scary to contemplate because they depict drug cartels as an unstoppable force taking over local jurisdictions one at a time. There is particular cause for concern in 2021, because Mexico is planning to hold the largest elections of its history during the summer, where thousands of local, state and federal seats will be contested. Considering that the President’s party has strong ideological rivals governing many of the states whose seats will be up for grabs, the stage is ripe for drug cartels to attack unprotected municipalities and extend the reach of their influence. Mexican democratic institutions are at risk during this election, but most importantly, the lives of thousands of local government officials and political candidates are at risk as well. Some of them represent Mexico’s greatest hopes for combatting drug cartels and reducing their influence. Unfortunately, these candidates and officials are precisely the ones that will be targeted for assassination.
Trejo, Guillermo, and Sandra Ley. “High-Profile Criminal Violence: Why Drug Cartels Murder Government Officials and Party Candidates in Mexico.” British Journal of Political Science 51, no. 1 (2021): 203–29.
