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rfmcdonaldOver at the Power and the Money, Noel Maurer has made an excellent series of posts taking a look at the ongoing epidemic of organized crime in Mexico, seemingly marked by massacre after massacre.
What's going on? Something bad, certainly. Noel crunched some numbers to demonstrate that Ciudad Juárez is more dangerous than Baghdad today, the Mexican city's homicide rates being surpassed by the Iraqi capital's only in 2006, when the city was going through the worst stage of the civil war. More, homicide rates are rising throughout northern Mexico, not only in the state of Chihuahua where Ciudad Juárez is capital: "Four states border Chihuahua; homicide has risen in all of them. That said, things need to stay in perspective. Coahuila’s homicide rate would still fit comfortably within the United States, having risen to the level of Maryland. Sonora’s rate has soared past Louisiana and Puerto Rico, but is still around the same as it was in the early 1990s. (A time when bandits hijacked entire trains and chilangos feared to drive to the States through the state.) Sinaloa has always been violent; I saw narcos walk into a barbacoa place, put guns on the table, and scare the hell out of the other patrons (or at least me) back in the 1990s. That said, it is certainly possible that killings in Coahuila and elsewhere will soar in the next few years. The signs are there."
The consequences of such a criminalization of northern Mexico--what he calls the Sicilianization of northern Mexico--would be extreme, with gangs "fighting it out to establish themselves as Mexico’s version of the Cosa Nostra or ‘Ndrangheta. Extortion and racketeering, drugs and vice. The end result would see violence decline ... along with economic growth, political democracy, and Mexico’s prospects." This doesn't mean that the doesn't mean that the Mexican state is failing, that there's an insurgency.
It would mean that Mexico, a country of more than one hundred million people with one of the more substantial countries in the world, a partner of Canada in North America and a much bigger partner of the United States, would stagnate. That would be a tragedy.
Noel has blogged about the origins of northern Mexico's crime rings, starting with early 20th century opium-smuggling rings based in Baja California, and evolving into a stable situation where crime existed but under the control of the Mexican government.
The growth of cross-frontier cocaine smuggling, and--as a student suggests--the new, less connected Mexican government’s efforts to crack down on these networks, catalyzed the change.
These are all good posts. Go, read.
What's going on? Something bad, certainly. Noel crunched some numbers to demonstrate that Ciudad Juárez is more dangerous than Baghdad today, the Mexican city's homicide rates being surpassed by the Iraqi capital's only in 2006, when the city was going through the worst stage of the civil war. More, homicide rates are rising throughout northern Mexico, not only in the state of Chihuahua where Ciudad Juárez is capital: "Four states border Chihuahua; homicide has risen in all of them. That said, things need to stay in perspective. Coahuila’s homicide rate would still fit comfortably within the United States, having risen to the level of Maryland. Sonora’s rate has soared past Louisiana and Puerto Rico, but is still around the same as it was in the early 1990s. (A time when bandits hijacked entire trains and chilangos feared to drive to the States through the state.) Sinaloa has always been violent; I saw narcos walk into a barbacoa place, put guns on the table, and scare the hell out of the other patrons (or at least me) back in the 1990s. That said, it is certainly possible that killings in Coahuila and elsewhere will soar in the next few years. The signs are there."
The consequences of such a criminalization of northern Mexico--what he calls the Sicilianization of northern Mexico--would be extreme, with gangs "fighting it out to establish themselves as Mexico’s version of the Cosa Nostra or ‘Ndrangheta. Extortion and racketeering, drugs and vice. The end result would see violence decline ... along with economic growth, political democracy, and Mexico’s prospects." This doesn't mean that the doesn't mean that the Mexican state is failing, that there's an insurgency.
Organized crime in Mexico does not want to displace the state. It does, of course, want to end the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence, because you can’t run an extortion racket without that. But it has no desire to replace or destroy the state. The capos certainly would like to subvert the state, and failing that, they’d like it to leave them alone. But that’s it. This is why Ciudad Juárez can experience Baghdad-high levels of violence (and I owe a favor to Anon for pointing out that misplaced decimal point) without experiencing Baghdad-like breakdowns of public service. If you define an “insurgency” as any group with a desire to break the state’s monopoly on violence, then most organized ones become insurgents and the word loses all its usefulness.
It would mean that Mexico, a country of more than one hundred million people with one of the more substantial countries in the world, a partner of Canada in North America and a much bigger partner of the United States, would stagnate. That would be a tragedy.
Noel has blogged about the origins of northern Mexico's crime rings, starting with early 20th century opium-smuggling rings based in Baja California, and evolving into a stable situation where crime existed but under the control of the Mexican government.
[O]rganized crime was tied up with the political system practically from the very beginning. The result wasn’t good for Mexican governance, but it did mean that the politicians were in control of the gangsters. There were violent outbreaks in the 1960s and then again in the late 1980s, but organized crime simply didn’t exist separately from the political system. There were individual gangsters and criminals, but no independent syndicates and no armies upon which the capos could draw to resist the state or intimidate the citizenry ... at least not without the active cooperation of the politicians.
That went away with the transition to democracy in the late 1990s. But violence didn’t really get out of the control until the last few years. So something else is going on. If that “something” turns out to be Sicilianization, then the end result will be a return to the bad old days of the PRI’s dictatorship, minus the protectionism. In Sicily in 2007, extortion rackets collected about 12% of GDP from businesses on the island — that’s more than the Mexican federal government collects in non-oil revenue.
The growth of cross-frontier cocaine smuggling, and--as a student suggests--the new, less connected Mexican government’s efforts to crack down on these networks, catalyzed the change.
Melissa Dell, a brilliant student at MIT, has crunched the numbers to test the hypothesis that the national crackdown may have in fact incited the violence. She took daily county-level data on drug-related homicides (generally called “executions” in the Mexican data). She then tested a simple, but not intuitive, hypothesis. If the government crackdown prompted more violence, then we should expect drug-related violence to jump after a county elects a mayor from the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN). The reason is that Calderón’s party is the PAN. Not only did the federal PAN spearhead the assault on organized crime, but PAN candidates generally campaigned on a “tough on drugs” platform, and one would expect PAN mayors to be better able to coordinate law enforcement with the PAN federal government.
These are all good posts. Go, read.
