Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: The Impact of Democratization on Drug Crime

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In December 2006, right after winning the election by a margin of victory of less than 1 percent, the Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched a full-fledged military campaign against drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs). The punitive strategy triggered a turf war between DTOs and the state as well as among competing DTOs. The escalation of violence has generated an estimated death toll of more than 40,000 people in four years and a half. This project analyzes the dynamics of large-scale organized crime violence in Mexico by addressing three questions: What explains the onset of the war on drugs in Mexico? Once the conflict starts, whay does drug violence escalate so rapidly? And lastly, why is there subnational variation in the diffusion patterns of violence? The argument holds that democratization undermines pacts between organized criminals and politicians, and motivates politicians to fight crime, thus triggering different mechanisms of violence-imposition, contestation, competition and succession-which tend to cluster around strategic territories. In order to test this argument, this project builds the first geo-referenced database of daily events of drug violence in Mexico using computerized coding. This dataset, comprising roughly 9 million observations when completed, will provide detailed information on who did what to whom, when and where in the war on drugs in Mexico.Scholars have relied on machine coding to analyze international conflicts. This research improves on thes previous efforts by focusing on sub-national actors and, for the first time, adapting the protocol to codify text in Spanish for identifying three key elements of a violent event: the perpetrators, the violtent action, and the target of such action. In order to avoid bias from individual sources, the coding scheme will process a vast quantity of national and local newspapers and government press releases for the last ten years. The dependent variable will be an index comprising the frequency and type of drug violent events.The project will provide several contributions. By focusing on organized criminals, it studies a largely neglected actor capable of perpetrating large-scale violence. Theoretically, it bridges research on political violence and organized crime to fill a gap in the literature on intra-state conflict. It provides an integrated explanation for the onset, escalation and diffusion of drug violence and disaggregates different processes of violence while incorporating them into a unifying framework. Methodologically, this research provides a coding protocol to process documents in Spanish. The project will also produce the first geo-referenced database of daily drug violence in Mexico. This database will be made available to citzens, scholars, and authorities.By focusing on Mexico, this research responds to the imperative need to understand large-scale organized crime violence. Lessons from the Mexican war on drugs will generate valuable insights for comprehending and controlling a pervasive threat to political stability in Latin American countries such as Colombia, Brazil, Guatemala, and Honduras and in fragile states such as Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Myanmar, and Somalia.