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

2006年12月，就在以不到1%的优势赢得选举后，墨西哥总统费利佩·卡尔德龙发起了一场全面的军事行动，打击贩毒组织。这一惩罚性战略引发了DTO与国家之间以及相互竞争的DTO之间的地盘争夺战。暴力升级在四年半的时间里造成了估计超过4万人的死亡。该项目通过解决三个问题来分析墨西哥大规模有组织犯罪暴力的动态：如何解释墨西哥禁毒战争的开始？一旦冲突开始，毒品暴力为什么会如此迅速地升级？最后，为什么暴力的扩散模式在国家以下地区会有所不同？该论点认为，民主化破坏了有组织罪犯和政客之间的契约，并激励政客打击犯罪，从而引发不同的暴力机制--强加、争辩、竞争和继承--这些机制往往聚集在战略领土周围。为了验证这一论点，该项目使用计算机化的编码建立了第一个墨西哥毒品暴力日常事件的地理参考数据库。这个数据集完成后，包括大约900万个观察数据，将提供关于墨西哥禁毒战争中谁对谁做了什么，何时何地做了什么的详细信息。学者们依赖机器编码来分析国际冲突。这项研究改进了以往的工作，将重点放在次国家行为者身上，并首次修改议定书，以西班牙语编纂文本，以确定暴力事件的三个关键要素：肇事者、暴力行为和此类行动的目标。为了避免来自个别来源的偏见，编码方案将处理过去十年来大量的国家和地方报纸以及政府新闻稿。因变量将是一个指数，包括毒品暴力事件的频率和类型。该项目将提供几个贡献。通过关注有组织的罪犯，它研究了一个基本上被忽视的有能力实施大规模暴力的行为者。从理论上讲，它将政治暴力和有组织犯罪的研究联系在一起，填补了国内冲突文献的空白。它对毒品暴力的开始、升级和扩散提供了一个综合解释，并将不同的暴力进程分类，同时将它们纳入一个统一的框架。在方法论上，本研究提供了一种处理西班牙语文档的编码协议。该项目还将制作墨西哥每日毒品暴力的第一个地理参考数据库。这个数据库将向市民、学者和当局提供。通过关注墨西哥，这项研究回应了了解大规模有组织犯罪暴力的迫切需要。墨西哥禁毒战争的教训将为理解和控制哥伦比亚、巴西、危地马拉和洪都拉斯等拉美国家以及阿富汗、塔吉克斯坦、缅甸和索马里等脆弱国家的政治稳定所面临的普遍威胁提供宝贵的见解。

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.