Since 2006, when President Felipe Calderón brought in the army to combat drug trafficking in Mexico, more than 10,000 people have died in a wave of armed violence that now threatens to spill over the border into the U.S. In general, sustained attacks on state forces by drug trafficking organizations (DTO) are rare. Unlike revolutionary insurgencies and other radical groups, DTOs do not seek to overthrow the state, force major reforms, or stake secessionist claims. Rather, they seek to maximize profit, and their modus operandi, even in Mexico until recently, is to use anonymity, bribes, threats, and other types of leverage to minimize confrontations with state forces. The abrupt switch by Mexico's cartels to a strategy of violence leads naturally to a comparison with Colombia: it was precisely Pablo Escobar's attacks on and attempts to intimidate the Colombian state in the early 1990s that made his reign of 'narcoterror' infamous. A less obvious but equally important case for comparison is the ongoing drug war in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. DTOs there have held significant territory for more than two decades and frequently attacked state forces despite (or because of?) a policy of militarized police repression that kills thousands of civilians every year.
In all three cases, DTOs' brazen attacks on the state contribute to social disruption on par with that of civil wars. This poses a puzzle: what do drug syndicates gain from anti-state violence? Do drug cartels attack because they are desperate, as President Calderón would have it, or because they are strong, and know they can intimidate state actors? Does corruption make violence less attractive (by facilitating bribes) or more so (since a corrupt state cannot strike back forcefully)? This study asks under what conditions it makes sense for drug syndicates to attack, and why. In particular, it focuses on the structure of state security institutions and the way they condition those policy responses that ultimately shape the incentives of DTOs.
This study will create and disseminate the first comprehensive datasets on violent confrontations between DTOs and state forces in Mexico and Brazil, modeled after an existing dataset for Colombia. Data will be collected from newspaper reports that cover a 4-8 year period, and will include anti-state attacks by syndicates, attacks by state forces, and clashes among syndicates.
In terms of impact, the insights from this project may help states reduce violence, improve the rule of law, and ultimately save lives. In addition, this project will provide researchers in Mexico and Brazil with reliable data on key episodes of armed violence, addressing a major gap in our empirical knowledge and permitting new cross-national comparisons of conflict events in three countries. Finally, studying anti-state violence by drug syndicates with "pure" profit motives will help us understand important 'mixed' cases, i.e. terrorist and insurgent groups like Colombia's FARC and the Taliban that increasingly rely on drug profits to fund their actions.
