As you probably know by now, the Sinaloa cartel’s leader Joaquin Guzmán was captured in Mexico last Saturday. How will violence in Mexico shift following Guzman’s removal?
(Alfredo Estrella/AFP/Getty Images)
I take up this question in an article forthcoming in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology. According to that research (which used negative binomial modeling on a cross-sectional time series of Mexican states from 2006 to 2010), DTO leadership removals in Mexico are generally followed by increased violence. However, capturing leaders is associated with less violence than killing them. The removal of leaders for whom a 30 million peso bounty (the highest in my dataset, which generally identified high-level leaders) been offered is also associated with less violence. The reward for Guzmán’s capture was higher than any other contemporary DTO leader: 87 million pesos. Given that Guzmán was a top-level leader and was arrested rather than killed, I would not expect a significant uptick in violence (in the next 6 months) due to his removal. This follows President Pena Nieto’s goal of reducing DTO violence.
My paper was in progress for a while, so the data is a few years old. Fortunately Brian Phillips has also taken up this question using additional data and similar methods, and his results largely corroborate mine:
Many governments kill or capture leaders of violent groups, but research on consequences of this strategy shows mixed results. Additionally, most studies have focused on political groups such as terrorists, ignoring criminal organizations – even though they can represent serious threats to security. This paper presents an argument for how criminal groups differ from political groups, and uses the framework to explain how decapitation should affect criminal groups in particular. Decapitation should weaken organizations, producing a short-term decrease in violence in the target’s territory. However, as groups fragment and newer groups emerge to address market demands, violence is likely to increase in the longer term. Hypotheses are tested with original data on Mexican drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs), 2006-2012, and results generally support the argument. The kingpin strategy is associated with a reduction of violence in the short term, but an increase in violence in the longer term. The reduction in violence is only associated with leaders arrested, not those killed.
A draft of the full paper is here.
