Sit Tight: Political Lacunas and Violence in Mexican Municipalities

• In Event: The Politics of Confronting Criminal Violence

Abstract

In the past 12 years, Mexico’s levels of violence have increased dramatically. Most of this violence is the result of the so-called war on drugs, which exacerbated three conflicts: criminal organizations against the state, among different criminal organizations, and within criminal organizations (Farfán Méndez 2016). Given that there is significant variation in the levels of violence across the country, to better explain the logic of violence we should shift our unit of analysis to the subnational level (e.g. Arjona 2014; Trejo and Ley 2018). In this paper we seek to understand how the municipal political configuration affects the levels of violence by analyzing the consequences of what we call “political lacunas”. Mayors in Mexico are elected for three-year terms with the possibility of consecutive reelection starting in the 2018 general election. However, preliminary evidence suggests there is a large number of mayors who do not complete their terms. Rather, they “request a leave of absence” to campaign for a different political office. We argue that this scenario generates a “political lacuna” where power is diffuse and both citizens and criminal organizations are uncertain about who is in power. In this context, criminal organizations have a window of opportunity to either strengthen their power and hegemony within a municipality or attempt to gain control of a new municipality either through cooptation or coercion. We expect that as mayors seek another elected office, violence will increase in a given municipality. This effect will be stronger in municipalities with a substantial presence of criminal groups organized as franchises or that are decentralized. To test our argument we assembled an original dataset with information on mayors who “requested a leave of absence” in the municipalities of the states of Guerrero, Guanajuato, Colima, Tamaulipas and Yucatán for the period 2012-2018. Our results have two important implications: first, there are structural differences among criminal groups that affect their relationship with political actors at the municipal level and second, the political environment impacts the decision of criminal organizations to increase violence.

Authors

• Cecilia Farfan Mendez, University of California, San Diego

• Amalia Pulido, University of North Texas