State Repression and the Diversification of Drug-Trafficking Organizations

• In Event: Rebels and Cartels

Abstract

How does state repression affect the illicit strategies and behaviors of drug trafficking organizations (DTOs)? In this paper, I apply a principal-agent framework to three forms of police interventions involving federal and/or local security forces to understand the impact of state repression on one type of DTO behavior: the diversification of illicit activities. Analyzing the Mexican Drug War through this framework, I expect to find that DTO strategy diversification is more likely to occur in places where both federal and local-level authorities effectively coordinate their repressive resources and overcome information asymmetries, less likely to occur in places where federal authorities lack street-level information and therefore delegate security responsibilities to local-level policing institutions, and somewhat likely to occur in places where federal forces have the potential to engage in repressive actions on their own but where they also lack local, street-level information to effectively crack down on DTOs. To test these theoretical propositions, I employ a multi-method analysis that shows how delegated, non-delegated, and coordinated forms of repression can have varying effects on DTO strategy diversification

Author

• Juan Campos, University of California, Berkeley