Subnational Patterns of Violence and Modalities of Illicit Narcotics Networks

• In Event: Understanding Political Violence

Abstract

How do criminal groups’ use of violence change based on their place within larger illicit narcotics supply chains? Building on growing literatures in criminal politics and criminal governance (e.g., Barnes 2025, Duran-Martinez 2018, Lessing 2020), this paper seeks to answer this question by taking a micro-approach to understanding and documenting patterns of violence. I draw insights from Gutiérrez-Sanín and Wood (2017)’s framework for patterns of political violence, that documents the “organization’s pattern of violence as the configuration of repertoire, targeting, frequency, and technique in which it regularly engages.” My theory on how the modalities of illicit narcotics networks (i.e. in aerial trafficking, maritime trafficking, transshipment, retail markets, and production sites) shape subnational patterns of violence is grounded in years of comparative ethnographic fieldwork on the cocaine trade in Central America. This paper combines paired case comparisons with original datasets on violence to further explore how narco groups’ repertoires of violence vary across the different modalities of the illicit drug trade. I find that patterns of violence vary based on (1) political incentives, (2) the level of territorial control required for the specific modality of the illicit trade, with production requiring greater control than trafficking, and (3) whether it is a zero-sum criminal enterprise, with retail markets being the most zero-sum.

Author

• Laura Blume, University of Nevada, Reno