A Multi-Method Approach to Mapping Criminal Organizations in Mexico

• In Event: Mapping the Presence and Relationships of Non-State Armed Groups

Abstract

The presence and activities of armed criminal groups has shaped governance and state capacity at the subnational level in many territories of contemporary Latin America. Yet empirical studies of organized crime and criminal violence have been limited by a dearth of high-quality, systematic data on key attributes of violent criminal organizations including their structure, where they operate, what activities they engage in, and how they relate to one another. We present the first results of “Mapping Criminal Organizations”, a project that combines sources and methods to identify where armed criminal groups have operated and how they have related to each other, starting with Mexican states and municipalities. Our procedure triangulates sources to put together high-resolution qualitative dataset for a subset of units, separately produces a full municipal dataset based on natural language processing of a web-scraped collection of news articles, then uses each dataset to validate and update the other. We discuss three ways in which the data can advance research on the presence and control of armed criminal groups: micro-dynamics of violence, variations on property rights protection, and provision of security. And we illustrate two of these avenues with examples from Mexico’s northern states.

Authors

• Marco Alcocer, University of California, San Diego

• Cecilia Farfan-Mendez, University of California San Diego

• Brian J. Phillips, University of Essex

• Víctor Manuel Sánchez Valdés, Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

• Patrick Joseph Signoret, Princeton University

• Fernanda Sobrino, University of Chicago