Vigilante Mobilization and Local Order: Evidence from Mexico

• In Event: State, Society, and Organized Crime in Mexico

Abstract

Are communities able to provide local order and security absent a strong and impartial state? This paper uses an instrumental variable approach to assess whether community-led vigilante groups reduced levels of crime in Mexico during a surge of criminal violence that followed the repressive campaign of the Calderon presidency. We trace the exogenous sources of today's patterns of vigilante group mobilization back to the Mexican Cristero rebellion in the early twentieth century. The Cristero rebellion, we argue, produced persistent changes in local-level preferences and institutional legacies conducive to armed collective action. Exploiting this variation in historical patterns of contentious politics, we identify the causal effects of vigilante mobilization on contemporary criminal violence. Our results indicate that vigilante groups reduce a broad range of crimes, thus providing strong evidence that communities can build local order even where the state is weak and armed actors are particularly predatory.

Author

• Francisco Javier Osorio Zago, John Jay College, CUNY