Causes and electoral consequences of political assassinations: The role of organized crime in Mexico
Author links open overlay panel
Roxana Gutiérrez-Romero
,
Nayely Iturbe
Show more
Add to Mendeley
Share
Cite
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103206Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
Open access
Abstract
Mexico has experienced a notable surge in assassinations of political candidates and mayors. This article argues that these killings are largely driven by organized crime, aiming to influence candidate selection, control local governments for rent-seeking, and retaliate against government crackdowns. Using a new dataset of political assassinations in Mexico from 2000 to 2021 and instrumental variables, we address endogeneity concerns in the location and timing of government crackdowns. Our instruments include historical Chinese immigration patterns linked to opium cultivation in Mexico, local corn prices, and U.S. illicit drug prices. The findings reveal that candidates in municipalities near oil pipelines face an increased risk of assassination due to drug trafficking organizations expanding into oil theft, particularly during elections and fuel price hikes. Government arrests or killings of organized crime members trigger retaliatory violence, further endangering incumbent mayors. This political violence has a negligible impact on voter turnout, as it targets politicians rather than voters. However, voter turnout increases in areas where authorities disrupt drug smuggling, raising the chances of the local party being re-elected. These results offer new insights into how criminal groups attempt to capture local governments and the implications for democracy under criminal governance.
Previous article
Next article
Keywords
Political assassinationsDrug traffickingVoting behaviorHuachicolVoter turnoutCriminal governance
JEL classification
D72D74K42P00
1. Introduction
Criminal organizations infiltrate governments to further their agendas, significantly affecting many countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, such as Colombia, Brazil, Somalia, Nigeria, Afghanistan, and the Philippines. The influence of these criminal groups often leads to increased political violence and poses substantial challenges to establishing peace and legitimate political authority (ACLED, 2024; Albarracín, 2018). Mexico illustrates the vulnerabilities exploited by organized crime. Drug traffickers, through bribery and violence, have established a form of criminal governance known as narcocracy (Andreas & Youngers, 1989). In response to escalating drug-trafficking violence, President Felipe Calderón launched a war on drugs in 2006, deploying the army to areas with high criminal activity and arresting several drug lords. These crackdowns fragmented criminal organizations, leading to territorial battles and over 300,000 homicides to date. This pervasive violence has also affected politics, with unclear causes and impacts on voting behavior.
In this article, we examine the causes behind the alarming increase in assassinations of political candidates and mayors in Mexico, which has led to nearly 500 politicians being murdered during 2000–21. We also explore the implications of these assassinations for voting behavior. Earlier theoretical studies have investigated how criminal groups use violence as a strategic political tool to capture governments (Alesina et al., 2019; Dal Bó et al., 2006). Empirical studies focused on political assassinations during the first wave of Mexico's drug war, 2006–12, have found links to inter-cartel violence, though the specific drivers and electoral implications remain unclear (Blume, 2017; Hernández Huerta, 2020; Ponce et al., 2022; Rios, 2012; Trejo & Ley, 2021). We argue that criminal organizations in Mexico assassinate candidates and politicians for two primary reasons. First, to gain control over local governments, particularly in strategically important extractive areas, such as those used for oil theft. Second, in retaliation for government actions that threaten to dismantle or significantly disrupt their activities. We also hypothesize that because criminal political violence targets politicians rather than voters, it has a negligible effect on voter turnout.
We test our hypotheses using the ‘Political Assassinations, Intimidation and Actors in Mexico’ (PAIAMEX) dataset compiled for this article. This database includes 500 records of political assassinations during 2000–21, covering 69 candidates and people contending to become candidates (pre-candidates), 99 incumbent mayors, and 146 former mayors. We examine two types of government crackdowns on criminal organizations: arrests or killings of members of organized crime, and the destruction of illicit drugs. To address the potential endogeneity in these crackdowns and identify their causal effects, we use a fixed effects Poisson estimator with instrumental variables. Our instruments include the number of Chinese migrants arriving in Mexico in the 1930s, some of whom introduced opium cultivation. This historical migration pattern has been shown to influence the locations where drug trafficking groups operate today (Murphy & Rossi, 2020). Additionally, we use other instruments such as the retail prices of heroin and cocaine in the United States, and local corn prices in Mexico, which influence farmers' decisions about drug cultivation (Dube et al., 2016). These instruments satisfy the exclusion criteria, as they do not directly impact political assassinations but explain why certain areas experience higher drug trafficking activity and more intense government crackdowns.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629824001550?via%3Dihub=
