This chapter shows how the Peronist party in Buenos Aires, Argentina, stifled police reforms, tolerated or benefited from police illicit rent extraction, and, for most of this period, controlled the drug market through coordinated protection rackets. While the PJ governed Buenos Aires uninterruptedly between 1987 and 2015, drug regulation shifted in the late 1990s, as bitter factional disputes loosened the provincial government’s grip over the police, exacerbated particularistic negotiations between police and criminals, and increased police and criminal violence. In the mid-2000s the government restored its politicized control of the police. The Bonaerense’s coordinated protection regime contained the advance of drug gangs through Greater Buenos Aires, the vastest metropolitan area in the country, while criminal violence plateaued at the same time it ballooned in Rosario.

Peru’s Lava Jato stretched its tentacles widely and ravaged the political establishment. Grand corruption cases present a series of challenges related to how to secure evidence in information-poor and politically hostile environments. Overcoming these challenges without jeopardizing the integrity of the inquiry is no small feat. The tools that prosecutors rely on generate controversy, as well as tensions between effectiveness and due process that are difficult to resolve. Success therefore calls for clever and skillful prosecutors. The analysis digs deep into the dynamics of Peru’s Lava Jato to discuss the nature of these challenges and how prosecutors dealt with them. Contingent choices often determined whether enough evidence came to light, thus widening the window for ambitious investigative efforts. The chapter further looks at the backlash that ensued, how this conditioned prosecutorial efforts, and why investigators were able to mitigate its impact. One interesting feature of Peru’s Lava Jato is that prosecutors not only had to deal with an obstructionist political class, but also with networks of judicial clientelism commanded by senior officials. The chapter traces how rank-and-file prosecutors negotiated such bureaucratic pathologies to protect the inquiry, and discusses the likely impact of these struggles on the future of the case.

This chapter shows how partisan stability enabled police professionalization and the regulation of drug trafficking through coordinated coexistence in São Paulo. Following redemocratization in the early 1980s, São Paulo exhibited, like Rio de Janeiro, incoherent and unstable security policies that perpetuated the autonomy of a police force characterized by rampant corruption and brutality. However, the entrenchment of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB) since the mid-1990s enabled it to implement and consolidate various initiatives to professionalize the police and reduce their autonomy. This in turn enabled a coordinated coexistence arrangement, including an implicit pact with the state’s most powerful drug gang: the First Command of the Capital (PCC). While the government has allowed this organization to expand its power in the prisons and the streets, the gang has mitigated police violence and maintained homicide rates in São Paulo among the lowest in the country.

This chapter illustrates how police regulation of drug markets in Rosario, Argentina, mutated from a relatively non-violent source of rents controlled by the police and successive administrations to a blend of splintered corruption and unprecedented violence. The Peronist government’s low fragmentation and entrenchment initially enabled it to politicize the police, using it to run coordinated protection rackets that centralized corruption and mitigated violence. However, starting in the mid-1990s, turnover and fragmentation increased due to factional disputes within the ruling Peronist party, triggering multiple police reform cycles. The arrival in power of the Socialist party in 2007 further increased police autonomy and destabilized the local drug market. Police corruption fractured; practically every police precinct ran its own racket. This chaotic drug market made Rosario one of the most violent cities in the country. Despite three consecutive terms in office (2007-2019), Socialist administrations were unable—and perhaps ultimately unwilling—to reform the police, stabilize the drug market and significantly reduce criminal violence.

The disease went by many names and people told different stories about it. Scientists called it aftosa, or foot-and-mouth disease. The other anglophone term, hoof-and-mouth disease, was more precise: cloven-hoofed animals carrying the virus typically foamed at the mouth, developed painful blisters, and lost weight. Some aborted and a handful – mainly newborn animals – died. US and Mexican officials argued that the disease was a “dread plague” – a terrifying and grave threat to national wellbeing, akin to floods, storms, or earthquakes.1 From 1947 to 1954 a bilateral commission waged a campaign across central Mexico against this dangerous enemy. Many Mexicans regarded the campaign as a farcical and cruel affair. Most animals seemed to recover quickly, and many farmers believed that the disease was simply a version of a mild, familiar illness which they called mal de yerba or mal de boca – grass or mouth sickness. Few had seen anything quite like the anti-aftosa campaign before: brigades of pith-helmeted veterinarians, cowhands, and soldiers who dressed in bizarre heavy rubber overalls, drove through the country in jeeps, personnel carriers, and souped-up former ambulances, traipsed over the sierra on horses or mules, or paddled along rivers in wooden canoes, imposing quarantine, exacting fines, and dousing farms with acrid chemicals. At the start of campaign, they corralled hundreds of thousands of cows, pigs, goats, and sheep and shot them dead. Compared to run-of-the mill robavacas – cattle rustlers – their motives were hard to understand. Unlike Santiago matamoros, Spain’s legendary Moor-slayer, these men seemed menacing but cowardly, even slightly ridiculous – mere matavacas, or cowkillers.2

Chapter 2 explains how and why the campaign against aftosa adopted the policies it did, focusing on high politics of bilateral diplomacy, the main competing political and economic interests on both sides of the border, and bureaucratic infrapolitics. The Mexican government used international ties, obfuscation and delay to gradually blunt US policy preferences and shift the aftosa campaign from slaughter to vaccination. In this way the campaign illustrates the diplomatic leverage Mexico retained in the postwar period, and how it was used.

Chapter 1 surveys relations between domestic animals and state formation in Mexico from the colonial to the postrevolutionary era, and discusses how the aftosa disease arrived in Mexico. While the aftosa campaign represented an unprecedented effort by the state to intervene in the lives of livestock animals and their owners, it emerged from a longer history. Conquest, war, commodity booms, depressions, and revolution remade people's relations with domestic animals. Through these shifts, Mexico’s government had never been indifferent to animals, whether as sources of food, energy, disease, or symbolic power.