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.

Chapter 5 shows how the aftosa outbreak shaped the Mexican state’s efforts to modernize and regulate livestock from the 1950s to the 1980s. By disrupting existing methods of production and consumption, creating new technical capacities, and offering an example of effective state action, the crisis prompted officials to contemplate more ambitious state intervention. At the same time, the aftosa crisis offered painful lessons about the kind of political compromises and alliances – international and domestic – upon which government action rested. Along with the wane of Cardenismo, the Second World War, and the so-called Green Revolution, the aftosa campaign helps explain why Mexico’s developmental state took the shape it did, and illuminates its strengths, weaknesses, and contradictions.

Since its creation in 1991, the Constitutional Court has played an important role in the Colombian context because of the broad political, economic, cultural, and social impact of its decisions. Several rulings, however, have triggered fierce criticism, putting into question the very legitimacy of the court. This chapter seeks to identify some of the factors that contribute to improve the legitimacy of high courts in the eyes of the country’s citizens, especially when they hand down controversial rulings. The chapter reports a vignette survey experiment on college students aimed at determining under what conditions citizens are more likely to provide diffuse support to the court or to what extent the court’s legitimacy depends on its performance (specific support). It hypothesizes that the legitimacy of the court is affected by the way in which its decisions are framed and justified, and finds that by wording and framing judicial rulings so that they convey a sense of principled reasoning and neutrality, the court helps translate specific support into diffuse support. Specifically, decisions based on scientific reasoning are more suitable to achieve that goal than other types of argument, including those based on legal norms and precedent.

Lava Jato (Car Wash) was one of the largest corruption trials in the world. The Lava Jato taskforce launched a battle against powerful political actors using legal tools creatively and sought to garner public support by resorting to the media. The chapter examines three examples that illustrate these two strategies and unpacks their legal dimensions. It focuses on three decisions by Sergio Moro, Lava Jato’s most prominent judge: ordering the police to bring former president and 2018 presidential candidate Lula Da Silva in for questioning without a previous request, disclosing a recorded conversation obtained during an investigation against Lula, and making public a plea bargain agreement that incriminated Lula. The chapter outlines the political impact of Moro’s actions and examines them in light of current Brazilian legislation on transparency and accountability for judges’ behaviour. It finds that while transparency is a principle that informs criminal trials in Brazil, Moro pushed the existing rules to their limits to gain public support. At the same time, he attempted to influence public opinion by taking advantage of the discretion the Brazilian inquisitorial criminal system provides judges. The chapter also analyses the limitations of Brazilian legislation to prevent this kind of behaviour and points to the challenges of reforming it. It concludes that while courts’ mobilization of the media and creative use of legal tools may increase anti-corruption accountability, the costs of this strategy outweigh its benefits.

To what extent are employees in the Mexican judiciary – both judges and lower level officials – connected by family ties? Are these family connections used inappropriately to hire or to favor relatives in ways that would not have been possible absent the family connection? This chapter takes advantage of a unique dataset to answer these questions. It documents a departure from the promise made in the judicial reform of 1994, that by removing the administration of the judiciary from the Supreme Court and transferring it to a judicial council, a professional and meritocratic judicial career would be established for all federal judges, making merit and not connections the main determinants of becoming a judge. The sheer magnitude and pervasiveness of family relationships within the Mexican federal judiciary conspicuously show the limitationsof this reform and highlight the challenges Mexico faces to consolidate judicial careers.