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This chapter explains why the federal government’s decision to deploy the military in a War on Drugs against the cartels led to a five-fold increase in violence. We argue that acute political polarization and partisan conflict between Right and Left, and the bitterly contested 2006 presidential election, motivated the War on Drugs.The federal government developed interventions in states where the president’s conservative co-partisans ruled, but deliberately neglected leftist governors – the president’s main political rivals – and then blamed the violence on them. We use time-series cross-sectional models to show that between 2007 and 2012 drug violence was more intense in leftist-governed municipalities, not because of incompetence but due to conflict between a Right-wing federal government and leftist governors. We present a natural experiment comparing the intensity of criminal violence in nearly identical municipalities located across the state borders of Michoacán (ruled by the Left) and Jalisco (ruled by the Right). This partisan conflict explains why municipalities on the Michoacán side of the border experienced significantly higher levels of violence than those in Jalisco.
One of the most surprising developments in Mexico’s transition from authoritarian rule to democracy is the outbreak of criminal wars and large-scale criminal violence after the demise of seven decades of one-party rule. Under the reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), several major drug cartels had coexisted in relative peace and pursued their criminal activities without conflict among themselves or serious confrontation with the state. But as the country moved into multiparty competition and opposition parties scored unprecedented victories across cities and states in the 1990s, eventually winning presidential power in 2000, the cartels went to bloody war over profitable drug trafficking routes. As the late journalist Jesús Blancornelas (2002) observed, the first major inter-cartel war emblematically broke out in Tijuana in the northwestern state of Baja California where, in a historic 1989 election, the PRI had lost control of a state for the first time in the century.
This chapter explains why Mexican drug cartels went to war as the country transitioned from authoritarian rule to electoral democracy. Postauthoritarian elites did not reform the military, the police, and the judicial system and did not dismantle the gray zone of criminality. Electoral mechanisms thus became catalysts of criminal violence. Subnational alternation and the rotation of parties in the gubernatorial seat undermined informal networks of protection that had allowed Mexican cartels to thrive, so they created their own private militias to defend themselves from rival groups and incoming opposition authorities, and to conquer rival territory. We use in-depth interviews with the first opposition governments and new data on historical patterns of government repression to show that state-level police and judicial authorities were key todeveloping informal networks of protection, allowing cartels to become major players in the international drug trafficking industry in the late 1980s. Using time-series, cross-sectional, and synthetic control models, we show that party alternation in the 1990s and early 2000s caused inter-cartel violence.
In 1905, world-renowned bullfighter Luis Mazzantini arrived in Guatemala City for a number of corridas. Despite the excitement of the urban elite, the matador's fights were poorly attended by the working class due to high ticket prices. This article uses the ‘Mazzantini Season’ as a case study of working-class consumer culture in Guatemala City to trace shifts in Guatemalan political economy through the 1890s and early 1900s, analysing the constraints on popular consumerism such as price inflation, currency deflation, food shortages and other factors affecting working-class urban Guatemalans. It also demonstrates the manner in which responses by the state and coffee planters to economic crises to protect elite interests fundamentally undermined the ability of working-class residents of Guatemala City to participate in consumer culture.