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17240 results in Latin American government, politics and policy

Page 407 of 862

  • 4 - Modeling Violent Corruption and Lobbying

  • from PART I - A THEORY OF CARTEL–STATE CONFLICT
  • Benjamin Lessing, University of Chicago
  • Book:
    Making Peace in Drug Wars
    Published online:
    17 November 2017
    Print publication:
    07 December 2017, pp 82-118

  • Summary

    To clarify and analyze the central causal logics of my theory, this chapter presents game-theoretic models of violent corruption and violent lobbying. Violent lobby- ing can be captured by a very simple war-of-attrition framework—a “toy” model of a dispute over de jure policy between cartels and state leaders; adding sufficient incomplete information generates violence in equilibrium. Violent corruption, however, involves a principal-agent problem between leaders and state enforcers, yielding counterintuitive dynamics. Conventional wisdom treats corruption and confrontation as strategic substitutes; this ignores the complementary role that violent threats play during bribe negotiation. In equilibrium, the likelihood and size of bribes depends on what cartels do if no agreement is reached: either “hiding”—taking evasive actions to reduce loss—or “fighting”—employing vio- lence that may physically reduce losses but also inflicts pain on enforcers. For that reason, I develop a more in-depth sequence of models that provide two important contributions. First, baseline models of “hiding” and “fighting” responses by cartels provide a framework for conceptualizing and mapping the set of possible outcome scenarios: ideal-type scenarios where bribery never occurs (“Peaceful” and “Violent Enforcement”) or always occurs (“State-Sponsored Protection” and “Coerced Peace”), and more realistic “Hide-and-Bribe” and “Fight-and-Bribe” scenarios. Second, by endogenizing cartels’ choice of strategy, a richer version of the model explores how state policy choices interact with parameter conditions to determine which scenario occurs in equilibrium. State crackdowns, I find, can yield both incremental and sudden increases in anti-state violence when (a) corruption is sufficiently rampant, and (b) repression is insufficiently conditional.

    A MODEL OF VIOLENT CORRUPTION

    Introduction: Crackdowns in Corrupt Contexts

    If you want a quick and dirty measure of police corruption, ask a taxi driver “If a cop pulled you over, would you offer a bribe?” In low-corruption settings like Northern Europe, Japan, and much of the United States, the answer is probably “No way.” This is how law enforcement is supposed to work: when police catch an infractor, neither side even considers bribery a real possibility, and the law is always enforced.

  • Appendix A - Violent-Event Data

  • Benjamin Lessing, University of Chicago
  • Book:
    Making Peace in Drug Wars
    Published online:
    17 November 2017
    Print publication:
    07 December 2017, pp 299-300

  • Summary

    Figures 3.4, 5.2, 6.2, and 6.3 present descriptive statistics from the NRI/ OBIVAN dataset of coded newspaper reports of cartel-related violent events in Colombia, Mexico, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, produced by the author. This appendix offers a brief summary of the dataset and the coding methodology employed.

    For each case, the universe of cartel-related violent events was collected from newspaper reports over the relevant period, manually in Colombia (1984–1993), and using digital search algorithms in Mexico and Brazil (2002–2012). Relevant reports were then manually coded by native-speaker research assistants working at partner NGOs in each country. Reports were collected from multiple newspapers, but coding was only completed for the leading national newspaper in each case: El Tiempo in Colombia, Reforma in Mexico, and O Globo in Brazil. Some 30,000 events have been coded to date.

    A single coding methodology was adopted for all three countries: the unit of analysis is the violent event, which in turn is composed of one or more actions contiguous in time and place. Actions are coded by type, protagonists, affected groups, outcomes (death tolls, drug and arms seizures, arrests, etc.); the event as a whole is coded for date and location. Some actions are not considered violent, such as police patrols, seizures, arrests, etc., but are coded as sequential components of events that contained other violent actions.

    A long list of action types (such as “assassination,” “kidnapping,” “arson,” and so on) and corresponding criteria was developed to accommodate the particularities of the three cases. However, a single action type, “clash,” was used across cases to code any situation in which two or more groups exchange lethal force. All other violent actions are considered “unilateral actions.” All clashes have at least two protagonists, though one or more may be unidentified.

    Figure 6.3 examines the universe of event reports that included one or more clashes for Rio de Janeiro, regardless of the protagonists involved. In the left-hand chart, all clashes between organized criminal groups and state forces are categorized as “Cartel vs. State.” Only clashes in which both protagonist could be identified as organized criminal groups were categorized as “Cartel vs. Cartel.” Clashes involving individuals as at least one of the protagonists were excluded.

  • 10 - The Challenge of Sustaining Conditionality

  • from PART III - CONDITIONAL REPRESSION AS OUTCOME
  • Benjamin Lessing, University of Chicago
  • Book:
    Making Peace in Drug Wars
    Published online:
    17 November 2017
    Print publication:
    07 December 2017, pp 269-275

  • Summary

    In both Colombia and Rio, conditional approaches were surprisingly successful in quickly reducing cartel–state conflict; ironically, this success contributes to the difficulty of sustaining conditionality over time. Rapid expansion of conditional programs, often into dissimilar and more challenging settings, can outstrip logistical and institutional capacity, leading to an erosion of program principles and the conditionality of repression in practice. Politically, the very same reframing of objectives that favors policy reform in the first place can create self-undermining dynamics later. Once leaders adopt violence reduction as the primary objective of anti-narcotics policy, thus “owning peace,” the political optics of cartel violence change. Under an unconditional crackdown policy of “frontal combat,” even extreme cartel violence can be interpreted as a positive sign that cartels are desperate or “in their last throes.” In contrast, even sporadic violence calls into question the raison d’être of a conditional approach. Episodes of corruption can be similarly detrimental, particularly if leaders have suggested that a conditional approach will reduce corruption.

    The previous chapter argued that political cohesion, room for trial-and-error policy experimentation, and effective reframing of the problem were important factors in overcoming logistical and acceptability constraints, ultimately helping pro-conditional reform efforts to succeed. Unfortunately, neither logistical nor acceptability constraints disappear once conditional repression is implemented, even when it proves effective at reducing violence. Indeed, conditional approaches appear to generate self-undermining dynamics that can lead to their erosion over time. For one thing, they can be—ironically—victims of their own success: precisely because conditionality produces sharp decreases in violence, conditional pilot programs can come to be seen as silver bullets, and hence are hastily replicated and deployed to problem areas. Three problems arise: first, the replicated versions of the original program may be imperfect copies, lacking key elements such as proper training, committed leadership, or buy-in and participation from civil society. Second, whereas pilot programs are generally developed in smaller, relatively controlled environments, repli- cations can frequently get deployed in crisis areas whose characteristics make them far more challenging. Finally, conditional repression is generally more resource-intensive than unconditional repression, and expanding conditional programs from pilot areas to crisis areas further raises this cost differential.

  • Preface

  • Benjamin Lessing, University of Chicago
  • Book:
    Making Peace in Drug Wars
    Published online:
    17 November 2017
    Print publication:
    07 December 2017, pp xiii-xvi

  • Summary

    The first pages of a book like this are usually the last ones written, so it feels right to start (and end) it here in Maré. My earliest visits to this sprawling collection of favelas (slums) in 2003 opened my eyes to the absurdity of Rio's drug war, with its home-grown drug syndicates locked in a decades-long militarized conflict with brutal and corrupt police. It was here, talking with locals, that I began to understand the intertwined dynamics of violence and bribery driving and sustaining this conflict. It was here that I saw first-hand the capacity of enlightened state policy to radically transform those dynamics, mostly for the better. And it is here that I now see the tragic fragility of such policies and the terrifying resilience of this conflict.

    Rio's residents have been cynically predicting for years that the “Paci- fication” strategy—a novel approach to policing that, since its rollout in 2008, vastly curtailed violence while re-establishing state control in some 200 favelas—would be dismantled once the 2016 Olympics ended. As I write, the Olympic flame is still burning, and many of the city's largest favelas are still Pacified, but here in Maré, the end of Pacification is in plain view. As we turn off Avenida Brasil at the entrance to the Nova Holanda neighborhood, gone is the army soldier who stood guard on my previous visit in 2015; in his place stands a teenager holding an AR-15 automatic rifle almost as long as he is tall, next to a makeshift barrier made from scrap I-beams. He looks us over through the windows we perfunctorily roll down, then waves us on with the barrel of his weapon. When our car cannot fit between the I-beams, he shouts and some nearby kids come and clear a path for us. A few blocks down the bustling street, on a busy corner, more armed youths stand around a large table stacked with small packages labeled “Crack Nova Holanda, $2.”

    Except for the crack—drug syndicates used to prohibit its sale but eventually gave up—and the nifty new printed labels, the scene is indistinguishable from my earliest visits to Maré.

  • 9 - Explaining Reform Efforts’ Success: Key Factors and Alternative Hypotheses

  • from PART III - CONDITIONAL REPRESSION AS OUTCOME
  • Benjamin Lessing, University of Chicago
  • Book:
    Making Peace in Drug Wars
    Published online:
    17 November 2017
    Print publication:
    07 December 2017, pp 250-268

  • Summary

    Why were reformers able to overcome logistical and acceptability constraints and implement conditional repression in Colombia and Rio de Janeiro, but not Mexico? Reformers themselves suggested a number of candidate factors they saw as important; yet the presence of these varied considerably across cases. A comparative analysis suggests that three factors are particularly decisive: (1) the successful reframing of the problem as violence minimization, as opposed to ending the drug trade per se; (2) institutional cohesion, or where institutional structure is fragmented, political cohesion; and (3) the ability to hone and build support for conditional policies through a process of trial and error. Other factors may have played a more limited and idiosyncratic role in individual cases.

    Why were some reformers able to overcome logistical and acceptability constraints and successfully implement conditional repression, while other reform attempts failed? During the qualitative interviews that inform the descriptive accounts of reform efforts in Part II, reformers and other state actors suggested a number of potentially decisive factors. In this section, I evaluate the relative importance of the most commonly proposed factors. Three of these factors, I will argue, were the most decisive in facilitating the formulation and adoption of conditional approaches:

  • Reframing the Problem: The officials leading anti-cartel efforts redefined the problem that repressive policy was supposed to solve, from drug trafficking writ large to drug-related violence.

  • Political/Institutional Cohesion: Police and other repressive agencies were unified by their institutional structure, by political cohesion across levels of government, or both.

  • Layering/Trial and Error: Reformers could experiment at a local or small scale, honing and building support for conditional policies before expanding them.

    • Three other factors may have played idiosyncratic roles in some of the cases, but were not decisive: a large pool of policy ideas to draw on, the largest cartel also being the most violent, and a leader not tied politically to status quo policies. Finally, three factors that reformers frequently emphasized appear to have played little role in practice: a forum for brainstorming without fear of superiors, delegation of responsibility by decision-makers to provide political cover, and what I call “Sino-Nixonian Effects”—the idea that, just as it took a known anti-communist like Nixon to open diplomatic relations with China, it takes a known hardliner on drug policy to implement conditional repression.

Page 407 of 862