In Mexico, political party alternation, particularly at the local level, has been linked to an increase in violence, as organized crime seems to look at this as a disruption of its “protection networks.”

Sandra Ley, a professor of Political Science at the School of Social Sciences and Government at Tecnológico de Monterrey, explained this during her participation in the Annual Political Science Conference as part of the panel “The Effects of Violence and Conflict on Democracies in the Region.”

“Party alternation and mayorships affects the logic of of violence,” said the researcher about the book “Votes, Drugs, and Violence: The Political Logic of Criminal Wars in Mexico,” which she co-authored with Roberto Trejo in 2020. “In this process, organized crime has become a political actor with political interest, even if not interested in substituting the state”.

During electoral events, Ley revealed that they documented more than 300 attacks between 2006 and 2012, while in the more recent period from 2018 to 2024, the number exceeded 1,200 attacks.

Elections become a focal point because that is when organized crime can influence key appointments and public policy. At that moment, they activate and exert their influence through both violent and non-violent means, she explained. Even in the absence of violence, Ley noted, there is a deep connection that ends up dismantling different democratic institutions.

“For the understanding of organized crime, we should not think of it as a parallel entity from the state. That it is deeply intertwined with the state in what we call the gray zone of criminality,” Ley emphasized.

How does organized crime violence affect democratic processes?

Richard Snyder, a political science professor at Brown University, questioned the implications for a country, democratic or not, where you have endemic ongoing violence, for over a generation? “It’s been mentioned here that there are people who don’t remember when violence wasn’t present. In Mexico, it clearly means that democracy doesn’t guarantee that you can solve the problem,” he argued.

Another angle he suggested to consider is that not only is democracy unable to solve the problem, it may actually exacerbate the problem. “Instead of analyzing the effects of violence on democracies, what effects does democracy have on violence?”

He referred to the cases of Mexico and Burma after 1990, when drug-related violence was low and then something changed. “Our argument is that violence was low because there existed an informal institution in which officials from the old PRI regime— not all, but many—basically had agreements with drug trafficking organizations. This kept the violence under control.”

“Our argument is that (violence) was low because you had this informal institution where officials of the old pre PRI, regime –not everybody, but many–, basically had deals with drug trafficking organizations, and that kept violence down”.

The decomposition of corrupt structures with democracy

Snyder recalled the concept of rackets or state-sponsored protection schemes, a term developed in 2009 in the study Drugs, Violence, and State-Sponsored Protection Rackets in Mexico and Colombia, co-authored with Angélica Durán from Brown University.

State-sponsored protection rackets are informal institutions through which public officials refrain from enforcing the law or, alternatively, enforce it selectively against the rivals of a criminal organization, in exchange for a share of the profits generated by the organization.

For organized crime, political competition and democracy can make it difficult to sustain these types of agreements, which, in some cases, could contribute to an increase in violence.

“In a robust democracy, where parties alternate, you [as organized crime] may not be dealing with the same person on the other side of the table” Snyder said.

Another “obstacle” for organized crime to operate more easily besides the alternation in power is the flow of information, Snyder added.

It could be democracy or even technology, he considered, but he reminded that “in the old authoritarian regime,” if someone wanted to report on corruption by officials colluding with cartels, there was more threat or repression.

Sixteen years after publishing the study, his co-author reflected on what has happened to state-sponsored protection schemes in Mexico over the last 15 to 20 years.

“I would say, well, with democratization they kind of ended, you know. And maybe not. I think maybe they’ve scaled down subnationally…. I get the sense that maybe some state governors, maybe municipalities, they’re sort of micro smaller scale protection rackets.”

He added that they may not be as stable, unless those local jurisdictions lack political alternation where criminal groups prevent it, although they no longer occur at the federal level or at least not in the last 15 to 20 years.

How does organized crime violence affect development?

Despite the extensive research on the deep involvement of organized crime in violence and democracy, Juan Pablo Luna, a political science professor at McGill University in Canada, spoke about Criminal Politics and Botched Development in Contemporary Latin America, a research book he co-authored with Andreas Feldmann from the University of Illinois, which focused on understanding how these criminal groups impact the economic development of Latin American countries.

“What we try to highlight is that organized crime also functions around capital intensive scenarios, in which you have not much violence, not much coercion even, right? But huge tons of capital flowing through illicit markets,” he explained.

As part of their research, they thoroughly reviewed old literature on development, incorporating the analysis of illegal and informal markets and their multiple interactions with formal markets.

“If you look at illicit markets from that perspective, I think we cannot deny that they are creating a lots of jobs in Latin America. They are creating welfare spillover. They have and produce trickle down effects on the local economy and the national economy,” Juan Pablo Luna said.

However, the goal is to invite people to consider organized crime as a challenge for development and not as part of the expansion of it.

“What we try to claim is that part of the developmental traps that Latin American countries are facing today are not only middle-income traps, but are traps that relate with this interaction between illicit markets and institutions.”

And there are different ways through which those interactions start to weaken institutions and filter in the political systems in ways that create eventually intertemporally traps for thinking out development, which is what they denominate as “botch development”.

“There is a lot of economic growth in the region today being produced by illicit markets, not only drugs, obviously. The avocado is one of the examples, but there are many more, right? And we are trying to leverage the implications of that type of growth in the region,” he concluded.

“Legitimate” money also impacts democracies

The panelists also commented on other conflicts or actors in the region that are not necessarily linked to organized crime but interfere in democracies, such as the case of elections in the United States and the dynamics in which certain private actors, corporations, and legitimate businesses can contribute their money to finance electoral campaigns or influence future democratic processes.

“Now, the money is money of criminal groups or is it money from legitimate business? I mean, the US, some people will say the country legalized corruption basically, starting in the 1970s,” Richard Snyder compared.

For him, this example is comparable to the old threat phrase attributed to Pablo Escobar, the former leader of the Medellín cartel in Colombia, “plata o plomo.”

“Well, in the United States, a lot of plata, maybe not so much plomo. But maybe metaphorically plomo. You know, the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, promises to defund primary opposition to Republicans who don’t support Trump’s agenda,” Snyder commented on the current Senior Adviser to the President of the United States.

Other forms of alternate justice systems and their effectiveness

Researcher Shannan Mattiace, a professor of political science at Allegheny College, shared her research on the Coordinadora Regional de Autoridades Comunitarias-Policía Comunitaria/Pueblos Fundadores (CRAC), a community self-defense system in eastern Guerrero, and how they provide public safety as a good.

For her, the CRAC serves as public security effectively, at times facing some of the world’s most powerful criminal organizations, as well as a state that hinders the operation of these autonomous institutions.

She said that for decades of research, the assumption had been that if there were more state, there would be less violence. Or in other cases, that if there were a better state, there would be less violence, “but it’s really hard to have better states for a lot of reasons,” she argued.

Shannan invited people to imagine a parallel justice system, something the CRAC in Guerrero has managed to establish through a communal assembly to elect leaders, which allows for effective selection and rotation of leadership.

“These are communities where people perform service roles for short amounts of time, usually about a year or so. And that rotation isn’t important just because there’s not a lot of time to get in mesh in different kinds of maybe corrupt networks. It’s also important because it broadens participation.”

Similarly, she recalled that at the local level in Mexico, they frequently do not involve the state at all due to historical reasons. “Maybe one of the things that it’s taught us is that there are some policy implications where the state could get out of the way of some of these initiatives and not put up constant obstacles,” Shannan commented on the CRAC in Guerrero.

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