HOBBES ON DRUGS UNDERSTANDING DRUG VIOLENCE IN MEXICO A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Notre Dame in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Javier Osorio Christian Davenport, Director Graduate Program in Political Science Notre Dame, Indiana July 2013 c Copyright by Javier Osorio 2013 All Rights Reserved HOBBES ON DRUGS UNDERSTANDING DRUG VIOLENCE IN MEXICO Abstract by Javier Osorio This dissertation analyzes the unprecedented eruption of organized criminal vi- olence in Mexico. To understand the dynamics of drug violence, this dissertation addresses three questions. What explains the onset of the war on drugs in Mexico? Once the conflict starts, why does drug violence escalate so rapidly? And lastly, why is there subnational variation in the concentration of violence? Based on a game theoretic model, the central argument indicates that democrati- zation erodes the peaceful configurations between the state and criminal organizations and motivates authorities to fight crime, thus triggering a wave of violence between the state and organized criminals and among rival criminal groups fighting to con- trol strategic territories. In this account, state action is not neutral: law enforcement against a criminal group generates the opportunity for a rival criminal organization to invade its territory, thus leading to violent interactions among rival criminal groups. These dynamics of violence tend to concentrate in territories favorable for the re- ception, production and distribution of drugs. In this way, the disrupting effect of law enforcement unleashes a massive wave of violence of all-against-all resembling a Hobbesian state of war. To test the observable implications of the theory, the empirical assessment relies on a novel database of geo-referenced daily event data at municipal level providing Javier Osorio detailed information on who did what to whom, when and where in the Mexican war on drugs. This database covers all municipalities of the country between 2000 and 2010, thus comprising about 9.8 million observations. The creation of this fine-grained database required the development of Eventus ID, a novel software for automated coding of event data from text in Spanish. The statistical assessment relies on quasi- experimental identification strategies and time-series analysis to overcome problems of causal inference associated with analyzing the distinct - yet overlapping - processes of violence between government authorities and organized criminals and among rival criminal groups. In addition, the statistical analysis is complemented with insights from fieldwork and historical process tracing. Results provide strong support for the empirical implications derived from the theoretical model. A mam´ay pap´a, quienes me ense~naronel valor del trabajo y la responsabilidad de no ser indiferente. ii CONTENTS FIGURES . vii TABLES . x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . xii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION . 1 1.1 The Main Argument . 3 1.1.1 The Mechanisms . 6 1.1.2 Methodological Strategy . 8 1.1.3 Contributions . 9 1.2 Redefining the Role of Organized Criminal Violence in Conflict Research 13 1.3 Key Conceptual Definitions . 20 1.4 The Road Map . 26 CHAPTER 2: AN INTEGRATIVE THEORY OF ORGANIZED CRIMINAL VIOLENCE . 31 2.1 Introduction . 31 2.2 A Fragmented Set of Alternative Explanations . 33 2.3 An Integrative Theory of Organized Crime Violence . 50 2.3.1 Players and Actions . 51 2.3.2 Fighting Crime in New Democracies . 55 2.3.3 Shifting Military Capabilities . 58 2.3.4 Payoffs . 65 2.3.5 Equilibrium Conditions . 70 2.3.5.1 Conditions for the Target to Fight the Challenger . 70 2.3.5.2 Conditions for the Challenger to Invade the Target . 73 2.3.5.3 Conditions for the Target to Retaliate Against the State 74 2.3.5.4 Conditions for the State to Enforce the Law . 75 2.3.5.5 Summary of Equilibrium Conditions . 76 2.4 Empirical Implications . 76 2.4.1 War of All Against All . 81 2.5 Conclusion . 87 iii CHAPTER 3: AUTOMATED CODING OF EVENT DATA USING EVEN- TUSID ..................................... 89 3.1 Introduction . 89 3.2 Historical and Technological Developments of Automated Coding . 91 3.2.1 A Brief History of Event Data . 91 3.2.2 Trade-offs Between Manual and Machine Generated Event Data 97 3.3 Coding Event Data Using Eventus ID . 104 3.3.1 Eventus ID coding process . 106 3.4 Stage 1. Input Files . 107 3.4.1 Step 1.a. Information Sources, Coverage and Selection Criteria 107 3.4.1.1 Manual gathering and selection criteria . 111 3.4.2 Step 1.b. Collecting Individual Input Files . 115 3.4.3 Step 1.c. Eventus ID Input Format . 116 3.4.4 Step 1.d. Corpus of Text . 120 3.5 Stage 2. Event Coding . 120 3.5.1 Step 2.a. Actor Dictionary . 121 3.5.2 Step 2.b. Verb Dictionary . 123 3.5.3 Step 2.c. Event Coding Using Eventus ID . 127 3.5.3.1 General sequence algorithm . 129 3.5.3.2 Partial sequence algorithm . 131 3.5.4 Step 2.d. Event Database . 133 3.6 Stage 3. Event Location . 134 3.6.1 Step 3.a. Location Dictionaries . 135 3.6.2 Step 3.b. Event Location Using Eventus ID . 136 3.6.3 Step 3.c. Georeferenced Event Data . 139 3.7 Stage 4. Validation and Recoding . 139 3.7.1 Step 4.a. Validation . 141 3.7.2 Step 4.b. Recoding . 142 3.7.3 Duplicates . 151 3.8 Stage 5. Validated Event Database . 153 3.9 Conclusion . 154 CHAPTER 4: MAIN TRENDS OF ORGANIZED CRIMINAL VIOLENCE . 156 4.1 Introduction . 156 4.2 Limitations of Body Counts . 158 4.3 Main Trends of Organized Criminal Violence . 167 4.3.1 General Description of Event Data . 167 4.3.2 Temporal Trends of Organized Criminal Violence . 173 4.3.3 Disaggregating the Trends of Violence at State Level . 179 4.3.4 Main Trends of Violence at Municipal Level on a Daily Basis . 186 4.3.5 Spatial Trends of Violence Between Criminal Organizations . 187 iv CHAPTER 5: THE EMERGENCE, CONSOLIDATION AND COLLAPSE OF ORDER . 191 5.1 Introduction . 191 5.2 Explicit Assumptions about Democratization and Law Enforcement . 195 5.3 The Emergence of Order out of the Mexican Revolution . 198 5.3.1 Early Days of Drug Traffic in Mexico . 200 5.3.2 The Post Revolutionary Era . 205 5.4 The Consolidation of Order Under Authoritarianism . 210 5.4.1 Cold War Politics and its Repressive Instrumentation . 212 5.4.2 Political Threats and Authoritarian Reaction . 217 5.4.3 Counter Narcotic Efforts During the Dirty War . 221 5.4.4 Maintaining Peace in Drug Markets . 225 5.5 The Erosion of the Preexisting Order in a Democratic Context . 232 5.5.1 Increasing Strength of Drug Trafficking Organizations . 233 5.5.2 Dismantling the Political Security Apparatus . 240 5.5.3 The Process of Democratization in Mexico . 244 5.5.4 Not All Good Things Come Together . 258 5.5.5 The Collapse of Order . 267 CHAPTER 6: UNDERSTANDING DRUG VIOLENCE IN MEXICO . 281 6.1 Introduction . 281 6.2 Structural Factors . 283 6.2.1 Hypotheses and Operationalization . 283 6.2.2 Model Specification . 296 6.2.3 Statistical Results of the Structural Model . 297 6.2.4 Overall Model Fit . 307 6.3 Interactive Model of Drug Violence . 308 6.3.1 Hypotheses to Evaluate . 310 6.3.2 Data . 311 6.3.3 Model Specification . 315 6.3.4 Effect of Violent Enforcement on Violence Among DTOs . 320 6.3.5 Effect of Violent and Non-Violent Enforcement on Violence Among DTOs . 332 6.3.6 Overall Model Fit . 342 6.4 Conclusions . 344 CHAPTER 7: DYNAMICS OF VIOLENCE IN THE MEXICAN WAR ON DRUGS ..................................... 348 7.1 Introduction . 348 7.2 Hypotheses and Research Design . 351 7.3 Time Series of Organized Criminal Violence . 353 7.3.1 Time Series Identification . 353 7.3.2 Time Series Estimation and Diagnosis . 357 v 7.3.3 Model Specification of Time Series Processes . 360 7.4 Dynamic Analysis of Drug-Related Violence . 363 7.4.1 Base-Line Vector Autoregressive Model for the Dynamics of Drug Violence . 363 7.4.2 Full Specification of the Vector Autoregressive Model for the Dynamic Analysis of Drug Violence . 376 7.5 Discussion of Results . 390 CHAPTER 8: CONCLUSION . 399 8.1 Why do Politicians Decide to Fight Criminal Organizations After Hav- ing Peacefully Coexisted With Them? . 400 8.2 Why Does Drug-Related Violence Escalate so Rapidly? . 406 8.3 Why is Violence More Concentrated in Some Areas Than in Others? 412 8.4 Contributions . 415 8.5 Looking Ahead . 417 APPENDIX A . 420 A.1 Infolatina Query . 421 A.2 Number of Information Sources by Year . 422 A.3 List of Information Sources . 423 A.4 List of Mexican States . 427 A.5 Map of Mexican States . 428 A.6 Descriptive Statistics of Data at Municipal Level on a Daily Basis . 429 A.7 Descriptive Statistics of Data at the National Level on a Daily Basis . 431 A.8 Hospitalizations by Drug Intoxication . 432 BIBLIOGRAPHY . 433 vi FIGURES 1.1 Types of organized violence . 15 2.1 The Game of Drug Violence.