Social groups and organisations, under pressure from them the political establishment, have been demanding from the government a clearer breakdown of its statistics on violent deaths linked to the drugs trade - as a result of either the confrontations between rival gangs or the government’s actions against the drug gangs. An analyst has come up with a challenging contribution to the discernment of patterns in the violence afflicting Mexico.
Initially, at the top of the list was the question of how many of the people killed were not involved in the world of drug trafficking; there is a widespread conviction that the government has been playing down this number. Another demand that has been gaining strength more recently is for the clearer accounting of deaths caused by the military and the police, with emphasis on the circumstances in which they occurred. This is fed by the suspicion that the security forces have been reporting what has come to be known in Colombia as ‘false positives’: the staging of murders as deaths in armed clashes.
It is not only on the government side, however, that clarity has been lacking. There has been little serious analysis by the media or scholars on the nature of the violence linked to the drug gangs. One welcomed recent exception is the analysis published in Nexos (No 405, September) by Eduardo Guerrero Gutiérrez, which distinguishes the modus operandi of the drug traffickers as such from that of local ‘mafias’, defined as criminal organisations engaging chiefly in the extorsive practice of ‘selling protection’.
Some of the latter, says Guerrero, have come into being as a result of the breakup of drug cartels; some are gangs of gunmen hired by the cartels who engage in the ‘protection’ racket as a sideline. He says the violence by these mafias has been rising dramatically since 2010. Guerrero does not ignore the violence that arises directly from drug cartels fighting each other for the control of routes and territories, but he maintains that there is a fundamental difference between the two. This is that drug trafficking per se is a ‘consensual’ activity which does not necessarily call for the use of violence, whereas the ‘protection’ racket can only work if there is a credible threat of violence. From this emerges the mafias’ frequent recourse to ‘exemplary’ killings — which in order to be effective must carry a ‘signature’.
This provided Guerrero with a useful analytic tool. With official statistics as a reference, he built up from media reports a database on 59 municipalities reporting killings attributed to organised crime between December 2006 and March 2011, discriminating between those that had been ‘signed’ by the attachment of messages explaining the reason for the crime, and those that did not. He then classified the municipalities into three groups according to the ratio of messages to killings: those with ratios below 1% he identified as affected by violence from drug traffickers; those with ratios above 3%, as affected by violence from ‘mafias’; and those that fell in between, he left as still ‘undefined’.
As can be seen in the tables (see page 12), most of the killings (10,075) were carried out by drug traffickers, in 21 municipalities in 8 states. Those assigned to ‘mafias’ amounted to 4,862 in 18 municipalities in 10 states. The overlap between the two groups was confined to only two states, Sinaloa and Tamaulipas. In both the number of ‘mafia’ killings was higher: 1,887 to 280 in Sinaloa, 158 to 113 in Tamaulipas.
Killings attributed to organised crime
December 2006- March 2011*
A - Killings by drug traffickers B - Killings by mafias
State No Cases State No Cases
Munic. Munic.
Chihuahua 8 7,392 - - -
Durango 4 1,207 - - -
Coahuila 1 524 - - -
Baja California 2 327 - - -
Sinaloa 3 280 Sinaloa 1 1,887
Sonora 1 129 - - -
Tamaulipas 1 113 Tamaulipas 1 158
Nuevo León 1 103 - - -
- - - Guerrero 4 1,106
- - - Michoacán 4 740
- - - Mexico city 2 231
- - - México 2 193
- - - Morelos 1 180
- - - Jalisco 1 145
- - - Aguascalientes 1 113
- - - Quintana Roo 1 109
C - Undefined
SUMMARY
State No Cases A B C
Munic. States 8 10 10
Baja California 1 1,669 Municipalities 21 18 20
Chihuahua 2 1,510 Cases 10,075 4,862 6,640
Sinaloa 5 1,501
Sonora 2 553
Tamaulipas 3 534
Nuevo León 1 296
Nayarit 1 256
Guerrero 3 222 Source: Own presentation of data
Durango 1 189 from E. Guerrero Gutiérrez in
Jalisco 1 166 Nexos.
*Based on data on municipalities reporting more than 100 such killings.
Guerrero found two broad patterns to the killings. One is geographical: violence by drug traffickers is concentrated mainly along or close to Mexico’s border to the US, where routes and crossing points converge, whereas violence by the ‘mafias’ is more prevalent in parts of the country of less strategic value to transnational traffickers.
The other is temporal: violence by the ‘mafias’ is a more recent phenomenon that that of the traffickers. He notes that in the municipalities with a strong presence of trafficking organisations violence began to increase sharply in 2008 and 2009, in those affected by the ‘mafias’ killings attributed to organised crime did not become endemic until 2010. Guerrero does point to an important exception to this pattern: the violence in the border towns of Tamaulipas after Los Zetas broke away from the Gulf cartel in 2010.
