Citation

Caulkins JP, Kilmer B, Reuter P. Science 2023; 381(6664): 1291-1293.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, American Association for the Advancement of Science)

DOI

10.1126/science.adj8911

PMID

37733855

Abstract

Immense violence and corruption in Mexico, and their connections to illegal drugs in the United States, are a great problem of our time. Mexico's homicide rate in 2022 was 25 per 100,000, similar to Colombia's and more than triple the US rate. Measuring corruption is notoriously difficult, but some Mexican criminal organizations have a history of intimidating and bribing government officials (1). On page 1312 of this issue, Prieto-Curiel et al. (2) take on two important tasks: estimating how many people are employed by, and flow into and out of, Mexican criminal organizations responsible for much of the violence and corruption, and creating a model that permits "what-if " analysis of policy interventions. Concluding that increasing incarceration will lead to higher criminal employment and violence, the authors argue that restricting organizations' ability to recruit, such as by offering better alternative employment, is "the only way to lower violence in Mexico."

These organizations (usually called "cartels" although they do not meet the economic definition of the term) participate in multiple illegal activities, but trafficking drugs such as cocaine, fentanyl, heroin, and methamphetamine is thought to account for a large share of their revenues (3). Prieto-Curiel et al. provide the first systematic estimates of individual cartel sizes and total cartel employment. Prior to their paper, there were only expert guesses at the size of a few of the more prominent organizations. The article accomplishes this in part by assembling a variety of data that had been accessible but scattered and also by integrating those data through a stocks and flow model. The data included official government statistics on the number of homicides, missing persons, and incarcerations, as well as data from open sources on the number of cartels and their distribution across states gathered by the social science research organization Programa de Política de Drogas. The model is an important contribution, as there had previously been few serious attempts to write down equations that capture the "physics" of what drives cartel size or violence.

Language: en