Unintended consequences of state action: how the kingpin strategy transformed the structure of violence in Mexico’s organized crime

By Oscar Contreras Velasco

This paper builds on social network analysis and structural balance theory to analyze, with a novel approach, some of the unintended consequences of Mexico’s kingpin strategy on the network of criminal organizations. I use data on violent conflicts between Mexico’s criminal organizations, between 2004 and 2020, from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), and a combination of statistics, social network analysis, GIS, and archival methods to understand the patterns and geography of violent conflicts and alliances before and after the war on drugs. The goal of this paper is threefold: first, to show that the kingpin strategy is associated with the fragmentation of criminal organizations in Mexico; second, to show that criminal organizations developed a set of structurally balanced arrangements before the government waged a war against them and that the kingpin strategy disrupted such arrangements, which led to an increase in the number of violent conflicts; third, I will argue that the fragmentation of criminal organizations also produced a process of clustering of violence, where sets of organizations started fighting each other in specific regions of the country, increasing the levels of violence in those geographical spaces.

Trends Organ Crim (2023), 25p.