By Simen Madslien

Has the increasing demand for Mexican avocados caused an escalation of violence between Mexican cartels? I theorize that the cartels enter growing licit industries to diversify their revenue stream from the drug trade. Increasing demand for legal commodities possibly leads to higher territorial competition between cartels and higher rates of violence. Recent media attention suggests that avocados are implicated in the bloody cartel business. However, earlier research found a negative relationship between cartel-related crimes and licit industries. Based on the negative relationship observed in recent studies, using an OLS and IV design, I test the hypothesis that the growth in the Mexican avocado industry leads to a decrease in cartel-related violence in Mexican municipalities. In contrast with earlier research, I find a significant increase in the total number of reported cartel-related crimes as a consequence of Mexican avocados' growing production rates. Given the growth rate of global avocado demand, leading to an explosion of Mexican avocado production in the last decade, I interpret the result as coming from intensified territorial competition between Mexican drug trafficking organizations' splintered landscape. With the necessity for cartels to diversify their revenue streams in the aftermath of the war on drugs initiated in 2006, the avocado industry's profitability is expected to draw numerous cartels to the business, increasing the likelihood of territorial contestation and rates of violence.

Bergen: Norwegian School of Economics, 2020. 77p.

By Megan Erickson and Lucas Owen

Has growing demand for licit goods caused an increase in violence among Mexican criminal organizations? We theorize that cartels enter licit markets to supplement and diversify revenues from the drug trade, and that the incentive to do so changes with revenues in licit markets. Given their comparative advantages in agricultural production and violence, we expect cartels to react to increasing demand in agricultural markets by fighting to maximize territorial control and monopolize production. Using a difference-in-differences design, we test the hypothesis that a positive shock in demand for avocados from municipalities in the states of Michoac´an and Jalisco led to an increase in cartel violence. We ultimately find the opposite of what we expect. The enactment of a U.S. phytosanitary policy in June of 2016, which extended U.S. demand for avocados to municipalities formerly unable to export to the United States, led to a significant decrease in cartel homicides compared to municipalities that were unaffected by this policy. Given that cartels were present in most areas of Michoac´an and Jalisco before the policy, we interpret this result as coming from cartels anticipating increased territorial contestation. Since cartels expect others to challenge their territory, they bolster their defenses, reducing incentives for territorial contestation.

Working Paper, Washington Political Economy Forum, 2020. 31p.

By Fernando Sobrino

The number of major Drug Trafficking Organizations (known as cartels) in Mexico increased from four to nine over the last two decades. This was accompanied by an increase in drug trade related violence. This paper examines the relationship between violence and competition for market share among cartels. To measure cartel presence, a difficult to measure phenomenon, I construct a novel data set of cartel presence across Mexican municipalities by scraping Google News and using natural language processing. To study how market size and structure interact with violence, I exploit two empirical strategies using within municipality variation. First, I interact heroin prices with agro-climatic conditions to grow opium poppy, using exogenous variation in demand for heroin from the 2010 OxyContin reformulation. This reformulation made OxyContin harder to abuse and led some opioid abusers to switch to heroin. Second, I exploit variation in the timing of cartel entry in a municipality. Cartel presence increases substantially after 2010 in municipalities well-suited to grow opium poppy. As more cartels enter a market, homicide rates increase. These results suggest that a substantial part of the increase in violence that Mexico experienced in the last fifteen years is due to criminal groups fighting for market share of heroin, not only due to changes in government enforcement.

Working Paper,  Department of Economics, Princeton University, 2020. 63p.

By Alanna Fulk 

This thesis examines research from the disciplines of political science and criminal justice to develop a theory that explains geographic variation in violence related to organized crime. Large-scale organized crime violence exhibits characteristics of both ordinary crime violence and political violence, but these subjects are generally analyzed separately. However, as large-scale organized crime has become more prevalent and violent in recent years, most notably in Latin America, studies, including this one, have attempted to cross disciplinary boundaries in order to better explain trends in organized crime onset, termination and violence. This thesis argues that although the overall goal of organized crime groups is not to take control of a country, both organized crime groups and insurgent groups confront the state’s monopoly on violence, leading to evident similarities in the way they use violence to attain their goals. They both use violence to maintain control over resources, take control from other groups and retaliate against the government. Previous literature has demonstrated that control is directly linked to geographic variation in political violence and through case studies of organized crime violence in Honduras and Brazil, as well as negative binomial regression analysis of organized crime violence in Mexico, this thesis finds that control is also directly linked to geographic variation in organized crime violence.   

Orlando, FL: University of Central Florida, 2019. 111p.