By Rebecca S. Gambler, et al., U.S. Government Accountability Office

  With more than 60,000 employees, CBP is the nation’s largest federal law enforcement agency and is responsible for securing U.S. borders while facilitating legitimate travel and trade. When conducting their duties, CBP law enforcement personnel may be involved in critical incidents. For example, in 2023, critical incidents occurred when a vehicle struck and injured Border Patrol agents and when a child died in CBP custody. CBP personnel may also be involved in noncritical incidents. GAO was asked to review CBP’s approach in responding to incidents. This report assesses how Border Patrol CITs operated before they were disbanded in 2022, Border Patrol’s response to noncritical incidents since that time, and how OPR has developed capacity and implemented investigative standards for critical incident response. GAO analyzed Border Patrol documents on CIT operations from fiscal years 2010 through 2022. GAO interviewed Border Patrol officials from headquarters and the nine southwest border sectors. GAO also analyzed OPR documents and data and interviewed OPR officials. GAO conducted site visits to three southwest border locations. What GAO Recommends GAO recommends that Border Patrol implement guidance that standardizes sector approaches to noncritical incident response and monitor adherence to the guidance, and that OPR develop guidance for investigators on identifying potential impairments to their independence and train investigators on how to apply the guidance. CBP concurred.

GAO-24-106148

Washington, DC: U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2024. 91p.

By The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe

This report analyses publicly available statistical data and factual observations collected about the functioning of the Kosovo justice system institutions in the Mitrovicë/Mitrovica region before and after the mass resignation of Kosovo Serb judges, prosecutors, and administrative staff in November 2022. It identifies the impact of the resignations on the Mitrovicë/Mitrovica justice system, with a focus on rule of law and fair trial standards, particularly the right to trial within a reasonable time and access to justice.

Vienna: OSCE, 2024. 32p.

By The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe

This report provides an analysis of data collected by the OSCE Mission in Kosovo trial monitoring programme from January to December 2022 and identifies trends in prosecution, defence and court practices in relation to the imposition of detention measures on defendants with mental health needs in Kosovo. It analyses judicial practice for compliance with fair trial and international human rights standards.

Vienna: OSCE, 2024. 18p.

By The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe,

This report provides an analysis of data from cases of illegal possession of weapons collected by the OSCE Mission in Kosovo trial monitoring programme from December 2020 to August 2023 and assesses court sentencing practices for compliance with fair trial and international human rights standards, with a particular focus on fair and consistent sentencing. 

Vienna: OSCE, 2024.  21p.

By The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe,

Office of the Special Representative and Co-ordinator for Combating Trafficking in Human Beings

This paper provides an overview of the existing links between disability and trafficking in human beings, how persons living with disability are affected by trafficking, and to what extent legal standards, policy frameworks, and anti-trafficking measures integrate concerns associated with disabilities. This analysis is approached from four distinct perspectives: disability as an enhanced vulnerability factor that traffickers target; disability as a feature of exploitation; disability as a result of trafficking and exploitation; and disability of trafficking survivors as a factor in accessing justice, protection, employment, health, and rehabilitation services. Finally, the paper presents a series of recommendations and potential strategies aimed at elevating awareness and prioritizing the disability dimension within efforts to combat human trafficking.

Vienna: OSCE, 2024. 46p,

By Christopher Lau

Against the backdrop of declining crime rates, gun violence and gun-related homicides have only risen over the last three years. Just as it historically has, the brunt of that violence has been borne by poor Black and brown communities. These communities are especially impacted: they are not only far more likely to be the victims of gun violence, but are also the primary targets of police surveillance and harassment. People of color are disproportionately prosecuted for gun crimes, which, in part, prompted the Black Public Defenders Amicus Brief in support of expanding gun rights in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass'n v. Bruen. Recognizing that the carceral approach of policing and prosecution has failed to prevent gun violence and has harmed Black and brown communities, this Article sets forth community violence interruption groups as a promising decarceral alternative. Violence interruption groups address violence by working with the people who are most impacted by cyclical gun violence and intervene by mediating conflicts, defusing imminent violence, and encouraging people to give up their firearms. Building on the work of abolitionist scholars and organizers, this Article centers the role of Violence Interrupters as an important alternative to policing and punitive prosecution. It explores legal changes that might minimize the legal barriers to violence interruption, including statutory reform, mens rea reform, expansion of the Second Amendment, and recognition of an innocent possession defense.

104 Boston University Law Review 769 (2024), Univ. of Wisconsin Legal Studies Research Paper No. 1805

By Ingrid V. Eagly and Steven Shafer

This Article traces the modern development and institutional design of detained immigration courts—that is, the courts that tie detention to deportation. Since the early 1980s, judges in detained immigration courts have presided over more than 3.6 million court cases of persons held in immigration custody, almost all men from Latin America, most of whom are charged with only civil violations of the immigration law.

Primary sources indicate that detained immigration courts are concentrated outside major urban areas, most commonly in the South, and often housed in structures not traditionally associated with courts, including inside prisons, jails, detention processing centers, makeshift tents, shipping containers, and border patrol stations. Other defining features of these detained courts include case completion goals prioritizing speed, minimal representation by counsel, heavy reliance on video adjudication, constrained public access, and arrest and venue rules that give the government unfettered control over the court that hears the case. Accompanying these developments, judges working inside detained courts have become increasingly separated from the rest of the immigration judge corps and, when compared to their counterparts in the nondetained courts, are more likely to be male, to have served in the military, and to have worked as prosecutors.

This Article argues that the largely unregulated design elements of detained immigration courts threaten due process and fundamental fairness by fostering a segregated court system that assigns systematic disadvantage to those who are detained during their case. Recognizing the structure and function of the detained immigration court system has a number of important implications for organizing efforts to reduce reliance on detention, policy proposals for restructuring the immigration courts, and future research on judicial decision-making.

Virginia Law Review, Vol. 110 Issue 3, 691 (2024)

UCLA School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 24-15

By Elizabeth Wrigley-Field

Field Reparations proposals typically target wealth. Yet slavery’s and Jim Crow’s long echoes also steal time, such as by producing shorter Black lifespans even today. I argue that lost time should be considered an indepen dent target for redress; identify challenges to doing so; and provide examples of what reparations redressing lost lifespan could look like. To identify quantitative targets for redress, I analyze area- level relationships between Black lifespans and six measures of intensity of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial terror. Results reveal inconsistent relationships across measures, suggesting difficulties in grounding a target for redress in such variation. Instead, I propose that policies aim to redress the national lifespan gap between White and Black Americans. The article concludes with a typology of potential strategies for such redress.  

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences June 2024, 10 (2) 88-112; DOI: https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2024.10.2.04

By Cas Mudde 

The rise of Donald Trump has weakened the dominance of the “American exceptionalism” paradigm in analyses of U.S. politics, but the pivot to views of the United States as part of a global trend toward democratic backsliding ignores important, uniquely “American” cultural, historical, and institutional attributes that make the country more at risk for democratic erosion than most other established democracies. This short article puts Trump, and his Republican Party, into the broader comparative perspective of (European) far-right studies. I argue that Trump in many ways fits the “fourth wave” of postwar far-right politics, lay out the unique challenge that the United States is facing in terms of democratic erosion, and draw on the case of Viktor Orbán in Hungary to learn lessons for the United States. The article ends with some suggestions of how democrats (not just Democrats) should address the far-right Republican challenge to U.S. democracy.

It is rare for political scientists to write a New York Times bestseller, but Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt did just that, with their insightful book How Democracies Die (2018). It is the best contribution to what has quickly become a new and popular genre of political doomsday books, declaring the end of democracy, liberalism, or both. What makes the success of How Democracies Die even more remarkable is that the authors look to other countries to help explain what is happening in the United States. Based on the authors’ extensive research on early-twentieth-century Europe and late-twentieth-century Latin America, Levitsky and Ziblatt provide an original and thought-provoking understanding of contemporary U.S. politics. With this comparative approach, the authors went against the “American exceptionalism” paradigm, claiming that U.S. politics is unique in the world, which has long dominated academic and political debates in the United States.

Ironically, for a politician who championed an isolationalist “America First” policy, Donald Trump has done more to open the country up to comparisons with the rest of the world than possibly any U.S. politician before him. Few analyses of his ascendence failed to note similar developments in other countries, from Brazil (Jair Bolsonaro) to Italy (Silvio Berlusconi) and France (Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen). The most ahistorical accounts declare Trump the trendsetter of a global “far right” surge that, in fact, started at least 25 years prior in Europe. The pivot from “American exceptionalism” to views of the United States as part of a global trend toward democratic backsliding might be therapeutic to those who oppose Trump, but it ignores important, uniquely “American” cultural, historical, and institutional attributes that make the United States more at risk for democratic erosion than most other established democracies.

In this short article, I put Trump, and his Republican Party, into the broader comparative perspective of (European) far-right studies. In the first section, I argue that Trump in many ways fits what I have called the “fourth wave” of postwar far-right politics. In the second section, I lay out the unique challenge that the United States is facing in terms of democratic erosion; and in the third section, I draw on the case of Viktor Orbán in Hungary to learn lessons for the United States. The article ends with some suggestions of how democrats (not just Democrats) should address the far-right Republican challenge to U.S. democracy.

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 699(1), 101-115. 2022. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027162211070060

By Dennis Rodgers

Gangs are widely considered major contributors to the high levels of violence afflicting Latin America, including in particular Central America. At the same time, however, the vast majority of individuals who join a gang will also leave it and, it is assumed, become less violent. Having said this, the mechanisms underlying this ‘desistance’ process are not well understood, and nor are the determinants of individuals’ post-gang trajectories, partly because gang desistance tends to be seen as an event rather than a process. Drawing on long term ethnographic research carried out in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández, a poor neighbourhood in Nicaragua’s capital city Managua, and more specifically a set of ‘archetypal’ gang member life histories that illustrate the occupational options open to former gang members, this article offers a longitudinal perspective on desistance and its consequences, with specific reference to the determinants of individuals’ continued engagement with violence (or not) 

Journal of Latin American Studies (2023), 55, 679–704 doi:10.1017/S0022216X23000718 

Emily Greberman and Colleen M. Berryessa

The United States (U.S.) and its criminal-legal system have had a historically turbulent relationship with drugs and substance use. Public rhetoric, political ideology, and resulting policies, shaped by both rehabilitative and punitive ideals, have served as a foundation for the criminalization and mass incarceration of those who possess, distribute, and use illegal drugs–especially the targeting and blaming of communities of color. Early on, though drugs such as opium had versatile medical benefits, the use of heroin, crack/cocaine, and cannabis by people of color was quickly shaped into discourse that amplified fear and racist stereotypes and catalyzed the War on Drugs. Throughout several presidential administrations, the criminalization of drug crimes disproportionately affected Black individuals, despite White citizens using them at similar or higher rates. ‘Tough on crime’ policies, policing, and sentencing that resulted from this period culminated in the mass imprisonment of people of color. Now trying to repair the harm caused by the War on Drugs and rhetoric from the media in 2024, there is a strong push for the decriminalization and legalization of several drugs across the U.S. For cannabis in particular, efforts have been made to advocate for its legalization federally. In the criminal-legal system, many political leaders and legislators have actively attempted to advocate for and enforce policies that release individuals from prison who have been incarcerated for minor drug offenses or are affected by unjust sentencing practices. Combined with nationwide efforts to promote research on the use of drugs for medicinal purposes as well as the problems of drug abuse and addiction, a more progressive and optimistic approach to drug use has begun and continues to grow across the U.S. The social and political forces that have historically shaped attitudes towards drug use and punishment are crucial to understanding the current direction of U.S. drug policies and why the pendulum continues to swing.

In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Oxford University Press. 2024  (forthcoming)

By Dennis Rodgers

• Open access

• Published: 08 April 2024

• Volume 47, pages 377–404, (2024)

This article explores the longitudinal dynamics of youth gang transformation in urban Nicaragua. On the basis of an overview of successive gang iterations that have emerged over the past 30 years in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández, a poor neighborhood in Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, the article identifies key elements for the articulation of a political economy of both change and stability. In particular, drawing on Bourdieusian theory, it conceives of a gang as a “social field” rather than as a discrete organizational form. It traces how different processes of individual and collective capital accumulation underpinning the social order promulgated by distinct gang iterations emerge and interact with each other, and the consequences that this has for their evolution over time. In doing so, the article offers a better understanding of the logic of what might be termed “gang rule(s)”.

  Qualitative Sociology (2024) 47:377–404 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-024-09561-1''  

By Natalie Byrom  

  The justice system in England and Wales, once lauded as “the envy of the world” is now more often described as being “in crisis”. Since 2010, government funding for both the courts and for legal advice and representation has been significantly reduced, increasing gaps in the provision of legal information, advice and support for people facing issues with community care, immigration, housing and welfare benefits. More parents now attempt to represent themselves in family court proceedings. Measures introduced to combat the spread of COVID-19 have exacerbated backlogs across the civil, criminal and family courts – leaving victims, defendants, claimants and their families waiting longer to access justice. The cost-of-living crisis has intensified issues, increasing the number of people experiencing legal problems with debt, housing and domestic abuse. Existing provision of legal advice and representation is inadequate to meet this need. In 2024 the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) was criticised by the National Audit Office for failing to collect the data needed to effectively manage the supplier base for this critical service5. Against this backdrop of escalating unmet legal need and a justice system under strain, justice system leaders are increasingly turning to technology with the dual aim of promoting earlier dispute resolution and achieving efficiency savings. There is growing government interest in remote and digital alternatives to face-to-face legal advice provision, creating both new opportunities and challenges. However, an absence of agreed quality standards for digital tools and inadequate regulation of AI-assisted provision exacerbates risks and undermines innovation. Issues with the leadership, culture and structure of the MoJ undermine attempts to address these issues. Since 2010 there have been 11 changes in Lord Chancellor, equalling the number between 1945 and 2003. The inclusion of responsibility for prisons within the department’s remit when it was created in 2007 has detracted focus and funding from other areas of justice policy – including access to civil justice and the courts. The challenges in delivering the £1.3bn programme of digital court reform, which has been beset by significant delays and multiple reductions in scope6, have exposed  issues with the governance structures created to oversee the operation of HM Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS). Experts have questioned the adequacy of the existing framework agreement7 and suggested that wider constitutional reforms may be needed to put in place the structures and leadership necessary to effectively manage the courts and tribunals. Issues with the leadership, structure and culture of the MoJ (and other justice system institutions) are reflected in persistent and systemic issues with the data that is available to system leaders. The absence of joined-up data – structured at the level of people, not cases – prevents justice leaders from taking a whole system view, undermining attempts to identify and resolve challenges. The relative absence of data, and persistent issues with arrangements for accessing the information that does exist8, also weaken opportunities for external researchers to undertake robust research. This means that justice, especially civil justice, does not in general benefit from the networks of independent think tanks, researchers and evidence intermediaries that promote effective decision making in other areas of social policy. This report sets out what we know about the ways in which the justice system fails to meet people’s needs, highlighting existing examples of research on current issues in access to justice. Just as crucially, the report focuses on what we do not know, and draws attention to the gaps in data, evidence and infrastructure that undermine our ability to sustainably address existing challenges. 
London: Nuffield Foundation, 2024. 90p.

By Chelsa Kenney, et al.
  The U.S. government has identified illicit drugs, as well as the criminal organizations that produce and traffic them, as significant threats to both the U.S. and partner nations. DOD is the lead department responsible for detecting and monitoring the aerial and maritime transport of illicit drugs to the U.S. Senate report 117-130 accompanying the FY 2023 National Defense Authorization Act contains a provision for GAO to examine issues related to counternarcotics and counter transnational organized crime activities. This report examines (1) funding available for DOD’s activities and funding allocation in FYs 2018 through 2022; (2) the extent to which DOD components coordinate activities; and (3) how DOD assessed the effectiveness of these activities, and the extent to which its future assessments align with key practices. GAO reviewed DOD documents and data about its authorities, funding, and activities, including coordination and performance management. GAO also interviewed DOD officials, including officials at headquarters and combatant commands. What GAO Recommends GAO is making four recommendations, including that DOD develops a plan to assess agency-wide progress. DOD partially agreed with all recommendations. GAO maintains that fully implementing them is necessary to improve DOD’s coordination and assessment of activities.  

Washington, DC: U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2024. 56p.

By ASTRA – Anti-trafficking Action
  This report by ASTRA – Anti-Trafficking Action, details a suspected case of labour exploitation involving 11 Indian workers contracted by China Energy Engineering Group Tianjin Electric Power Construction Co. LTD's Belgrade branch in Zrenjanin, Serbia. ASTRA began assisting the workers in late January 2024 after being contacted by the workers. Within a month, on February 11th, the workers left Serbia abruptly. Despite the short timeframe, ASTRA collected significant evidence, including documents, footage, and testimonials from the workers. This report, available in both a short and longer version, serves a dual purpose: I. Warning Sign: To highlight concerning practices towards migrant workers seeking decent employment in Serbia. II. State Response Evaluation: To assess the state institutions' reactions or lack thereof regarding this case. This incident reflects a broader trend. Similar cases involving foreign workers have emerged in Serbia over the past five years, often sharing common recruitment and employment elements. These cases also reveal evolving trends in exploitation methods and concerning gaps in the state's response. Serbia's growing foreign workforce requires a clear, competent framework to address human and labour rights violations effectively, for both foreign and domestic workers.

Belgrade, Republic of Serbia, ASTRA, 2024. 36p. 

By  UK Ministry of Justice Justice Data Lab team 

  This analysis looked at the reoffending behaviour of men and women who participated in His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service’s (HMPPS) Creating Future Opportunities (CFO) programme some time between 2015 and 2021 (concluding in or after August 2018). The overall results show that men who took part in the programme in the community were less likely to reoffend, reoffended less frequently and took longer to reoffend than those who did not take part. These results were statistically significant. A previous analysis was published in July 2019, covering a separate cohort and a variation of the programme. This can be found in the Justice Data Lab statistics collection on GOV.UK. HMPPS CFO intervention is based on one-to-one case management, with the aim of increasing the employability of participants. The programme operates in three settings: in the community, in custody and through the gate (TTG). The headline analysis in this report measured proven reoffences in a one-year period for a ‘treatment group’ of 3,520 male offenders who began receiving support in the community some time between 2015 and 2021 (concluding in or after August 2018), and for a much larger ‘comparison group’ of similar offenders who did not receive it. The analysis estimates the impact of the support from HMPPS CFO on reoffending behaviour. Additional analyses were also conducted on male and female participants who received support from HMPPS CFO in each of the settings outlined above.  

London: Ministry of Justice, 2024. 20p.  

By Alexander Ritzmann

  This report analyzes the potential threats affiliated with the largest and fast growing transnational right-wing extremist (RWE/REMVE) combat sports network, called Active Clubs. It explores the objectives, strategies, strengths, and weaknesses of this network, which has spread from the U.S. to Canada and to at least 14 countries in Europe within three years. ● The overall objective of the Active Club White Supremacy 3.0 strategy is the creation of a stand-by militia of trained and capable RWE/REMVE individuals who can be activated when the need for coordinated violent action on a larger scale arises. ● Over 100 Active Clubs have been created between late 2020 and August 2023, with at least 46 in the United States across 34 U.S. states. At least 46 Active Clubs exist in 14 European countries, and 12 in Canada. The estimated number of members per Active Club is between five and 25. ● Some Active Clubs in the U.S. are conducting or participating in military-style tactical and casualty care trainings. Members or sympathizers of Active Clubs in France and Estonia appear to be fighting in the Russia-Ukraine war. ● If Active Clubs are allowed to continue to operate and multiply, the likelihood for targeted political violence and terrorism by their members against supposed enemies of the “white race” (e.g., Jews, people of color, Muslims, and LGTBQI+ people) will increase. ● A key component of the White Supremacy 3.0 strategy is to hide in plain sight. To avoid, delay, mitigate, or withstand law enforcement interventions, Active Clubs are supposed to present a friendly face to the public. Consequently, network members are asked to avoid threatening behavior or displaying obvious Nazi symbols to appear less relevant to law enforcement. This less aggressive and more mainstream strategy is also meant to help grow the network, in particular from the general public. ● For the Active Club strategy of hiding in plain sight to work, members should look like regular guys, like the members of the (NSDAP Schutzstaffel) SS did. When recruiting, Active Club members should not talk about Jews and history. Instead, the focus in public should be on brotherhood, community, fitness, and self-defense. 

 Berlin:  Counter Extremism Project (CEP), 2023. 52p. 

By  A.K.M. Maksud, Khandaker Reaz Hossain, Sayma Sayed and Jody Aked 

The CLARISSA programme aims to understand the dynamics that are central to running a business in the informal economy in Bangladesh’s leather industry and explore how and why worst forms of child labour become a feature of business operations. This research paper explores the findings from semi-structured interviews with business owners operating enterprises involved in leather processing and production across three prominent neighbourhoods and business districts in and around Dhaka. A focus on the leather industry in Bangladesh is an opportunity to explore the demand side of the child labour issue in a situated way, with the intention of bringing the lived experience of business owners to pre-existing literature on poverty entrepreneurship, supply chain governance, and political economy. The paper details the risks and stressors business owners face, the relationships they have with other informal and formal enterprises in the supply chain system, and their rationale for hiring children. Business owners experience poverty and financial precarity, taking significant financial risks to sustain enterprises that are barely viable economically. Stuck in vicious operating cycles, on ‘produce now, pay later’ credit arrangements, enterprises respond by squeezing labour budgets. The need for cheap labour is amplified by price points at lower than the cost of production. To understand why child labour has been so difficult to ‘end’, an informal economy business perspective points to the economic dysfunction of complex supply chains, particularly mediated by downward financial pressures produced and reproduced by highly fragmented manufacturing processes in cost-driven markets. When poverty and precarity among informal economy business owners intersects with formal economy power, the result is business models that rely on children as cheap labour. The findings make clear the policy value of engaging business owners in the informal economy in efforts to reduce worst forms of child labour, especially given the insights they can offer about how, when, and why supply chain systems are at risk of depending on children for the provision of goods and services.

  CLARISSA Research and Evidence Paper 8, 

Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, 2024. 54p.

By Robert A. Kleinman

Background

Despite the increase in fentanyl-involved overdose deaths in Canada, there have been no national-level studies evaluating the proportion of illicit opioids containing fentanyl or fentanyl analogues in Canada.

Methods

This cross-sectional exploratory study characterized trends in fentanyl, carfentanil and other fentanyl analogues within opioids seized by law enforcement agencies in Canada from 2012 to 2022 and submitted to the Health Canada Drug Analysis Service (DAS). Analyses were stratified by province/region. Mann-Kandell tests were used to test for trends.

Results

A total of 157,616 samples containing any opioid (“opioid-containing samples”) were submitted to the DAS from Canadian provinces between 2012 and 2022, of which 81,165 (51.5%) contained fentanyl or a fentanyl analogue. The percentage of opioid-containing samples that were positive for fentanyl or a fentanyl analogue increased from 3.0% (95% CI: 2.6-3.4%) in 2012 to 68.3% (67.7-68.9%) in 2022 (p < 0.001 for trend). The percentage of opioid-containing samples that were positive for fentanyl or a fentanyl analogue increased between 2012 and 2022 in all regions. In 2022, the percentage of samples containing fentanyl or an analogue followed an east-to-west gradient: 15.8% (13.3-18.6%) of samples in Atlantic Canada and 84.7% (83.6-85.7%) in British Columbia. Carfentanil was present in 4.9% (4.6-5.2%) of opioid-containing samples in Canada in 2022 and 19.7% (18.3-21.2%) of opioid-containing samples in Alberta.

Conclusions

The illicit opioid supply in Canada increasingly contains toxic synthetic opioids. As of 2022, important regional differences existed in the illicit opioid supply in Canada.

   Drug and Alcohol Dependence Reports, (2024)

By The International Crisis Group

  Outgoing Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has deployed troops on a scale never seen before to fight crime across the country, but this measure has barely loosened the grip of illegal outfits. In some ways, the government can call its policy a success. Violence, measured by reported murders, has dipped from the historic heights of a few years ago, an achievement supporters attribute to the president’s incorruptible character. Polls suggest that his party’s candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum, will romp to victory in the 2 June election. But in the states hardest hit by crime, the reasons behind lulls in fighting appear less flattering to federal authorities. Some security officers and criminal leaders suggest that a modus vivendi between military commanders and illegal outfits has enabled crime groups to profit and expand their hold on communities so long as overt violence is curtailed. Mexico’s next president may be unable to withdraw troops from public security, but she should delineate limits to their role while endeavouring to sever state ties to crime and create the conditions for effective civilian law enforcement. After campaigning in 2018 on a platform promising to pacify Mexico, end the “war on drugs” and return troops to the barracks, López Obrador seemingly underwent a radical conversion. Even before he took office, the president declared that he could not trust the country’s various police forces to curb heavily armed criminal groups, opting instead to reinforce the role of the military – whose law enforcement capacities had been an article of faith for the previous two governments. López Obrador boosted troop deployment and created an entirely new security force under military leadership, the National Guard. In addition to expanding the military’s role in ensuring public safety, he also handed the armed forces major roles in infrastructure, migration control, and seaport and airport management. According to the 2024 budget, 20 percent of state spending is now being channelled through the armed forces. Top government officials insist that the president’s integrity – alongside the military's robust presence and a barrage of social programs – have served to dampen levels of armed conflict. On closer inspection, however, the areas most affected by warring criminal groups – including states such as Michoacán, Veracruz, Colima and Guerrero – have seen large military deployments but limited concrete crime fighting. Security force insiders and criminal leaders note that a set of largely unspoken rules has been established, encouraging illegal groups to reduce and conceal the violence they perpetrate. In exchange, authorities have turned a blind eye to a degree of illegality, enabling these organisations to diversify their trafficking operations (including into newer illicit drugs such as fentanyl), expand their extortion rackets, branch out into legal business, and assume greater control of communities and local governments. When these understandings fall apart, or when major criminal syndicates engage in frontal battle with one another, triggering humanitarian emergencies and drawing national media and political attention, the military are prone to take on a more interventionist and offensive role. But even then, they do not always focus on undermining criminal power, and they can be ambivalent toward illicit operations. When the Jalisco New Generation Cartel launched a major offensive in Michoacán, military    commanders are reported to have hatched deals with crime rings to fight the group, including a campaign to kill numerous members of the cartel. Elsewhere, military officers in cahoots with specific crime groups have allegedly abused their authority to shield their illegal partners. The misuse of authority in Mexico is not unique to the military. But the sheer extent of the armed forces’ security, political and budgetary powers, combined with the lack of any independent civilian oversight, reinforces the risks that members of the armed forces will engage in corruption and collusion. That said, a precipitous move to return soldiers to the barracks could destabilise areas plagued by crime groups locked in arms races and trigger political risks that neither of the main candidates seems willing to countenance. As the candidate for López Obrador’s party, Shein baum has defended the strategy of the past six years, saying the military should remain at the heart of public security for as long as needed. Her main adversary, Xóchitl Gálvez, representing a coalition of opposition parties, has advocated for pulling troops back from some of their many duties. But she concedes a continuing role for troops in tackling the most violent criminal outfits, and she appears ready to reinforce the National Guard, albeit under civilian command..........

Brussels, Belgium: ICG, 2024. 44p.

 Latin America Report N°106 | 24 May 2024