Politics: The geography of political violence
In the second installment of our analysis of how security conditions have evolved in the past three years and what we can expect from those trends in this crucial election year, we are turning our attention to the specific dynamics of politically related criminal violence at a time when the ability of security and justice institutions to deter criminal organizations from assuming control over governmental organizations, especially at the local level, appears increasingly in doubt. And the election year push by criminal organizations to expand their institutional reach threatens to leave ever more citizens at the mercy of those groups that wield control over police forces as well as public prosecutors and judges. An example of this dark history was highlighted just three weeks ago with the January 22 massacre in Tamaulipas of 19 Guatemalan migrants at the hands of state troopers.
Encountering little or no pushback from local governments, this phenomenon of capturing and re-configuring state institutions began to spread in some parts of Mexico from the first years of the current century and eventually led then-president Felipe Calderón to launch his six-year effort to break the back of criminal groups, especially the dominant drug cartels of that period. But roughly 15 years later, such gangs have extended and tightened their grip over many parts of the country, killing local elected officials, candidates, police chiefs, jail and prison directors and guards in their struggle for control of all manner of local institutions.
In this week’s analysis, we divide political violence into the categories of crimes strictly related to candidate selection and election campaigns, for which we are drawing on information from 2018 for comparison, and violence against authorities for control of institutions such as murders and attacks on police, municipal or state officials, including current and former mayors, for which we are using information for the first eight months of 2020. After focusing on four northern border states and Baja California Sur the previous week, we are shifting our attention further south to three Pacific-coast states, Colima, Nayarit and Sinaloa, and two others further inland, San Luis Potosí and Zacatecas.
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