Mourning our dead: The impact of Mexico’s war on drugs on citizens’ depressive symptoms
International Journal of Drug Policy, Volume 60, 2018.
Research has shown the substantial impact on mental health for victims of drug-related crime in Mexico, especially individuals who have been heavily exposed to violence. However, the effect of drug-related violence in non-victims has been less studied because causal pathways via indirect violence are more ambiguous. We argue that drug-related violence does have an influence on the mental health of non-victims. Our findings suggest that the general population is a direct victim of the psychological violence imposed by the use of narcomessages. This additional effect of the war on drugs should be considered when deciding how to address the psychological effects of drug-related violence. The government should provide safer public spaces to improve perceptions about security, and more mental health services in communities that are most affected by organized crime violence. Mental health is also affected when police forces fight criminal groups. These findings corroborate the crisis of local institutions, the low confidence citizens have in police, and/or the infiltration of organized crime in local police corps.
Around the world, non-state armed actors have been linked to the illegal extraction of energy resources. This research note explores the case of Mexico. Anecdotal evidence suggests that criminal groups have been gaining control of energy infrastructure across the country. At the same time, oil tapping has been directly associated with criminal violence. Yet, there has not been a systematic effort to causally identify the relationship between illegal extraction and criminal violence. In this research note, we use the exogenous variation in international oil prices—as a measure of potential profits—to assess the effect of access to energy infrastructure on criminal-related violence. Our results show that increases in oil prices are associated with higher levels of homicide rates in municipalities with pipelines and in neighboring municipalities. Specifically, a standard price increase during this period is associated with approximately 20% more homicides per year in municipalities with gasoline pipelines. A locality-level analysis suggests a non-linear distance effect. Finally, we also explore criminal fragmentation as the mechanism connecting access to resources and violence. We find that access to pipelines is associated with higher presence of organized crime groups, but not necessarily with more fragmentation.
Research on ‘the War on Drugs’ in Mexico finds that military interventions increase lethal violence in the country. However, these studies fail to account for other processes that may be driving the behavior of lethal violence in the Mexican municipalities. We find confirmation that these rival processes influence the relative impact that military interventions have on lethal violence. In particular, we find that seasonality in violence, competition for scarce resources and PAN’s governance in the municipalities are associated with higher levels of lethal violence, as measured by the young male homicide rate. We argue that the literature may have overestimated the effect that military interventions have in lethal violence in municipalities and that other drivers of violence should be taken into account to accurately measure the impact that military interventions have on lethal violence.
