This chapter continues the comparative analysis of the two municipalities in Michoacán by leveraging within-case shifts in the availability of police as allies for victims’ resistance efforts. In both cases the variants of collective vigilantism produced “bottom-up” purges of the local police who had been captured by criminal actors. Victims responded to this shift in strategic conditions by pursuing the coproduction of local order. Yet the projects of coproduction varied in their structures and practices in ways that reflected the enduring differences in the nature of the local political economies and the legacies of differing forms of collective vigilantism. Avocado sector victims employed their robust sectoral organization and joined with governing authorities to jointly shape local order, whereas the legacy of decentralized collective vigilantism and weak ties to governing authorities in the berry sector resulted in violent competition between coalitions of armed victims and politicians to obtain political power during elections.

This chapter analyzes two cases of collective vigilantism in Michoacán, Mexico, to show why and how variation in the local political economies in which victims operate influences their strategies of resistance to criminal extortion. I first examine a case of resistance in the avocado sector where victims operated in an encompassing political economy with a single robust sectoral organization to coordinate among themselves and between them and governing authorities. This enabled avocado sector victims to pursue centralized collective vigilantism wherein victims carried out a range of extralegal practices closely coordinated by a group of leaders. By contrast, in a case of resistance in the berry sector, victims operated in a segmented political economy with competing sectoral organizations that precluded victims’ abilities to coordinate with each other as part of a unified self-defense group or with local governing authorities. This led to decentralized collective vigilantism in which multiple self-defense groups engaged in a range of both complementary and contradictory practices against criminals and simultaneously jockeyed against each other for power and resources.

Drawing on extensive interviews with subnational elites and focusing on six Mexican states (Baja California, Chihuahua, Jalisco, Nuevo León, Michoacán, and Guerrero), this chapter analyzes how party alternation and opposition governors’ decisions to remove top- and mid-level officials in the state attorneys’ offices and the state judicial police led to the breakdown of informal government protection networks for drug cartels in the 1990s and early 2000s. Cartels created private militias in response to this political uncertainty in Mexico’s gray zone of criminality, which allowed drug lords to defend their turf and challenge rival territory. Using a sequential analysis, we show how every new party alternation, starting in Baja California in 1989 up to Guerrero in 2005, stimulated an arms race among cartels and led to the proliferation of increasingly lethal dyadic conflicts in the northwest, northeast, and south of the country. By 2006, Mexico’s drug trafficking industry had experienced dramatic transformations: cartels used powerful private militias to settle disputes and the death toll surpassed the 1,000 murders threshold used to classify a conflict as a civil war.

This chapter presents new evidence showing how drug cartels and their associates attacked municipal party candidates and mayors to take control over local elections, penetrated municipal governments, and subdued local economies, populations, and territories. Extensive interviews with former local officials, local economic actors, and local human rights activists show the development of subnational criminal governance regimes in Michoacán and Guerrero – two states ruled by leftist governors, where subnational authorities were purposefully unprotected by the conservative federal government. Cartels inflitrated local campaigns and municipal governments, established themselves as monopolists of violence and criminal taxation, and regulated economic activities in key economic areas. But they failed to do this in Baja California, where the federal government protected the president’s subnational co-partisan rulers. We discuss why, in a context of competition for turf, and state-cartel and inter-cartel conflict, drug lords and their associates developed highly coercive and predatory governance regimes, subverting local democracy, and opening a new era of intense civilian victimization.

This chapter unpacks the federal intervention in the War on Drugs and analyzes the strategies the president followed across states depending on governors’ political affiliations. We disaggregate the intervention on the military, judicial, communicative, and social policy dimensions and assess patterns of cooperation and conflict between federal and subnational authorities. Using extensive interviews with federal and subnational elites and case studies from three cities in three states, we show how Mexico’s federal government followed differentiated strategies to deal with drug violence. The president protected subnational co-partisans (PAN) in Tijuana (PAN); partially cooperated with centrist opposition authorities (PRI) in Ciudad Juáreza; but confronted leftist governors and mayors (PRD), leaving them at the mercy of drug cartels in Apatzingán. Cartels responded by launching strategic attacks and challenging their rivals in municipalities with vulnerable leftist states.Thus, the politicization of law enforcement in the War on Drugs – which was possible because Mexico transitioned to electoral democracy without developing the rule of law – became a major stimulant of violence.

This chapter analyzes a surprising wave of 311 lethal attacks by drug cartels against local elected officials and party candidates in Mexico (2007–2012). As the War on Drugs intensified, competition for turf increased and drug lords expanded their range of actions into new illicit markets – including extortion, kidnapping, and the extraction of natural resources. Cartels attacked mayors and local party candidates to develop subnational governance regimes as part of their new strategy. We use time-series cross-sectional analyses to show that attacks took place in subnational regions where intergovernmental partisan conflict between Right and Left was more intense and mayors and local party candidates were unprotected and vulnerable. Attacks took place disproportionately during subnational election cycles, when new governments were elected and new appointments were made. Two natural experiments, contrasting municipalities along the Michoacán–Guerrero and Michoacán–Guanajuato borders, show that political vulnerability and political opportunity are causally related to the probability of attacks against mayors and party candidates.

This chapter explains why the federal government’s decision to deploy the military in a War on Drugs against the cartels led to a five-fold increase in violence. We argue that acute political polarization and partisan conflict between Right and Left, and the bitterly contested 2006 presidential election, motivated the War on Drugs.The federal government developed interventions in states where the president’s conservative co-partisans ruled, but deliberately neglected leftist governors – the president’s main political rivals – and then blamed the violence on them. We use time-series cross-sectional models to show that between 2007 and 2012 drug violence was more intense in leftist-governed municipalities, not because of incompetence but due to conflict between a Right-wing federal government and leftist governors. We present a natural experiment comparing the intensity of criminal violence in nearly identical municipalities located across the state borders of Michoacán (ruled by the Left) and Jalisco (ruled by the Right). This partisan conflict explains why municipalities on the Michoacán side of the border experienced significantly higher levels of violence than those in Jalisco.