Working Paper: NBER ID: w21171
Authors: Jason M. Lindo; Mara Padilla-Romo
Abstract: This study considers the effects of the kingpin strategy, an approach to fighting organized crime in which law-enforcement efforts focus on capturing the leaders of criminal organizations, on community violence in the context of Mexico's drug war. Newly constructed historical data on drug-trafficking organizations' areas of operation at the municipality level and monthly homicide data allow us to control for a rich set of fixed effects and to leverage variation in the timing of kingpin captures to estimate their effects. This analysis indicates that kingpin captures have large and sustained effects on the homicide rate in the municipality of capture and smaller but significant effects on other municipalities where the kingpin's organization has a presence, supporting the notion that removing kingpins can have destabilizing effects throughout an organization that are accompanied by escalations in violence.
Keywords: kingpin strategy; drug war; homicide; violence; Mexico
JEL Codes: I18; K42; O12
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Capture of a DTO leader in a municipality (Y60) | Increases homicide rate in that municipality (R28) |
| Capture of a DTO leader in a municipality (Y60) | Spillover effect of violence in neighboring municipalities (H73) |
| Capture of a DTO leader in a municipality (Y60) | Increased violence in more distant municipalities with same DTO presence (R11) |