Major: Political Science Minor: Economics Hometown: Cozumel, Mexico Thesis Advisor: James Fearon
Tentative Thesis Title:Making Friends with the Enemy: A Study of Cooperation Between Drug Cartels and Local Politicians in Mexico
Future aspirations post-Stanford: After Stanford, I hope to pursue a PhD in political science focusing on Latin American politics and Economic development. My dream is to return to my home country of Mexico and help create a better future for all my fellow citizens. I am unsure whether this would be through academia, journalism, or public office, but I am excited to see what the future holds. Above all, I hope to follow the footsteps of academics and reporters who have devoted their lives to improving conditions in Latin America.
A fun fact about yourself: I am obsessed with the Nobel Prize in Literature. I can name half of the people who have won the award at the top of my head and in my free time, I always read as many laureates as I can (currently at 40 out of 117).
Why do drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) sometimes prey on the communities in which they operate but sometimes provide assistance to these communities? What explains their strategies of extortion and co-optation toward civil society? Using new survey data from Mexico, including list experiments to elicit responses about potentially illegal behavior, this article measures the prevalence of extortion and assistance among DTOs. In support of our theory, these data show that territorial contestation among rival organizations produces more extortion and, in contrast, DTOs provide more assistance when they have monopoly control over a turf. The article uncovers other factors that also shape DTOs’ strategies toward the population, including the degree of collaboration with the state, leadership stability and DTO organization, and the value and logistics of the local criminal enterprise.
The levels of violence in Mexico have dramatically increased in the last few years due to structural changes in the drug trafficking business. The increase in the number of drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) fighting over the control of territory and trafficking routes has resulted in a substantial increase in the rates of homicides and other crimes. This study evaluates the economic costs of drug-related violence. We propose electricity consumption as an indicator of the level of municipal economic activity and use two different empirical strategies to test this. To estimate the marginal effects of violence, we utilize an instrumental variable regression created by Mejía and Castillo (2012) based on historical seizures of cocaine in Columbia interacted with the distance of the Mexican border towns to the United States. We find that marginal increases of violence have negative effects on labor participation and the proportion of unemployed in an area. The marginal effect of the increase in homicides is substantive for earned income and the proportion of business owners, but not for energy consumption. We also employ the methodology of synthetic controls to evaluate the effect that inter-narco wars have on local economies. These wars in general begin with a wave of executions between rival criminal organizations and are accompanied by the deterioration of order and a significant increase in extortion, kidnappings, robberies, murders, and threats affecting the general population. To evaluate the effect that these wars between different drug trafficking organizations have on economic performance, we define the beginning of a conflict as the moment when we observe an increase from historical violence rates at the municipal level beyond a certain threshold, and construct counterfactual scenarios as a weighted average from optimal control units. The analysis indicates that the drug wars in those municipalities that saw dramatic increases in violence between 2006 and 2010 significantly reduced their energy consumption in the years after the change occurred.
Following in the footsteps of last year’s international conference on violence and policing in Latin American and U.S. Cities, on April 28th and 29th of 2015, the Poverty Goverance and Violence Lab(PovGov) at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) turned Encina Hall at the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies (FSI) into a dynamic, instructive and stimulating discussion platform. The exchange of experiences, expertise and ideals that flourished within this space helped create a “dialogue for action,” as speakers and participants explored the various dimensions of youth and criminal violence in Mexico, Brazil and the United States, while advocating for the importance of opening up adequate pathways to hope. The event was sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies, The Bill Lane Center for the America West, The Mexico Initiative at FSI, and the Center on International Security and Cooperation.
Beatriz Magaloni, director of CDDRL's Program on Poverty and Governance (PovGov), and Zaira Razu, a research associate and project manager at PovGov, recently released a piece in Current History on Mexico's ongoing drug war and the rise of violence. Although democratic structures have helped improve certain freedoms throughout the country in the past decade, institutionalized injustice is slowly jeopardizing stability and security for much of the Mexican population.
This paper evaluates the causal impact of Rio de Janeiro’s Pacifying Police Units (UPPs), probably the largest–scale police reform initiative taking place in the developing world. The main goals of the UPPs were: 1) to regain control of territories previously dominated by armed criminal groups; and 2) to improve security for these communities through reduction of lethal violence. In the course of six years, more than 9,000 police officers were permanently assigned to the UPPs, servicing close to half million residents in the city slums (favelas). We are interested in understanding the process through which governments supply a basic public service –the police -- in poor urban neighborhoods that have long been abandoned to the arbitrary rule of non-state armed actors. Moreover, our paper documents Rio de Janeiro’s painful trajectory of police violence, illuminating some of it major institutional facilitators. Painstakingly geo-coding homicides and police killings from 2005 to 2013, we provide answers to some of the most critical questions about police use of lethal force, including the determinants of variations in who is targeted by police repression and how different strategies for policing the slums have impacted police killings. To evaluate the UPP impact on lethal violence, we use a variety of causal identification strategies that leverage spatial and temporal variation in the introduction of the UPP as well as geo-referenced data of more than 22,000 incidents of lethal violence. Our empirical models reveal that the UPP had mixed results. The introduction of the UPPs did not play a significant role in reducing murders in the favelas that were pacified. The UPP’s failure to reduce homicides imply that the poor in the slums continue to be subject to two or three times higher murder rates than the white middle class. Nonetheless, the UPP is breaking long-held practices of extreme use of police lethal violence. Our empirical results convincingly demonstrate that police killings would have been 60 percent larger without the UPP intervention.
Following in the footsteps of last year’s international conference on violence and policing in Latin American and U.S. Cities, on April 28th and 29th of 2015, the Program on Poverty and Governance (PovGov) at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) turned Encina Hall at the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies (FSI) into a dynamic, instructive and stimulating discussion platform. The exchange of experiences, expertise and ideals that flourished within this space helped create a “dialogue for action,” as speakers and participants explored the various dimensions of youth and criminal violence in Mexico, Brazil and the United States, while advocating for the importance of opening up adequate pathways to hope. The event was sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies, The Bill Lane Center for the America West, The Mexico Initiative at FSI, and the Center on International Security and Cooperation.
For a link to the conference event page, click here.
To find out more about CDDRL's Program on Poverty and Governance, click here.
In April, the Program on Poverty and Governance (PovGov) at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law welcomed academics, policymakers, practitioners and youth leaders from Latin America, the U.K. and the U.S. to explore educational and entrepreneurial initiatives to support youth in places of violence.
Building on last year’s theme on violence and policing, the conference examined the rise in criminality among youth in both Latin America and the U.S., calling on attendees to share best practices aimed at curbing this trend. The conference served as a platform for attendees to highlight innovative government and community-based programs that have been successful in steering youth away from violence and towards more promising pathways.
"This conference is the result of a long reflection on the connection of poverty, violence, inequality and corruption," said Associate Professor of Political Science and PovGov Director Beatriz Magaloni who organized the conference. "However, our goal is not to reflect on the costs of violence, but to highlight alternatives that organizations, public officials and individuals are helping create. We want to reflect on the work that has been happening on the ground and on the revolution that these players are making."
The two-day conference featured two keynote addresses. The first was delivered by Brazil’s Sub-Secretary of Youth and President of the National Council on Youth (CONJUVE) Angela Guimarães who remarked on violence and its negative impact on educational and employment opportunities for Brazilian youth.
“The current youth experience is marked by violence,” Guimarães said. “There has been an expansion in access to education, work, formalization and quality of life, but violence continues to mark this generation.”
The other keynote speaker Héctor Castillo Berthier highlighted his 28 year-old NGO, Circo Volador, one of the longest-running social interventions in Mexico. The organization supports excluded sectors of society, promoting culturally appropriate arts and culture programming to youth in collaboration with community partners.
Keynote: Angela Guimarães, Sub-Secretary of Youth (Brazil)
“We created a new common language that we could all understand,” said Castillo Berthier. “We planned things with them. We drew with them. We produced things on the ground with them. We gave them respect, self-sustainability and the space. This example must be taken into account when forming public policies."
Both days of the conference featured research presentations, uncovering some of the innovative evaluation work underway by the PovGov team. PovGov Postdoctoral Fellow Brenda Jarillo Rabling spoke about the effect of drug-related violence on educational outcomes for children in areas of high crime, such as Ciudad Juarez in Mexico. Rabling’s study pointed to the strong connection between violence and loss of instructional time in schools where the quality and quantity of school days are lower than the national average, creating inequality within the education system.
Gustavo Robles Peiro, a PhD student at Stanford’s political science department and PovGov pre-doctoral fellow, shared the results of a comprehensive impact study, which evaluated the overall effectiveness of Jóvenes con Porvenir, a government program operating in Zapopan, Mexico, that offers work and educational opportunities for youth living in neighborhoods with high levels of crime. Robles Peiro’s research found that over a six-month period, youth exposed to the program exhibited greater interest in pursuing educational and career endeavors.
Keynote: Hector Castillo Berthier, Circo Volador
Academic research was complemented by the individual experiences of youth and youth advocates. Among them was Christa Gannon, founder and executive director of Fresh Lifelines for Youth (FLY), a Bay Area-based organization, which works with local at-risk and incarcerated youth to build their skills and reduce delinquent behavior through leadership training, legal education and active mentorship.
“Our youth have incredible strengths, but often society does not see them,” said Gannon. “At FLY, we always ask ourselves how do we look for strengths and potential in everyone that we work with - how do we see our young people as resources and co-creators that have so much to offer us?”
Gannon’s remarks were echoed by a number of other speakers, highlighting the need to provide more platforms for youth to become active community citizens, whether through education, volunteering, leadership, or artistic and cultural production.
Former inmate Felix Lucero spoke about his 18-year incarceration experience as a student of the Prison University Project, an initiative that provides higher education to inmates of San Quentin State Prison in California. “[The program] affects people not only when they get out of prison, but also while they are in there… it gives us something to look up to,” Lucero said. “Education allows people to think critically about their surroundings and empower people to do things differently.”
Marcus Faustini, founder of Agência de Redes Para Juventude (Network for Youth Agency) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, expanded on the topic of youth opportunity, touching on his organization’s mission. “We knock from door to door in the favela. We don’t want to educate the youth, we want to walk alongside them. Social projects don’t have to give people fish, they need to teach people how to fish. At Agência, we go to the supermarket, buy the fish and cook it with the youth. We do things with them,” said Faustini.
Another theme emphasized by many of the conference speakers was the influence of arts and culture as an outlet for self-expression for many youth growing up in violent societies. To help illustrate the hopefulness of many of these youth projects, the PovGov Program hosted a photography exhibit inside the conference hall that contained a collection of twelve iconic photographs highlighting life in the slum neighborhoods – favelas – of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The collection was presented by Imagens do Povo, an arts initiative under Observatorio de Favelas (Favela’s Observatory), an NGO, which educates youth on critical urban issues affecting the under-resourced favela communities of Rio.
The conference concluded with a dynamic panel of youth activists and leaders who shared their inspirational accounts of experiencing and overcoming the challenge of criminality and violence in their hometowns. Drawing unconnected, but similar life stories of struggles and hardships, the panel provided examples of how individuals leveraged a variety of tools, resources, and community-based organizations to transform themselves – and others – to help bring about positive social change to their communities.
Mariluce de Souza, a social entrepreneur and artist from the Alemão favela in Rio, emphasized the significance of youth-to-youth assistance: “It is like a language from the community to the community,” she said. “We come together to demand respect and rights.”
PovGov signs a Crime Lab partnership agreement with Marcus Faustini (Agência de Redes para Juventude)(right) and Jailson Silva (Observatório de Favelas)(second from left).
Seeking to broaden its network and impact globally, PovGov also used the conference to serve as a launching point for its new International Crime and Violence Lab – Crime Lab – a new platform for academics and practitioners to share their work and research on crime and violence throughout the U.S., Latin America, and beyond. The Lab seeks to develop scientific and action-oriented research by assisting community organizations, government agencies, policy-makers, police departments, and other relevant players in Latin America - and eventually elsewhere in the developing world - to reduce violent crime and its devastating consequences.
Two of Crime Lab’s newest partners – Jailson de Sousa e Silva, co-founder and director of Observatorio de Favelas, and Marcus Faustini of Agência – signed a partnership agreement during the conference, opening the door to future research collaborations with PovGov focused on improving the youth experience in Rio.
All speaker presentations were video recorded and can be found on the CDDRL YouTube page and below. To view other conference materials, including an executive summary and full conference report; agenda; speaker bios; and presentation slides, please see below or refer to the original conference event page.
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Keynote: Angela Guimarães, Sub-Secretary of Youth (Brazil)
Keynote: Hector Castillo Berthier, Circo Volador
PovGov signs a Crime Lab partnership agreement with Marcus Faustini (Agência de Redes para Juventude)(right) and Jailson Silva (Observatório de Favelas)(second from left).