Angélica Durán-Martínez’s book does away with the common understanding of drug violence driven by stereotypes and extreme situations and seeks to explain variation in violence within countries affected by drug trafficking. The book’s puzzle asks why criminals publicize violence even though it can have adverse long-term effects, while also understanding why criminals prefer to conceal their violent actions. Durán-Martínez argues that cohesion of the state security apparatus and the amount of competition in illegal markets best explain variations in drug violence.
This valuable work is well written and easy to read with impressive methodology, and the theory and findings are important contributions to the literature. Therefore, I strongly recommend that this book become required reading for every scholar interested in drug violence.
Durán-Martínez makes two novel contributions in this book. Her first major advance introduces the notion of visibility. This crucial dimension of violence refers to when drug traffickers expose their violence to the public or claim responsibility for attacks. Second, her book advances a political economy framework that shows that drug violence does not occur at the fringes of the state but instead is shaped through interactions between the state and criminal actors. Specifically, the cohesion of the state security apparatus and the amount of competition in illegal markets determine the incentives and opportunities for drug traffickers to engage in violence.
This disaggregation of violence beyond frequency only and including visibility provides the tools to examine both extreme violence and the hidden and less visible forms of violence, the latter of which do not receive the same academic and media attention as the former. Furthermore, Duran-Martinez also includes an often overlooked aspect of organization in criminal markets—whether violence is “insourced” (i.e., vertically integrated into the organization) or “outsourced” (i.e., contracted out to youth gangs). Because of this analytical departure from the existing literature, she advances the field.
To explain the vast variation in the amount of violence existing in countries affected by drug trafficking, this book examines drug violence between 1984 and 2011 in five cities across two states: Cali and Medellín in Colombia and Culiacán, Ciudad Juárez, and Tijuana in Mexico. Durán-Martínez studies these five cities because they highlight the variation in violence over time and both across and within territories, particularly along the dependent variables (frequency and visibility) and independent variables (state cohesion, market competition, and armed coercion), as well as other key variables, such as size of illegal market and international influence. The book’s unit of analysis is a period of violence in a city. Durán-Martínez employs subnational comparative analyses across two countries and systematic paired comparisons to address a potential limitation of subnational analyses that typically focus on only one country. In this way, when she pairs cities in the same country that experienced contrasting patterns of violence, she engages in a most-similar comparison. When she pairs similar patterns of violence in different countries, she engages in a most-different comparison. And by pairing periods of violence within each city, she provides a stronger and longitudinal most-similar research design.
Arguably the most impressive aspect of Durán-Martínez’s research design and methods is her extensive fieldwork. She derives her data from more than 15 months in the 5 cities and 196 semistructured interviews. Her access to elites in each country is extraordinary; it includes several dozen interviews each with law enforcement and intelligence officials, politicians and public officials, journalists, academics, and human rights and NGO workers.
She also created a dataset that includes 6,497 violent events coded from the main local newspaper in each city for selected years. Included in the dataset are features such as the methods, the type of victims, and the number of victims for each violent event. While conducting research on a sensitive subject, Durán-Martínez takes many precautions to guarantee not only her own safety but the ethical anonymity of her interviewees for their own protection. She is up front about the potential bias involved with her use of the snowball sampling technique, but she did not accept every interview offered to her. Her frankness about following common sense and her gut feelings as the most important protection device are both appreciated and helpful for scholars who may try to replicate such a study.
After discussing violence in general and her research design and methods, Duran-Martinez turns, in the second chapter, to conceptualizing drug violence. She demonstrates how visibility is distinct from related concepts like symbolic violence, brutality, indiscriminate violence, and media representations of violence. Visibility refers to the extent that criminals expose or claim responsibility for their attacks. Visibility can be used to frighten enemies, respond to government action, try to change the government’s behavior, or negotiate protection. In this way, visible violence allows criminals to demonstrate power or instill fear. This stands in stark contrast to hidden violence, whereby criminals attempt to cover up their actions or not to claim responsibility. However, visibility also generates state attention because it challenges the Weberian state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Furthermore, Durán-Martínez operationalizes frequency and visibility by defining drug violence as “acts of lethal violence that emerge in the functioning of drug markets and can affect civilians, state officials, and criminals alike” (53).
While it includes a broad array of actors, her definition potentially overestimates drug violence, since it does not conceptualize it as separate from other violence. Instead, her definition helps to explain variation in violence in both Colombia and Mexico—a variation brought into relief by comparing city homicide rates with their country counterparts. It should be noted, however, that this focus on lethal violence, by definition, leaves out other forms of violence that do not result in death (e.g., sexual violence, torture, beatings).
The use of visible violence depends on the interactions between states and criminals. Durán-Martínez addresses the state portion of this equation in chapter 3. She shows that since the late 1980s, both Colombia and Mexico have undergone crucial transformations in their political regimes and have witnessed sharp variation in drug violence, with an increase in violence coinciding with crucial institutional changes. The chapter argues that democratization and institutional change may increase criminal violence, although it is not an inevitable relationship. The book’s central argument is that visibility of violence increases when the state is fragmented because the state is less efficient in enforcing the law or in reliably protecting criminals.
Durán-Martínez discusses state capacity and autonomy from criminal actors and institutional reforms in both Colombia and Mexico. She points out that while the absence of violence can reflect a state’s capacity to control territory, it can also imply that criminal actors may have influence with the state. Thus, the third chapter presents an overview of state responses to drug trafficking in Colombia and Mexico that shows why national and international processes and policies do not sufficiently explain local dynamics of violence. This sets the stage for the succeeding case studies and subnational comparisons of her five selected cities.
The empirical case study chapters (4 through 6) highlight the extreme variation in violence between states and cities, even within each city. For Medellín, Durán-Martínez describes how the city went through various phases, from the most violent city in the world in the 1990s to a sharp decrease in homicide rates in the 2000s. Her detailed research shows that when the state security apparatus has been cohesive, violence has not been visible, because the state can better protect or prosecute criminals. This is juxtaposed with visible violence when the state experiences fragmentation. The competition between multiple traffickers helps to explain the persistence of frequent violence over time. Moreover, the outsourcing of criminal activities to youth gangs is associated with the most violent periods, whereas peace occurred when criminals held a monopoly and youth gangs were disciplined. This comparison over time, and controlling for important variables, demonstrates the most controlled and convincing test of Durán-Martínez’s argument.
In chapter 5, Durán-Martínez analyzes Cali and Culiacán. Although the two cities are in different countries with different political and societal histories, they share a pattern of frequent but low-visibility drug violence. Reinforcing the book’s core argument that interactions and power relationships between the state and criminals explain variation in violence, she finds that the “quiet wars” in Cali and Culiacan can best be explained by a cohesive state that was often in collaboration with criminals. This cozy relationship allowed criminals the freedom to conduct violence but also incentivized them to hide their actions because visibility requires a state response. Although criminal competition existed and thus explains steadily high homicide rates, the rates did not experience upward spikes, due to controlled insourced agents.
In contrast, the following chapter shows how the two cities of Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana, along the border with the United States, experienced divergent patterns of drug violence, despite sharing a similar border status in the same country, influence from economic globalization, and diverse migrant populations. Durán-Martínez argues that interactions between the state security apparatus and competition among groups in illegal markets, along with varying strategies used by drug traffickers, best explain the variation in drug violence. Although the Mexican government’s declaration of war against drug traffickers increased state fragmentation and violence in the two border cities, the local security apparatus and criminal strategies mediated the effect of national policies. In Tijuana, a more cohesive security apparatus and insourcing by criminals led to more limited frequency and visibility of violence compared to Ciudad Juárez, where outsourcing and fragmentation were associated with greater increases. These findings challenge the idea that border cities are inevitably dangerous and emphasize the need to focus on the local context in order to fully explain variation.
This book is a must-read for scholars who research political violence generally and those who study drug violence specifically. It makes important contributions to the political economy literature by moving drug violence beyond purely economic explanations that link profits to violence, proposing instead that drug violence is the result of interactions between states and illegal markets. It also builds on the literature on civil wars, drug trafficking, and illicit markets, increasing our understanding of fine-grained variation in violence.
The chapters on research design and methods, logic of visibility, and conceptualizing drug violence can easily be listed on a syllabus for a graduate seminar on qualitative methods as a blueprint for how to properly conduct this type of research. Depending on the content of the course (e.g., Comparative Politics of Latin America, the War on Drugs, Politics of Development), any of the case study chapters can be assigned to undergraduate students to illuminate drug violence in Colombian or Mexican cities.
I would be interested to see Durán-Martínez’s theory and framework tested in other cases in order to replicate her results in different contexts. For example, is this only a Latin American story? If so, other studies might explore coca-producing states like Peru and Bolivia, or gang-controlled areas of El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, where drug trafficking occurs. And if this is not only a Latin American story, would this theory travel to Asia, the world’s largest market for stimulants (e.g., methamphetamine pills, crystal meth)? A study of drug violence in Myanmar (the largest meth producer in the world) or Afghanistan (the largest opium producer in the world) would be of great interest to all who study political violence. Therefore, I look forward to more work on this important and insightful topic by Duran-Martinez and others who take up her valuable framework.
