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Abstract
Despite the importance of how criminal organizations in Mexico and Colombia have come to interact with political elites in order to preserve the new structures of social and political power, very little attention has been paid to this subject in the broader literature on the war on drugs. By focusing only on criminal organizations' need for protection, studies on the subject have often reduced the political character of narcotrafficking to one of mere corruption. According to this oversimplified view, mafias intervene in politics, whether through alliances or conflicts, with purely utilitarian motives. Once in the door, they threaten or corrupt the public authorities with the sole motive of extracting rents from an illegal product. They never consider that social domination per se is the criminals' central purpose. This dissertation explains drug trafficking in Mexico and Colombia from the political perspective of oligopolies of coercion, a new form of authority were the state and criminal organizations simultaneously control and superpose each other. Instead of the classic monopoly of force argued by Weber, this new authority is the result of a combination of institutions that are imposed and ruled by diverse actors, from civil servants, military functionaries and national elites on the center to criminal organizations and local elites that benefited from the drug trafficking on the periphery.
