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One of the most surprising developments in Mexico's ongoing drug wars is the strategic decision by drug cartels to target local elected officials and political leaders for assassination. After sixteen years of inter-cartel wars (1990–2006)1 in which drug trafficking organizations rarely targeted active government authorities or politicians, since 2006 drug lords have launched a series of systematic lethal attacks against subnational officials and local political leaders. Between 2007 and 2012 drug cartels murdered fifteen state government officials, sixty-four mayors, forty-five municipal government officials, seven party candidates and twenty-five party activists. If we add assassination attempts, public death threats and kidnappings, Mexico experienced 311 lethal criminal attacks – affecting 9.6 per cent of the country's 2,457 municipalities and the 29 per cent of the Mexican population who live in them.
Scholars of political conflict agree that the killing of a head of state is one of the most severe forms of political violence for any society (Iqbal and Zorn 2006). Likewise, although on a different scale, the murder of a governor, mayor or local party candidate is a traumatic event in the collective life of any city or rural town. If cartels can kill a people at a community's highest level of authority, the generalized perception among civilians will be that everyone is subject to the criminals’ will. Just as the assassination of a head of state immediately captures the whole country's public imagination, the murder of a mayor or party candidate instantly attracts publicity throughout the locality and beyond, and thus acquires a high-profile status.
High-profile criminal violence is puzzling because drug cartels, like any group operating in the criminal underworld, would presumably prefer to stay out of the spotlight (Durán-Martínez 2017; Gambetta 1993). Such attacks would appear to be counterproductive, because they attract the attention of national law enforcement agencies and expose drug cartels and illicit drug markets to state intervention. Moreover, cartels have a history of successfully co-opting subnational authorities to assist them in the operation of illegal markets (Snyder and Durán-Martínez 2009), and drug lords have typically preferred the secrecy of bribery to the publicity associated with political killings. Admittedly, if bribes get too expensive, criminals often rely on the threat of violence or a few exemplary executions to lower...