- Violence and the new roving bandits of the Mexican Drug War: A political economy perspective (with Fernanda Gutiérrez Amaros and Diego Castañeda)
Although inequality and economic geography have been regarded as relevant variables to explain violence in conflict in the Mexican Drug War since 2006, these factors have not been tested together consistently with other competing explanations. In this research, we explain how these two
key economic variables are relevant to explaining the increase, distribution and persistence of homicidal gun violence related to the war on drugs. We performed a panel analysis with different homicide measures for 1992, 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2014 within Mexican municipalities and yearly
clustered regression by municipalities and states, with new data measuring different forms of inequality and economic activity. Our results show that drug trafficking, Gini, industrial production, exports, mining, schooling, and unemployment are relevant variables across years. On the contrary,
party alignment and extraction rates are not robust variables. However, these variables’ robustness changes across years and periods. Instead of competing variables, we propose using a political economy of war framework to interpret these results. As the drug war conflict displaces territorially, some regions’ economic geography becomes more relevant because of the function and resource hubs for both the government and criminal organisations. With these results, we contribute to the various fields of research in conflict, violence, and crime regarding a Latin American case.
- Inequalities and probabilities of ending in prison: findings from the National Survey of Prison Inmates (ENPOL) 2021 (with Luis Ángel Monroy Gómez Franco).
Using logistic regressions on the recently released data from ENPOL 2021, the second wave of the National Survey of Inmate Population in Mexico, we aim to study the socioeconomic factors behind the probability of being imprisoned in Mexico.
Sugiero que las Normales en México tienen impedimentos de capacidades humanas e institucionales para atender demandas de cambio curricular, con la mayor eficacia posible, debido a problemas de cargas administrativas, clima organizacional, coordinación intergubernamental y de múltiples principales. Sostengo esto a partir de los resultados de una observación participante que hice en la Escuela Normal de Ecatepec, Estado de México.
- The army of supply labour for Latin American criminal organisations
Other planned projects
- Robbery and economic crisis in Mexico, XX Century
- El fracaso de la reforma fiscal de 1961: una historia política
- Tensiones doctrinales de política exterior: la candidatura de Luis Echeverría a la Secretaría General de la ONU
- La historia de la selección de los Secretarios de Defensa y Marina en México
- E-learning during COVID-19: evidence from a rural town in México
- A history of the onset of the criminal wars in Latin America
Raul Zepeda Gil 