What reduces drug-trafficking-related violence?

What reduces drug-trafficking-related violence? This pressing question naturally arises among policymakers and security experts as marginalized communities—both in developed and developing countries—grapple with escalating violence linked to the drug trade. According to existing data, such violence can be deadlier than interstate wars, civil conflicts, and terrorism combined.

Existing research in criminal politics has concluded that the most effective policy for directing the coercive capacity of the state for reducing violence is for governments to implement state-sponsored repression against leaders of drug-trafficking organizations, but only when these leaders are fostering cycles of violence. This approach is known in the literature as “conditional repression.” Despite empirical and theoretical evidence showing that unconditionally capturing or killing these leaders increases violence, many governments—especially in Latin America—continue to do so. Why?

While the natural explanations suggest that governments fail to reduce violence because they either lack the will or are corrupt, I present a formal theory to demonstrate that these explanations are incomplete or incorrect. To address this, I develop the first model that considers the dynamic incentives policymakers face when implementing conditional repressive policies. Below, I present the main insights from this new theory and how it updates our knowledge of violence-reducing policies in the context of strong drug-trafficking organizations.

Why do governments that want to reduce violence fail to do so?

Governments that aim to reduce drug-trafficking-related violence might fail to implement conditional repressive policies because these strategies have upfront costs, and their benefits are realized far into the future. When drug lords can successfully hide in hard-to-reach regions or have the support of the local population, efforts to capture or find them can be extremely costly and lengthy. For example, in Colombia, it took years for the military, intelligence services, and American agencies to locate Pablo Escobar. In the case of the Sinaloa drug lord Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, he evaded capture for over 30 years. In countries where political parties and governments are frequently replaced—such as in many multi-party presidential systems in Latin America—the threat of conditional repressive policies might not be credible when governments expect to remain in office for only a few years.

Anti-corruption policies, if anything, increase violence

When drug lords can transfer resources to public officials, the prospects for peace expand through two channels. First, during times of conflict, it reduces the immediate costs of implementing a conditional repressive policy because the drug lord is willing to eagerly provide resources to a public official if it means state repression will be directed toward his rivals. Second, in times of peace, the state finds it more valuable if it can extract resources from drug lords in the form of extortion, making the threat of conditional repression more credible. Consequently, when anti-corruption policies make these transfers unfeasible, these two mechanisms are shut down, and violence can only increase.

Implications of the theory on foreign aid and legalization

Finally, the theory is expanded to account for patterns of foreign aid and the prospects of legalizing an illicit drug market. Historically, U.S. foreign policy towards Latin America has emphasized extraditing drug lords to serve life sentences in the United States. Evidence suggests that the U.S. tied foreign aid and favorable trade agreements to Latin American countries’ proactive efforts against international drug trafficking, which often involved governments capturing and extraditing drug lords. If true, this foreign policy undermines the adoption of conditional repressive policies in favor of more unconditional ones, which increase drug-trafficking-related violence.

Additionally, the theory incorporates the prospects of legalizing an illicit drug market. Legalization is often mentioned as a solution to drug-trafficking-related violence. In my theory, legalization has opposite effects in the short and long run. In the long run, once an illicit drug market has been legalized, the associated profits are smaller, and thus, violence is reduced. However, in the short run—or the interim period when legalization is announced or approved but not yet implemented—the incentives for violence are highest. Drug lords may find it harder to peacefully share a shrinking pie of revenue over time, which increases the risk of drug-trafficking-related violence.