Help Needed to get Mexican Drug Traffickers 'Out of the Game'

Monday, September 10, 2012

Help Needed to get Mexican Drug Traffickers 'Out of the Game'

ByPatrick Corcoran

A new academic investigation looks at understudied but important elements of Mexico's security challenge: the factors that lead drug traffickers to exit the violent trade, and how to encourage more to follow suit.

The study is called "Getting out of the Game: Desistance from Drug Trafficking," and was written by Howard Campbell and Tobin Hansen, professors at the University of Texas El Paso and Oregon State University, respectively. Based on interviews with dozens of former drug traffickers in El Paso and neighboring Juarez, the authors sought to examine what keeps a given trafficker in a life of crime, providing insight into how to facilitate such a transition.

Unemployed youth in Mexico, known as "ni-nis" because they neither work nor are they in school (in Spanish, "ni estudian ni trabajan"), number some 8 million, and serve as fertile ground for gangs in need of gunmen, lookouts, and retail drug vendors. Many of the social proposals to target organized crime have focused on how to reduce this number, and therefore reduce the number of bodies interested in working for the nation's various drug trafficking organizations.

However, probably the biggest single impediment to reducing the cohort of disenfranchised youth is slow growth, something that has dogged Mexico since the 1970s. It is the product of structural factors more than a lack of sufficient interest from the government, and insofar as attention to the ni-nis can reduce the power of the drug trade, it is a long-term proposition, not something that can bring murder rates down in the next couple of months.

Furthermore, Mexico's drug trade employs an estimated 500,000 people, so even if the ni-nis all found jobs or started school tomorrow, the nation would still be saddled with a huge number of dangerous criminals. Eliminating such a large group via arrests and confrontations is, of course, plainly impossible; to reduce the size of the population living off of the drug trade, Mexico's government needs to ease and encourage the transition away from drug production.

And here is where Campbell and Hansen's study proves helpful. They point to four different obstacles to or catalysts for a criminal leaving the drug trade:

The risk of punishment. This can either serve to impede or encourage a move out of the drug trade. Traffickers who are worried that their partners will kill them or their families should they try to escape the business will be more leery of severing ties to their past life. However, the prospect of a long jail sentence or death at the hands of their rivals serves as a powerful motivator to carve out a new existence.

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Help Needed to get Mexican Drug Traffickers 'Out of the Game'