The transformation of Mexican cartels and violence against government officials

Since the early 2000s, Mexican cartels have increasingly threatened, attacked, and assassinated government officials. Existing explanations emphasize electoral incentives, political vulnerability, and government crackdowns. We propose an additional and largely overlooked explanation: transformations within Mexico’s criminal underworld itself. As large cartels fragmented, more localized criminal organizations emerged, multiplying both symmetric and asymmetric inter-cartel conflicts. We argue that cartel capacity and inter-cartel conflict interact to produce distinct incentives for the targeting government officials. To test these claims, we combine original data on assassinated politicians in Mexico between 2000 and 2018 with existing datasets on attacks against political actors and municipal-level cartel presence. We find that high-capacity cartels and inter-cartel conflicts are the strongest predictors of violence against politicians. While early violence is driven primarily by high-capacity organizations, lower-capacity splinters become significant perpetrators after fragmentation intensifies, but only in municipalities experiencing inter-cartel conflict. Lower-capacity cartels operating alone do not predict assassinations. We further find that cartel dynamics primarily shape violence against local and, to a lesser extent, state-level politicians, but not federal officials. These findings demonstrate that changes within the criminal underworld play central roles in shaping patterns of political violence in Mexico’s ongoing security crisis.