Organized crime fuels Mexico’s election violence, plus Europe’s Southern Cone cocaine pipeline

Organized crime’s hold on local governments fuels record election violence. Mexico’s June 2 elections are set to be the most violent in the country’s recent history, with nearly thirty candidates murdered so far. Gunmen killed two mayoral candidates for Maravatío, Michoacán—one from President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador’s Morena party, another from the opposition National Action Party—within hours of each other in February. Gisela Gaytán Gutiérrez, a Morena candidate for mayor in Celaya, Guanajuato, was shot dead on April 1.

The violence is mostly local. All but two of the murdered candidates were running for one of the over twenty thousand local positions on the ballot. It’s most prevalent in states where organized crime is deeply embedded, with Michoacán, Jalisco, and Morelos’ candidates seeing more kidnappings, extortion, killings, and threats than others. But the violence has spread to relatively more peaceful states too. Part of the reason is that criminal organizations increasingly make money not just from drug trafficking along the coasts and northern border, but also from migrant smuggling, oil theft, extortion, and kidnapping in the south. The southern state of Chiapas, which transits migrants and cocaine north, reported thirty-four victims over the last seven months, one of the highest rates of political violence in the country.

This rising political violence erodes Mexico’s democracy. Candidates are pulling out of races due to personal threats: El Universal counts forty-six opposition candidates who have bowed out and estimates the true figure could be three to four times higher. Voters too may be scared away from the polls: previous studies show turnout falls 1.3 percent per attack on a candidate. Together this looks to skew electoral outcomes and strengthen the voice of criminals over voters.

Europe’s cocaine pipeline shifting to the Southern Cone. Last July, Hamburg authorities seized ten tons of cocaine, the second largest shipment ever interdicted in Europe. The powder originated in Bolivia and passed undetected through Paraguay, Uruguay, and six ports in Brazil before crossing the Atlantic.

The journey reflects organized crime’s growing presence in the Southern Cone and the passage of cocaine through lesser-known shipping routes. In Paraguay, the ruling elites’ close ties with criminal networks encourage customs officers to look the other way, as seemed to have happened in this case where an official scanned but didn’t report the drugs on the MSC Sofía Celeste. Uruguay’s weak port controls, money laundering laws, and aging infrastructure—the capital port’s only scanner is nearly seventeen years old, breaks often, and processes just 6 percent of the port’s cargo—make it hard to supervise the influx of cocaine. In Brazil, police struggle against the power and penetration of transnational criminal groups, including the Primeiro Comando da Capital, to stop both international shipments and domestic flows serving the world’s second-largest cocaine market.

Absent greater international cooperation and more domestic law enforcement capacity, the Southern Cone is likely to become a larger conduit for European bound cocaine. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, more concerned with fentanyl than cocaine, closed its Montevideo, Uruguay, office in 2019 and ignored the current president’s pleas to return. Europeans have yet to build up security collaborations, only Spain setting up a permanent police attaché in Montevideo.

For decades, organized crime has been a lesser worry for the Southern Cone, at least compared to their Andean neighbors. Yet the growing presence and sophistication of criminal gangs across nations, increasing local violence and tying into the global drug trade, may soon change these calculations.

This publication is part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Project on the Future of Democracy.