Why are Mexican mayors getting killed by traffickers?

This is a paper about how organized crime and politicians interact, and the way in which political institutions impact this relationship. In this paper, I explore corruption interactions between the Mexican government and drug traffickers, and the way in which federalism affects the price and number of bribes, and ultimately the incentives that traffickers have to be violent. Based in an extensive fieldwork along Mexico’s drug war zone, I constructed a formal model to understand why if politicians and traffickers have long agreed on mechanisms to keep illegal drugs flowing, it is just now that traffickers have become violent against politicians. The answer, I claim, comes from the way in which federalism has changed the incentives of traffickers to remain faithful to governments interests for peaceful illegal trade. Paper presented at MPSA Annual Conference. March, 2011 (Chicago, IL), and as a public lecture at the Center for U.S. Mexican Studies, UCSD. January 12, 2011 (San Diego, CA). The author thanks Jorge Dominguez, Torben Iversen, Robert Bates, David Miller, David Shirk, Alberto Diaz-Cayeros, Alisha Holland, Mauricio Duque, Jesse Driscoll, and James Alt for feedback and thoughtful comments.