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This volume focuses on the specific relationship between the institutional impunity, lack of public safety and public space in failing to prevent organized sexual murder. The murder of women on the U.S.-Mexican border is a complex phenomenon with multiple geographic, economic, political, sociological, and psychological causes

This volume focuses on the specific relationship between the institutional impunity, lack of public safety and public space in failing to prevent organized sexual murder. The murder of women on the U.S.-Mexican border is a complex phenomenon with multiple geographic, economic, political, sociological, and psychological causes.

This brief fills a gap in the studies of organized crime in Mexico (Kan 2012, Ríos 2011, Dell 2011) by documenting and mapping the post-2008 assassination of Mexican border police chiefs. It traces out a "systematic" of law-enforcement assassination in Northern Tier Mexico, showing how the selective, often sequential, hits by cartels on chiefs in border towns and along key drug-trafficking corridors has proven an effective strategy by organized crime elements to serve several goals: (1) to retaliate for federal, state and local prosecution, (2) to try and neutralize police chiefs, (3) to achieve intermittent local governance and/or to seed corrupt police chiefs at the municipal level, and, (4) to reduce local governmental capacity to obtain greater freedom for movement of goods. It is argued that the tactical advantage of organized crime elements gives them relatively easy physical access to law enforcement targets and thus is thus one prime element facilitating the use of assassination as a strategy. U.S. and Mexican legal, political and judicial institutions have not been able to adequately restrict opportunity for law-enforcement assassinations. The inability to reduce access to weapons and officials, to increase security for police personnel, to reduce corruption and punish offenders sets the stage for the assassination of local law enforcement. Yet, it is the goals of organized crime elements (to clear drug-smuggling routes and to try and gain more pliant governance at the municipal level) that ultimately motivate such killings.

Murder and Politics in Mexico studies the causes of political killings in Mexico s liberalization-democratization within the larger context of political repression. Mexico s democratization process has entailed a little known but highly significant cost of human lives in pre- and post-election violence. The majority of these crimes remain in a state of impunity: in other words, no person had been charged with the crime and/or no investigation of it had occurred. Over 70% of the political murders of Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) members in the 1990s remain unsolved. This has several consequences for Mexican politics: when the level of violence is extreme and when political killings that are systematic and invasive are involved, this could indicate a real fracture in the democratic system. This book analyzes several dimensions regarding impunity and political crime, more specifically, the political killings of members of the PRD in the post-1988 period in Mexico. The main argument proposed in this book is that impunity for political killings is a structured system requiring one central precondition, namely the failure of the legal system to function as a system of restraint for killings. This structured system of impunity for political killing in general consists of political and institutional elements (law enforcement agencies, lawyers, public prosecutors, politicians). Dr Schatz s research finds that political assassinations are indeed rational, targeted actions but they do not occur within an institutional vacuum. Political assassinations are calculated strategies of action aimed at eliminating political rivals. They are caused by multiple interacting factors that involve the political, legal and criminal justice systems. As a form of interpersonal violence, political assassination involves direct or implied authorization from political leaders, the availability of assassins for hire and the willingness of some political leaders to utilize them against political opponents, and violent interactions between political parties combined with judicial system ineffectiveness. A corrupt legal system facilitates the use of political assassination and explains the persistence of impunity for political murder over time. To reduce political violence in the transition to electoral democracy, specific institutional conditions, namely a structured system of impunity for murder must be overcome.

Explores strategies of democratization & social actors' intentions used to extend political citizenship rights to Mexican citizens during the late 1980s & 1990s. Analysis of democratization strategies employed by rebellious indigenous groups, political elites, leaders of opposition parties, & actors in civic movements reveals a paradoxical approach to achieving democratization. Whereas several political citizenship rights were extended to Mexican citizens (eg, secret ballots & the right to self-determination), the aforementioned actors & groups sharply disagreed on the substantive content of these political rights. The continued rebellion in Chiapas for municipal self-government & the granting of enfranchisement to abroad populations illustrate the paradoxical character of Mexican citizens' political rights & the degree of conflict between various social & political actors & groups. It is concluded that movements to extend political rights signify delayed democratic transitions. 125 References. J. W. Parker