Mexican Drug Cartels are 5th Largest Employer in Country: Study

Drug cartels in Mexico involve as many as 175,000 people, making them the fifth largest "employer" in the nation, and an incredibly powerful danger, a new study reports.

Because of the cartels, the number of homicides in Mexico more than tripled between 2007 and 2021. Mexico tallied 34,000 victims in 2021 — nearly 27 victims for every 100,000 inhabitants – making it one of the deadliest nations in Latin America.

The optimal way to combat burgeoning "employment" in the deadly drug gangs is to reduce cartel recruitment, concluded the study published Thursday in the journal Science.

Mathematical models suggest that other methods, including increasing policing of the cartels, are ineffective, the study found.

Findings, based on a painstaking collection of data of people involved in cartels, as well as murder rates, and incarceration, suggest that strategies to reduce recruitment instead of increasing incarceration is a more effective policy to hurt the cartels — and reduce violence, the study argues.

Increasing "incapacitation [incarceration] would increase both homicides and cartel members," the research warns. "Conversely, reducing recruitment could substantially curtail violence and lower cartel size."

More than "1.7 million people in Latin America are incarcerated, and adding more people to saturated jails will not solve the insecurity problem,” wrote the authors.

The study, however, does not detail ways to block or reduce cartel recruitment.

But study author Rafael Prieto-Curiel, a former police officer in Mexico City who now works as a mathematician at the Vienna-based Complexity Science Hub, suggested that an ongoing deeper understanding of the appeal of cartels would help develop strategies.

The study's intriguing perspective was hailed by some experts — with caveats.

“It’s a breakthrough,” Carlos Gershenson, a computer scientist at Binghamton University who was not involved in the study, told Science in an article on the research.

"Policing cartels has only led to more violence," he noted. "You need to cut the source of the problem rather than deal with the consequences.”

Victoria Dittmar, a researcher for the Insight Crime think tank in Washington, D.C., which specializes in studying crime in the Caribbean and Latin America, called the study a "first of its kind."

She added: "I haven’t seen any other estimates of how many people we believe are somehow related to criminal groups.”

But she warned that determining accurate numbers can be tricky, depending on the definition of a cartel and what constitutes "membership" in organized crime.

“It can be very difficult to say who is a member of a criminal organization, and who isn’t,” said Dittmar.

“What about a politician that receives money? Or someone who cooperates with the group just once?” she asked.

Valentin Pereda, a professor at the University of Montreal, agreed that if cartels "cannot recruit, then they cannot replace their losses, then they cannot keep fighting each other."

It "makes sense," she told the Guardian. "But until now, no one had provided a data-based assessment of how it would work in practice."

But she also warned that it's difficult to devise policies to reduce recruitment.

Pereda urged a multipronged approach to reducing drug cartel violence, one that would include gun control.

“One thing that is missing from this study is that violence in Mexico is also a product of the weaponry that is used,” said Pereda.

“We’re not talking about people with knives going at each other in a bar. We’re talking about paramilitary units with military-grade weapons.”