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The Collapse of Solidarity in Criminal Civil War

Citizen Indifference towards the Victimsof Organized Violence in Mexico

Andreas Schedler

CIDE Centro de Investigacin y Docencia EconmicasDepartment of Political StudiesMexico CityE-mail: [email protected] page: http://works.bepress.com/andreas_schedler

Paper prepared for presentation at the Research Seminar Politics andGovernment, CIDE, Department of Political Studies, 3 September 2014.

Draft! Work in progress (hopefully). Version 1.0. 18 August 2014.

All rights reserved.
http://works.bepress.com/andreas_schedler/http://works.bepress.com/andreas_schedler/


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Abstract

After its successful transition to democracy, Mexico has stumbledinto a criminal civil war, also known as the drug war, that to datehas cost well over 100,000 casualties, most of them consigned to

oblivion, without proper investigation or prosecution. Victims havebeen organizing and protesting, yet ordinary citizens haveremained quiet. As I hypothesize, the primary reason for theiracquiescence is attitudinal: Criminal civil war destroys the moralfoundations of citizen solidarity, which is, the recognition ofvictims as equal members of the political community. Based onoriginal data from the Mexican 2013 National Survey on OrganizedViolence, I address two empirical questions. First, how much docitizens care about the victims of criminal violence? I find thataverage citizens are rather ignorant of and indifferent to their fate.Second, what explains variations in citizen sympathies towardsvictims? My theory of solidarity under criminal civil war focuses onits cognitive framing. To the extent that citizens hold criminalviolence to be selective, an exclusive affair among criminals, theytend to blame victims for their fate and deny them theirsympathies. Lineal regression analysis confirms the expectedframing effect, even when controlling for complementaryexplanations, such as victimization, distance to war, class, andpolitical sophistication.

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Imagine Mexico (or any other country) were governed by a dictatorshipthat had killed around 85,000 people since the year 2000, had madedisappear about 26,000 more, and was storing some 16,000 unidentifiedbodies in its morgues, a regime that exhibited its victims on publicplaces, hang them from bridges, abandoned them in trunks and on open

fields, naked, tortured, dismembered. Imagine the public outcry.Fortunately, the scenario is different and Mexico is a democracy since2000. Unfortunately, the figures of victimization are true. They are theresult of a criminal civil war, also known as narcoviolence, that hasescalated over the past years. Yet where is the outcry?

On the public surface of collective debate and political activism, there isnone, or only a feeble one. For the most part, those who participate ineither civil protest movements or armed self-defense forces are victimsof violence. Victims have also resorted to individual strategies of exit bydomestic withdrawal or migration. Ordinary citizens who are not directlyaffected by the war stand by and watch, or look the other way. As Ihypothesize, the primary reason for citizens factual acquiescence toviolence and impunity is attitudinal: Criminal civil war destroys the moralfoundations of citizen solidarity, which is, the recognition of victims asequal members of the political community.

I explore the cognitive foundations of citizen solidarity on the basis oforiginal data from the Mexican 2013 National Survey on OrganizedViolence. I address two empirical questions. First, how much do citizenscare about the victims of criminal violence? I find that average citizens

are rather ignorant of and indifferent to their fate. Second, what explainsvariations in citizen sympathies towards victims? My theory of solidarityunder criminal civil war focuses on its cognitive framing. To the extentthat citizens hold criminal violence to be selective, a self-contained affairamong criminals, they tend to blame victims for their fate and denythem their sympathies. Lineal regression analysis confirms the expectedframing effect, even when controlling for complementary explanations,such as victimization, distance to war, class, and political sophistication.

Mexicos New Civil War

Once in a century, it seems, Mexico stumbles into dramatic encounterswith collective violence. The war of independence between 1810 and1821 left around two-hundred thousand dead, and the MexicanRevolution from 1910 to 1917 no less than one million (see Krauze 2012:15). Today, after decades of relative authoritarian peace and only twodemocratic presidencies, the country finds itself immersed in yetanother epidemic of violence.

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In the 2000 presidential balloting, the victory of opposition candidateVicente Fox of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) capped along process of democratization by elections and ended seven straightdecades of hegemonic rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).Yet even as Mexicos fledgling democracy has been struggling to find its

way, the country has slidat first imperceptibly, then dramaticallyintocivil strife. It has suffered a pandemic escalation of violence related toorganized crime.

The Escalation of Violence

In 2006, after a close and contentious election, PANs Felipe Caldernassumed the presidency amid a lingering security crisis. During Foxsterm in office, violent competition among drug-trafficking organizations(so-called cartels) had been provoking more than a thousand homicidesper year, and the number was rising. Although it had not been an issueduring the election campaign, President Caldern decided to make thefight against drug cartels the defining policy of his presidency, only tosee that fight turn into his terms defining failure. During his six years inoffice, violence escalated both qualitatively and quantitatively.

In qualitative terms, modes of assassination moved towarddemonstrative cruelty, routinized and ritualized, including the publicdisplay of tortured, dismembered, and decapitated bodies. Inquantitative terms, the number of annual homicides attributed tocriminal organizations shot up from around 2,200 in 2006 to more than16,600 in 2011. In 2012, drug-related homicides started to decline forthe first time since 2001. This trend continued in 2013, even thoughannual figures of executions remained at a level (over 11,000) manytimes higher than in the early 2000s (see Figure 1). All these numbersmust be read with great caution, though. The problems that clusteraround the task of compiling accurate data on the violence are massive.Besides, thousands of people have disappeared after being abducted.According to official figures, more than 26,000 individuals were reportedmissing during the Caldern years.1

[Figure 1 about here]

When confrontations between armed groups within a state cause morethan a thousand battle-related deaths per year, academics speak ofcivil war. At least since 2001, democratic Mexico has experiencedlevels of internal war that surpass this conventional threshold. Yet thewar is not one but many. Its major lines of conflict run between criminalenterprises. Many, perhaps most, acts of private coercion are hostileacts within a multilateral war among competing cartels. Yet, while the

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so-called drug war entails various interacting nonstate conflicts, it alsocontains elements of one-sided violence that criminals unleash againstcivilians. Profit-oriented participation in illicit markets forms only aportion of organized crimes activity. The drug cartels are also massivelyengaged in predatory crimes involving unilateral violence against

civilians. Organized homicides have only been the tip of the violenticeberg. As criminal organizations have diversified their activities, thecountry has seen the dramatic expansion of kidnapping, humantrafficking, and extortion (mafia-like protection rackets). 2 In addition,insofar as the cartels wage a guerrilla war against state agents, theyparticipate in a kind of criminal insurgency. They have carried outnumerous attacks against the state, such as the kidnapping, torture, andmurder of security officials and assaults on police stations using handgrenades and heavy weapons.

Thus the Mexican state is a warring party, too. In theory, it has amonopoly on the wielding of legitimate violence. In practice, it commitscriminal violence on a large scale. International human-rights groupsagree in ascertaining widespread human-rights violations perpetratedby security agents. In part, these violations are expression of state abuse .They are the unintended but inevitable consequence of acting with bruteforce, little actionable intelligence, and no oversight in an irregular warcharacterized by endemic problems of information. In part, illegal stateviolence is a symptom of partial state collusion . Between January 2008and November 2012, more than 2,500 police officers and more thantwo-hundred military personnel were murdered by criminal

organizations. Yet in numerous instances, public officials havecollaborated with criminal organizations. 3

The Language of Violence

The vocabulary of violence has been unstable and contested. Mexicanpolitics and society have been struggling with how to talk about thehell it found itself dragged into. 4 The Fox administration talkeddramatically about narcoterrorism, the Caldern administrationeuphemistically about thug rivalry (rivalidad delincuencial), and thePea Nieto administration prefers not to talk at all. Academicscommonly refer to drug violence, organized crime, or organizedviolence. In the media and within civil society, the language of warabounds. People habitually speak and write about the war, the waragainst drugs, the war of drugs, or the war among cartels. 5 Somerefer to multiple parallel wars (Hernndez 2012: 13). Externalobservers often concord. For instance, in its 2010 report, the HeidelbergInstitute for International Conflict Studies ascertains that the regional

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predominance conflict between the main drug cartels [], on the onehand, and the government, on the other, escalated to a full scale war the first war in the Americas since 2003 (HIIK 2010: 48 and 42).6

By logic and definition, since the conflict in question is not an external

conflict, if it is to be considered a war, it must be a civil war (Waldmann2012: 17). Many, perhaps most, domestic observers would object. Manyobject the language of war, as it involves the treatment of criminals asenemies (see e.g. Escalante 2012: Ch. 1, Madrazo 2013). It also evokesimages of symmetrical warfare among regular armies (see Ovalle 2010),while the Mexican war has been unfolding as a typical irregular war inwhich most of the violence is perpetrated against defenseless unarmedindividuals. Irregular civil wars see many more executions than battles(Antoine de Saint-Exupry, cited in Kalyvas 2006: 334).7

Classic conceptions of civil war require that the parties in conflict arepolitically and militarily organized, and have publicly stated politicalobjectives (Sambanis 2004: 829). Prototypical civil wars are fought bywell-organized groups with political agendas, challenging the sovereignauthority (ibidem: 820). The new Mexican civil war is different. It is nota classical civil war in which ideological insurgencies fight to topple statepower or transform the political regime. It is a prototypical new civilwar, fought for material gain not social justice. 8 It is a war without eventhe pretense of ideological justification. Its only ideology is the freemarket. If the political insurgents of the 20 th century strove to abolishcapitalism, the criminal insurgents of today strive to unbound it.

Capitalism without moral (or legal) limits is their utopia.Public Responses to Violence

The statistics of murder, torture, and disappearance represent anatrocity on a massive scale. But they also represent an injustice on amassive scale. Even though they are not planned and executed by thecentral state, they are tolerated by a state that has renounced theeffective judicial prosecution of organized violence. The criminal war hasescalated in a context of near complete impunity. According to figurescollected by Human Rights Watch, between December 2006 and January

2011, Mexican authorities counted 35,000 homicides they attributed toorganized crime. Of these, 997 led to formal criminal investigations (2.8percent), of which 343 led to formal criminal accusations (0.9 percent),of which 22 led to firm convictions (0.06 percent) (see HRW 2011: 15). Forall practical reasons, the rate of successful persecution is zero, whichamounts to something we have seen at other places in Latin America:the de facto privatization of the death penalty. The states grants privateactors (as well as its own agents) a license to kill.9

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How have Mexican citizens responded to the epidemic of death andinjustice in their fledgling democracy? The direct and indirect victims ofcrime have responded in many ways. Individually, they have mostlysought refuge in exit strategies, such as changing their place of residence(internal and international migration) or shutting down business

operations in the face of extortion. Collectively, their responses havebeen bifurcated. Some have turned to peaceful mobilization, others toarmed resistance. On the side of civil protest, over the past years, acrossthe entire geography of organized violence, numerous local civicmovements and associations have been formed by victims of violentcrime and their families and friends. These initiatives gained nationalvisibility in Spring 2011 when poet Javier Sicilia, after his son had beenkilled by local police officers, founded the nation-wide Movement forPeace with Justice and Dignity.10 On the side of societal counter-violence, paramilitary self-defense forces have risen in more than adozen of Mexican states. They have gained most prominence in 2013 inMichoacn where the federal government responded with large-scaleintervention attempting to regain control through a mixture of militaryaction, institution building, and social policy.11

The question of political solidarity, however, does not concern thevictims of violence, but those of their co-citizens who have not (yet)been directly affected by criminal civil war. The key test of politicalsolidarity is not the solidarity among victims, but the solidarity towards victims. How, then, have ordinary citizens been responding to the civilwar that has been unfolding on their television screens? In essence, they

have adopted the role of passive onlookers. They have been trying toaccept the new realities of war as normal and to carry on their daily livesas smoothly as possible. Yes, a few thousand people accompanied JavierSicilia at the rallying points of his 2011 tours across Mexico and in 2012citizens voted Felipe Calderns National Action Party out of thepresidential office (in the wake of an election campaign in which partiesand candidates kept silence on the war). But not much more. We haveseen few public displays of sorrow or anger, little serious debate, nosustained pressure on authorities. Rather than a nation of concernedcitizens mobilizing their energies towards the construction of a decentsystem of justice, we have seen a nation of bystanders who have beenquick to absorb the atrocious realities of civil war into their linguistic andstatistical routines. 12

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Requisites of Political Solidarity

Whenever severe violations of human rights, such as torture, murder,and disappearance, spread within a modern nation state, ordinarycitizens face discomforting questions. 13 What do they know? What

should they know? What do they want to know? How much do theycare? How do they relate to victims and perpetrators? Whom do theysympathize with? Which acts of violence do they condemn, whichcondone? What can they do to stop or alleviate the suffering of victims?What do they actually do? Do they do enough? Do they do everythingthey could? These questions touch the essence of political solidarity,which is: citizens willingness to assist the victims of severe andsystematic injustice. Citizens face such questions whenever direct humanintervention by either public or private actors produces suffering anddeath on a massive scale: under repressive dictatorship, in the face ofgenocide, in civil war, in epidemics of criminal violence.

More often than not, citizens fail to meet the high demands of politicalsolidarity. They fail their responsibility to protect their co-citizens. Theylet atrocities run their course, know little, care little, do little about thefate of victims. Even worse, they often act in opportunistic ways, reapingpersonal advantage of acts of injustice, in complicit manner, encouragingvictimization by omission or commission, or even in collaborativefashion, participating directly in the organization of violence andinjustice.

What explains empirical variations in political solidarity? When arecitizens able and willing to mobilize the moral resources of solidarity?When by contrary do they refuse to assist co-citizens who suffer frominjustice? As most of contemporary political science comprehendspolitical actors as acting under the primacy of self-interest, the disciplinehas paid scarce attention to moral interventions in the face of injustice.Modern political science is not a science of solidarity, but one of utility.Reflections on political solidarity have been largely left to normativepolitical theorists (e.g. Brunkhorst 2005 and Rorty 1989), to historians oftotalitarian systems (e.g. Longerich 2006), and to a certain extent tostudents of social movements, interest groups, and ethnic mobilization(for a synthesis, see Scholz 2008: Introduction).

Much theoretical reflection and empirical work on the logic of moralintervention of behalf of victims has taken place in sociology and socialpsychology. The language is usually different. Authors rarely frame theirwork under the positively connotated heading of solidarity, but ratherfocus on its opposites, such as moral disengagement (e.g. Bandura et al.1996), denial (e.g. Charny 2003 and Cohen 2001), and passive bystanding

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(e.g. Nickerson, Mele, and Princiotta 2008 and Pozzoli and Gini 2013). Inmy reading, this dispersed sociological and psychological literature onmoral action suggests that the degree of solidarity actors offer or denyothers critically depends on how they conceive the situations of injusticethey witness. It depends on how they perceive and frame the four basic

building blocks of such situations: the nature of victims, the nature ofinjustice, the effectiveness of their own intervention, and the risks ofsuch intervention.

a) Identification with victims: The concept of solidarity is bounded. Itdescribes reciprocal horizontal obligations among members of acommunity of equals. It differs from neighboring concepts, such asbenevolence, which refers to relations among individuals, charity,which refers to hierarchical relations between donors andrecipients, or clemency, which refers to relations between victorsand losers. The original Roman concept of solidarity was a legalconcept. It described reciprocal financial obligations amongmembers of a community, their joint liability for personal debts.One for all, all for one. Everyone assumes responsibility foranyone who cannot pay his debt (Brunkhorst 2005: 2). Themodern concept of political solidarity is a moral concept. Itdescribes reciprocal moral obligations among strangers who sharemembership in an imagined community (Benedict Anderson)defined by some abstract criterion, such as class, occupation,gender, age, ethnicity, nation, or humanity.

In principle, group membership is binary. Either you are in or youare out. Either you qualify as potential addressee of groupsolidarity or you dont. To the extent that politics polarizesbetween opposing camps of friends and foes, such dichotomies ofbelonging tend to map the scope of political solidarity well. Yet,the relevant social psychological literature on moral action neitherdeals with social groups nor with situations of political polarization.It studies individual relations in more ordinary settings, in whichgroup boundaries are fuzzy, groups are internally diverse, andpeople belong to multiple groups at a time. Accordingly, thisliterature does not ask whether spectators categorize victims in abinary fashion as either insiders or outsiders of some abstractcommunity. Rather, it asks where they place them along acontinuum of proximity versus distance. Just as social distancebetween victim and perpetrator increases the probability ofcriminal violence (e.g. Sykes and Matza 1957, Grossman 2009),positive attitudes towards victims (Pozzoli and Gini 2013: 231)increase the probability of defensive intervention by third parties.

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b) Perceptions of injustice: Solidarity is a response to the suffering ofothers. Political solidarity, more narrowly, is a response toinjustices co-citizens suffer. It involves the acceptance of positiveduties in response to a perceived injustice (Scholz 2008: L. 105). Itis the perception of injustice that creates the demand for solidary

action. A just world has no need for political solidarity. Citizens canuphold the delusion of a just world (Marvin Lerner) either byignoring acts of injustice (the logic of denial) or by re-describingthem as acts of justice (the blaming of victims). By pleadingblindness, citizens can remain deaf to the calls of solidarity.Alternatively, if they invert responsibilities by blaming the victimsfor their own misfortune, if they hold them to be deserving ofpunishment, rather than worth of protection, then their very senseof justice will impel them to side with perpetrators, rather thanvictims (see e.g. Lerner 1980, Ryan 1976).

c) The effectiveness of intervention: Much of the psychological USliterature on passive bystanding was triggered by a high-profilecase of citizen unresponsiveness: the abuse and murder ofCatherine Kitty Genovese on a 1964 winter night in New YorkCity, in which dozens of neighbors could have intervened by callingthe police. But only one did, hesitantly, when it was too latealready. 14 One of the fundamental irritations the case producedstemmed from the ease with which the witnesses could have donesomething: by simply dialing the emergency number. They facedno problems of coordination, no uncertainty about the choice of

means. They had effective individual means of intervention at theirdisposal: their telephones. Cases of injustice that call for politicalsolidarity are not like this. In politics, individuals possess onlylimited capabilities of effective intervention. To aid victims in aneffective manner, they need to coordinate with their co-citizensand herewith face all the costs and uncertainties of collectiveaction. 15

d) The risks of intervention: In contexts of severe and systematicviolations of human rights, any intervention on behalf of victimscarries high potential risks. It is legitimate for sympathetic citizensto weight the risks solidary action involves for their own physicalintegrity against the benefits it promises for the victims.

For citizens to take solidary action in favor of victims of injustice, theymust frame each element of the situation they encounter in anappropriate manner: they must identify victims as one of us , they mustrecognize them as victims of grave injustice, they must see feasible

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courses of defensive intervention, and they must hold these safe enoughto be taken. All four bundles of perceptions are necessary componentsof active political solidarity. In addition, they form a logical sequence. Ifbystanders to injustice do not fulfill first conditions, they need notponder latter ones. If they place the victims of injustice outside the

bonds of their moral community and in addition conceive their sufferingas a higher form of justice, all further considerations of solidaryintervention turn moot.

Situations of criminal civil war, like other situations of systemic violence,place tight limits and high risks on solidary action. Under the shadow ofillegitimate violence, it is difficult to see what individual citizens couldpossibly do to protect victims (condition c) and anything they might bedoing is likely to entail considerable threats to their own physicalintegrity (condition d). While the constraints criminal violence places oncitizen behavior are easy to comprehend, the constraints it places oncitizen attitudes are less easily understood. No doubt, criminal civil waraffects citizens capacities of solidary action towards victims. Yet, as Iwish to argue, it affects their attitudinal dispositions towards victims inthe first place. Even before destroying citizens abilities to help victims,criminal violence destroys their desire to do so. As I hypothesize, civilcriminal war tends to destroy the bonds of sympathy between citizensand victims, because its official description (as a war among criminals)tends to place victims into one community with perpetrators.

The Imagined Community of Perpetrators and Victims

Generally speaking, how do citizens relate to the perpetrators ofillegitimate violence and their victims? With whom do they identify?Which types of imagined communities do they construct? The classiccriminal triangle of perpetrators, victims, and spectators contains fourideal-typical possibilities which are illustrated in Figure 2:

a) Sympathy: the imagined community between citizens and victims.Citizens sympathize with victims, identify with their plight,recognize them as victims of injustice who are worthy ofprotection. Typical example: ordinary citizens in the face of

ordinary crime.

b) Complicity: the imagined community of citizens and perpetrators.Citizens sympathize with perpetrators, identify themselves withtheir cause, recognize them as agents of justice who deservesupport. Typical example: pro-regime actors who sympathize withrepressive campaigns against the enemies of the people underdictatorship.

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c) Polarization: the confrontation between communities ofperpetrators, victims, and citizens. In violent conflict amongcommunities, citizens sympathize with those victims andperpetrators who belong to their own imagined community.Drawing a sharp line between insiders and outsiders, they side

with our victims (aka martyrs) and our perpetrators (akaheroes) against their victims (who are deserving) and theirperpetrators (who are evil). Typical examples: the distribution ofnational sympathies in international war, the distribution of ethnicsympathies in ethnic war, and the distribution of politicalsympathies in internal political war.

d) Detachment: the community of victims and perpetrators. Citizenssympathize or identify with no-one. In their perspective, bothperpetrators and victims belong to a community separate fromtheir own. They are not community members, but some sort ofaliens entangled in extraneous violent encounters. Both arebarbarians, neither of them merits support. Typical example: theperception of revolutionary warfare by apolitical observers.

Now, as I wish to argue, the very notion of criminal warfare pushescitizens towards a position of detachment. Prototypical criminal wars arenot structured by pre-established collective identities. As these are wars,collective actors are battling each other. But there are no collectiveidentities involved. The parties in conflict are not, and do not pretend tobe, representative of larger groups. They do not fight in the name of

anybody. They only fight for themselves. Against others, who do thesame. The notion of criminal warfare, though, does not suggest asituation of anomie, amorphous and chaotic. It does impose some sort ofsymbolic structure on the Hobbesian state of nature. It blurs one socialboundary (between perpetrators and victims) and creates another one(between criminals and decent citizens). 16 These two conceptualoperations merge in the notion of selective violence that defines violenceas an exclusive affair among criminal organizations.

Students of civil war speak of selective violence when the election ofvictims is personal. They speak of indiscriminate violence when victimsare anonymous; when they are elected, not on the basis of individual,but collective criteria, like group membership or place of residence. Withlight shifts in connotation, we can translate this conceptual pair intocriminal wars. In criminal civil wars, we can describe violence asselective as long as it serves as a means of conflict settlement amongthe members of criminal enterprises. We can describe violence asindiscriminate when it reaches beyond the criminal world and sows its

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victims among civilians unrelated to criminal activities. Selective criminalviolence is self-contained, indiscriminate violence is expansive.

Selective violence in criminal civil war presupposes that the boundaryline that separates combatants (criminals) from non-combatants

(civilians) is crystal clear, while the boundary line that separatesperpetrators from victims is fuzzy. Criminals form an imaginedcommunity distant from, or even outside of, society that conceives itselfas innocent. Both perpetrators and victims belong to the criminalcommunity whose members are guilty of whatever happens to happento them. The armed conflict runs among criminal organizations whosupply the assassins and the corpses. Decent citizens have nothing tofear as long as they stay out of their business. It is a war among them,not against us. In this ideal-typical criminal war, criminals kill criminalsbefore the audience of passive citizens who watch murder news andread the homicide statistics in the relative safety of their homes.

During most of the presidency of Felipe Caldern (20062012), officialdiscourse produced and reproduced the idea of selective violence. Itsbasic message was simple: The war is about bad guys killing each other.More than 90 percent of all fatal victims are criminals murdered bycriminals. The rest divides among public officials who were killed bycriminals and decent citizens who were killed by accident, as collateraldamage of public military confrontations among armed groups orbetween them and state agents. As the former president himselfformulated:

More than 90% of the homicides and executions, as we have been classifyingthem, derive from the fight of some cartels against others []. Many soldiersand many police officers have fallen in fulfillment of their duty, but their sharedoes not reach even 5% of these deaths. There have been even many less cases,although unfortunately they have happened and we deplore it, of innocentcivilians who have been caught in the cross-fire between delinquents orbetween the police and delinquents, but these are really the fewest. 17

The idea of criminal selectivity has not been exclusive to top governmentcircles. Lower-level officials have embraced it, too. Victim families havegiven countless testimonies of state officials who treated them with

disdain and refused to investigate their cases under the speculativesuspicion that their murdered or disappeared family member had beenconnected to criminal groups. 18 In the public sphere, too, even mediaoutlets critical of the government like the weekly Proceso habituallydescribe the victims of narcoviolence as criminal subjects who arevictims of selective violence and distinguish their routine deaths(explicable and comprehensible) from those few (deplorable and

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exceptional) cases of innocent passers who are hit by stray bullets (seeLemaitre 2013).

The idea of selective criminal violence involves the assumption thatcriminal organizations are able to solve the problem of identification

(Kalyvas 2006) that is endemic to irregular civil wars. In regular modernwars the parties in conflict confront each other on the battlefield. Theyare proletarian professionals of violence, carry flags and wear uniform,and the frontline keeps one side apart from the other. The distinctionsbetween combatants and civilians and between combatants of one sideand the other are clear. In irregular civil war, they are not. Civil wars arebeset by uncertainties over the identity of actors. We never know forsure who is who in the complex field of private and public actors.

The notion of criminal selectivity, however, assumes that criminals areable to identify those who are guilty of having committed any of thenumerous infractions that are punishable by death, according to theirdraconian criminal codes which do not know the distinction betweencivil and criminal offenses. It is not without irony that the officialdiscourse on the selectivity of criminal violence under Felipe Calderncarried assumptions of judicial efficacy that corresponded to the self-image of criminal groups themselves (see also Escalante 2012: 46 and50). As the cartel La Familia proclaimed in October of 2006, when itentered the national political arena by throwing five human heads ontoa dancing floor in Uruapan, Michoacn: The Family does not kill formoney. It does not kill women, it does not kill innocents. Those who

must die, will die. Everybody should know that. Which is: DivineJustice.19

Needless to say, the notion of perfect criminal justice is preposterous. Asit cannot be otherwise, the narcos often abduct, torture, and kill thewrong people. 20 Besides, the very nature of criminal civil war, its self-reinforcing combination of structural opacity and structural impunity,opens the floodgates for violence to become expansive. The circles ofboth perpetrators and victims tend to expand beyond the criminal worldinto wider spheres of state and civil society (see Schedler 2014b: Ch. 1).

Even though unrealistic, the notion of selective criminal violence istempting nevertheless. It is, we may say, a comforting ideological by-product of the discomforting concept of criminal civil war. It is a frameeffect. By framing the war as a kind of external war among the voluntarymembers of the fraternal community of criminal assassins, citizens areable to retreat to a position of detached observers. Criminal civil wars, Ihypothesize, encourage both things: the frame and the framing effect.They invite citizens to believe in the selectivity of violence and thus to

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maintain a detached attitude of indifference towards its victims. Fromthis twin theoretical expectation I derive two empirical implications.

Descriptively, I expect high degrees of attitudinal distance betweenordinary citizens and the victims of criminal civil war. I expect

citizens to know little and care little about the victims of organizedviolence.

Causally, I expect citizens distance to victims to vary as a functionof their framing of war. To the extent that they perceive the war asa self-contained enterprise in which criminals kill criminals(selectivity of violence), civilians are less likely to reduce theirsubjective distance to victims.

I test both empirical expectations on the basis of the Mexican 2013National Survey on Organized Violence (ENVO) that strives to reconstruct

citizen attitudes towards the main actors of organized violence underconditions of criminal civil war: perpetrators and victims, state and civilsociety. ENVO is a nationally representative face-to-face survey that wascarried out in Mexico from 26 October through 30 November 2013among adult citizens ( age 18). Its 2,400 interviewees were chosenthrough multi-stage sampling based on election precincts as defined byIFE. The national sample was stratified by five levels of municipal violence(average municipal homicide rates from 2009 to 2011). Designed by theauthor and jointly sponsored by the National Council of Science andTechnology (CONACYT) and the Federal Electoral Institute ( IFE),21 it was

implemented by the survey firm DataOPM

. The surveys overall margin oferror is +/- 2 percent. 22

Selective Violence, Distant Victims

In the face of organized criminal violence, citizens are caught betweencross-cutting moral pressures. One the one hand, the moral grammar ofdemocratic citizenship obliges them to recognize the need to protect thebasic rights of their co-citizens. On the other hand, the moral grammarof criminal civil war induces them to conceive its victims as deservingcriminals who have placed themselves outside the community of decent

citizens and who have put themselves voluntarily at risks the politicalcommunity cannot insure them against.

How do Mexican citizens balance these conflicting normative logics?How much do they know and care about the victims of organizedcriminal violence? Which logic prevails in their attitudes towards thevictims of war? The logic of solidarity or the logic of detachment andindifference? To capture the cognitive, emotional, and political closeness

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citizens perceive in relation to the victims of organized violence, I usefour survey items. One pair of questions refers to individual victims andanother one on victims movements the civic associations and protestmovements by victim families who seek justice for their dead andknowledge about their disappeared:

Remembrance: the ability to remember the name of a victim oforganized violence (Do you remember the name of some personwho was murdered or disappeared by organized crime?).

Empathy: the ability to name some case of criminal violence therespondent found moving (Outside the circles of people you knowpersonally, do you remember some person whose [murder ordisappearance] has moved you in particular?).

Knowledge: information about victims movements (Over the pastyears, there have been victims of violence, people with family thathas been murdered or disappeared, who have been organizingthemselves to demand justice. Have you heard about thesegroups?).

Identification: political sympathy for civic mobilization by victimfamilies (How much do you identify with the victims who organizethemselves?).

Figure 3 displays the corresponding frequency distributions (fordescriptive statistics, see Table B in the appendix). Only one in tenrespondents remember some victim by name (10.1 percent) and onlyone in six recall some case they found particularly moving (17.1 percent).

Less than two fifths of citizens have ever heard of civic mobilization byvictim families (37.8 percent). Only one in fifteen citizens identifies verymuch with these collective efforts (6.4 percent) and more than a thirdnot at all (35.9 percent).

[Figure 3 and Tables 1 and 2 about here]

Bivariate correlation coefficients displayed in Table 1 suggest areasonable degree of the internal consistency among these items.Principal component analysis (without rotation) of these four variablesyields one factor with an Eigenvalue greater than 1. It explains 36.9

percent of the variance (Eigenvalue 1.47). I interpret subjective proximityto victims as its underlying substantive dimension and thus use it as myindex of closeness to victims. Table 2 contains the correspondingfactor loadings. The graph at the bottom of Figure 3 shows the frequencydistribution of the corresponding factor scores (regression points).

Just like the individual components, factor scores are heavily skewedagainst victims. Even in the absence of comparative data, they lend

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credence to the notion that a vast majority of ordinary citizens keep thevictims of organized criminal violence at safe distance. Citizen proximityto victims is the exception, indifference the rule. In the fog of Mexicoscriminal war, the victims of murder and disappearance seem to remainanonymous and invisible, leaving no more than faint traces in individual

citizens minds and hearts.23

When survey results show so little variance, when public opinion leanstowards consensus, with majoritarian opinions crowding out dissentingviews by large margins, then the main explanation needs to be eitherstructural (respondents are subject to a powerful external context thatmakes them respond in certain ways) or cultural (respondents sharecognitive schemas or normative commitments that make them respondin certain ways). Nevertheless, differences between individualrespondents may still provide residual explanations for their limitedattitudinal variance.

In my theory of frame effects, the crucial intermediary variable orcausal mechanism that accounts for variations in citizen attitudestowards victims is cognitive. I expect subjective perceptions of selectiveviolence to induce subjective distance towards the victims of criminalviolence. My initial question thus is descriptive: to what extent has thehypothesis of selectivity found acceptance among Mexican citizens?

When violence is indiscriminate, when it threatens to touch everybodyregardless of what they do or who they are, civilians cannot protectthemselves. When perpetrators do not discriminate between the goodand the bad, between allies or enemies, the rational course of action isresistance. Only when violence is selective, when it targets those whosay or do certain things, or omit saying or doing certain thing, citizenscan protect themselves by collaborating with the dominant force or bypresenting themselves as neutral in the battle between contendingparties (see Kalyvas 2006). In political civil war, neutrality is often not aviable option. In particular in contested war zones, warring partiesdemand active collaboration, not passive observation (see Kalyvas 2006:226232). In criminal civil war, by contrast, neutrality appears as areasonable self-protective strategy under conditions of selectiveviolence. Thus, to operationalize the perceived subjectivity of criminalviolence, we asked survey respondents to evaluate the protective forceof neutrality:

Talking about murders attributed to organized crime, how much do you agreewith the following statement: As long as you do not get involved with them,nothing happens to you. 24

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To the extent that criminal violence is selectively and exclusivelycommitted by criminals against criminals, innocence should save citizensfrom its wrath. Living an ordinary life, keeping their distance, stayingclean and staying out, should protect them from attracting the lethalattention of criminal organizations. As Figure 4 shows, more than sixty

percent of respondents either show full confidence (29.5 percent) orsome confidence (33.9 percent) in their capacity of protectingthemselves by not meddling with the criminal world. About a fifth showsome degree of disagreement (21.1 percent). Only one eighth (12.9percent) plainly reject the idea that nothing happens as long as onekeeps pretending that nothing happens.

[Figure 4 about here]

The overall picture is quite clear: Among the citizens of Mexicostroubled civil war democracy the idea of selective criminal violence ismajoritarian, but not consensual. Even though a large majority of citizenstend to support the notion that the criminal war is essentially a waramong criminals, a substantive minority does harbor their doubts.Meaning: there is variance. Which allows us to proceed to the causalquestion: which are its consequences for citizen attitudes towardsvictims?

Table 3 confirms the theoretical intuition that the perceived subjectivityof violence correlates negatively with the subjective proximity to thevictims of violence (r = -.153, p = .000, N = 2179). The bivariate linealregression results shown in Table 4 provide further confirm therelevance of framing effects. Although the overall explanatory capacityof perceptions of selective violence is rather low (R2 = .023), its linealimpact on the index of closeness to victims is both statistically andsubstantively significant (see Table 4). The more firmly respondentsbelieve in the selectivity of violence, the more likely there are to showthemselves ignorant and indifferent towards the victims of violence.

Complementary Explanations

How do people form their attitudes towards victims of criminal civil war?

Certainly, these attitudes derive from a complex process in which theframes of war (Butler 2010) constitute only one causal factor amongmany others. The Mexican National Survey on Organized Violence allowsus to test for a broad range of complementary hypotheses.

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Hypotheses

Victimization . It seems reasonable to expect that personal experiences ofvictimization by criminal organizations change personal stances towardsvictims. Citizens who have experienced cases of assassination or

disappearance inside their families or within their circles of friends andacquaintances are likely to be more sympathetic to victims than thosewho have been spared the chilling touch of organized violence. Tomeasure degrees of victimization by organized crime, I constructed anaggregate index of victimization that adds experiences of victimizationinside the family (extortion, murder, and disappearance) as well aswithin the wider circle of friends and acquaintances (murder,disappearance, orphanage and emigration). 25

Distance to violence . Organized violence in Mexico is not generalized, butterritorially concentrated at entry and exit points and along thetransport routes by which drugs move transnationally. Between 2009and 2011, less than 10 percent of Mexicos 2,453 municipalitiesexperienced extreme levels of deadly violence (with average homicidelevels above 50 per 100,000 inhabitants). In more than a fifth ofmunicipalities, not a single person was murdered in these three years(22.4 percent), and more than one eighth (13.9 percent) still enjoyedalmost European levels of homicide ( 5 per 100,000).26

The objective proximity to criminal violence may have complex andcontradictory effects on public perceptions of violence. Yet, overall, Iexpect the same logic and the same lineal relationship to hold as forvictimization: objective proximity to violence is likely to generatesubjective proximity to the victims of violence. Its just harder to beindifferent to the fate of victims if they get killed and kidnapped on yourdoorsteps.

To measure respondents geographic distance from the war, Iconstructed an aggregate index of distance to violence that adds threepieces of information: (a) objective data on average annual levels ofviolence in their place of residence, (b) subjective sensations of localsecurity (How secure do you consider living in your locality?), and (c)

subjective distance from violence (things have been calm around here;the violence occurs in other regions of the country).

Social distance . A substantial body of criminological literature arguesthat the perceived social distance between citizens and criminals moldsthe punitive sentiments the former harbor against the latter (see e.g.Ramrez 2013). Social proximity seems to be regulating, too, not just ourantipathies towards perpetrators, but also our sympathies with victims.

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A more disperse body of literature in history, psychology, and politicssuggests that citizens are able to watch the suffering of others withperfect indifference, or even approval, if they are able to classify them asdistant others. [H]uman sympathy can be turned on or off dependingon how another person is categorized (Pinker 2012: L 7193). 27

The two most evident candidates for defining the social status ofMexicos victims of war are poverty and skin color. In the ethnicallystratified societies of Latin America, crime is often suspected to beethnically stratified, too. In the region, the most common image ofcriminals is of poor, nonwhite men (Arias 2006: L 342) and the sameapplies to the victims of violent crime. According to one recurrentdiagnosis, in Latin Americas violent democracies (Arias and Goldstein2010a), the homicides tend to be impoverished, poorly educated,nonwhite adolescents and young men (Arias 2006: L 173) and they tendto recruit their victims from the same social stratum. Trigger-happykillers on the public payroll tend to share their criteria of victim selection(see e.g. Brinks 2008, Gay 2010, Stanley 2010).

Some critical observers have described the Mexican drug war in similarterms, as a war of the poor against the poor (Rea 2012: 230). Povertyis the leading explanation of violence among the Mexican public: 37.3percent of our respondents identify it as the primary cause of organizedviolence in the country. If it criminal violence indeed is, and is perceivedto be, a domain of the poor, with poor men abducting, torturing, andkilling other poor men, we should expect public opinion to reflect its

social stratification. I take the reported number of light bulbs inrespondents dwellings as indicator of economic status andclassifications of facial skin color by interviewers (on theLAPOP 11-pointcolor palette that goes from pink to dark brown) as measure ofphenotype.

Of course, objective respondent attributes need not translate intosubjective attitudes. High social status does not necessarily producenegative prejudice against subordinate classes and light skin color doesnot necessarily produce racism. However, to the extent that (a) theseobjective attributes do correlate with social and ethnic prejudice and (b)respondents conceive the victims of organized violence as dark-skinnedmembers from lower classes, their social status and phenotype shouldbe predictive of their sympathies towards victims. Under this twinassumption, I expect respondents social status to correlate positivelyand their skin color to correlate positively with their distance to victimsand victims movements.

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Political sophistication. Three standard variables in political surveyresearch formal education, interest in politics and media consumption are likely to mold citizen views on the war. They are all indicative ofpolitical sophistication. The more educated citizens are, the moreinterested in political affairs and the more they keep themselves

informed by watching, reading, and listening to the news, the moreknowledgeable they should be about victims. If information inhibitsindifference, the should be more sympathetic as well.

To measure political interest, I use the respective standard item in ENVO:Generally speaking, how much are you interested in politics? Thesurvey also contains a battery of questions on news consumption: Howfrequently do you follow the news in different media (almost never, acouple of times a month, a couple of times per week, almost daily)? Iaverage the values for television, radio, and newspapers.

Ideology . By definition, criminal wars are wars without ideology.Meaning, they are not driven by political ideologies, like distributive justice or religious salvation or ethnic self-determination, but by theprivate ideology of ruthless individual self-enrichment. The fact thatneither perpetrators nor victims are ostensibly motivated by politicalideologies does not imply that governmental policies towards organizedviolence are free from ideological guidance. Nor does it imply that citizenattitudes towards the war, its actors, and its management by thegovernment are unaffected by ideological worldviews.

Although I do not have elaborate hypotheses on the impact of politicalideology on citizen attitudes towards victims, I wish to explore theeffects of two variables: (a) the ideological position of respondents:their self-positioning on the ideological left-right scale from 0 to 10 and(b) their ideology possession: their ability or willingness of positioningthemselves on the political left-right scale. Those who say they do notknow how to position themselves or do not respond at all ( DK/NR) arecoded as ideological orphans (score 0), all others as ideologically self-conscious (score 1). The former constitute a third of all respondents(33.3 percent). It is possible that these post-modern citizens withoutideological anchor belong to a different universe of public opinion thanthose more sophisticated citizens who view the political world (as wellas, possibly, the criminal world) through the lenses of left or right orcentrist identities.

Religiosity . Religion can justify anything. The big managers and killers ofthe drug war are said to be deeply religious. Still, given the emphasis thecontemporary Catholic church places on peace and solidarity, religiousbelief should lead Mexican citizens to sympathize with the plight of

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victims. As measure of religiosity, I take respondents indications aboutthe importance of religion in their lives.

Sex . Generally speaking, killing and being killed is a mens business. Atthe global level, eight of ten homicides as well as eight of ten victims of

homicide are men ( UNDOC 2011: 11). In Mexico and Latin America, theaverage participation of men in the use of lethal force is even higher. 28 We have little systematic knowledge on perpetrators and victims inMexicos criminal war. Yet, the familiar pattern of men killing men seemsto hold. According to the Memoria dataset on organized violence inMexico, assembled by the Justice in Mexico project of the University ofCalifornia, San Diego, for the years 2006 through 2013, the vastmajority of victims were men, with just 9% of the victims identified asfemale (Heinle, Rodrguez, and Shirk 2014: 31).

Age . Mexico is no country for young men. Between 1998 and 2012,about two thirds of victims of homicide with firearms have been youngerthan 40 years. The highest number of victims comes from the age groupbetween 20 and 29 years. 29 According to the Memoria dataset, whichrecords more specifically victims from organized violence, between 2006and 2013, the average age of the victims was 32 years, which appearsto contradict widespread assumptions that organized crime violence isperpetrated by uneducated, unemployed, and disaffected youths(Heinle, Rodrguez, and Shirk 2014: 31). Even though the immediateequation the authors draw between victims and perpetrators is puzzling,their data do put into question certain clichs that depict the drug war

as a war between private armies of teenagers attracted by excitingprospects of upward mobility (the fastest way to heaven).

If the so-called drug war carries a clear sex bias and an unclear age bias,what follows for public attitudes towards the war? How should weexpect respondents sex and age influence their perceptions of victims?If the simple mechanisms of social distancing work here, too, we shouldexpect women and people of advanced age to be less concerned aboutvictims.

Results

To what extent does our hypothetical battery of complementaryindependent variables correlate with citizens closeness to victims? Asbivariate correlation coefficients in Table 3 indicate, skin color, left-rightself-placement, religiosity, and sex are unrelated. All other variablesconfirm our theoretical expectations. Victims feel closer to victims andpeople closer to violence feel closer to victims, too. The same holds forpersons with higher levels of sophistication, that is, for the higher

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educated, the politically interested, the politically informed, and thosecapable of positioning themselves along the left-right scale. It alsoapplies for the young.

In the previous section, we found a significant bivariate effect of

subjectivity of violence on distance to victims. To what extent is thiseffect robust to the inclusion of controls? Table 4 shows the results ofmultivariate OLS regression analysis fed with those variables thatdisplayed significant lineal associations (correlation coefficients) with theindex of closeness to victims (that is, excluding skin color, ideologicalposition, religiosity, and sex). In this multivariate analysis, age pales intoinsignificance and education falls just below the conventional thresholdof statistical significance (p .05). Yet the subjective subjectivity ofviolence as well as all other complementary variables remain significant.None of the individual coefficients is impressively high, yet the jointexplanatory power of the nine variables included is quite decent (R 2 =158).

[Tables 3 and 4 about here]

Conclusion

In conclusion, I wish to highlight three findings:

1. In descriptive terms, aggregate patterns of Mexican public opinionreflect the structural devaluation of victims in criminal civil wars. A solidmajority of citizens have faith in the selective nature of criminal violence.Individual victims of violence appear as nameless numbers whose fatescarcely touches their co-citizens. Average citizens barely take notice ofvictims movements and hardly identify with them.

2. Criminal civil wars tend to encourage civic detachment because theytend to blur the dividing lines between perpetrators and victims, and toreinforce those between victims and citizens. Nevertheless, neither theblaming of victims nor the cognitive, emotional, and moral withdrawal ofcitizens are carved in stone. Both are variables, not parameters. As myexplanatory explorations have shown, the extent to which citizensdistance themselves from the victims of war is sensitive to the framesof war (Judith Butler). On average, citizens who hold the selection ofvictims to be restricted to criminals know and care less about victims.The conceptualization of war and its victims matters at least for citizenattitudes towards its victims.

3. This paper has produced some joyful negative findings. We know littleabout the socio-economic profiles of the victims of violence. It is well

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possible that they belong to the typical category of victims of lethalviolence in Latin America: poor, non-white, young men. However, even if this is objectively the case, it does not bias citizens subjective attitudestowards victims. Although Mexicans maintain the victims of war atconsiderable symbolic distance, their distant attitudes do not vary with

their own skin color, while they vary inversely to their class status: themore affluent are more emphatic. Perhaps, in Mexico, racism and classprejudice are unrelated with objective markers of ethnic membershipand social status. In any case, though, the negative finding is still positivenews: even if violence is biased by ethnicity and class, public opinion onviolence is not.

Notes

1 See El Gobierno mexicano reconoce hasta 26.000 denuncias de desparecidos,

El Pas (Mexico City), 27 February 2013, 9. On disappearances and mass graves(narcofosas) related to organized crime, see also Molzahn, Rodrguez, andShirk (2013: 1819).

2 See e.g. Aguilar et al. (2012: 9395), Bergman (2012: 7072), Bravo, Grau, andMaldonado (2014: 11), Buscaglia (2010), Echarri (2012), andOAS (2012: 7075).

3 Casualty figures from Molzahn, Rodrguez, and Shirk (2013: 30). On state abuseand collusion, see.g. Amnesty International (2009, 2012, and 2013), Article 19(2012 and 2013), and Human Rights Watch (2009, 2011, and 2013). Oninformation problems in irregular wars, see Kalyvas (2006).

4 I am alluding to the movie El infierno by Luis Estrada (Mexico, 2010).

5 See e.g. Aguilar Camn et al. (2012), Escalante (2012: Ch. 1 and 2),EmergenciaMx, Llamado global a frenar la guerra en Mxico,http://emergenciamx.org/blog/Llamado-global-a-frenar-la-guerra-en-Mexico(accessed 17 May 2013).

6 According to the HIIK definition, A war is a violent conflict in which violent forceis used with a certain continuity in an organized and systematic way. The conflictparties exercise extensive measures, depending on the situation. The extent ofdestruction is massive and of long duration (2010: 88).

7 On the distinction between regular and irregular civil war, and between

symmetric and asymmetric warfare, see Kalyvas (2009).8 Seminal texts on new civil wars have been, among others, Enzensberger

(1993) and Kaldor (2006). For a critical discussion of the distinction betweenideological old civil wars based on grievances and non-ideological new warsbased on greed, see Kalyvas (2001).

9 See Brinks (2008), Rivera (2010), Stanley (2010: L 1942 and 2157).

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10 Under the heading of sites for peace ( sitios por la paz ), the webpage of theMovement for Peace with Justice and Dignity offers a collection of links to like-minded movements (http://movimientoporlapaz.mx/) . The documentary filmJavier Sicilia: En la soledad del otro by Luis Riley (Canal 22, 2013) reconstructsthe movements cathartic first months

(http://vod.canal22.org.mx/media/10377) .

11 See e.g. Heinle, Rodrguez, and Shirk (2014: 4647), Trejo, Guillermo (2014), Lapeligrosa apuesta de las autodefensas en Mxico, El Pas , Tribuna, 20 January2014(http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2014/01/20/actualidad/1390229607_176398.html), accessed 21 January 2014.

12 On civil societys responses to organized criminal violence in Mexico, see Dudleyand Estrada (2013), Job (2012), Ovalle (2010), Rodrguez (2013), Rojo-Mendoza(2013), Villagran (2013).

13 I use the notion of human rights violations in a broad way that covers public aswell as private perpetrators (see. e.g. Borer 2013). Similarly, I use the notion ofcitizens in a wide, minimalistic way, as members of a modern territorial state(which may be dictatorial or failing), rather than carriers of rights in an effectivedemocratic polity.

14 [add references]

15 The locus classicus on obstacles to collective action is, of course, Mancur Olson(1965).

16 On the internal divisions within and the blurred boundaries betweenperpetrators and victims of severe violations of human rights (in South Africa

under apartheid), see Borer (2003).17 Jorge Ramos, Muertes de civiles son las menos: FCH,El Universal , 16 April

2010, http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/673331.html (consultado el 7 defebrero de 2014). At other occasions, the president proclaimed even moreprecise figures on the victims of homicides attributed to criminal organizations:more than 90 percent of those persons, 93 to be exact, have direct or indirectconnections with some of the groups of organized crime; they are drug dealers(Felipe Caldern, Discurso pronunciado en el evento Mxico: Perspectivas yOportunidades Econmicas en el Nuevo Entorno Mundial, 12 March 2009,http://calderon.presidencia.gob.mx/prensa/discursos).

18 See, for instance, Amnesty International (2012: 12) and (2013: 6), Gibler (2012:139), Human Rights Watch (2012: 2 and 5), Turati (2012: 107108).

19 My translation (AS). See, for instance,, Siete carteles desangran a Mxico, ElPas (Colombia), 1 November 2009,http://historico.elpais.com.co/paisonline/notas/Noviembre012009/mexico.html(accessed 15 January 2014).

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20 Journalist Javier Valdez offers some brushstrokes of violent mistakes bycriminal organizations (2012: 15, 56, 70, 97, 143, 165, 176177, 214, 249, 267268).

21 Since 4 April 2014: National Electoral Institute (INE).

22 The national population survey was complemented by an elite survey (N = 629)among high-level representatives of six groups: government, parties, media,academia, civil society, and business. For analytical summaries over the maindescriptive results of the two surveys, see Schedler (2014b and 2014c). As soonas bureaucratically possible, the integrated dataset of both surveys will bepublicly accessible via theCIDE data archive BIIACS (http://biiacs.cide.edu).

23 I am alluding to Robert McNamaras phrase that inspired the title of thedocumentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S.McNamara (Errol Morris, 2003).

24 In Spanish, the item phrasing contains an ambiguity that is hard to translate.Mientras uno no se meta con ellos, no pasa nada implies two things: Nothinghappens as long as you do not join them and as long as you do not get in theirway.

25 For more precise descriptions of this as well as all other indices and variables,see Table A in the appendix; for descriptive statistics, see Table B.

26 Author calculations based on homicide data by the National Health InformationSystem (SINAIS) (www.sinais.salud.gob.mx) and population data from the 2010national census by the National Institute for Statistics and Geography ( INEGI)(www.inegi.org.mx). Note that the World Health Organization considers violenceto be epidemic once it surpasses 10 annual homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.

27 Among many others, see also Arendt (2004), Butler (2010), Grossman (2009).

28 See, for instance, Bravo, Grau y Maldonado (2014: Grfica 2.2),UNODC (2011:Cap. 5), OAS (2012: Tabla 1.3), Jos Ignacio Torreblanca, El varn, arma dedestruccin masiva, El Pas, 26 January 2014, p. 29. According to the dataset onmissing persons, assembled by the General Prosecutors Office towards the endof the Caldern presidency, 54 percent of persons registered as missing (forunknown reasons, including but not limited to organized crime) were men, 40percent women (6 percent were left unidentified). 29 percent (!) of thesepersons were children aged between 10 and 17 years. See Centro deInvestigacin y Capacitacin Propuesta Cvica (CIC), Informe sobre las personasdesaparecidas en el sexenio 20062012, Mxico City: 2012, p. 7. See also Baseintegrada de personas no localizadas,http://desaparecidosenmexico.wordpress.com/descargas/ (accessed 18 May2013).

29 Bravo, Grau, and Maldonado (2014: 89 and Figure 2.3). See also Merino, Zarkiny Fierro (2013),OEA (2012: 21) and UNDOC (2011: 65).

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Table ADescription of variables

Dimension Survey questions Range / Categories Variablename

Closeness tovictims

Index of subjective closeness to victims and victimsmovements. Factor loadings from PRINCIPAL COMPONENTANALYSIS:

FAC1_CTV

Effective name recognition of individual victims: Do youremember the name of some person who was murderedor disappeared by organized crime?

No (0), yes (1) P13_corr

Empathy (in the context of questions on murder anddisappearance): Outside the circles of people you knowpersonally, do you remember some person whose case hasmoved you in particular?

No (0), yes (1) P31

Information on victims movements: Over the past years,there have been victims of violence, people with familythat has been murdered or disappeared, who have beenorganizing themselves to demand justice. Have you heardabout these groups?

No (0), yes (1) P56

Identification with movements: Generally speaking, whichis your impression of these movements? How mucho doyou identify with the victims who organize themselves?

Not at all (0), a little(0.33), somewhat (0.66),very much (1)

P59_norm

Selectivity ofviolence

Talking about murders attributed to organized crime, howmuch do you agree with the following statement: As longas you do not get involved with them, nothing happens toyou.

Disagree very much (0),disagree somewhat (1),agree somewhat (2)agree very much (3).

P24B

Victimization Additive index of victimization by organized violence

within and outside family. SUM OF FIVE VARIABLES:

05 Index_VCO

Extortion: Over the past years, has it happened to you orsomeone in your family that you were asked extortionmoney (derecho de piso ) to conduct your business orother activities?

No (0), yes (1) P26C

Assassination or disappearance within family: Over thepast years, someone member of your family has beenmurdered or disappeared by organized crime?

No (0), yes (1) P26DE

Assassination or disappearance outside family: Someoneamong your friends or acquaintances has been murderedor disappeared by organized crime?

No (0), yes (1) P30

Orphanage: Do you know a child or teenager who wasorphaned because criminal groups murdered their motheror father?

No (0), yes (1) P33

Emigration: Do you know someone who migrated to theUnited States or some other country because of theviolence?

No (0), yes (1) P34

Distance toviolence

Additive index of subjective and objective distance toviolence. SUM OF THREE VARIABLES:

010 Index_D _VIOL

Local security: How secure do you consider living in yourlocality?

Not at all (0), a little (1),somewhat (2), verymuch (3)

P5

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Subjective distance from violence: As a matter of fact,things have been calm around here; the violence occurs inother regions of the country.

Disagree very much (0),disagree somewhat (1),agree somewhat (2)agree very much (3)

P10C

Objective distance from violence: Five strata of civility (04)= inversion of survey sample strata of municipal violence,

by municipal homicide rates (annual number of homicidesper 100,000 inhabitants, average 20092011).

(0) = very high homiciderate (> 30), (1) = high

(1530), (2) = medium(1015), (3) = low (610),(4) = very low homiciderate (< 6)

Estrato_INV

Class Proxy for household wealth: number of light bulbs in placeof residence.

(1) = 13 bulbs, (2) = 46bulbs, (3) = 79 bulbs, (4)= 10 or more bulbs.

PK _ag

Education Level of formal education of survey respondent 08 EDU Phenotype Facial skin color of survey respondent, as assessed by

interviewer at the end of the interview according to colorpalette developed by the Latin American Public OpinionProject (LAPOP).

1 (pink) 11 (darkbrown)

ENC1

Politicalinterest

Generally speaking, how much are you interested inpolitics?

Not at all (0), a little (1),somewhat (2), verymuch (3)

P1

Mass medianews

Frequency of news consumption in mass media: Howfrequently do you follow the news on TV / on the radio / inthe newspaper? (average of all three informationsources)

Almost never (0), acouple of times a month(1), a couple of times perweek (2), almost daily (3)

P2_PROM _ABC

Ideology(position)

Self-placement of left-right scale: In politics, people talkof left and right. In general terms, where would youlocated your point of view?

010 P68

Ideology(possession)

Respondents ability and willingness to place themselveson the left-right scale.

(0) = dont know / noresponse, (1) self-placement anywhere on

scale.

P68binary

Religiousness Importance of religion in private life: Please, could youtell me, how important is religion in your life?

Not at all (0), a little (1),somewhat (2), veryimportant (3).

PL

Sex Sex of survey respondent (binary) Male (0), female (1) SexoAge Age of survey respondent (years) 18 Edad

Source (in all Tables and Figures, unless otherwise indicated): Mexican National Survey of Organized Violence(ENVO).

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Table BDescriptive statistics

N Minimum Maximum Mean Standarddeviation

Index of closeness to victims (PCA factor scores) 2228 -1.07 3.47 .00 1.00Subjective selectivity of violence 2335 0 3 1.82 1.009Index of closeness to victims movements 2226 0 3 .82 .750Index of victimization 2305 0 4 .53 .857Index of distance to violence 2332 0 10 4.87 2.197

Class (light bulbs) (aggregation) 2361 1 4 2.49 .979Phenotype (skin color) 2370 1 10 4.63 1.406Education 2390 0 8 4.01 2.254Political interest 2384 0 3 1.14 .958Frequency of mass media news consumption 2361 0 3 1.52 .740

Religiousness 2366 0 3 2.27 .895Ideology (left-right position) 1601 0 10 5.71 2.678Ideology (possession) 2400 0 1 .67 .471Sex 2400 0 1 .51 .500Age 2399 18 85 41.10 15.506

For descriptions of variables, see Table A.

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Table 1Index of closeness to victims: bivariate correlations among components

Remembranceof individual

victim

Empathy withvictims

Informationon victims

movements

Identificationwith victimsmovements

Remembrance of victims Correlation 1.000 **.182 **.149 **.095Sig. (bilateral) . .000 .000 .000N 2400 2363 2383 2273

Empathy with victims Correlation **.182 1.000 **.182 **.119Sig. (bilateral) .000 . .000 .000N 2363 2363 2346 2241

Movement information Correlation **.149 **.182 1.000 **.149Sig. (bilateral) .000 .000 . .000N 2383 2346 2383 2260

Movement identification Correlation **.095 **.119 **.149 1.000Sig. (bilateral) .000 .000 .000 .N 2273 2241 2260 2273

For descriptions of variables and descriptive statistics, see Tables A and B. Spearman Rho correlation coefficients.

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Table 2Index of closeness to victims:PCA factor loadings

Variables Factor loadings

Memory of individual victim .588Empathy with victims .651Knowledge of victims movements .633Identification with victims movements .554

Note: Principal component analysis (PCA) without rotation, 1 component extracted: Eigenwert 1.47, Varianceexplained: 36.9%. For descriptions of variables and descriptive statistics, see Tables A and B.

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Table 3Index of closeness to victims: Correlates

Factor Closenessto Victims

Selectivity of violence Correlation **-.153Sig. (bilateral) .000N 2179

Victimization Correlation **.314Sig. (bilateral) .000N 2157

Distance to violence Correlation **-.169Sig. (bilateral) .000N 2174

Class (light bulbs) Correlation **.150Sig. (bilateral) .000

N 2193Phenotype (skin color) Correlation .028

Sig. (bilateral) .197N 2200

Education Correlation **.155Sig. (bilateral) .000N 2219

Political interest Correlation **.216Sig. (bilateral) .000N 2213

Mass media news Correlation **.191Sig. (bilateral) .000

N 2196Ideology (position) Correlation -.017Sig. (bilateral) .514N 1505

Ideology (possession) Correlation **.103Sig. (bilateral) .000N 2228

Religiousness Correlation -.014Sig. (bilateral) .50

schedler_collapse of solidarity in criminal civil war

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