In Mexico, organized criminal violence has been seeping into the political arena since 2000. However, it got worse in the 2018 elections, when dozens of local candidates were killed. In most of the cases, the concrete perpetrators and motives remained unknown. Why? Andreas Schedler, lead researcher of our De- and Re-Democratization Workgroup, provides some insight about it in his most recent piece for the Journal of Latin American Studies. 

After a qualitative content analysis of over 1,200 news reports, he examines the structuring power of a shared narrative: the frame of organized crime, and argues that the fact that the criminal community conceived the candidate killings as economic violence allowed Mexican society to 'normalize' these crimes and consider them as ‘business as usual' by criminal organizations. 

Read the full article here.