Sunday, December 26, 2010
Threats to the Cities
For everyone disappointed by the absence of a hyper-specific crime stat in their stocking, Edgardo Buscaglia has a little something for you: the ubiquitous Mexican expert says that 73 percent of the nation's municipalities are under the control of criminal groups. As is often the case with his figures, the precise accuracy of this claim is hard to verify, but the general thrust here is irrefutable: Mexico's municipal governments don't have the resources to protect themselves from criminal groups.
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Edgardo Buscaglia published his empirical methodology. He simply measures PHYSICAL presence of infraestructure within 22 types of crimes. For EXAMPLE, just a basic physical inspection within Mexico City would account for "open and notorious" physical presence if child prostitution infrastructure "centres" inside the historical section of downtown. Open and notorious, according to Buscaglia, means that anyone passing by would notice the criminal activity. Anyone would include Mexican police and politicians, such as Mr Ebrard, according to Buscaglia's latest interviews. it's Not difficult to verify. It just requires leaving a comfortable US G environment for a few days and perform some good old field work. This simple inspection and the presence of open/notorious infrastructure implies a degree of corruption and state capture by organized crime. If anyone within the government cares to verify the same observation in all other municipalities, Buscaglia argues that would find similar situation in 73% of all local governments. Not hard at all to verify!
Anon, thank you for reading and for pointing that out about publicizing his methodology. I should have liked to have read up on that more. Nonetheless, my point with the specific claims is not that Buscaglia doesn't have a basis for them, but that they are hard to verify in that they are inevitably an imperfect measure of reality.
"For EXAMPLE, just a basic physical inspection within Mexico City would account for "open and notorious" physical presence if child prostitution infrastructure "centres" inside the historical section of downtown"...This simple inspection and the presence of open/notorious infrastructure implies a degree of corruption and state capture by organized crime
I guess my point is that the degree to which this implies state capture is actually pretty limited. That scenario you offer or others like it being true 73 percent of the time doesn't necessarily tell us all that much about how often, say, the municipal police are operating as lookouts for a local drug gang, because both sides have an interest in keeping the relationship hidden.
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