Politics: The relationship between organized crime and politics in Mexico and Latin America — what is its magnitude and what does it imply?
Mexican politics and organized crime are bound together not by a single, uniform relationship but by a layered continuum whose intensity varies sharply from one territory to another. At its most basic, criminal groups purchase the omission of police and officials through bribery; further along the spectrum, they capture entire institutions — above all, municipal governments and police forces — repurposing them through concrete demands: a cut of public budgets, control over procurement and payroll, veto power over police appointments, advance warning of military operations, and selective non-enforcement.
Documented cases from Michoacán, where mayors described paying Los Caballeros Templarios what amounted to a survival tax, and from Coahuila, where entire police departments were absorbed into the Los Zetas command structure, show this is rarely a matter of ideological alignment; it is closer to protection money extracted under the threat of violence.
Beyond capture lies a further, more counterintuitive stage: criminal governance, in which armed groups take over functions ordinarily reserved for the state — setting rules, resolving disputes, dispensing a rough form of order and protection. Contrary to the assumption that this fills a vacuum left by absent government, cross-national survey data suggest it actually clusters in places where the state's presence is comparatively strong, producing a kind of stable coexistence rather than substitution — two overlapping authorities sharing control of the same territory. Measured this way, the phenomenon affects a smaller share of Mexico's population than is typically considered and clearly observed, although the underlying data are several years old and capture only part of what these groups actually do, almost certainly understating a reality that has likely deepened since.
What ties all of this together and gives it present-day political weight, is the way these entrenched local arrangements — reinforced under Morena through exchanges of electoral support for territorial permissiveness — leave the Mexican state exposed at precisely the moment Washington is applying targeted pressure on individual politicians. That pressure lands on fault lines already present within the ruling party's own internal balance of power, turning what might otherwise be a domestic governance problem into a lever in the bilateral relationship itself.
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