Drug War
Fernando Soto
RWS
9/29/18
The impact of violence on the communities affected is not well understood today and has become a major area of research. In this paper, Sukanya Basu and Sarah Pearlman study the impact of violence and migration on the drug war in Mexico which is one of the major drug zones in the US and other related countries around the globe. The authors clearly seek to explore the impact of drugs by studying the way in which violence on the private choices of people has become an issue that is debated in the context of conflict and crime. A further examination is done on the drug cases of the drug war zones that are affected by drugs due to the steep rise in the number of homicide cases since late 2016 in the Mexican population hence estimating the impact of violence on migration at both the state and municipal levels by using federal highways as cocaine supply from Columbia. The authors clearly address the issue of drugs and their influence in the society (Basu & Pearlman, 2017).
According to Basu & Pearlman, (2017) the rise in the number of debates related to the steep rise in the number of homicide cases and violence that is experienced in Mexico, a country that is a drug lord in the manufacture and distribution of the illegal drugs that have been globally banned is what prompted to this research study. The drugs and other illegal substances have been a major concern that has negatively led to the increased fear of violence among the residents while causing others to migrate to neighboring countries that have guaranteed security like Canada and the United States. The drug war essentially began after the elected president launched a state assault on all the drug trafficking organizations and cartels leading to a higher proportion of Mexican adult residents to feel their state of residence as unsafe and as a result the distorted belief on the true violence has played a fundamental role in determination of the relocation choices. The authors find on an aggregate level that one way for people to exit certain locations like Mexico is because they think that there is a threat of violent behavior from dissidents or the government towards their personal integrity. This is evident in the case where most households with greater exposure to violence in their neighborhoods relocate to Colombia a country which is similar to Mexico (Basu & Pearlman, 2017).
The authors clearly overcome obstacles by making good use of instrumental variables strategy. They instrument the rate of annual violence by use of kilometers of the interacted federal highways with seizures of cocaine in Colombia. They find out that highways show the distribution networks of pre-existing drugs where violence has been seen among different cartels in order to gain controls of the drug networks (Basu & Pearlman, 2017). The highways are used as a predictor that is relevant to the changes in the violence experienced locally; they are linked between migration and drug interdiction efforts from Colombia. Strong evidence of increased homicides and migration is seen in the period of the drug war. This is evident in the domestic migration which is arguably less costly relocation, there are mixed results for international migrations as per the geographic level, negative coefficients for municipal levels where increase in violence led to decrease in the numbers of households which sent people abroad and positive coefficients at the state level.
The model used is the instrument of an interaction of the number of kilometers of some of the federal highways in the year 2005 and 2016 with the hundreds of the tons of cocaine that was seized by the Colombian and Mexican authorities annually. The assumption used is that supplies in cocaine have an impact on the value of the highways for violence and transport of drugs related to the control of these particular routes but then have no effect on migration that is direct. A panel of data on some of the international migration was used to estimate the model at the municipal level from the panel data and census on international and domestic migration at the state level from surveys in the labor force. The instrument used, clearly captures the changes in the value of the routes used in the distribution of drugs conditional on the pre-existing local network of transportation Basu & Pearlman, 2017).
To sum up, this paper investigates how the large increase in the number of homicides in Mexico after the beginning of the drug war has led to an increase in the rate of migration to other parts of Mexico and abroad. The relationship between the rates of migration and violent deaths at the state and municipal level are identified by carrying out research for the violence by using the federal highway kilometers related with the shocks to the supply of cocaine from Colombia. Federal highways are viewed to be the network of distribution and a major asset that drives the dissent on the cartels and the federal government as the instrument used is vital in capturing the variation to the network values over time. There is evidence of an increase in the international migration at both the state and municipal levels and general accounts of wide-scale displacement due to the drug war and the effect of violence on the migration process in Mexico (Basu & Pearlman, 2017). The results obtained from the analysis are therefore positive that the rise in violence and the homicide cases experienced due to the drug war have led to migration and residents living in fear and therefore, it is essential for future studies to be carried out on how individuals form violence perceptions and the methods in which they adapt in order to carry out a welfare exercise and further the understanding of the total societal costs of violence.
References
Basu, S., & Pearlman, S. (2017). Violence and migration: evidence from Mexico’s drug war. IZA Journal of Development and Migration, 7(1).
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