Kingpin Down: Power Vacuums, Market Structure, and the Violent Consequences of High-Profile Arrests

This paper studies how targeting the top leaders of criminal enterprises impacts market structure and homicide rates in Mexico. While executive capture may diminish organizational capacity, it may also induce territorial disputes as the existing balance of power between organizations is disrupted. To empirically assess these competing theories, I build a new longitudinal dataset on the presence of criminal enterprises in Mexican municipalities, drawing from over 21 million newspaper articles. I train natural language models to extract (1) whether the article pertains to organized crime, (2) the names of criminal enterprises and locations mentioned in the text, and (3) which locations (if any) each criminal enterprise is operating in. I find that capture or assassination induces a 49% local increase in the number of criminal enterprises operating in these locations, reflecting the entry of competing groups to the geography. This market restructuring explains why a leader’s capture or death induces a 32% increase in local homicides, suggesting costly repercussions associated with the policy.