How do Criminal Groups Communicate?: The Role of Narcomensajes
In this paper, we analyze the political and economic goals of narcomensajes that are messages deployed by criminal groups to communicate with other actors. We depart from the assumption that criminal organizations employ narcomensajes to increase profits and reduce operating costs. Thus, narcomensajes’ goals might include: 1) threatening; 2) inviting others to reach agreements; 3) stating previous revenge actions to demonstrate what could happen in the future if there no compliance; and/or 4) altering public opinion to gain additional advantages. How frequent criminal organizations pursue these four types of goals depends on the type of actor (government, other criminal organizations, public) to whom these messages are written, and the type of violence prevalent in a district (among criminal groups or between the government and criminal organizations). We use a data set gathered by the Drug Policy Program at the Centre for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE) that includes information of events related to organized crime in Mexico. The data comprises 2680 narcomensajes deployed by criminal organizations from December 2006 to November 2011. We employ a Panel VAR model to control for temporal causality between violence and the use of narcomensajes. Our paper contributes to building a stronger understanding of political communication of criminal groups competing for their illegal markets.