Violence and crime in Mexico at the crossroads of misgovernance, poverty and inequality

"Hello, son, are you Ok?  We just got a phone call, and someone told us that one of our sons/daughters was kidnapped. We wanted to be sure that you are fine."  You can imagine how scary was the movement that these parents went through after they picked up the phone and received the ugly and unexpected message.  As sad as it sounds, this situation is something that some families in Mexico have experienced.  Sometimes they are lucky to find out that their relatives are fine, and that everything was faked by someone looking for a profit by creating confusion among relatives.  In other unfortunate cases, the message is real and families have to go through very difficult experiences that may last several months and that not always have a good outcome.

It's not new that Mexico is having problems with violence and crime, coming either from drug-cartels or from organized mafias of kidnappers and car thieves, among others.  It's also true that the entire country is not a jungle and lawless area where nobody is safe.

Over the last decade and a half, most of the approaches to solve these issues have looked at the rule of law and law enforcement elements of the equation.  Better legislation that penalizes these criminal activities; well paid, trained, appropriately equipped and not corrupted police corps; military support to fight drug-cartels; better prison's system that functions as social rehabilitation centers and not as universities of crime... and the list goes on.  This is a good direction to follow.  However, I've always told my friends and colleagues that there are other elements in the equation that also matter a lot, namely, poverty reduction and inequality.

Latin America is one of the most unequal regions of the world, and Mexico is not the exception -even though it is not the worst performer in the region when we look at GINI coefficients and other inequality measurements.  However, in 2006, only 6 percent of total income was shared by the lowest 20 percent of the population, while 50 percent was shared by the upper 20 percent of Mexicans (see INEGI's National Income and Expenditures of Households survey - Spanish).  Moreover, evidence suggests that inequality is also present in public social spending, 21 percent of which went to the third poorest segment of the population, while about 40 percent was received by the third richest group of Mexicans (here the source in Spanish).

How are inequality, crime and violence related? From my experience, part of the problem starts with the social tension created in an environment where not everyone has access to basic opportunities and/or services of good quality, such as education, health, water and sanitation...  While some Mexicans have enjoyed economic buoyancy over the last decades, others have continued their life under difficult conditions.  When this happens for a long period of time, the question among many starts to be: why did you have those opportunities and why I didn't? 

A report by the National Population Council (CONAPO) elaborates very well on some of issues mentioned above.  I'll translate a few sentences:  "... experience has demonstrated that the lack of equality has become the main catalyst of rebellions and social unrest... inequality has also undermined the trust in democratic institutions, which create negative externalities for the political and economic systems... on other issue, if income inequality is on the rise, economic growth might be insufficient to reduce poverty..."

How is it possible to get out of the crossroads of misgovernance poverty and inequality?  That's a topic for other blog entries.  Meanwhile, I'll just mention a couple of things.  The first thing is a quote from Kevin Casas Zamora, Senior Fellow at Brookings, based on the case of Bogota: "zero tolerance for crime with zero tolerance for social exclusion offers a way forward even in dire circumstances."  The second thing is Progresa-Oportunidades, the conditional-cash-transfer (CCT) program in Mexico that fights extreme poverty by increasing the human capital of people that really need help.  Even though this program represents only a small fraction of social programs in Mexico, in a sound economic and political environment it could be a good way to redistribute income and to give people those opportunities that probably they would never have.