Drawing on extensive interviews with subnational elites and focusing on six Mexican states (Baja California, Chihuahua, Jalisco, Nuevo León, Michoacán, and Guerrero), this chapter analyzes how party alternation and opposition governors’ decisions to remove top- and mid-level officials in the state attorneys’ offices and the state judicial police led to the breakdown of informal government protection networks for drug cartels in the 1990s and early 2000s. Cartels created private militias in response to this political uncertainty in Mexico’s gray zone of criminality, which allowed drug lords to defend their turf and challenge rival territory. Using a sequential analysis, we show how every new party alternation, starting in Baja California in 1989 up to Guerrero in 2005, stimulated an arms race among cartels and led to the proliferation of increasingly lethal dyadic conflicts in the northwest, northeast, and south of the country. By 2006, Mexico’s drug trafficking industry had experienced dramatic transformations: cartels used powerful private militias to settle disputes and the death toll surpassed the 1,000 murders threshold used to classify a conflict as a civil war.

This chapter unpacks the federal intervention in the War on Drugs and analyzes the strategies the president followed across states depending on governors’ political affiliations. We disaggregate the intervention on the military, judicial, communicative, and social policy dimensions and assess patterns of cooperation and conflict between federal and subnational authorities. Using extensive interviews with federal and subnational elites and case studies from three cities in three states, we show how Mexico’s federal government followed differentiated strategies to deal with drug violence. The president protected subnational co-partisans (PAN) in Tijuana (PAN); partially cooperated with centrist opposition authorities (PRI) in Ciudad Juáreza; but confronted leftist governors and mayors (PRD), leaving them at the mercy of drug cartels in Apatzingán. Cartels responded by launching strategic attacks and challenging their rivals in municipalities with vulnerable leftist states.Thus, the politicization of law enforcement in the War on Drugs – which was possible because Mexico transitioned to electoral democracy without developing the rule of law – became a major stimulant of violence.