Government Crackdowns and the Transformation of Mexican Drug Cartels

This event is hybrid, to attend remotely register here.

This research project explores how the Mexican War on Drugs prompted drug cartels to diversify their activities and expand their geographic presence beyond their historical strongholds. Focusing on oil theft, it then explores the intrusion of cartels into new territories and analyzes its impacts on politics, crime, and violence.

Speaker: Marco Alcocer, Academy Scholar, The Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.

Moderated by Steven Levitsky, Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.

Marco Alcocer studies the politics of violence and crime. Marco is an Academy Scholar at The Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, and incoming Assistant Professor at the University of California, Merced. Previously, he was a Predoctoral Fellow at ITAM and Innovations for Poverty Action in Mexico City and a Fellow at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies. Marco holds a PhD from the University of California, San Diego.

Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, with a focus on Latin America. He is co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times Best-Seller and was published in 25 languages. He has written or edited 12 other books, including Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2003), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (with Lucan Way) (Princeton University Press, 2022), and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point (with Daniel Ziblatt) (Crown Publishers, 2023). He and Lucan Way are currently working on a book on democratic resilience across the world.

Presented in collaboration with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs