Below you can find the latest projects I am working on.
Gifts or Gambits? Explaining the Provision of Goods and Services by Criminal Organizations
Submitted - Under Review
Organized criminal groups are typically viewed as violent, profit-driven actors. Yet, many also provide goods and services to civilians. While this practice is documented globally, its occurrence varies across communities. Why do criminal groups engage in the provision of goods and services? This study argues that the provision of goods and services by criminal groups is a strategic practice motivated by inter-group competition. In contested territories, criminal groups provide goods and services to build civilian loyalty, strengthen territorial control, and manage their public image. Using original data from Mexico, the analysis shows that competition is associated with higher levels of criminal provision of goods and services. Interestingly, criminal violence is not consistently associated with the provision of goods and services by criminal groups. This study contributes to broader debates on informal governance and strategic behavior of violent non-state actors.
LLMs for Classifying Organized Crime Events: An Evaluation of Automated Event Coding
This project evaluates the use of large language models (LLMs) to classify organized crime–related events in Mexico. I apply multiple LLMs to a corpus of more than 40,000 news articles and assess their ability to identify, categorize, and code criminal events. I compare LLM-generated classifications against human-coded data, examining accuracy, reliability, and reproducibility.
Winning Hearts and Minds: The Effects of Criminal Provision of Goods and Services on Public Sentiment
How do criminal organizations shape the way the media portrays them? Existing research shows that media narratives strongly influence public perceptions of organized crime, yet little work identifies whether criminal behavior itself affects these representations. This study argues that the provision of goods and services by criminal organizations can influence media framing. When criminal organizations provide goods and services, they generate community reactions that differ from those produced by violence, creating opportunities for journalists to frame criminal behavior in less exclusively threatening terms. To test this claim, the study analyzes more than 40,000 news articles in Spanish from local and national outlets in Mexico, linking variation in criminal behavior to shifts in media sentiment and narrative emphasis.
The Provision of Goods and Services by Criminal Organizations: A Theory of Extractors and Looters
Why do some criminal organizations provide goods and services while others do not? This study argues that variation in criminal provision emerges from the interaction between organizational characteristics and external competitive pressures. Hierarchical groups embedded in territorial markets behave like extractors that rely on stable relations with communities and provide selective goods and services to secure cooperation and community allegiance. In contrast, horizontal organizations engaged in mobile or transnational markets act like looters, prioritizing coercion and immediate profits. Competition—from rivals and the state—shapes whether these internal capacities and incentives translate into the provision of goods and services.
Drawing on interviews and qualitative data, the study examines three major criminal organizations operating in the state of Veracruz, Mexico: the Gulf Cartel, Los Zetas, and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG). Findings show that provision is a strategic tool to consolidate control and legitimacy, highlighting the mechanisms behind the provision of goods and services by profit-driven violent actors.