Why are Mexican mayors getting killed by traffickers? The dynamics ...

states which can central-enforce and provide public services.
In short, because legal trade increases illegal profits, even very powerful DTOs may find it
harmful to dismantel the state and/or to substitute it by a parallel criminal state. Actually,
the best scenario for DTOs is one in which they do not have to take the cumbersome and
overly public task of ruling a country themselves. Traffickers prefer to outsource politics to a
sufficiently strong and centralized government that will ensure the survival of illegal businesses.
The paradox of the political/criminal nexus is a simple but powerful one: having a state reduces
operational costs for drug traffickers (e.g. provides infrastructure, and increase legal trade) but
also weakens traffickers because dealing with the state may entail non-trivial monetary costs
(i.e. bribes).
Lemma 1: Organized crime (i.e. a group of drug traffickers (N)) prefers to have a legitimate
state (i.e. a group of politicians (A)) than to become the state, independently its relative
strength (P n ) versus that of the state (P a ).
Given Lemma 1, a question remains as to which would be the mechanism used by criminals
and politicians to interact. In the following section, I introduce the traditional way in which the
relationship between politicians and traffickers has been understood by the literature (“Silveror-lead”
argument).
2 Corruption mechanics: a bargain game between criminals
and politics
The political/criminal nexus between organized crime and politicians has so far being understood
as a very straightforward exercise described by the “silver-or-lead” dichotomy. Those
politicians ruling in areas of interests for traffickers have to decide between accepting bribes
(silver) and getting killed (lead). According to this narrative, bribes are determined by how
costly corruption is for politicians, as well as by the relative power of traffickers versus the state
(Bo etal 2006). The price of a bribe thus is the outcome of a rational calculation.
The price of bribes is determined by the relative power of the state versus traffickers. As
a government becomes more powerful (i.e. able to enforce law), its ability to extract traffickers’
profits via bribes increases. On one side of the spectrum, a powerful government extorts
traffickers keeping most of the illegal profits for itself. Such would be the case of Montesinos at
Peru, and the Communist Party at China. On the other side, traffickers retain almost all profits
for themselves with small –or non-existent– bribes for authorities. Such would be the world of
trafficker organizations that have managed to work in a virtual autonomy from the state, such
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