How Mexican Judicial Reform May Have Fueled Crime: Arrest Trends and Trust Erosion

Yet, the reform overlapped with the declaration of the Mexican drug war by President Calderón, leading to the deployment of military forces to fight drug-trafficking organizations, the arrests of the most-wanted drug lords, and the intercepting of their shipments. [...] In addition, we gauge the validity of the parallel trends assumption, which would require homicide rates to have trended similarly across municipalities that adopted the reform and those that had not, in the absence of the reform itself. [...] For example, the state of Durango adopted the reform in the capital city of Durango in December 2009, and we coded the implementation as occurring in 2010.9 As a general rule, when the reform was adopted before July, we coded the implementation as taking place in the same year; otherwise, it was coded as occurring the year after. [...] Our outcome variable is a dummy variable equal to one if the household reported the crime to the authorities and zero otherwise.13 Using that information, we model the likelihood of reporting a crime across all 90+ municipalities, as well as according to whether the municipality was in a state with organized crime, as a function of the reform implementation and the controls included in the most co. [...] To confirm the role of individuals’ hesitance to interact with the criminal justice system due to diminished trust in the authorities or fear of retaliation, especially in states with organized crime, we examine crime reporting using data from the MxFLS and the ENVIPE.