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Introduction

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Democracies at War Against Drugs

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Abstract

This book addresses in detail the causes and consequences of deploying the military as police to fight drug gangs and organizations. It shows that military operations have a limited effect in controlling crime in the medium and long term, but transform legislation, jurisdiction, military doctrine, and education. Because of those changes, politicians are increasingly relying on the military to provide security and appease the population’s demands for security.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    According to official data managed by US border agencies, about 70,000 vehicles and 20,000 pedestrians cross San Ysidro port of entry each day (U.S. General Services Administration, 2021).

  2. 2.

    A maquiladora plant imports raw materials, components, and equipment from the US; process them in Mexico and ships them back to the US. NAFTA permits to import raw materials and machinery to Mexico without paying import tariffs, whereas import duties back to the US only refer to the value added by manufacturing in Mexico (Carrillo, 2017, p. 668).

  3. 3.

    Histórico de operações GLO—2010 a 2015. The joint operations division within the Ministry of Defense, Brasília, provided the document by email.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Florianópolis, Brazil

    Anaís Medeiros Passos

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Correspondence to Anaís Medeiros Passos .

Appendix: Methodology

Appendix: Methodology

This book draws on exhaustive fieldwork research to provide an in-depth account of military intervention in anti-crime activities. I conducted a total of 100 semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions, most of them taped, in the cities of Mexico City, Tijuana, Rio de Janeiro, Brasília, and São Paulo from February to August 2016 and October to November 2017. Interviewees ranged from those involved at the higher-level of negotiation to street-level agents (including police and military officers), as well as citizens who had been particularly impacted by the operations. I interviewed high-ranking military officers (active-duty and retired); politicians from the federal, state, and local levels; middle-ranking military officers; members of the judiciary; police officers who took part in these operations; NGO activists, civil society leaders, and residents from areas where a military operation happened. The combined criteria for accessing informants were their representativeness (in the case of military officers, various ranks; citizens, diversity in age, gender, and ethnicity) and snowball sampling (participants provided contact information of future interviewees).

Afterward, I transcribed all interviews and subsequently codified them in order to highlight similarities and differences across cases. Furthermore, I contrasted the answers I got in interviews with data collected from other sources, including newspapers, legal processes, official statistics, NGO reports, and specialist magazines of the Armed Forces, which served as a secondary source to construct accounts. For ensuring reliability of the analysis, I kept meticulous notes during the fieldwork regarding the conditions under which the interview took place. Subsequently, I used triangulation of the sources of data mentioned above and reflexivity as a means of validating my research findings and developing a more accurate and comprehensive account of the cases studied.

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Medeiros Passos, A. (2022). Introduction. In: Democracies at War Against Drugs . The Sciences Po Series in International Relations and Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11327-7_1

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