Viridiana Rios: To Win the Mexican Drug War, You Have to Know Who the Enemy Is Viridiana Rios - The Washington Post
go to original April 15, 2013

The writer is a fellow in inequality and criminal justice at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. From 2010 to 2012, she and Michele Coscia, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Center for International Development, studied how and where Mexican drug cartels operate.

The U.S. government has spent $1.6 billion to help Mexico end a war between drug cartels that has killed 63,000 people south of our border in the past six years. Yet many of our assumptions about this war are wrong.

As part of a study tracking the behavior of Mexico’s organized-crime groups, a colleague and I created an algorithm that uses Google to explore blogs, newspapers and news-related Web content and extract detailed data about how Mexican drug cartels operate. Our tool reads everything published and indexed as part of Google News and collects all the information the Web contains about the activities of the cartels, including their routes of expansion, since the 1990s. Our discoveries shocked us and surprised the U.S. officials who reviewed our findings.

The United States may be helping Mexico fight the wrong war because we do not know who the enemy is.

Read the rest at The Washington Post

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