Mexico’s gangs could be the country’s fifth-biggest employer
A recent paper suggests a novel way to curb their power
What would it take to tackle Mexico’s criminal organisations? That is a question that successive governments have tried and failed to answer. A crackdown on gangs from 2006 caused them to splinter. Violence increased. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s policy to deal with the root causes of crime is known as “Hugs not bullets”. A new paper published in Science by Rafael Prieto-Curiel, and his co-authors Gian Maria Campedelli and Alejandro Hope, suggests a novel answer: stop them recruiting.
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This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline “Criminal enterprise”
From the September 30th 2023 edition
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