The “War on Drugs” in Mexico: (Official) Database of Events during the period from December 2006 to November 2011, Aggressions (A-A)

Autor(es): Laura Atuesta. Oscar S. Siordia, Alejandro Madrazo

Fecha: 2019-01-15

Warning

The opinions and data contained do not represent CIDE as an institution or its Drug Policy Program. The database that is made public here replicates as closely as possible to the database that was received from an anonymous source by the PPD (for purposes of this registration, the base received will be referred to as Mother Base). This Mother Base was submitted to a coding process to eliminate sensitive information, thus enabling its publication. The codified and public version that is disclosed here will be referred to as the DPP Event Base (EB-DPP). The Drug Policy Program carried out a validation process based on open sources of the events recorded here, which is described in detail in the descriptive article that accompanies this database (Atuesta, L. H., Siordia, O. S., & Lajous, A. M. (2018). The “War on Drugs” in Mexico:(Official) Database of Events between December 2006 and November 2011. Journal of Conflict Resolution, doi: 0022002718817093). This process is also described in the technical document attached to the descriptive article. The EB-DPP Base has two important limitations that must be taken into account when using it for exploratory or research purposes. The first consists of the lack of a documented source of the Mother Base, which gave rise to the EB-DPP database published here. The second is related to the methodology that is inferred was used to generate the information included in the Mother Base. With respect to the first bias, the DPP carried out the validation process, which is described in detail both in the descriptive article and in the technical document. The main objective of the validation process was to corroborate that the information obtained in the Mother Base had not been fabricated and that, in fact, corresponded to events that occurred in the context of the war on drugs during Felipe Calderón's six-year term. The DPP team concludes, after the validation process has been carried out, that the Mother Base corresponds to the main source with which the "Base of Deaths related to Presumed Delinquency Activity" was published on the Presidency page until the beginning of this administration; suggesting that the files contained in it are not manufactured but correspond to the corresponding administrative records. If in fact our conclusion is correct, the second limitation is a function of the methodology used to generate the information included in the Mother Base, and reported in the Methodological Guide (see Atuesta, Sánchez Siordia and Madrazo Lajous, 2018). We identified three main limitations related to this methodology: (i) the reason for which it was decided to collect the information in the Mother Base; (ii) differences in how the information was collected depending on the governing body that contributed the registration; and (iii) spatial and temporal differences in the information collected. These limitations and other biases are explored in detail in the descriptive article referred to above, which we recommend is considered a must read for anyone interested in using the database. The DPP team recommends researchers and users of the Base to read the descriptive article in detail to understand each of these limitations, and to draw their conclusions with caution, always taking into account the imperfections and limitations that were generated in the generation of the Base Mother. You can copy, distribute and use this work but for this it is mandatory to recognize the author's rights citing the author, mentioning that the work is deposited in the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics, AC, using the work only for purposes legal and respect the other terms of the Creative Commons License Attribution 2.5.

I have read and am aware of the limitations set forth in this warning.

At the beginning of the presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto, the CIDE Drug Policy Program received, anonymously, a disc containing various files. When we opened them, we found that it contained three databases, which recorded violent events that took place in the context of the so-called "war on drugs" during the government of Felipe Calderón, specifically, between December 2006 and November 2011. If it is reliable, the information contained there would make it possible to understand, from concrete facts, the development of the so-called "war on drugs" launched at the beginning of the previous administration. However, the anonymity of its source and the wealth of its information forced us to proceed with caution. We began a long process of reflection, discussion and treatment of the files in order to first validate the information and then prepare the database to be used by the general public without compromising the safety or reputation of the people involved in the events registered there. In the subsequent months, a multidisciplinary team of the Drug Policy Program in collaboration with CentroGeo, designed a validation and coding system for the information contained in the bases. The results of the validation and codification processes were satisfactory and, consequently, today we make public the database that we will call Base CIDEPPD, so that it can be used by anyone who wants to investigate drug policy during Felipe Calderón's six-year term based on the facts that constitute the core of the so-called "war on drugs".

The sample size is 53 variables and 1561 records in a period ranging from December 1, 2006 to November 30, 2011, describes the number of attacks by criminal groups towards a public security body.

Atuesta, L. H., Siordia, O. S., & Lajous, A. M. (2018). The “War on Drugs” in Mexico:(Official) Database of Events between December 2006 and November 2011. Journal of Conflict Resolution, doi: 0022002718817093.

Base de datos
Resumen

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