The employment of Armed Forces in the fight against organized crime the Mexican case

Abstract

International security studies have received a considerable impulse from the ideas of the Copenhagen School. One the School’s key concepts is the idea of the “securitization” of a variety of threats to the state and, as a matter of fact, drug trafficking, due to its scope and potential for compromising the state order, is undergoing a process of securitization in various regions of the world. Mexico is one of the countries that has suffered most from the action of organized crime linked to drug trafficking and has deployed its Armed Forces in order to answer to this threat. Thus, this study’s general goal is to analyze the Mexican state’s use of Armed Forces in the fight against organized crime. Its intermediate objectives are: (a) assessing the Armed Forces’ involvement in the fight against organized crime from the perspective of the theme’s securitization; (b) analyzing the role of drug trafficking as damaging to the Mexican social and political order; c) studying the historical background of this use of the Armed Forces, in the Mexican case. The study concludes with a discussion on the relevance, to the Mexican case, of the concept of securitization.