How Is Organized Crime Organized? Understanding the Political Economy, Industrial Organization, and Recruitment Into Organized Crime in Colombia
Principal Investigator: Christopher Blattman, University of Chicago
Years of award: 2024-2027
Managing Services Agency: Air Force Office of Scientific Research
Project Description:
Organized crime is the main driver of violence, corruption, and the weakening of democratic trust among U.S. allies in the Americas. Research has overlooked a critical threat: the development of powerful “bottom up” criminal organizations that control vast swaths of major cities and prison systems. We propose a three-pronged study of how systems of urban organized crime operate, form, and cohere. We investigate a set of broad, general hypotheses, using variation in Medellín, Colombia, to investigate three questions: First, how the city’s gangs and confederations form, and what incentives, institutions, and state policies helped them hold together over time? Second, who joins these organizations, why, and what incentives are used to keep members united and focused. We will measure and structurally model what motivates and predicts entry into armed groups. Our early evidence suggests that the adolescents most interested in gangs are those who underestimate their legal opportunities and earnings (or who are misled by gangs). Third, we are interested in the two main sources of criminal earnings—drugs and extortion—how these markets operate, and what makes some revenue sources more vulnerable to intervention. We hypothesize that extortion is especially vulnerable to “conditional repression” strategies by the state, and we propose to test our theory via the first gang-level field experiment to date (anywhere in the world). The infrastructure and relationships we have built, plus Medellín’s unusual data availability and the openness of the authorities to cooperate provides a unique opportunity to advance our general understanding of gang organization, recruitment, revenues, and cohesion.