From the streets to the household: organized crime and gender-based violence in México

Abstract

This research estimates the causal effect of organized-crime violence on gender-based violence in Mexico. To identify exogenous variation in criminal violence, I exploit shocks to drug supply generated by monthly drug seizures conducted by the Mexican military, following the rapacity framework of Castillo et al. (2020). The empirical strategy instruments municipality-level organized-crime homicides using the log of kilograms of marijuana, methamphetamine, and heroin seized in a monthly municipality panel covering 2017–2020. This IV design isolates variation in violence driven by drug-market disruptions rather than local confounders. The exclusion restriction rests on the fact that seizure operations respond to the geography of trafficking networks, not to local determinants of gender-based violence in Mexican municipalities. The results show that increases in organized-crime homicides raise reported domestic violence, while the effect on rape is positive but imprecisely estimated. Complementary evidence using individual-level survey data shows that organized-crime violence disproportionately restricts women’s mobility relative to men’s, consistent with a deterioration in women’s outside options. The findings contribute to bridging the economics of conflict with the behavioral and household-bargaining mechanisms through which cartel violence spills over into the private sphere, a link with limited causal evidence in the Latin American context, where organized-crime violence, unlike conventional armed conflict, has received little attention in this literature.