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In the law – as in technology and other areas – such weaknesses often fuel calls for more power, such as property seizure, conspiracy and racketeering authorities, as used in the U.S. against the mafia. But without a better foundation of information, strategy, and coordination, such laws will be limited and ultimately counter-productive. Such calls also reflect a common paradox in Latin American police reform: both success and failure in battling crime lead to demands for stronger and more policing. Policymakers’ continuing ability to ignore such a contradiction is emblematic of their inability to embrace the true complexity of transnational crime policing.

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Overall, we were unable to get Mexico’s story right because we focused our attention into usual suspects like state capacity, judicial institutions and the instability of the democratization processes rather than in the ways in which all these variables were affecting the informal rules under which the state and criminals interacted. We failed to realize that the core of this story lay in the subtle world of the informal and the formal, and in the not very subtle ways in which these institutional worlds shape each other.

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