Schell Center Fellow Spotlight

Alejandro Madrazo Lajous and Catalina Pérez Correa, a pair of highly regarded academics and a married couple, are both Schell Center fellows visiting this year from el Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas. Their work spans a number of issues, including drug policy and criminal justice in Mexico. In the excerpted interview below, they discuss their research and their experience at the Schell Center.

Could you tell us about your work?

Alejandro Madrazo Lajous: My main academic agenda for the past six years has been setting up a drug policy program in Mexico. Mexico has been involved in a very, very costly drug war over the past decade, and, to my surprise, when the war began and the data started emerging, I saw very quickly that there were no academic institutions that were dedicated to studying drug policy – drugs were only on the agenda in spaces dominated by the health sciences and medicine. So, I proposed a drug policy program––a social science program––at my university’s new campus, and I’ve been basically working on that over the last six years.

My main concern has been the undermining of fundamental rights, both in law and in practice, throughout the drug war––rights such as due process rights, presumption of innocence. There’s a huge increase in torture, in extrajudicial executions, and a carving out of a separate criminal legal system for those accused by the government of being involved in drug crime or in organized crime in general. This is a system with reduced rights, arbitrary and unilateral decision-making processes, a lot of deference to prosecutors, and so on. It’s this bifurcation of the criminal justice system, among many other things, that I call the constitutional costs of the war on drugs. Constitutional costs involve not only due process issues but also federalism. We’re in the process of both undermining fundamental rights and centralizing our political system. Catalina sees this a lot, too, in her work on criminal justice.

That project pretty much concluded right before coming to Yale. Now I’m working on a long project, which I hope will become a second book, on the genealogy of constitutional imagination in Mexico – how we came to think of ourselves as a political community and in what ways. Specifically, since I got to Yale, I’ve narrowed this project down a bit and have focused on the significance of the Mexican-American War, and the Mexican defeat, to the conformation of the constitutional government in the mid-nineteenth century.

Catalina Pérez Correa: While doing my JSD at Stanford, I studied the public prosecutor in Mexico, and one of the things that I was trying to see was how public prosecutors’ practices were different to what was written in the law. So I did an ethnographic study of public prosecutors in Mexico City. Then I did some work on the police, and finally I started focusing more on prisons.

I surveyed inmates in federal prison to find out who they were, what crimes they were there for, and what their criminal process and background were like. A couple of years ago I also did a study showing how the use of prison affects not only the person you put in prison, but also their family. Women who sustain loved ones in prison are particularly affected by this dynamic. In the case of Latin America––this isn’t just Mexico––prisons don’t give inmates food, water, clothing, and so the family has to give that to inmates. So it becomes very burdensome to these people to maintain somebody in prison.

But in more general terms, the question has really been how the failure of civil institutions to actually provide an efficient and just criminal justice system has led to the militarization of state functions in Mexico: the military has taken over many of the functions that civil authorities should be doing in terms of criminal justice.

Now, I’m working on a manuscript for a book about the Mexican prison system, using data to analyze the system from different perspectives –  inmates', authorities', families' – but also from a theoretical, policy and health perspective.

AML: One thing that she doesn’t emphasize is that she was part of the team that started researching the lethality indexes of Mexican federal authorities in the context of the war on drugs and documented a phenomenon that is really without precedent, in which the lethality index of Mexican authorities when facing organized crime is really way higher than it is even in wartime. The highest ratio of people killed to people wounded in a war context that has been documented is .5 people killed for each person wounded. The ratios that Catalina has documented reach up to over 70 people killed for one person wounded. The data suggests a massive policy of extrajudicial executions in Mexico in the context of the war on drugs.

Have you done work together? Or has your work influenced each other’s?

CPC: I think a lot of our work comes together, such as the work I did on prisons. One of the things we found in federal prisons is that 60% of the people in federal prison are there for drug crimes. In the case of women, we found that 80% of the women we surveyed were in federal prisons for drug crimes. And the types of crimes that they’re in there for are not leading cartels. The people who are in are typically users or low-level dealers.

AML: We wrote a piece together for a law-sociology textbook on drug law and policy, really bringing together research that we had done previously. But there is dialogue in other pieces, too: for example her work on the lethality indexes was very influential on work that the Drug Policy Program has been doing on extrajudicial executions. My team found that for every time there was fire exchanged between presumptive drug traffickers and authorities, not only were there more people killed than wounded on average, as Catalina documented, but most of the people killed were killed in battles in which there were no people wounded.

CPC: So there were no survivors, unless some escaped. The military is actively trying to kill.

How has the field of drug policy changed over time?

AML: There has been a radical change: when we started working, it wasn’t really a field, at least not in Latin America.

CPC: And I think what we have seen in recent years is that the focus has changed from drugs to violence. We’re focused on understanding why our country is so violent, and how this dynamic changed so quickly, because the data we have from 2005 and 2006 shows that homicides were going down in Mexico. But the moment that the war was declared on drugs, that tendency changed rapidly, and homicides started increasing. They peaked in 2011, when we saw a scale of violence like we’ve never seen. What we see today in Mexico is that again we’re at the worst level that we were at in 2011.

AML: Probably higher.

CPC: It’s almost a quarter of a million people dead in eleven years. The homicide rate this year is 77 people per day. So there’s an epidemic that we are not yet prepared to deal with or to understand, and I think that the change in academia has been to try and understand all these different angles and how to deal with it.

The responses are very worrisome for people like us. We’ve studied constitutional law and we’ve studied legal systems and democracy, and the importance of these situations is to see that the response, at least from a very important sector of society, has been that what we need to do is curtail rights and bring out the military. And what we’re seeing is that this is only making things worse.

What has your experience at Yale and the Schell Center been like so far?

CPC: There’s a point where, when you’re in Latin America, and your social problems are so devastating and intense, academia becomes political and you somehow become activists and academics at the same time and it’s very difficult to disentangle them. And I think our time here at Yale, at least as we see it, is a possibility to move back a little from the activism, and to start looking again at the theories and the base knowledge that we need in order to understand these problems from a step back.

AML: I think her point is very important because when you start working on this in the context of the war on drugs, literally every piece you publish is political in and of itself. Here’s an example of how that plays out. In January there was a discussion on a bill that would further militarize the country. I was asked to present as an expert witness before the Senate. I presented the Drug Policy Program’s findings which included statistics that proved, for the first time, that there was a causal relationship between the entrance of the military in a specific population and the rise in the homicide rate (on average, three months after the military came in, there was a 9% rise in the homicide rate). Now, presenting that in the Senate immediately provoked a very political reaction, and we got critiqued by the former president of Mexico and his team of collaborators. So for the next three months, we were fighting off accusations of academic dishonesty from a former president in the media.

Now, that is not very amiable to thoughtful reflection on what the implications of the data are. So for instance, what I’ve been trying to do since I came here is withdraw a little bit from the war on drugs specifically and try to look at the broader horizon. I think Mexico is in a major constitutional crisis. Part of understanding how we got here and how we can crawl out is looking at different crises throughout Mexican history, such as the Mexican-American War. Just moving away from the month-to-month statistics of homicide and thinking about century-long historical periods allows you to think through these problems with a little more depth and a little more critical understanding of what the immediate data tells you.

CPC: I also think that being outside our country makes you think about your problems from a different perspective. Being here and reading the news and seeing what I would say, and I think I’m not alone in this, is the failure of social and democratic institutions, which here resulted in the election of Donald Trump and more importantly the divide we’re seeing today in American society––we see that also in Mexico, and other Latin American countries. In both places, we see the erosion of democratic institutions and the lack of responses to a way out of social problems like inequality, poverty, and violence.

AML: I am very grateful to the Schell Center for having brought us here. They invited us here both out of interest for our work, but more importantly out of a concern for the conditions that we’ve been working in in Mexico. Being here is both an important opportunity in intellectual terms––disengaging from the immediate as Catalina was saying––and also just to feel safer in doing my work. Over the last year in particular, we were engaged in very intense activism against the militarization bill. Having the safety of distance is important to be able to actually think things through.

What do you think needs to happen in Mexico to solve some of the problems you’ve been talking about?

AML: We need to stop thinking in terms of repression. There is a really, really ingrained culture of repression in the context of the war on drugs that has been set in place in large part due to the political investment of the Calderón administration with the drug war. For six years, the government hammered at the population at every possible moment that we were being threatened, that we stood before an existential threat of an enemy that was monster-like, and that the only way to do this was to kill it. And that really sunk in. During a major epidemic of violence, it’s very hard to ask people to actually look at the facts and not at their prejudices, even now that there’s abundant data and analysis that prove that the drug war not only has been a failure in terms in so far as it hasn’t achieved its ends, but also has been undermining the very capacity of the state to act in its most basic services. We are literally destroying the political community in the name of the war on drugs. Even though the evidence is there, and it’s pretty conclusive, it’s very hard to get across the message that we need to make a serious revision of this.