Changing Minds: Understanding Collective Violence in the Southeastern US–Mexico Border from a Public Health Perspective

Organized crime is usually approached as a criminal issue. Today, however, a rising number of scholars, political leaders, and policymakers accept that this strategy has failed. This bi-national study suggests that collective violence, the study of organized crime-related homicide, should be treated as a public health issue. Can organized crime violence along the US–Mexico border be considered an “epidemic”? Can epidemiological approaches to organized crime violence increase knowledge about the root of the problems? This paper answers these issues by applying the first two steps—describing, monitoring, and tracking the problem; and identifying factors that trigger violence—of the (four-steps) public health approach to the violence that has affected the Southeastern US–Mexico border from 2005 to 2013. The authors argue that the northern states of Mexico—Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas—experienced an epidemic of collective violence from 2008 to 2014. More specifically, they describe organized crime-related homicides, its patterns and trends in the four Mexican states mentioned above, plus Texas, through an analysis of homogeneity, incidence, predisposition, enabling and disabling factors, precipitating factors, and reinforcing factors. Public health methods allow researchers and policymakers to promote integrative leadership, identify best practices from learn-as-we-go approaches, and create policy evaluations for each agency meant to intervene on this issue. Consequently, further steps in this agenda call for expanding the study to the others phases of the public health approach: designing and evaluating prevention policies, and disseminating and executing prevention strategies.