Crime, Kidnapping, and Liberalization in Mexico in the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries (1994–2015)

This chapter provides the political-economic context in which the book takes place. It describes the processes of liberalization and democratization which took place in Mexico from the 1960s and explores the relationship of these processes to crime—specifically, the non-intended consequence of higher crime rates and heightened social volatility. The rise of most types of crime since the mid-1990s is intimately tied to political economic processes that were gripping the country and the Latin American region at the time. They are, as this chapter will show, a by-product of deep economic and political changes—democratization and liberalization—that took place in Mexico from the mid-1980s. The chapter aims to provide the reader with a solid context on which to situate the analyses of kidnapping and trust explored later in the book.