The Criminal Community of Victims and Perpetrators: Cognitive Foundations of Citizen Detachment from Organized Violence in Mexico
![handle is hein.journals/hurq38 and id is 1058 raw text is:
HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY
The Criminal Community of Victims and
Perpetrators: Cognitive Foundations of
Citizen Detachment From Organized
Violence in Mexico
Andreas Schedler*
ABSTRACT
After its successful transition to democracy, Mexico has experienced an
epidemic of organized societal violence known as the drug war that, to
date, has caused well over 100,000 casualties. Most of this violence has
been consigned to oblivion, without proper investigation or prosecution.
Victiims have been organizing and protcsting, yct ordinary citizens have
remained quiet, except for two short lived waves of nationwide protest.
As I hypothesize, a primary reason for their acquiescence is cognitive. The
framing of organized violence as a self-contained war among criminals
(bounded violence) erodes the attitudinal foundation of citizen solidarity
and sympathy with the victims of injustice. I explore the cognitive founda-
tions of citizen attitudcs towards victims on the basis of original data from
the Mexican 2013 National Survey on Organized Violence. Logistic regres-
sion analysis confirrnis the expected framing effect. Even when controlling
for alternative explanations, such as personal proximity to violence and
social proximity to its victims, the notion of bounded violence within a
criminal community induces citizens to view its victims with indifference.
* Andrp; Schedler is Prnfessnr nf Pnlitical Science at the Center for Fconomic Teaching
lnd Research (CID) in Mpyirn City tIis most recent hnnL piihlications ;ire The Politics of
Uw,!,, c inty, Sust.ining i..nd Subve hig Ek' iural r (O ffl lr 1jui ,uRiIy Press,
2013) and En la niebla dc la guerra: Los ciudadanos ante la violencia criminal organizada
[In the Fog of War: Citizens and Organized Criminal Violence in Mexico] (CIDE, 2015).
Human Rights Quarterly 38 (2016) 1038-1069 © 2016 by Johns Hopkins University Press](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/hurq38&div=67&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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