Defeating Los Zetas. Organized Crime, The State and Organized Society in La Laguna, Mexico, 2007-2014

The narrative regarding criminal violence in Mexico tends to highlight the negative, while minimizing success stories: this book is different. It explains the reasons why the region of La Laguna succeeded in reducing the statistics of homicides and missing persons and how it started to attend to the families of victims. There were two key factors: 1) federal, state, and local government pushing aside party differences in order to coordinate efforts, and 2) dialogue and response to the petitions of social actors. The result is the best security model in Mexico. In this investigation —based on files of regional searches for missing persons and dozens of interviews with officials from all three levels of government, victims, businesspeople, and members of civil society organizations and the press— their story is told.