legados de la guerra de Independencia y la Revolución sobre la violencia criminal en México

This paper o ers a novel approach to the study of criminal violence in Mexico by focusing on its historical connections with the War of Independence and the Revolution. We nd that criminal violence is mainly concentrated in municipalities that had a rebel presence during the Mexican Revolution. In turn, the municipalities where royalist militias were created during the War of Independence show less criminal violence today. This legacy of violence appears to travel through two causal paths. Firstly, the most violent municipalities today are those that had on average a lower presence of indigenous institutions during the viceroyalty (the so-called pueblos de indios). Second, municipalities with a higher local state capacity in the late 19th century are better at containing contemporary criminal violence. In contrast, the various land reforms of the authoritarian period do not appear to have a systematic e ect on reducing criminal violence.