This is an examination of the challenges Mexico faces in reforming the administration of its justice system - a critical undertaking for the consolidation of democracy, the well-being of Mexican citizens, and US-Mexican relations.

Mexico's Unrule of Law: Human Rights and Police Reform Under Democratization looks at recent Mexican criminal justice reforms. Using Mexico City as a case study of the social and institutional realities, Niels Uildriks focuses on the evolving police and justice system within the county's long-term transition from authoritarian to democratic governance. By analyzing extensive and penetrating police surveys and interviews, he goes further to offer innovative ideas on how to simultaneously achieve greater community security, democratic policing, and adherence to human rights.

This report examines Mexico's progress toward implementation of the country's "new" criminal justice system, which introduces the use of oral, adversarial proceedings and other measures to improve the handling of criminal cases in terms of efficiency, transparency, and fairness to the parties involved. The report provides a general background on the 2008 judicial reform initiative, and examines Mexican government efforts to implement the reforms at the federal, state, and judicial district level, relying on a unique dataset and maps generated by the Justice in Mexico program based at the University of San Diego. As an additional resource, this report also contains a translation of the 2008 constitutional changes underlying the reforms

The urgent need to professionalize Mexican police has been recognized since the early 1990s, but despite even the most well-intentioned promises from elected officials and police chiefs, few gains have been made in improving police integrity. Why have reform efforts in Mexico been largely unsuccessful? This book seeks to answer the question by focusing on Mexico's municipal police, which make up the largest percentage of the country's police forces. Indeed, organized crime presents a major obstacle to institutional change, with criminal groups killing hundreds of local police in recent years. Nonetheless, Daniel Sabet argues that the problems of Mexican policing are really problems of governance. He finds that reform has suffered from a number of policy design and implementation challenges. More importantly, the informal rules of Mexican politics have prevented the continuity of reform efforts across administrations, allowed patronage appointments to persist, and undermined anti-corruption efforts. Although many advances have been made in Mexican policing, weak horizontal and vertical accountability mechanisms have failed to create sufficient incentives for institutional change. Citizens may represent the best hope for counterbalancing the toxic effects of organized crime and poor governance, but the ambivalent relationship between citizens and their police must be overcome to break the vicious cycle of corruption and ineffectiveness.

Latin America suffered a profound state crisis in the 1980s, which prompted not only the wave of macroeconomic and deregulation reforms known as the Washington Consensus, but also a wide variety of institutional or 'second generation' reforms. 'The State of State Reform in Latin America' reviews and assesses the outcomes of these less studied institutional reforms. This book examines four major areas of institutional reform: a. political institutions and the state organization; b. fiscal institutions, such as budget, tax and decentralization institutions; c. public institutions in charge of sectoral economic policies (financial, industrial, and infrastructure); and d. social sector institutions (pensions, social protection, and education). In each of these areas, the authors summarize the reform objectives, describe and measure their scope, assess the main outcomes, and identify the obstacles for implementation, especially those of an institutional nature.

One of the most surprising developments in Mexico's transition to democracy is the outbreak of criminal wars and large-scale criminal violence. Why did Mexican drug cartels go to war as the country transitioned away from one-party rule? And why have criminal wars proliferated as democracy has consolidated and elections have become more competitive subnationally? In Votes, Drugs, and Violence, Guillermo Trejo and Sandra Ley develop a political theory of criminal violence in weak democracies that elucidates how democratic politics and the fragmentation of power fundamentally shape cartels' incentives for war and peace. Drawing on in-depth case studies and statistical analysis spanning more than two decades and multiple levels of government, Trejo and Ley show that electoral competition and partisan conflict were key drivers of the outbreak of Mexico's crime wars, the intensification of violence, and the expansion of war and violence to the spheres of local politics and civil society.