Violence on the "Forgotten" Border: Mexico's Drug War, the State, and Paramilitarization of Organized Crime in Tamaulipas in a "New Democratic Era".

This paper explains the high levels of violence on the Mexican side of the Texas-Tamaulipas border. In general, this part of the U.S.-Mexico border has been overlooked by scholars, political analysts, and the media until recently when violence in the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas reached unprecedented levels. The study finds that the recent increase in violence in the so-called "forgotten" border has to do mainly with the following factors: deteriorated socioeconomic conditions, endemic corruption, the introduction of federal forces into the fight against drug trafficking groups, the new shape of the Mexican political system, the division between the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas, and the paramilitarization of those organizations. This last phenomenon is crucial to explain the situation of extreme violence in Tamaulipas, where the State seems to have lost the "monopoly" of the legitimate use of violence. In other words, the violence levels that are currently afflicting the territory of Tamaulipas are indicative of the degree of control and coercion that organized crime groups exert over this region of Mexico, at times even substituting the State as the legitimate purveyor of control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]