Bargaining with criminals: The morality of witness collaboration in Mexico's “war on drugs”
| Author | Juan Espindola |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806211072859 |
| Published date | 01 February 2023 |
| Date | 01 February 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Bargaining with criminals:
The morality of witness
collaboration in Mexico’s
“war on drugs”
Juan Espindola
National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico
Abstract
Public authorities take considerable and oftentimes controversial steps in their efforts to
dismantle criminal organizations involved in drug trafficking and related crimes in
Mexico. Among other things, they recruit offenders who abandon their criminal organ-
ization and strike a deal with law enforcement agents and prosecutors to share informa-
tion about their co-perpetrators in exchange for leniency in sentencing as well as of
protection from retaliation. This article explores whether the deployment of collabora-
tors is morally permissible in view of the significant risks it exposes them to, most not-
ably retaliatory aggressions. The article examines the underlying philosophical problem
regarding the justifiability of deploying collaborators in the social and political circum-
stances prevailing in the country. The normative framework I advance to explore the
Mexican case can be useful in examining the ethical implications of using collaborating
witnesses elsewhere.
Keywords
Collaborators, criminal justice, just intelligence, punishment and society, war on drugs
Public authorities take considerable and often controversial measures in their efforts to
confront drug trafficking and related crimes in Mexico. Among other measures, they
recruit, deploy, or “turn”significant numbers of individuals to obtain information
Corresponding author:
Juan Espindola, Research Fellow, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Institute for Philosophical
Research, 7180, Circuito Mario de la Cueva, Ciudad de Mexico 04510, Mexico.
Email: juanespindola@comunidad.unam.mx
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2023, Vol. 27(1) 5–22
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13624806211072859
journals.sagepub.com/home/tcr
about criminal organizations and their operations. Collaborating witnesses, or testigos
colaboradores, fall within this category. They are offenders who abandon their criminal
organization and strike a deal with Mexican law enforcement agents and prosecutors to
share information about their co-perpetrators in exchange for leniency in sentencing.
Similarly, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) heavily relies on collaborating witnesses
in its operations in Mexico and elsewhere. In both cases, which are the focus of the article,
public authorities—in Mexico and the USA—have determined that enlisting collabora-
tors in the service of the criminal justice system is worth the risk of retaliatory aggressions
and other consequences. This article calls into question the morality of that determination.
Even if it turned out that the abuse of the system for collaborators can be eradicated
and the practice reformed, there is still room to question the morality of the practice.
Above all, this article argues that the use of collaborators ought to be regulated and con-
strained according to clear and defensible principles, in particular, principles of propor-
tionality and necessity, as they are commonly understood in the literature on just
intelligence. As I shall argue, intelligence involving collaborating witnesses in Mexico
commonly fails to honor these principles, however, in part because of the institutional
and socioeconomic conditions in the country, which include extraordinary violence
and pervasive corruption, exacerbate the potential risk of harm to collaborators them-
selves and to ordinary citizens.
To anticipate the gist of the argument in the following sections, I shall contend more
specifically that in light of the harm inflicted on collaborators, and in some cases on the
citizenry, the use of collaborators in Mexico is a disproportionate and sometimes even an
unnecessary intelligence measure. Although intelligence work inherently entails uncer-
tainty, particularly of the epistemic kind, for collaborating witnesses and civilians, the
degree of uncertainty varies depending on the context. In a constitutional democracy,
with low levels of corruption, strong security and justice institutions, and moderate
level socioeconomic deprivation, the uncertainty diminishes considerably. Conversely,
in countries such as Mexico, where authoritarian enclaves persist within formally demo-
cratic institutions, and where corrupt and unaccountable public officials, weak security
and public institutions, rampant violence, and precarious socioeconomic conditions
prevail in many regions of the country, the margins of uncertainty for intelligence
work widen considerably, putting both collaborators and civilian population at grave
risk. In such settings, intelligence interventions that rely on the work of collaborating wit-
nesses and informers will tend to be disproportionate, even if necessary, to the detriment
of intelligence agents themselves as well as civilians. In situations of epistemic uncer-
tainty arising from institutional deficits or social violence, a restrictive view of propor-
tionality is the morally appropriate path for intelligence operations.
In considering this topic, several questions arise. Why focus on collaborators and the
perils they go through as they become state witnesses, for example? Are they not, after all,
secondary figures in the landscape of drug violence in Mexico? What does the fate of a
handful of collaborators (most of them morally and legally culpable to some extent)
matter compared to the plight of the hundreds of thousands of the innocent victims of
drug violence, some of it perpetrated by these very same collaborators?
For theoretical purposes, exploring the Mexican case illuminates the moral implications
of using collaborating witnesses elsewhere. Scholarly work on the ethics of knowledge
6Theoretical Criminology 27(1)
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