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A paper published by academics at Harvard University shows that, using simple and publicly available information, it is possible to track and gather information about Mexico’s 13 drug cartels. They created a tool, MOGO, that scours online information to gather reliable data about the cartels.

The paper, “How and where do criminals operate? Using Google to track Mexican drug tracking organizations,” was written by Michele Coscia and Viridiana Rios. The methodology  was pretty simple:

MOGO works in three steps. First, it denes the actors that will be identified, in this case an extensive list of criminal organizations and criminals and a list of locations. Then, we create set of queries to search for matches between criminal organizations and locations in the text of notes at Google News. We decided to use Google News as it organizes sources that are supposedly reliable (ocial newspapers and blogs). Queries use key words to make sure that searches are non-ambiguous. Finally, we store the hits that we obtained and identify the date in which the note was created.

After they filtered this data, they were able to discover, for example that  cartels only operate in 713 of 2,441 municipalities in Mexico, concentrated in areas near U.S. ports of entry or transportation routes associated with those ports. They also found that less than 44% of municipalities experienced drug-related murders.

The upshot is that, with this new tool, there’s a way to track drug cartels, since many Mexican journalists stopped writing about them in order to avoid becoming their targets. Read the whole paper here.

About Sara Inés Calderón (183 Posts)

Sara Inés Calderón is a journalist and writer who lives between Texas and California. Follow her on Twitter @SaraChicaD.