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Lawfare Archive: Stephanie Leutert on Violence in Mexico and Central America

March 1, 2026·38 min·3 clips

Since 2005, at least 180,000 Mexicans have been murdered or disappeared, with violence surging again this year.

This Lawfare Archive episode, re-aired in March 2026 following the killing of Jalisco New Generation Cartel leader El Mencho, features Stephanie Leutert discussing the security crisis across Mexico and Central America with host Benjamin Wittes. Leutert describes the Mexico Security Initiative at UT Austin's Straus Center, created to fill a void in policy-relevant security research about a country that shares a 2,000-mile border with the U.S. and is its second-largest export market. She argues that Mexico's proximity to the U.S. paradoxically causes it to receive less serious national security attention, because the issues touch sensitive domestic policy nerves around immigration and border security. The scale of violence is stark: at least 150,000 murdered and 25,000-30,000 disappeared Mexicans since 2005, with the true number likely closer to 200,000. Homicide rates per 100,000 people run at 5 in the U.S., 13 in Mexico, 30 in Guatemala, 57 in Honduras, and 103 in El Salvador. Leutert emphasizes that Mexico is simultaneously a world-class economy with a strong aerospace and automotive sector and a country with pockets of extreme violence in remote states like Tamaulipas, Veracruz, and Michoacan. The discussion breaks down the actors producing body counts: traditional cartels like Sinaloa, hyper-violent new-generation groups like the Zetas and Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion that embrace and publicize extreme violence, local street gangs that operate as franchises of larger organizations, and police and military forces accused of their own human rights violations. Leutert traces how MS-13 originated among Salvadoran migrants in Los Angeles who formed gangs for protection, became more violent through exposure to established gangs in U.S. prisons, then were mass-deported back to a post-civil-war El Salvador that provided fertile ground for their expansion. On U.S. policy, Leutert notes that seemingly good policies often create bad consequences: deporting criminals lowered U.S. urban violence but created El Salvador's security crisis, while targeting cartel kingpins like El Chapo produces splintering and more violence as factions fight over territory. Migration from Central America has continued at roughly 5,000 unaccompanied children per month, though improved processing systems have moved it out of the headlines. Asylum cases for gang violence are difficult to win because U.S. asylum law was not written for people fleeing profit-motivated criminal organizations rather than state persecution. Leutert identifies conditions in short-term border detention centers as the most fixable policy failure, where processing facilities designed for a few hours of holding are housing migrants including small children for 72 hours on concrete floors with inadequate food, blankets, and temperature control.

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