Gomorrah and Mexican Cartel Violence: Is the

Italian Camorra more violent than Mexican

Drug Cartels?
James Creechan, Ph.D. (Toronto, Canada)
May 19, 2009
Jean-François Gayraud includes the Camorra of Naples in his list of nine
important organized crime groups of the world. He does so even
though he acknowledges that the Camorra lacks the hierarchical
structure characteristic of other mafia organizations included in his
book.
“En la actualidad, la Camorra sigue siendo una entidad criminal atípica. A
diferencia de la Cosa Nostra, realiza un reclutamiento masivo y carece de un
jerarquía clara y estable. En realidad, se asemeja más a una federación de
conveniencia de bandas que aparecen y desaparecen que a una entidad
homogénea. El modelo sería más horizontal que piramidal. … No existe una
estructura permanente con functiones reguladoras, capaz de cortar y
controlar las explosions de violencia.”1 102

Roberto Saviano’s runaway bestseller, Gomorrah , similarly describes a

horizontal criminal organization that facilitates the control of imports
and exports through Naples and fosters profitable links with other
organized crime groups in Europe and Asia. Alexander Stille’s extended
essay review of Gomorrah praises Saviano for calling attention to an
organized crime group that had frequently been trivialized as less
important than other well-known crime organizations:
“That it took the garbage crisis, the recent killings, and Saviano's book to
make the Camorra a major issue is part of the tragedy. As Saviano readily
acknowledges, most of the information in his book has been in the public
record for years; it could be found in court records and government reports
that have been piling up like the trash that reemerged in Naples in the last
several weeks. Back in 1993, a report of the Italian parliament's anti-Mafia
commission issued a clear warning: ‘The Camorra is underestimated’."

Saviano’s description of Camorra clans is much more complete than

the general overview found in Gayraud’s book. (pp. 98-104)
Furthermore, Gomorrah also claims that the mafia of Campania is
more important than it is portrayed in El G 9 de las Mafias del Mundo,
especially when Saviano describes its control of global commerce
moving through Naples into the heart of Europe. Corruption and
extortion tainting all commerce, as well as the dominance in politics
permeates all aspects of life, and leaves the reader to only imagine the
enormous profit it generates for the Camorra coffers. Saviano put it
this way:

1
In fact, the Camorra continues as an atypical criminal group. Unlike the Mafia, it undertakes a
widescale recruitment and lacks a clear and stable hierarchy. In fact, in fact it most resembles
a convenient confederation of bands that appear and disappear than it does a homogeneous
entity. The model is more horizontal than pyramidal. … A permanent structure with regulatory
functions capable of stopping short and controlling explosions of violence doesn’t exist.

Draft: © James Creechan Sept 10, 2009 page 1 of 13

 “Everything that exists passes through here. Through the port of Naples.
There’s not a product, fabric, piece of plastic, toy, hammer, shoe, screwdriver,
bolt, video game, jacket, pair of pants, drill, or watch that doesn’t come
through here. The port of Naples is an open wound. The end point for the
interminable voyage that merchandise makes…It’s a bizarre thing, hard to
understand, yet merchandise possesses a rare magic: it manages both to be
and not to be, to arrive without every reaching it’s destination, to cost the
customer a great deal despite its poor quality, and to have little tax value in
spite of being worth a huge amount.” (p.4-5)

Unlike the widely-known Mafias and ‘Ndranghetta, the structure of

Camorra is less focused on hierarchy and less dependent on ritual, and
instead has been audaciously dedicated to a pure business model
generating unimaginable riches. Saviano distinguishes the difference
between the Sicilians and the Campanians in one extended quote from
the testimony of Camorra defector:
“One of the declarations about the Sicilian Mafiosi that shocked me most was
made by the Casalesi pentito Carmine Schiavone in a 2005 interview. He
talked about the Cosa Nostra as if it were an organization enslaved to
politicians and, unlike the Caserta Camorristi, incapable of thinking in business
terms. According to Schiavone, the Mafia wanted to become a sort of
antistate, but this was not a business issue. The state-antistate paradigm
doesn’t exist. All there is, is a territory where you do business— with, through,
or without the state.2” (190)

Saviano doesn’t dwell on macro and economic details of Camorra

corruption, extortion and money-laundering, but prefers to relate
personal narratives and vignettes from individuals sucked into an
organizational crime vortex fed by the business opportunities
associated with the port of Naples. In fact, this is the strength of his
book because it provides a rarely seen portrait of daily life in regions
controlled by organized crime. Many of his most memorable narratives
are graphic descriptions of violence during the many disputes and turf
wars that flourished unchecked by institutional self-regulating
processes. One extended example is described in chapter 4, the
Secondigliano War, where he relates the carnage that resulted when
non-hierarchical and competing clans of Campania attacked rivals over
turf, jealousy and most frequently over profitable opportunties.
Saviano carefully catalogues the casualties of those Camorra clan wars
within the Campania region over a quarter of a century :
“You don’t need to count the dead to understand the business of the
Camorra. The dead are the least revealing element of the Camorra’s real
power, but they are the most visible trace, what sparks a gut reaction. I start
counting” 100 deaths in 1979, 140 in 1980, 110 in 1981, 264 in 1982, 204 in
1983, 155 in 1984, 107 in 1986, 127 in 1987, 168 in 1988, 228 in 1989, 222 in
1990, 223 in 1991, 160 in 1992, 120 in 1993, 115 in 1994, 148 in 1995, 147 in
1996, 130 in 1997, 132 in 1998, 91 in 1999, 118 in 200, 80 in 2001, 63 in
2002, 83 in 2003, 142 in 2004, 90 in 2005.
Since I was born, 3600 deaths. The Camorra has killed more than the
Sicilian Mafia, more than the ‘Ndrangheta, more than the Russian Mafia, more
than the Albanian familes, more than the total number of deaths by the ETA in

2
Casaliti refers to the powerful Camorra clan from Casal de Principe as does Caserta. A pentito
is a “witness” or more appropriately someone who has “turned”.

Draft: © James Creechan Sept 10, 2009 page 2 of 13

 Spain and the IRA in Ireland, more than the Red Brigades, the NAR, and all the
massacres committed by the government in Italy. The Camorra has killed the
most. Imagine a map of the world, the sort you see in newspapers such as Le
Monde Diplomatique, which marks places of conflict around the globe with a
little flame, Kurdistan, Sudan, Kosovo, East Timor. Your eye is drawn to the
south of Italy, to the flesh that piles up with every war connected to the
Camorra, the Mafia, the ‘Ndrangheta, the Sacra Corono Unita in Puglia, and
the Basilischi in Lucania. But there’s no little flame, no sign of conflict.3”. (119-
120)

“(G)ut reaction” is an appropriate descriptor summarizing the reader’s

reaction to that routine violence producing almost 140 assassinations
each and every year, and Roberto Saviano’s homicide counts are
deliberatley drawn out in a year to year count to emphasize his belief
that the Camorra is more important than acknowledged. In fact,
Saviano audaciously claims that Camorristas are the most vicious when
he writes “The Camorra has killed the most”. This assertion was
prominently displayed on the jacket cover which reports that author
describes “an organized crime network more powerful and violent than
the Mafia”, and this focus on violence was also emphasized in external
reviews: Rachel Donadio is an example, and wrote the following in a
major review for the New York Times.
Since 1979, 3,600 people have died at the hands of the Camorra — more than
have been killed by the Sicilian Mafia, the Irish Republican Army or the Basque
group ETA. Just last month, the pope made a special visit to Naples to
denounce the “deplorable” violence in the region, the result of continuing
drug wars between rival clans. The dead do not leave this world peaceably. In
“Gomorrah,” bodies are decapitated with circular saws, strangled slowly,
drowned in mud, tossed down wells with live grenades, shot point blank near
a statue of Padre Pio. A young priest who dared speak out is murdered and
posthumously accused of cavorting with whores. Even after death, Saviano
writes, “you are guilty until proven innocent.”

Is the Camorra the most violent organized crime group?

Saviano does not compare Camorra carnage with other data about
organized crime casualties in either Colombia or Mexico! Perhaps it
was simply a matter of not thinking to make this comparison, or
perhaps he was blinded a the prevailing European view which
traditionally excludes Latin American organizations by default and
paradigmatically assigns them to a less important category of action in
the global economy. Neither did Jean-François Gayraud include Mexican
or Colombian organizations among his nine most important
transnational crime organizations since, in his interpretation, Mexican
and Colombian criminal groups do not meet the eight criteria he
posited as necessary to label a group as a transnational organized
crime unit: control of a territory, capacity to dominate social order,

3
It continues:
This is the heart of Europe. This is where the majority of the country’s economy takes shape. It doesn’t much
matter what the strategies for extraction are. What matters is that the cannon fodder remain mired in the
outskirts, trapped in tangles of cement and trash, in the black-market factories and cocaine warehouses. And
that no one notice them, that it all seem(sic) like a war among gangs, a beggars’ war. Then you understand the
way your friends who have emigrated, who have gone off to Milan or Padua, smile sarcastically at you,
wondering whom you have become. They look at you from head to toe, try to size you up, figure out if you are a
chiachiello or a bbuono. A failure or a Camorrista. You know which direction you chose at the fork in the road,
which path you’re on, and you don’t see anything good at the end

Draft: © James Creechan Sept 10, 2009 page 3 of 13

hierarchy and loyalty, ethnic and family ties, criminal diversity, myths
and legends, antiquity and permanence, and rituals of initiation4.

This exclusion of Latin American crime groups is not unusual. With the
notable exception of Luis Astorga, few scholars even think to ask
whether Colombian and Mexican Drug Trafficking Organizations (DTO’s)
should be called cartels and/or mafias. . At a cursory level, historical
patterns suggest that larger DTO’s in Mexico such the Tijuana DTO
(Arellano Felix family), the Juaréz DTO (Carrillo Fuente family), and the
various incarnations of the Pacific/Sinaloa/Federation DTO (Joaquin
Guzman Loera, Ismael Zambada, Juan-José Espararragoza Moreno, the
Beltran-Leyva brothers), the Gulf/Zeta DTO, and the Milenio DTO
actually meet most of the 8 criteria outlined by Jean François Gayraud.
Most Mexican DTO’s control turf, dominate social order within a region,
operate within a clear chain of hierarchy and loyalties, are rooted in
strong family ties and a symbolic compradazco, are increasingly
diverse in criminal involvement and international money laundering,
and are also reinforced by myths and cultural tradition (primarily
narcorridos
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4
Gayraud does not spend much time defining who is NOT in his book, but focused on the
characteristics of the 9 groups he DID include. He did identify the secret rites of initiation as
the “defining criteria”. As noted above, he also recognized that the Camorra was “atypical”
because of its horizontal and loosely structured organization.

Draft: © James Creechan Sept 10, 2009 page 4 of 13

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Draft: © James Creechan Sept 10, 2009 page 5 of 13
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ROb3RlPn== ). These Mexican groups cannot claim a record of
antiquity and permanence characteristic of Gayraud’s G9 members,
but the Sinaloa, Tijuana and Juarez groups have links going back about
one hundred years to opium production. To this point, there’s little
Draft: © James Creechan Sept 10, 2009 page 6 of 13
evidence or testimony suggesting that they employ rituals of initiation
— something Gayraud indicated was his definitive criterion for
inclusion in the select group of 9 Global Mafia, although there are
distinctive cultural symbols of narco involvement such as tattoos,
attraction to folk-religious practises such as the worship of Jesus
Malverde and La Santa Muerte.

Generally, one can make an argument that the larger DTO’s in Mexico,
especially those from the northwest have much more in common with
Camorra than they share with the other 8 hierarchical crime
organizations identified by Gayraud or those described by Saviano.
This is especially true of groups connected to the northwestern state of
Sinaloa, recognized as the “cradle of drug-trafficking” in Mexico. The
Sinaloa Federation may be horizontally organized but it is nevertheless
recognized as the most powerful crime organization by several
authorities (. The rare accounts focusing on individual participation and
responsibilities within those organizations also paint a picture of groups
and individuals with shifting loyalties much like those described in
Saviano’s portrayal of Camorra.

Saviano had argued that “you don’t need to count the dead to
understand the business of the Camorra” but perhaps this isn’t the
case for Mexican Drug Trafficking Organizations. Arguably, most
knowledge about the Mexican organizations is directly related to the
violence and terror that they’ve left in their tracks. Arguably, violence
is so pervasive that the extent, enormity and diversity of crime linked
to Mexican cartels remains obscure and undocumented. We simply
don’t see past the violence to look at the extent of their involvement in
business, money laundering, corruption, and even politics.

However, when one does count the dead to take a comparative look at
the business of the Camorra and the Mexican cartels, Saviano’s claim
that the Camorra is the most violent criminal organization is not
justified.

Comparative Homicide Levels

Anyone who has worked with international data realizes the difficulty of
doing a comparative analysis based on crime statistics. And even
though most criminologists have traditionally argued that homicide
data is subject to fewer problems of interpretation, it’s also true that
even homicide data may contain errors related to both reliability and
validity. Nevertheless, a comparative data analysis of Italy and Mexico
reveals such overwhelming differences in the levels of homicide that
they cannot be explained by measurement error.

In the following comparison, the “mafia” homicide data presented by

Saviano is accepted as a true value and estimate. Those numbers will
be compared to homicide data available from the Procuraduria de
Justicia General (PGR) of Mexico. Furthermore, the data from the PGR
was matched against newspaper reports of violent murders. The PGR
and newspaper data (primarily from Noroeste) are generally the same

Draft: © James Creechan Sept 10, 2009 page 7 of 13

with a few exceptions: most of the annual data reported below varies
by only a few cases in any one year, and the only year where there is a
serious discrepancy is for the last reported year from the State of
Sinaloa.

PGR data indicates three Mexican States— Baja California, Chihuahua

and Sinaloa accounted for almost 75% of homicidios dolosos recorded
in Mexico in 2008. These three states are also the “home turf” of three
of the largest drug cartels. Baja California is traditional home turf of the
Arellano Felix drug organization as well as under invasionary threats by
clans linked to the Beltran-Leyva family and Joaquin “El Chapo”
Guzman Loera operatives. Sinaloa is home turf of the “Federation” that
has been formed from various “alliances” that have included Ismael ‘El
Mayo Zambada’, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, the Carrillo
Fuentes family, Juan José ‘El Azul’ Esparragoza Moreno, and in the
north by the Beltran-Leyvafamily. Chihuahua is the traditional home
turf of the Juárez cartel made notorious by Amado “El Señor de los
Cielos” Carrillo Fuentes and still the recognized turf of the Carrillo
Fuentes family led by Vicente “El Viceroy” Carrillo Fuentes. Chihuahua
has recently been the battleground where incursions by hitmen
(sicarios) of ‘El Chapo’ Guzman Loera have been engaged in a bloody
turf war with both the Carrillo Fuentes and erstwhile allies and hitmen
directed by “los Zetas”.

Figure 1 indicates the disproportionate share of homicidios dolosos

found in these three states. In Mexican law, there are several
categories of homicide and the “doloso” categorization has an
approximate meaning similar to “homicide with felonious intent”.
Furthermore, not all homicides are investigated by the Federal
Procuraduria, and therefore are not counted in the annual statistics of
PGR homicidio dolosos. The PGR must assent to open a file (una
averiguación previa) before the homicide is recorded in this database.
In fact, the number of Mexican homicidios dolosos is significantly
higher for 2008 according to reports published in newspapers of record
such as Reforma, El Universal, and Noroeste. By most newspaper
accounts, there were more than 6,000 homicidios dolosos in Mexico in
2008, but Figure 1 refers to 4,459 murders.

What happened to the other 1500+ murders? Eventually, PGR records

may correspond to the newspaper accounts after the averiguación
previas are gradually filed. It may also represent a reduced number of
homicides for “optics” because the Mexican Federal Attorney General
Eduardo Medina-Mora Icaza and Mexican President Felipe Calderon
Hinojoso have consistently insisted that violence in Mexico is not as
bad as the international press reports. It is impossible to answer the
question about the 2008 at this point, but an earlier comparison of
annual data from previous years shows a very close correspondence
between the PGR counts and the data reported in newspapers. For
instance, most of the homicides reported in Noroeste are associated
with a specific victim name and the circumstances of their death. In

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years prior to 2008, the Noroeste data and the PGR data for Sinaloa
differ by no more than 5 cases out of several hundred.

Figure 1: Homicidios Dolosos in selected

Mexican States.

Another issue that must be considered is whether all of these these

specific homicides are the result of cartel turf wars and business. Once
again, a definitive answer isn’t possible but evidence strongly points to
a conclusion that 90 to 95% of all homicidio dolosos in Sinaloa, Baja
California, and Chihuahua can be attributed to criminal organizations.
The most compelling support for this argument comes from a personal
decade long interest in reading the crime reports in Mexican
newspapers: my personal data base of all Noroeste accounts of
homicide dating back to 1997 regularly includes a name and detailed
reports about circumstances of death. Almost all homicides included in
the PGR reports from Sinaloa involved large calibre weaponry
(primarily AK-47’s, a smattering of AK-15). Some resulted from the use
of grenades and even bazookas. Most reported death accounts include
tell-tale signs of cartel activity and markers such as dumping of bodies
in oil-cans (entambalados), in trunks (encajuelados), wrapping in
blankets and rugs and taping hands and mouth (cobijada), to even
more gruesome patterns such as decapitation and mutilation. The
reality is that local PGR officials tend to classify all non-cartel related
homicides as “homicidios de fuero común”, a lesser category.

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Saviano provides the raw numbers for a 26 year period beginning in
1979 and ending in 2005. This report does not have immediate access
to homicide counts in Mexico prior to 1997, and it will be limited to
making a comparison of the Neapolitano criminal syndicate for the
period 1997 to 2005 in order to examine Saviano’s assertion that the
Camorra is the most violent group of organized criminals and that they
have killed the most.

Figure 2 summarizes the raw total of murders between over the period
lasting from 1997 to 2005 for Campania (the Naples region), and the
Mexican States of Baja California, Chihuahua and Sinaloa.

Figure 2: Total number of executions over a 9

year period

It is obvious that each one of the Mexican States far exceeds the
number of homicides that Saviano attributes to the Camorra in
Campania. In fact, every one of the Mexican States recorded more
homicides during this specific 9-year period than Saviano reports for a
26 year period (“Since I was born, 3600 deaths”).

But these are raw totals, and criminologists rarely make comparisons
based on raw frequencies and counts. Table 1 includes descriptive data
that will permit an estimated comparative and relative interpretation of
the raw homicide counts.

Table 1: Comparative Data for Campania and 3 Mexican States

The population estimate for Campania is for 2008 and has been
rounded to the nearest 100,000. The population count the Mexican
States in 2008 is taken from the PGR and the Instituto ciudadano de
estudios sobre la inseguridad estimates . The column labeled Annual
Mean creates an average number of homicides per year for each of the
regions using the data for each of the nine years between 1997-2005.
The column labeled Est. Hom. Rate computes a standard rate per
hundred thousand population using the 9-year average as the incident
count and the 2008 population estimate. The serious homicide rate,
assumed to be primarily related to organized crime, is actually an

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underestimation because it uses the population of 2008 to compute a
rate based on an earlier time period (1997-2005)5.

United Nations Crime Trend Survey data for 2005-2006 indicates that
the intentional homicide rate for Italy was 1.04 in 1995 and 1.06 in
2006, and the data here suggests that Campania is significantly higher
by a factor of 1.5. This comparison of Campania with the overall Italian
rate provides tentative and partial support for Saviano’s argument that
the Camorra are more violent than other criminal groups within Italy6.
The overall UNODC intentional homicide rate for Mexico is recorded as
10.91 in 2005 and 10.96 in 2006, and the three drug states are
significantly higher as much as 1.7 times (Sinaloa).

One final way of looking at this data is reported in Figure 3 which

presents a graphical representation of the actual data over time for
Campania and for the three Mexican narco-dominated States. Not only
are the Mexican States more violent than the Camorra region on the
average (Figure 2), they are consistently higher by a significant
number over a significant period (at least since 1997). Furthermore,
the data in this figure also indicates that the numbers are increasingly
worsening and that the level of violence is not a short term
phenomenon. It is an ingrained aspect of life in those three Mexican
States and they have been plagued by violence for tragically long
period of time.

5
That is, the denominator is larger than it should be resulting in a smaller rate.
6
A comparison to all other Italian regions would be required to provide full support.

Draft: © James Creechan Sept 10, 2009 page 11 of 13

Figure 3: Comparison over Time

The data presented here should leave no doubt that the criminal
organizations in Mexico are significantly more violent in their actions
than is the Camorra. Many questions are raised by this short analysis,
but perhaps the most important one is ‘why hasn’t this violence come
to attention prior to recently? Although there have long been news and
journalistic accounts about cartels in Mexico, the issue has rarely been
examined in depth in academic circles. The factors explaining this lack
of attention to such a dramatic level of violence points to a significant
gap in the intellectual study of drugs, violence and transnational crime.

There are at least three important issues that must be examined in

more depth.

The most obvious question that must be explained is whether the

Mexican violence is different than the violence in Italy because the
market for the Mexican exports is the United States rather than the
Camorra focuson the markets central Europe. Has the American
demand for drugs and their willingness to pay for them created an
entirely different economy than the one exploited by the Camorra? Is
the substantive business of drugs so inherently violent that it routinely
generates more violence than other forms of illegality?

Another important question that must be answered is related to the

role of arms shipments and availability from an easy market on the
American side of the border. Saviano’sbook does include a chapter and
many references about the dominance of AK-47’s — a weapon he
reports has killed more people in the world than any other instrument.
Draft: © James Creechan Sept 10, 2009 page 12 of 13
AK-47’s are the weapon of choice for Mexican cartels, and most data
suggests that 90% of the armaments in Mexico are coming from arms
dealers located in the Sunbelt of the United States. What role, and
what circumstances, related to arms sales have led to a trend of killing
that makes these Mexican States as much as 12 times more violent
than the levels seen in Campania.

Finally, one must also explore how the Italian institutional context
differs qualitatively and substantively form the Mexican narco-cultural-
context. It’s clear that the Italian carabinieri and courts have long been
involved in a dedicated pursuit to control or reduce organized crime
and violence. Although it is obvious that it is not completely successful,
it’s also obvious that the Italian Courts and Police are less likely to be
corrupted by the drug business than have been their Mexican
counterpart institutions and agencies. How did this happen, and what
would Mexico have to do to imitate the Italian anti-mafia policies? But
the Mexican context may also be different contextually because the
mafias and organized crime groups in Mexico purportedly do appear to
control themselves in ways outlined by Gayraud. In Mexico, there have
been many claims made that the cartels were self-regulating in the
past, perhaps directly through the PGR and other justice agents. Did
the violence in Mexico emerge from a horizontal organization that was
non-cooperative and overly competitive, and lacking any “self-
controlling processes” to keep a lid on disputes arising between
various groups?

References

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