Mathematician Proves Math Can Beat Mexico's Cartels

Rafael Prieto-Curiel ran thousands of computer simulations and found something shocking: the more cartel members police arrest, the more violent Mexico becomes.

The Mexico City mathematician wasn't always fighting crime with equations. After a boring finance job, he joined Mexico City's police department in 2009, where just a few dozen officers stared at 12 screens each, watching 8,000 security cameras across 80,000 city blocks.

Prieto-Curiel built a model predicting when and where crimes would happen. Within a year, daily arrests jumped from one to 120, and response times dropped from 17 minutes to four.

But people didn't feel safer. That question haunted him enough to pursue a PhD at University College London.

There, he built a virtual city filled with thousands of digital people who could experience crime and gossip about it with neighbors. When he doubled the crime rate in his simulation, fear levels stayed exactly the same. Less crime didn't make people feel safer either.

The discovery explained why Mexico's citizens felt terrified regardless of what official crime statistics showed.

In 2023, Prieto-Curiel and two colleagues published research estimating that between 160,000 and 185,000 Mexicans work for cartels, making them Mexico's fifth-largest employer. To maintain that workforce, cartels recruit 350 to 370 new members every week through TikTok, video games, and force.

Then Prieto-Curiel modeled 150 criminal organizations with their members, alliances, and rivalries. He tested different scenarios across thousands of simulations: arresting leaders, fragmenting groups, cutting off recruits.

Only one strategy consistently reduced both cartel size and homicides: stopping recruitment.

Arresting or killing cartel kingpins mostly created splinter groups and fresh waves of violence. Even doubling prosecutions would leave Mexico with more deaths in 2027 than today, his model showed. Cartels simply recruit faster to replace their losses.

The Ripple Effect

Prieto-Curiel's 2024 breakthrough won the Complexity Science Hub's Science Breakthrough of the Year award. Now based in Vienna, he consults with the OECD and World Bank on urban security and crime.

His research gives Mexico something it desperately needs: a roadmap. Instead of the endless cycle of arrests creating job openings for new cartel members, his work shows that blocking recruitment through education, economic opportunity, and cutting off cartel messaging actually works.

Mexico's former president dismissed his findings without evidence, but the math doesn't lie. For the first time, Mexican officials have a proven strategy to actually reduce cartel violence instead of just shuffling it around.

One mathematician armed with equations might have found the answer that billions of dollars in enforcement couldn't.