Jannice Gallagher The Last Mile Problem

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CPSXXX10.1177/0010414016688001Comparative Political StudiesGallagher
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Comparative Political Studies
2017, Vol. 50(12) 1666–1698
The Last Mile Problem: © The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0010414016688001
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Justice in Domestic
Courts
Janice Gallagher1
Abstract
The ability of a state to protect its own citizens’ lives is a key part of democratic
legitimacy. While the right to physical integrity is nearly universal, holding
those who violate this right legally accountable has proved difficult. I argue
that the dynamics between civil society groups and government officials can
activate investigatory processes plagued by bureaucratic inertia. I develop
two analytical categories of civil society actors: Activists impose a political
cost to impunity and challenge victim-blaming narratives, whereas advocates
facilitate the flow of investigative information between state officials and
family members of victims. Drawing from original statistical, ethnographic,
and interview evidence, I find that a synergistic political dynamic between
activists and advocates can emerge in which political pressure is mounted
by activists and channeled into investigatory advances by advocates. While
local groups usually anchor these activist–advocate dynamics, international
actors may play definitive roles in disrupting tenacious patterns of impunity.
Keywords
social movements, human rights, judicial systems, Latin American courts,
NGOs, violence
1Rutgers University–Newark, NJ, USA
Corresponding Author:
Janice Gallagher, Department of Political Science, Rutgers University–Newark, 360 Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. Blvd., Hill Hall Room 719, Newark, NJ 07102, USA.
Email: janice.gallagher@rutgers.edu
Gallagher 1667
Introduction
Legal and human rights norms against violations of the right to physical
integrity are clearly defined and established in all democracies.1 Implementing
these well-established legal norms—traversing the “last mile” from written
law to practice—has proved to be a tenacious problem, frustrating policy-
makers, scholars, and citizens. What stands in the way of the successful pro-
tection of this right and the adjudication of those who commit acts of lethal
violence? This article examines the interactions between organized citizen
groups, their allies, and state investigators as a window into understanding
the power relationships and mechanisms that produce both legal progress and
inertia. I use original data to address one important part of the last mile prob-
lem: the judicial fate of cases of homicides and disappearances in domestic
courts. Employing a least likely research design in two democracies strug-
gling with high rates of lethal violence and impunity, Mexico and Colombia,
I explore whether civil society actors are able to drive judicial progress2 in
lower courts under these adverse circumstances.
A diverse range of scholars have looked beyond institutional explanations
to organized citizens as motivators of stronger rule of law and the expansion
and enforcement of citizen rights (Epp, 1998; Keck & Sikkink, 1998;
Kleinfeld, 2012; McCann, 1994; Peruzzotti & Smulovitz, 2006; Simmons,
2009). This article follows the lead of recent scholarship that has honed in on
how nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and social movements can
improve legal accountability in domestic courts, and promote the diffusion of
legal visions and practices aligned with international treaties and human
rights obligations (Brinks, 2008; Dancy & Michel, 2016; Gonzalez Ocantos,
2014; Michel & Sikkink, 2013). Domestic courts—especially lower level
courts—are a crucial battleground for the right to physical integrity, given
that criminal homicides are the most common form of lethal violence in the
world3; these rights violations are overwhelmingly processed in domestic
courts; and states do a poor job of punishing those who violate this right.4
Debates over how to strengthen courts, build the rule of law, and the efficacy
of organized citizens and human rights advocacy all hinge on how to success-
fully change state behavior. Understanding the crucial final steps involved in
claiming and enforcing the well-established right to physical integrity is a
central but relatively little understood part of all of these debates.
To these ends, I present original data from Mexico and Colombia at the
national, subnational, organizational, and individual level. Within each level
of analysis, I ask why some cases of homicides and disappearances are inves-
tigated and enter the judicial pipeline while the majority languish.5 To test the
hypothesis that cases that are the focus of NGOs and civil society groups’6
1668 Comparative Political Studies 50(12)
organizing and advocacy efforts will be relatively more successful than aver-
age cases, I focus on NGOs that accept cases based on the category of the
lethal violence (disappearance, homicide, enforced disappearance) rather
than the individual merits of the case (strong evidence, sympathetic victim,
potential for important legal precedent). This allows me to isolate the effects
of their intervention at the case level. Triangulating among statistical evi-
dence, semistructured interviews, and ethnographic evidence, I find that
cases that are the target of civil society action are more than twice as likely to
show evidence of investigatory activity than the average case reported to the
state. These civil society efforts are not sufficient, however, as most accom-
panied cases do not show significant judicial progress.
The Argument: Activists and Advocates

To explain why some cases that are taken up by civil society organizations
progress while others stall, I develop two original analytical categories (see
Figure 1) to understand how the actions of family members of victims of
lethal violence and their social movement and intergovernmental allies can
drive judicial progress. First, I argue that activists can be key to challenging
systemic normative biases that criminalize victims of violence and preclude
Figure 1. Activists and advocates.

Gallagher 1669
them from justice. Activists contradict state narratives that blame victims,
reframing these victims of lethal violence as innocent subjects who deserve
justice. Activists also impose a political cost to impunity on judicial and state
officials through the well-documented practices of public naming and sham-
ing (Franklin, 2008; Murdie & Davis, 2012; Ron, Ramos, & Rodgers, 2005;
Schmitz, 2002). They are usually institutional outsiders—NGOs, social
movements—who demand structural change, and take a consistently and
vocally critical role of the state’s justice system. Activists may have little
contact with the state, or the contact they have may be hostile and conten-
tious. Their distance from or hostility to the state may be dictated by an
aggressive state that criminalizes victims and precludes dialogue, or result
from activists’ beliefs that negotiating with the state is not productive.
Activists not only produce the strongest political cost when they build
national and international ties but also maintain a permanent presence at what
I call the judicial decision-making site—the physical location in which those
with the authority to make key decisions about the investigation and prosecu-
tion of the case (e.g., which personnel will be assigned to the case) reside.
Second, I argue that advocates can address the informational deficiencies
that often plague investigations into lethal violence by facilitating regular
communication and exchange of crucial investigative information between
state judicial officials and family members of victims of lethal violence. They
serve as a bridge, or interlocutor, between the state and those directly affected
by violence, and must have legitimacy with both sets of actors to effectively
occupy this role. Advocates gain access to state officials through multiple
channels: Activist pressure and innocence framing play a central role in open-
ing up state officials to dialogue, and advocates are often former activists
who are brokered into new, collaborative relationships with state officials by
outside actors after waves of intense activist pressure. Advocates use their
access to state officials to generate and follow up on investigatory leads, and
to call for rapid state responses to new threats and violent events. Over the
course of these information exchanges, relationships can be built that not
only facilitate the flow of investigative information between the two parties
but also change the way that usually hostile parties relate to each other and
think about their respective roles in the judicial process, cementing changes
in attitudes about victims promoted by activists. Advocates must have an
ongoing physical presence at the judicial decision-making site, as the in-per-
son relationships they build with judicial officials, members of civil society,
and families of victims are vital to their effectiveness. Advocates can have
different institutional homes, including within organizations of victims’ fami-
lies, local NGOs, cause lawyer associations, and international and intergov-
ernmental organizations.
Table 1. Advocates, Activists, and the Provision of Justice.
Actors present Relative provision of justice

Advocate and activist High
Advocate Medium
Activist Low
While activists and advocates exert pressure on the judicial system inde-
pendently, a central argument of this article is that the interaction between
activists and advocates can lead to a synergistic political dynamic in which the
political pressure mounted by activists is channeled into judicial progress by
advocates who have strategically built relationships with investigators and
judicial decision-makers. I argue that the combination of comparatively hard
(naming and shaming) and soft tactics (relationship building, innocence fram-
ing, and information sharing), together with the shared tactics of pushing insti-
tutional reforms and mobilizing, can be definitive in activating investigations
and channeling them into the judicial pipeline. When only activists are pres-
ent, in contrast, the state often deflects political pressure with cosmetic changes
in discourse, new laws, or new specialized bureaucracies. When only advo-
cates are present, usually a temporary situation that occurs after an activist
group has transitioned into an advocate role and before a new activist group
has emerged, the provision of justice will be comparatively moderate, as there
is a lack of political pressure being exerted on judicial officials. While shallow
changes in bureaucratic organization and discourse have often been consid-
ered part of a spiral of norm diffusion (Risse, Ropp, & Sikkink, 1999), the
local processes necessary for these changes to be made meaningful are still
being explored (e.g., Chase, 2003; Muñoz, 2009; Shor, 2008). This conceptu-
alization of the impact of activists and advocates, distilled in Table 1, helps
unpack the black box of why some, but not all, external pressure effectively
shifts state behavior.
The synergistic dynamics between activists and advocates evolve in dis-
tinct contexts with very different actors. In small cities in Mexico between
low-level investigators and small victim-led social movements and faith-
based NGOs, and in Bogotá, Colombia between high-level federal govern-
ment officials and representatives of the United Nations High Commissioner
for Human Rights (UNHCHR), we see that a mix of political pressure and
relationship building can lead to the all-too-rare act of serious investigation
into cases of lethal violence.
These stylized categories of activists and advocates synthesize insights
from diverse literatures, putting concepts developed in social movements
Gallagher 1671
literature in conversation with scholarship focusing on judicial politics, courts,

and transnational advocacy networks. The insight that social movements with
different ideologies and strategies can generate complementarity and synergy
is grounded in social movement theory, specifically in the radical flank effect
(RFE; Anner, 2011; Gupta, 2002; Haines, 1984). The RFE is conceptualized
as the usually positive effect that radical movements and organizations have
on moderates’ ability to bargain and gain legitimacy. The RFE, however, relies
on a perceptive mechanism quite different from that which drives the advo-
cate/activist synergy. While the RFE favorably shifts the perceptions of mod-
erates by presenting an unacceptable radical and often threatening alternative,
in the activist/advocate dynamic, activists present a credible innocence narra-
tive that challenges the systematic criminalization of the entire category of
“victim,” paving the way for states to open dialogue and build trust with advo-
cates. That civil society actors are working productively to shift judicial prac-
tice and attitudes is not a surprise to judicial politics scholars: Gonzalez
Ocantos (2014) tells us that “NGOs are the engine behind the diffusion of new
technical skills legal visions” in judicial bureaucracies (p. 480). Scholars of
transnational advocacy networks will likewise not be surprised, as they have
long regarded human rights networks as a primary driver in changing the
human rights behavior of states. My findings look inside how “insider” (usu-
ally local) versus “outsider” (usually international; Sikkink, 2005) coalitions
are effective when targeting local courts, highlighting that all groups, regard-
less of their institutional home, are more effective if they have an ongoing
physical presence at the judicial decision-making site. “Activists” and “advo-
cates” leverage the insight of intracivil society complementarities, and add
precision and clarity to the mechanisms through which NGOs, social move-
ments, and Transnational Advocacy Networks (TANs) shift the behavior of
officials in and the outcomes of low-level courts.
Contributions
As democracies are constituted on the state’s promise to protect the lives of
its citizens, the failure to protect this right—and to punish those who violate
it—shakes the foundation of democratic states. While democracies have been
able to pass sweeping reforms and achieve substantive change in response to
other perceived threats to their legitimacy—constitutional changes granting
equality to previously excluded citizens; electoral transparency ensuring the
integrity of citizens’ votes; term limits to curb incumbent power—states con-
tinue to perform badly when it comes to protecting the right to physical integ-
rity and adjudicating lethal violence. O’Donnell (1993), writing about the
crisis of rule of law in democratizing states in Latin America, tells us that “a
situation in which one can vote freely . . . but cannot expect proper treatment
from the police or the courts, puts into serious question the liberal component
of that democracy and seriously curtails citizenship” (p. 1361).
In response to weaknesses in Latin American judicial systems following
democratic transitions, a great deal of scholarship has looked at judicial
reforms (e.g., Domingo & Sieder, 2001; Ingram, 2016; Ungar, 2002), issues
of judicial independence (Burbank & Friedman, 2002; Hilbink, 2012; Ríos-
Figueroa & Staton, 2014; Skaar, 2011), and the growing importance of the
law and the judiciary (Couso, Huneeus, & Sieder, 2010; Domingo, 2004;
Sieder, Schjolden, & Angell, 2005). As Brinks (2008) summarizes, however,
“There is very little work that combines close theoretical and empirical atten-
tion to the subject [of individual rights and judicial functioning]” (p. 15). In
response to this gap in our understanding, Brinks documents more than 500
cases of police killings in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, and analyzes what
individual and systemic factors map onto impunity or legal accountability.
He attributes failures in the judicial system to normative and informational
failures: In his framework, a normative failure occurs when the judge and
other judicial actors guarantee impunity. He presents cases of flagrant police
violence, in which despite overwhelming evidence there is no chance of judi-
cial accountability, as characterizing normative failure. Informational fail-
ures, however, are cases which stall judicially because the case file lacks or
distorts key evidence needed to convict the perpetrator.
My approach is cognate to Brinks’, focusing on individual cases and inves-
tigations to glean insights about how justice systems work in practice. I move
this research agenda forward in three key ways: First, Brinks understands that
the type of mobilization and the presence of private prosecutors7 will corre-
spond to the normative and information failures—normative failures inspire
confrontational tactics, whereas informational failures lead to the presence of
private prosecutors. I demonstrate that the presence of activists and advocates
does not merely reflect the local political environment but rather depends on a
negotiated political space that responds to relationship brokering by external
actors, strategic political calculations by all parties, and the beliefs of state
officials and members of civil society about each other. The rapid shifting of
tactics from confrontational to information providing, for example, illustrates
the contingent and nonstructural nature of civil society involvement.
The second contribution of this article to Brinks’s framework stems from
my close analysis of information failures.8 Brinks attributes information fail-
ure to two primary factors: (a) police unwillingness to investigate, and inten-
tional production of false and misleading evidence guaranteed to prevent a
conviction, and (b) the socioeconomic condition of the victim (p. 107). I rig-
orously examine both these factors and find that flawed case files and
Gallagher 1673
investigatory information—as opposed to victim demographics—best

explain information failure in the cases I consider. While Brinks focuses on
the investigatory mistakes as driving judicial failures—he says, “Garbage in,
garbage out”—I focus on how a complete lack of investigatory action guar-
antees impunity and prevents the majority of cases from every seeing a judge;
in other words - nothing in, nothing out. The battle for the quality of the case
file: the struggle by victims’ families to see the contents of the case file and
get copies of it; to populate it with information relevant to developing inves-
tigatory leads rather than filling it with repetitive paperwork; to implement
true accountability measures which guarantee that investigatory leads are fol-
lowed up on; is at the center of the activists’ demands and advocates’ daily
work. This focus leads me to highlight the interactions between victims’
families and police and investigators rather than judges—another departure
from what has been the main focus in the literature.
Finally, I develop several datasets, concepts, and heuristic tools to facili-
tate the comparative and systematic analysis of low court outcomes gener-
ally, especially in cases of lethal violence:
1. I develop the concept of the judicial decision-making site, which I

define as the physical location in which those with the authority to
make key decisions about the investigation and prosecution of the
case (e.g., which personnel will be assigned to the case) reside.9 I
argue that the political dynamics at this site are definitive in terms of
judicial progress. In the case of an investigation into an extrajudicial
execution in a small Colombian city, for example, a succession of
investigators put together a strong case file and moved toward indict-
ment, only to be transferred off of the case and moved to a far-away
office. Judicial progress was stymied, in the end, by a lack of pressure
at the judicial decision-making site: While there had been effective
activist and advocate pressure locally, these were ineffective because
definitive investigative decisions were made in the capital city.
2. Working together with lawyers in both Mexico and Colombia, I develop
a linear, five-step judicial classification rubric that serves as an ordinal
measure of how far cases have proceeded in each judicial system.
Although the names and specific steps of judicial processes vary
between countries, and in Mexico between states, I disaggregate judi-
cial progress into five standard, progressive steps: (a) reporting of a
crime, (b) concrete investigatory advances, (c) indictment, (d) trial, and
(e) sentence. While this five-step process necessarily compromises pre-
cision in favor of simplification and standardization, I argue that these
disaggregated judicial results make it possible to locate bottlenecks in
the judicial system that a binary, conviction/nonconviction paradigm

does not. This nuance enables us to gain a systemically more fine-
grained understanding of where justice breaks down. In the cases of
focus in this article, these disaggregated judicial outcomes indicate that
a breakdown occurs between the reporting and investigating of the
crime, with an average of more than 70% of cases failing to show any
signs of any investigative actions. I argue that this is a crucial insight, as
the actors in this stage act as gatekeepers to the justice system: Cases
that are not investigated will never enter the judicial pipeline in which
the indictment, trial, and sentence of a guilty party are possible. These
findings and my conceptualization of judicial stages drive my decision
to focus on the investigatory dynamics.
3. Using this 5-point scale, I bring new judicial outcomes data into the
public sphere. One reason that lower courts are not studied often is
that information about judicial outcomes is hard to obtain, often unre-
liable, and difficult to interpret (Hollar, 2013). Similarly, systematic
information about civil society interactions with legal systems is
often confidential, inconsistent, and/or inaccurate. I do not solve these
data problems in this article. Rather, I argue that these outcomes are
important enough to warrant serious study, as long as we are careful
to reflect on their possible biases and limitations. In the online appen-
dices, I discuss the processes through which I obtained these data
(Appendix C), reflect on their limitations and strengths (Appendices
B and C), and I share the state-supplied judicial outcomes data in an
online data repository (https://doi.org/10.5064/F6H12ZXF).
Research Design
In choosing Mexico and Colombia as research sites, I chose the two democra-
cies where the paired problems of impunity and violence were arguably the
worst in the world at the time I selected the cases, and where we are therefore
least likely to see civil society pressure leading to meaningful improvements
in judicial outcomes (Eckstein, 1975; Gerring, 2007; Landman, 2008). Mexico
and Colombia were ranked second and third, respectively, on a worldwide
impunity scale in 2015,10 and eighth and third in worldwide homicide rates as
of 2010.11 If civil society action can be shown to meaningfully affect judicial
outcomes in these inauspicious, dangerous contexts, these can be considered
crucial cases for testing my hypothesis that civil society involvement spurs
judicial progress (Gerring, 2007; Tsai, 2007). To examine this hypothesis, I
employ iterations of nested (Lieberman, 2005) and comparative research
design. I ask, Why do some cases of homicides and disappearances advance
Gallagher 1675
Figure 2. Research design: Levels of analysis and primary findings.
through domestic judicial systems while so many others stall, and proceed to
systematically examine the judicial effects of civil society action. Using the
unit of analysis of one legal case of a disappearance or homicide, I utilize
descriptive statistics at the national or state level, and move progressively
down through levels of analyses. As illustrated in Figure 2, I use a mixed-
methods approach to analyze national, subnational, organizational, and indi-
vidual determinants of judicial progress. I find that the subnational and
organizational levels yield the most meaningful explanatory power over which
cases make judicial progress.
For the national/state comparison, I compare judicial results from all of
Colombia with the aggregate judicial results from three violent states within
Mexico: Guerrero, Nuevo León and Chihuahua. All of the cases of lethal
violence analyzed herein occurred during a single president’s administration:
in Mexico during President Felipe Calderón’s administration from 2006 to
2012, and in Colombia under Álvaro Uribe, whose two terms spanned from
2002 to 2010. The comparison of the Uribe and Calderón administrations
limits the variation produced by the executive: They have similar political
ideologies (conservative with strong law and order orientations) and political
enemies (in Uribe’s case, the FARC rebels; in Calderón’s case, the drug car-
tels) that were the focus of their domestic policy. Both presidents made fund-
ing for and training of the armed forces—together with generous U.S. aid
packages—a central pillar of their strategies to fight these enemies. Both
these administrations also saw increases in lethal violence due at least in part
to their militarized security strategies, and both countries experienced pro-
nounced growth in human rights movements and antiviolence civil society
activity during their administrations. Although Colombia is often perceived

to have a much stronger legal system, both countries surprisingly converge
upon similarly low rates of judicial progress in cases of lethal violence, indi-
cating that the national-level independent variables I considered (presence of
civil war, political incorporation of popular classes, judicial independence,
legal and constitutional structures) do not translate clearly into judicial prog-
ress in these cases.
Within the Mexican and Colombian universe of cases, I conduct two most
similar subnational case comparisons and find significant variation in rates of
judicial progress. First, I analyze judicial results in two northern Mexican
border states: Chihuahua and Nuevo León. Both states experienced a dra-
matic jump in drug-related violence after 2008, were ruled by the dominant
Mexican political party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), since
at least 2003, and have active civil society movements calling for justice.
Second, in Colombia I explore temporal variation,12 taking a snapshot of
judicial results in cases of extrajudicial killings committed between 2002 and
2010 at two points in time—2009 and 2013.13 These two most similar com-
parisons with different analytical groupings—state and temporal, respec-
tively—facilitate a rigorous examination of my hypothesis that civil society
action drives judicial progress. My key findings in these subnational analyses
are that judicial cases of lethal violence that are the focus of civil society
organizations’ mobilization and lobbying have more than twice the rates of
judicial progress than average judicial cases. As I move to the organizational
level, I find that the significant variation in the degrees of success of these
groups hinges on the presence of activists, advocates, or both groups at the
judicial decision-making site. Finally, I look at the individual level of analy-
sis. In large part to evaluate Brinks’ 2008 finding that the economic status of
the victim can be one of the drivers of informational failure, I conduct a two-
part analysis of who seeks and participates in NGOs. I find that while I am
unable to rule out the causal importance of individual-level demographic
variables due to data insufficiency, I can reasonably exclude individual-level
characteristics as explaining the variation that I attribute to organizations,
specifically to activists and advocates.
Elaboration of Findings
National/State Level: Widespread Impunity and Failed
Institutional Reforms
In my analysis of aggregate data provided by state entities in Mexico and
Colombia, I find that fewer than 25% of all reported cases of homicides and
Gallagher 1677
Figure 3. Judicial progress in Mexico and Colombia.

Source. Analysis of original data from state sources.
Mexico data are obtained from the states of Chihuahua, Nuevo León, and Guerrero.
disappearances show any evidence that any concrete investigatory steps have
been taken, and fewer than 6% have had anyone sentenced for these crimes.
As is evident in Figure 3, in both countries, according to the states them-
selves, there is a judicial bottleneck: after a case is reported, three times out
of four there is no sign that any further action has been taken.14
As between 70% and 80% of cases of homicides and disappearances in
Mexico and Colombia show no signs that any investigative action was taken,
this suggests that there is little national variation to be explained. That is,
Colombia’s civil war, stronger judicial institutions, and the state’s violent
repression of insurgents, and Mexico’s federal system and popular incorpora-
tion are not producing significantly different rates of judicial progress for
cases of homicides and disappearances. To identify meaningful variation,
specifically to test the hypothesis of whether civil society involvement can
lead to improvements in judicial progress, I next look at the subnational and
organizational levels.
Subnational Findings: Organized Citizen Action and Participatory

Investigation
By looking at two subnational most similar case comparisons, I find that a
case advocated for by an NGO will have, on average, more than double the
probability of progressing past the initial case-reporting stage than an average
case received by the relevant judicial institution. First, I look at two states
Figure 4. Judicial progress rates in Mexico disappearances and homicides 2006-
2012.
Source. Analysis of original data from NGO and state sources.
NGO = nongovernmental organization.
within northern Mexico: Chihuahua and Nuevo León. Both states have been
controlled by Mexico’s corporatist party, the PRI, since 2003; are sites of dra-
matic increases in Drug Trafficking Organization (DTO)-spurred violence
between 2006 and 2012; and share a northern border with the United States.
By comparing all cases of homicides and disappearances with a small number
of cases accompanied by NGOs (slightly more than 100 cases in Chihuahua;
212 in Nuevo León as of 2013), I find that more than 75% of NGO-accompanied
cases report concrete investigatory advances as compared with fewer than
35% of average cases. These findings are summarized in Figure 4.
Nuevo León: Activists to Advocates. How did civil society pressure lead to the
advances documented above? While Nuevo León is one of Mexico’s richest
states and is known for having a bureaucracy that functions relatively well—
in Brinks’ terms, most would have considered Nuevo León a relatively posi-
tive normative environment—this reputation was not translating into active
investigations and prosecutions in the growing number of cases of homicides
and disappearances in early 2011. Rates of impunity, while better than in
Chihuahua and than the national average, were still staggeringly high. While
Nuevo León is not known for having strong social movements, a faith-based
human rights organization had long pressured the state to respect human
rights in various issue areas. They were clear activists: openly and consis-
tently critical of the state, largely around issues of prisoner mistreatment, and
did not believe that state officials were open to or capable of working
Gallagher 1679
effectively. As violence suddenly spiked in Nuevo León in 2011, they were

one of the few organizations positioned to work with victims of violence—
and when the opportunity came to move from critiquing the state to collabo-
rating in investigations—they took it.
Activist pressure responding to violence throughout Mexico began to
build in 2011, and this pressure arrived at Nuevo León on June 7, 2011 in the
form of a 500-person caravan organized by a new national social movement,
the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (MPJD). The MPJD,
founded by nationally known poet and political commentator Javier Sicilia in
the wake of his son’s murder, had just finished a month of massive mobiliza-
tion, and their visit shifted the possibilities for cooperation between the activ-
ist organization, family members of victims of violence, and state officials.
When the caravan pulled into Monterrey, they were met by a large group of
civil society organizations as well as Nuevo León citizens who were scared,
angry, and clamoring for an end to the recent upsurge in violence (Villarreal,
2015). MPJD leaders joined with the local NGO leader, and together they led
a march to the Attorney General’s office. Around midnight, the State Attorney
General met with the joint national–local leadership team and vowed to do
something to end the impunity that prevailed in Nuevo León.
This agreement directly and immediately led to a new modality of case
investigation in two ways: First, the local human rights NGO decided that it
would not only document cases of disappearances that were plaguing the
state but it would also take advantage of the political opening the State
Attorney General had given them, and figure out how to organizationally
support all family members of victims of disappearance who wanted to meet
with state officials about the disappearance of their loved ones. This decision
reflected the local leader’s belief that these meetings could be productive, and
a recognition that shifting dynamics with the state was necessary to achieve
judicial progress:
I am convinced that if we truthfully do rigorous, serious work in the

documentation and deep study of the case files, if we do this in a serious way,
sooner or later we have to get results . . . and what I am learning is that dialogue
[with the state] is a very important tool that requires the opening of both parties,
and that we as civil society had previously closed this possibility. (Author
interview, March, 2013)
This marked a new stage in their work: They had not engaged in this type
of advocacy previously, and scrambled to hire lawyers and secure funding,
but building on an established organizational structure and a strong leader
who believed in the possibilities of collaborative work with the state, and
they cobbled together the resources to pivot into this work.
Second, the NGO began to hold bimonthly collaborative meetings with

the state prosecutors’ office. These meetings were overseen and legitimized
by the State Attorney General, the most high-level judicial official in the
state. He brought nearly every state official involved in the investigation to
these meetings: the local and judicial police, the state case coordinator, the
assigned prosecutor (ministerio público) and their staff, and federal officials
when the case spanned jurisdictions. After several marathon meetings in
which everyone present reviewed all the cases, a methodology evolved in
which state officials divided themselves into four groups and engaged in a
detailed review of the 30 to 50 case files the NGO presented.15 The NGO
lawyers and family members of victims came to each meeting with a meticu-
lously prepared spreadsheet listing the promises that had been made at the
previous meetings by each member of the state investigatory team, as well as
by the family members of the victim. For anywhere from one to three hours,
any victim family member who had come to the preparatory meetings at the
NGO office was given a space at the investigatory table. In an average ses-
sion, the victim’s family might hand over the phone number of someone the
state investigators should interview by the next meeting—a cousin, for exam-
ple, who was finally ready to tell the investigators about his interactions with
the victim on the morning of his disappearance. The state investigators might
also agree to a variety of administrative tasks necessary for the investigation:
asking whether the stores around the area the victim was last seen have sur-
veillance videos; formally submitting a request to the phone company for the
cell phone records of the victim; sending letters to hospitals and jails asking
whether the victim might be among their patients or inmates. As each of these
investigatory teams worked through the details of these cases, NGO lawyers
would take notes that they would later share with the state investigators docu-
menting each of the actions completed and pending. These mesas de trabajo,
or working groups, virtually guaranteed that each case the NGO brought was,
at the very least, opened, escaping the fate of the majority of cases in Mexico:
never having any signs of being looked at after being reported.
With the transition of the local NGO from activist to advocate, however,
there was a void: The NGOs suddenly had a vested interest in preserving their
newly productive relationship with the Attorney General’s office, and viewed
criticism by family members of victims who complained that their cases were
not progressing as threatening to these relationships. This meant that the criti-
cal activist voice—demanding more substantial and quicker judicial advances,
denouncing the delays in investigations and scarce number of convictions—
was largely absent during 2011 and 2012. While the advocate organization
made much lauded concrete judicial advances during this time and was hon-
ored nationally and internationally for their work, they were accused of
Gallagher 1681
selling out by former participants and other organizations working on similar

cases. In the neighboring state of Coahuila, whose capital is only an hour
from Nuevo Leon’s capital and experienced a similar spike in violence and
cases of disappearances, another local human rights organization had very
different beliefs and strategy about working with the state—articulating what
I characterize as the activist position. As one person involved with the
Coahuila organization reflected,
We are not very interested in speaking with the state Attorney General. There are
not the political conditions, the political will, to move these cases forward. So
what do we gain by meeting with them? . . . We have developed a methodology—
that is, the victims have developed a methodology—for speaking with state
agents. When they say something nice to us, we don’t smile and nod. And when
they say something we disagree with, we also don’t react. If we smile and nod,
the state official knows that they have us in their hands. We listen to them, then
we reiterate our demands . . . People now know how to talk with us: when we
come, they know that we are serious. (Author interview, 2012)
This neighboring organization, now headed by people who previously

worked in Chiapas with Zapatista-allied organizations with explicitly anti-
state politics, had by 2013 spawned an affiliated chapter in Nuevo León. This
new group, comprised largely of disaffected family members of victims that
split from the advocacy organization, is now providing activist pressure key
to incentivizing accountability.
Chihuahua: Activists and advocates productively coexist. The work of the activist
and advocate organizations in Chihuahua has led to significant judicial
advances within contexts of rampant impunity and violence. The organiza-
tion that would come to fulfill the central advocacy role was, like in Nuevo
León, initially an activist group. In the early 2000s, it struggled with lack of
personnel and access to state officials, and the founder reported that protests
and marches were necessary to get a meeting with the governor or the Attor-
ney General. This shifted in 2007, after the ongoing international pressure to
solve femicides resulted in the governor bringing in two outside experts to
review the case files of the disappearances of women. The experts, trained in
Chile and Colombia in forensic science and investigation, sat down with the
organization’s founder and taught her not only how to read a case file but also
what actions to ask state authorities to take to solve the cases, and how to look
for investigatory leads.
Using the training they had received, the NGO began to analyze case files
more rigorously. The director asked for and received monthly meetings with
the prosecutors, and in these meetings, they began to review cases in detail.16
If the disappearance was recent, for example, they called for an immediate
emergency meeting of the relevant police, state judicial investigators, and,
when relevant, federal police and/or military. At this meeting, held often at
the NGO offices, the NGO and state actors devise an investigatory plan, and
“basically, we give them instructions” about how to proceed and coordinate
the investigation. The NGO leadership also built relationships with the tele-
phone companies, and was able to quickly obtain the cell phone records and
global positioning system (GPS) information—an often key piece of evi-
dence at this early stage of the investigation which normally took state inves-
tigators a long time to obtain. In 2011, the informal structures and relationships
that the NGO had nurtured were institutionalized with the creation of a spe-
cialized investigative unit, something that had been done many times before.
Unlike previous bureaucratic creations, however, the advocacy organization
selected all of the 27 staff and investigators—with the agreement that these
investigators, psychologists, and administrators would devote all of their
time to working on the cases that the advocates presented to them.
The cases accompanied by this small Chihuahua City-based NGO made
impressive judicial progress as compared with cases in the relevant universe
of cases: As of 2013, they had located the disappeared person in more than
50% of their cases, 23% of cases had at least one guilty party indicted, and in
12% of cases there was someone sentenced for the crime. In cases in which
the organization identified the probable perpetrator as a state official, how-
ever, cases more often stalled. This indicates the possible limits to these
efforts and points to a hesitancy to prosecute state-perpetrated crimes—in
other words, some degree of normative failure. Nonetheless, in a context of
overwhelming impunity, the organization and its members considered these
results positive and substantive. During the course of meeting with state offi-
cials and sitting in on joint meetings between civil society groups and judicial
officials, I found that these judicial advances were due not only to the rela-
tionships they built with members of the police, judicial investigators, and
military but also to the dynamics between them and another prominent NGO.
State officials I interviewed indicated that they were enthusiastic about work-
ing with the advocate NGO partially because the activist NGO was frustrat-
ing to them. One member of the Chihuahua investigator’s team complained
that their efforts were consistently met with public criticism and bad faith by
the activist organization, and so they preferred to work with the advocacy
organization: “With the [advocate organization] there are more results, totally
. . . Any investigatory official will tell you that with them you can talk about
. . . what is needed; about the possible ways forward.”
Gallagher 1683
In Juárez, Chihuahua, the other large city in the state of Chihuahua, there
was comparatively very little judicial progress. Despite the presence of sev-
eral activist organizations that regularly mobilize and denounce the state’s
role in promoting violence, there were no groups capable of serving as advo-
cates for male victims of disappearances and homicides during the period of
this study. The activist groups, who largely formed in response to the femi-
cides of the 1990s and early 2000s, employed the predominant strategies of
local mobilization and extensive and highly visible international coalition
building (Anaya, 2011). Despite this extensive political pressure, civil soci-
ety groups, journalists, and academics were hard-pressed to document judi-
cial progress in cases of disappearances or homicides committed between
2006 and 2012, apart from cases that the Chihuahua-based NGO took on and
a small number of cases that received intensive organizational attention.
Colombia: A scandal makes way for United Nations (UN) advocates. Colombia’s

50-year civil war has resulted in consistently high levels of lethal violence,
including countless massacres of civilians and targeting of political activists,
and, it was exposed in 2008, a nefarious army practice which was brought to
light in the “false positives” scandal. The scandal revealed that members of
the Colombian military had been incentivized to kill guerrilla fighters in
combat through promises of professional accolades, bonuses, and leave—but
that they were instead recruiting and killing innocent civilians and falsely
claiming them as legitimate battle kills.17 While the scandal revealed grue-
some details of how the army had engaged in a coordinated campaign to
entrap economically, socially, and politically marginal young men under the
guise of providing them agricultural work, only to then transport them far
away from home, kill them, and dress them up as guerrilla fighters—this was,
unfortunately, one of countless human rights scandals for the Colombian
military. For example, in the Trujillo massacres, which claimed the lives of
more than 340 people between 1988 and 1994, witness testimony indicated
that members of the military participated in the live dismemberment of vic-
tims with chainsaws.
At first, it seemed that the false positives scandal would follow the same
playbook that despite strong evidence, extensive mobilization, and interna-
tional pressure, there would be no meaningful justice. Indeed, in 2009 a
Colombian NGO put together a list of victims of extrajudicial killings and
through information requests obtained the judicial status of these investiga-
tions. They found overwhelming impunity, with very few investigations
showing any evidence of investigatory activity.
As can be seen in Figure 5, by 2013, it became clear that the false positives
scandal differed in an important way from previous scandals: Members of the
Figure 5. Judicial status of extrajudicial executions committed between 2002 and
2010: Snapshots from 2009 to 2013.
Source. Analysis of original data from NGO and state sources (see Online Appendix C: III).
EJE = extrajudicial execution; NGO = nongovernmental organization.
military—at least 240 of them by 2013—were held legally accountable for

their crimes, something that was thought impossible previously. Why this
time and in these cases? President Uribe’s exit and Juan Manuel Santos’
entrance into the presidency in 2010, and the corresponding shift away from
the mano dura “democratic security” approach of Uribe and toward the more
progressive policies of Santos, is an important part of this story. However,
perhaps the most crucial part of judicial progress in these cases—transferring
cases out of the notoriously ineffective military justice system and to the
civilian courts—began in 2007 when the first ever civilian Director of
Military Justice was appointed.18 President Uribe further laid the groundwork
for an end to military impunity when he fired more than 50 military officials,
including the head of the army, three generals, and four colonels in late 2008
and early 2009 in response to the scandal.
How do we explain why the Uribe administration, which was otherwise
explicitly hostile to human rights claims, laid the groundwork for the
Gallagher 1685
conviction of so many members of the military? I find that the documentation,

framing, and constant pressure of activists, together with behind-the-scenes
relationship building and advocacy of the UNHCHR, led to the initial recogni-
tion of “false positives” as a coordinated and systematic practice rather than as
a series of isolated events, and made the defense of total military impunity
untenable for Uribe. These same dynamics then channeled the political will
generated by the scandal into investigative momentum, leading to different
results—namely, the prosecution and conviction of members of the military—
than so many scandals before.
Colombian activists found common cause in the midst of high levels of
persistent violence during the civil war. The threats faced by all united ideo-
logically and programmatically diverse groups into broad coalitions, and by
the early 2000s, these organizations had professionalized into national net-
works with hundreds of member organizations capable of analyzing patterns
of violence using sophisticated methods and systematic data (see Tate, 2007).
These human rights networks began to notice a new modality of lethal vio-
lence in the early 2000s: Unlike the “typical” victim of extrajudicial execu-
tions and disappearances—politically engaged people with dense civil society
networks—they noticed that many victims were young men from poor neigh-
borhoods who did not have political affiliations. Most of them had disap-
peared while they were looking for work, and there were reports that they had
been promised work picking crops and set off with these “job recruiters.”
These networks of human rights activists published reports of these new pat-
terns of killings, and after being dismissed, criticized, and criminalized by the
Uribe administration, they made their claims internationally. In 2006 and
2007, Colombian NGOs presented case-level evidence of more than 100
extrajudicial executions at hearings of the Inter-American Commission on
Human Rights (IACHR), and also brought international human rights observ-
ers to Colombia to focus on these cases.
Desperate to draw attention to these killings, these groups found an ally
with the UNHCHR in Colombia, who then used their legitimacy as an inter-
national institution to raise the individual cases and the overall pattern of
“false positives” as early as 2003 with state actors. Their approach was “quiet
diplomacy,” and they limited their public statements so as not to damage their
nascent relationships with investigators and exacerbate already-tense rela-
tionships with high-level officials. Through these meetings, all accounts indi-
cate that state investigators first realized and/or admitted that members of the
military were systematically targeting and killing innocent civilians. As one
anonymous, high-level source told the former Director of the UNHCHR in
Colombia,
Little by little the contacts [between the UNHCHR, local prosecutors, the
Ombudsman, the Regional Procurator’s Office and the Attorney General’s
Office] increased and strengthened until sufficient trust was established to
exchange cases, define patterns and form an inter-institutional network for
work . . . in this inter-institutional look at the situation it was possible to
establish that it [the practice of disappearing and killing young men] was not a
matter of isolated cases but rather seemed to be a matter of a deliberate strategy
of the 4th [Army] Brigade. (Salazar Volkmann, 2012, p. 424)
The false positives scandal broke in 2008. Several cases emerged with
clear, irrefutable evidence that deaths which the military claimed were guerril-
las killed in combat were, in fact, innocent civilians. In the best known case, a
young man with limited use of his right hand and severe developmental dis-
abilities was killed in a supposed shoot-out with the military. The military
investigators reported that he had been the head of a narco-terrorist organiza-
tion, and that he was killed after firing a gun from his right hand. The patently
false military account of his killing led at first to the realization that his case
was linked to the disappearance and killing of 22 other young men from his
neighborhood, and after connecting with a human rights organization, the
media and the public realized what government officials (with the UNHCHR’s
persistence and pressure) already knew that there were thousands of these
cases, and that they were part of a coordinated military practice.
As the public outcry rose, activist calls for justice were echoed by interna-
tional state and nonstate rights groups. The UNHCHR, with a staff of more
than 100 people in Colombia, went to work channeling this political will into
investigatory advances. They shared the cases they had received from civil
society and rigorously documented themselves with the state investigators
they had built relationships with; they accompanied these investigators to the
military barracks to interview the accused members of the military and were
present at the trials; and they spoke out against threats and violence that pros-
ecutors faced in the course of investigating these cases.
As shown in Figure 6, by 2013, these dynamics resulted in much higher
rates of judicial progress in cases of extrajudicial killings than in the larger
universe of cases of homicides and enforced disappearances. While overall
rates of impunity for violations of the right to physical integrity (murder,
enforced disappearance, torture, kidnapping) remained quite high, by 2013,
240 perpetrators had been sentenced in cases of extrajudicial killings, and
more than 54% of almost 4,000 cases showed concrete judicial advances.19
These historic results are traceable to the activism and advocacy of a coali-
tion of Colombian social movements and NGOs, and a powerful intergovern-
mental actor with enough resources on the ground to mount a multiyear
Gallagher 1687
Figure 6. Judicial status in Colombia: Disappearances and homicides 2002-2010.

Source. Analysis of original data from NGO and state sources.
sustained effort to shift state investigatory and judicial behavior from the
inside.
Individuals: Alternative Explanations—Selection Bias and

Demographic Factors
Thus far, I have presented evidence for meaningful variation in judicial out-
comes at the subnational and institutional levels. What are the alternative
explanations for this variation? In this section, I engage with questions of
selection bias and also with Brinks’s (2008) second explanation for informa-
tion failure: the financial resources of the victim. I examine whether eco-
nomic status, other demographic factors, or case-specific factors may be
driving the variation in judicial progress that I document. I answer this crucial
question in two different ways: First, I conducted a randomized survey to
determine whether people who might turn to NGOs for assistance were
demographically similar to their fellow citizens. Second, I examine whether
people who reported their cases to NGOs were similar to people who pro-
ceeded to engage continually with NGOs, and thus benefit from their advo-
cacy activities.20
Who turns to NGOs or civil society organizations in times of life-threaten-
ing crisis? I addressed this question through a randomized person-to-person
survey conducted in rural, urban, and mixed areas throughout Mexico. The
survey also ensured that the interview respondents were balanced according
to the level of violence in their state.21 I asked, “If you were a victim of a
crime in which your life was at risk, who would you notify?” The respon-
dents could rank three answers among seven possible responses: the police or
Table 2. Who Chooses to Notify NGOs/Social Leaders if Their Life Is at Risk?.
Average schooling Monthly
Average where 2 = finishing junior household
age %Women high, 3 = finish high school income in US$
Would notify a civil 40.14 51 2.34 268

society organization Equivalent to finishing
or community leader the 10th grade
Would not notify a civil 40.78 52 2.66 264
Society organization Equivalent to finishing
or community leader the 11th grade
the Attorney General’s office; the church or religious community; an NGO or

social leader in your community; a relative; a neighbor, a friend; or other. Of
1,000 respondents, 111 indicated that they would notify “an NGO or social
leader in your community” first, second, or third.22 Were these respondents
different from the larger sample of respondents?
As shown in Table 2, respondents choosing to notify NGOs or civil society
leaders are nearly identical in their age, gender, schooling, and income to
those who chose not to. While we may expect some variation when citizens
are faced with the actual disappearance or murder of a loved one, and it is
possible that there is variation between Mexico and Colombia, these survey
results suggest that the demographics of the population who turn to civil soci-
ety and community leaders when there is a life-threatening situation are
demographically indistinguishable from the general population.
While people who go to an NGO may be similar to the larger population, not
everyone who reports their case to an NGO will end up benefitting from their
advocacy. In both the Mexican advocacy organizations I studied, cases only
receive the benefits of advocacy if the family members who reported the case to
the NGO are active and continuously participate in advocacy activities.23 In the
case of the Nuevo León-based NGO, for example, despite documenting more
than 1,000 cases of disappearances and homicides, only 53 of these cases had
been advocated for by the victims’ relatives as of 2013. If those participating
with the NGO are demographically different from the cases that were registered
by the NGO, this could introduce bias into the findings.
To understand the demographic profile of those family members of vic-
tims who become active members of the organization and, therefore, experi-
ence the benefits of advocacy, I worked with the Nuevo León-based NGO to
construct a database of all cases of disappearances that they had received
during a 4-year period. I obtained the full demographic information for all
those who had reported more than 1,000 cases of disappearances during this
Gallagher 1689
period whenever possible, and compared them with the individuals continu-
ally and actively involved in advocating for the 53 cases with the NGO. How
were the victims’ relatives who chose to engage in ongoing advocacy demo-
graphically different from those who did not?
As shown in Table 3, the demographics between the victims’ relatives in
the two groups are quite similar. Notably, however, NGO participants tend to
be slightly older and are more likely to work in the home than nonpartici-
pants. This confirms participants’ perceptions that participating with the
NGO is difficult if a person is employed, as many advocacy activities are
performed during the day, and are therefore more accessible to retired indi-
viduals or to people who do not work outside the home.
Taken together, these analytical exercises suggest that people who report
cases to NGOs and ultimately participate in advocacy activities in Mexico are
demographically similar to people who do not. This is not to say that the rich
do not fare better overall in the justice systems in Mexico and Colombia—in
fact, based on ethnographic observation, I believe that they do. Rich individu-
als generally have more resources to invest in the pursuit of justice, and I
believe that this results in better outcomes. My claim, rather, is that economic
resource is only one of the factors driving judicial progress. The political
resources conferred on victims through their activism and advocacy also result
in improved judicial results.
Conclusion and Implications

This article engages with the protection and enforcement of our most basic
right: the right to physical integrity. I analyze the mobilization and negotiat-
ing activities of some of those people most affected by these systemic fail-
ures—family members of victims of lethal violence and their allies. I argue
that while Mexico and Colombia are least likely cases for civil society action
to affect the provision of justice due to high levels of both impunity and vio-
lence, the involvement of activists and advocates in cases of disappearances
and homicides more than doubles the probability that these cases will be
investigated and enter the judicial pipeline. I show how participatory investi-
gations emerge, in which activists pressure the state for results, and advocates
are able to facilitate the sharing of information and building of trust between
family members of victims of violence and state officials. Using additional
original data, I make the case that selection bias and victim demographics do
not account for the variation I document in judicial outcomes.
I want to highlight three implications of this work. First, even deeply
flawed justice systems investigate and prosecute some cases, and given the
vital role of courts in democracy, we ignore at our peril insights that can be
1690
Table 3. Demographics of NGO Participants Versus Nonparticipants.
Demographic information of family member Demographic information

of victim reporting to the NGO of disappeared person
Average schooling
Weekly 2 = finishing junior high, %Who do not work Age of Weekly income
Age income (US$) %Women 3 = finish high school outside the home victim of victim (US$)
NGO participants 51 131 71 2.59 54 30 146
NGO 44 148 82 2.61 45 29 162
nonparticipants

Gallagher 1691
gleaned by looking at the ways courts sometimes do work and specifying what
mechanisms produce slightly better—if still unacceptable by any measure—
outcomes. We have gained important insights into how courts work through
studying institutional design; by thinking of courts as political battlegrounds
through which different state powers are negotiated; and by thinking about
how the ways in which judges are trained and think influence their judgments.
This article brings what Brinks (2008) calls the “fact-finding dimensions of
legal decision-making” to the forefront, arguing that the struggle to activate
investigations and put together a case file that can lead to a trial and possibly
conviction is a key venue in the struggle over impunity. If, as in the majority
of cases that I analyze, there are no investigatory actions taken, there can be no
trial, no judgment, and ultimately no justice.
Second, important parts of this vital state function—the investigation into
cases of lethal violence—are being performed by nonstate actors, and their
involvement is meaningfully affecting outcomes. I document the systemic
involvement of civil society and intergovernmental actors in the investiga-
tions of cases, and show that there are significant and nonrandom differences
in performance between these cases and those of the relevant universe of
cases. Research that addresses collaborative governance, focusing on labor
and environmental policy enforcement (Amengual, 2016) and participatory
budgeting (e.g., Baiocchi, Heller, & Silva, 2011), for example, could lead us
to believe that this democratization of judicial functioning and participatory
investigations has the potential to “break through the self- reinforcing equi-
librium of representative democracy in which those who have privilege can
use politics to reinforce that privilege” (Baiocchi et al., 2011, p. 142). Most
judicial politics scholars, however, emphasize the value of judicial indepen-
dence, and would most likely see the interactions I describe as regressive: If
civil society is able to influence investigatory behavior, this is another mech-
anism that skews access to justice toward those with more resources—albeit
political resources—and this could be seen as running counter to the project
of building Weberian judiciaries capable of consistently and equitably pro-
moting the rule of law. The debates between scholars of participatory gover-
nance and courts have not engaged with each other extensively. These
findings point to the relevance of such conversations.
Finally, these findings can be read as potentially hopeful: In systems in
which so little goes right, the finding that there are mechanisms that, under
certain conditions, can spur modest judicial progress is good news for those
seeing very few paths forward in the struggle against impunity. These find-
ings also, however, raise serious questions about the safety and capacity of
these groups. This article makes the case for the importance of the work that
often invisible and impoverished individuals and organizations are doing:
Stated in its strongest form, I argue that family members of victims of vio-
lence and their NGOs and intergovernmental allies are playing an important
role in building state capacity and shoring up democratic legitimacy by
enabling the state to eke out some progress in the crucial cases of lethal vio-
lence. This is a heavy burden—and one that has benefits for state–society
relations generally. Given the value of this work, this raises the question of
what responsibility state institutions and larger society have to support the
safety, capacity, and sustainability of these efforts.
Acknowledgments
I thank the following persons for comments on earlier versions of this work: Alejandro
Anaya, Phillip Ayoub, Kevin Escudero, Matt Evangelista, Yanilda González, Sinja
Graf, Lisa Hilbink, Michelle Jurkovich, Diana Kapiszewski, Sandra Ley, Sally Merry,
Veronica Michel, Kim Nolan, Ken Roberts, Mariano Sánchez Talanquer, Whitney
Taylor, Sidney Tarrow, and three anonymous reviewers.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, author-
ship and/or publication of this article: This article draws on field research carried out in
Mexico and Colombia between 2010 and 2013. This fieldwork was possible due to the
generous support of the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright Garcia-Robles
program, the Inter-American Foundation, the Einaudi Center for International Studies
at Cornell University, and The Law and Social Sciences Program of the National
Science Foundation under Grant Number 1122333. Any opinions, findings, and con-
clusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do
not necessarily reflect the views of the Law and Social Sciences Program of the
National Science Foundation or any other funding organization or university.
Notes
1. Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “everyone
has the right to life, liberty and security of person.” Article 4.1 of the American
Convention on Human Rights states that “every person has the right to have his
life respected. That right shall be protected by law . . . No one shall be arbitrarily
deprived of his life.”
2. I define “judicial progress” as an ordinal measure of how far within the justice
system a case progressed—the further a case progressed from the initial report-
ing of the crime, the more advanced I consider the outcome. I elaborate on this
further in the following section and in Online Appendix B.
Gallagher 1693
3. According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, criminal homicides take

more than 10 times as many lives annually as battle deaths in the past decade.
In 2012, Uniform Collateral Data Portal® (UCDP) estimates that 38,000
people were killed in battle-related deaths. In the same year, the UN Office
of Drug and Crimes (UNODC) estimated that 437,000 people were killed
in criminal homicides. It should be noted that I exclude suicide from this
analysis.
4. Only 43 of every 100 homicides have a perpetrator convicted internationally. In
Latin America—the region of the world with the highest homicide rates—there
are only 24 convictions for every 100 murders (United Nations Office on Drugs
and Crime: Research and Trend Analysis Branch, Division of Policy Analysis
and Public Affairs [UNODC; 2013] Global Study on Homicide).
5. In analyzing homicides and disappearances together under the category of “lethal
violence” instead of separating them based on the presumed identity of the per-
petrator, this article diverges from dominant scholarly and legal approaches.
Human rights and transitional justice scholars analyze state-perpetrated lethal
violence (categorized as extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances
under international law) separately from lethal violence perpetrated by civilians.
I discuss the reasons for this decision in Online Appendix A.2.
6. I use the following terms interchangeably: human rights groups, civil society
organizations, victim advocate organizations, and several other permutations of
these terms. This diversity in terminology reflects the many spaces that the orga-
nizations of this study occupy. Most of the organizations of focus are registered
with the state, and each in some way engages in legal advocacy and mobilization.
Most qualify as “social movements,” as they engaged in sustained interactions
with and challenges to elites and authorities based on “common purposes and
social solidarities” (Tarrow, 2011).
7. While for Brinks “private prosecutors” include any third-party lawyer, including
those who charge for their services, I examine only nongovernmental organiza-
tion (NGO) lawyers who work in a pro bono capacity. I argue that these types of
private prosecutors should be considered separately, given that they have differ-
ent incentives in terms of client–state relationships, as well as divergent implica-
tions for democratic citizenship.
8. My case selection presents significantly less variation in the normative failures
than Brinks’, as conviction rates—Brinks’ central metric for measuring norma-
tive failure—are similar between my cases and vary between 6% and 52% in
Brinks’ cases. This allows me to hone in on the causes of and variation in infor-
mation failures.
9. In Mexico, a federal system, this authority resides in the state capitals. Decisions
about investigative personnel are generally taken by the governor or the State
Attorney General (either the Procurador or Fiscal General del Estado). In
Colombia, a unitary system, all decisions about judicial personnel are made in
Bogotá, the nation’s capital, by members of National Attorney General’s Office
(Fiscalía General de la Nación).
10. Fifty-nine countries were compared and given a composite impunity score.
The Philippines ranked first on the scale, followed by Mexico and Colombia.
Based on the Índice de Impunidad Global, produced by Centro de Estudios sobre
Impunidad y Justicia. Available online at http://www.udlap.mx/cesij/resulta-
dosigi2015.aspx.
11. UNODC (2013) Global Study on Homicide.
12. In Colombia, I analyze temporal rather than geographic variation largely because
of the structure of the judicial system: Colombia is a unitary judicial system—the
same laws apply throughout the territory and meaningful investigatory decisions
are made in the country’s capital. Mexico, however, is a federal system, and at
the time of my research had different penal codes and different justice systems in
each of its 32 states, with meaningful investigatory decision being made in each
state capital.
13. See Figure 5 for elaboration of findings and Online Appendix C (Section B) for
discussion of the years of these data snapshots.
14. These findings echo those of previous work (Zepeda Lucuona, 2008), though
those findings did not link rates of impunity with the type of crime.
15. This NGO defined cases by the violent event: In one “case” for example, eight
people were disappeared. These meetings are ongoing, though the information
presented in this article was gathered during 2011-2013.
16. Interview with NGO director, January 2013. While this organization had ini-
tially focused exclusively on cases involving the killing of women, as the nature
of violence shifted they began to work with family members of male victims
of lethal violence. In 2013, after the period of focus of my study, they once
again accepted only cases of murders of women and cases of disappearances of
women, a change the director attributed to institutional capacity.
17. See Human Rights Watch (2015); Report: The Rise and Fall of “False Positive”
Killings in Colombia: The Role of U.S. Military Assistance, 2000-2010, http://
forusa.org/content/report-rise-fall-false-positive-killings-colombia-role-us-mili-
tary-assistance-2000-2010.
18. Luz Marina Gil was appointed to this post in September 2007 by Defense Minister
and future President Juan Manuel Santos. A December 2007 U.S. Embassy cable
progresses as follows:
The MOD [Ministry of Defense] is also working with the Military Justice
system to facilitate the transfer of cases involving alleged human rights
violations from military to civilian courts. In 2005 and 2006, the mili-
tary courts transferred seven cases and 33 cases to the civilian system
respectively. In contrast, so far in 2007 the military courts have trans-
ferred 572 cases, 155 of which involve alleged homicides. The increase
reflects the effort of Military Justice Director Luz Marin Gil, as well as
the impact of the high-level committee set up in June under Directive 10
to address the problem of extrajudicial killings. (https://wikileaks.org/
cable/2007/12/07BOGOTA8367.html)
Gallagher 1695
19. While only 1.5% of extrajudicial executions analyzed here were committed
in 2009 and 2010, the number of cases in the civilian justice system more
than doubled. These cases had largely been under the jurisdiction of the mili-
tary justice system but were subsequently transferred into the civilian justice
system.
20. I use descriptive statistics to present these data within this article. I also con-
ducted ordinary-least-squares (OLS) regression analyses of both these datasets;
these appear in Online Appendix D, and their implications echo the descriptive
statistical analyses presented in text.
21. The survey was administered by Buendía & Laredo, S.C., a statistical firm
headquartered in Mexico. The survey employed a multistage area probability
sample design and was conducted between July 5 and 8, 2012. Dr. Sandra Ley
and Dr. Cassy L. Dorff were the lead researchers in designing the overall survey
instrument.
22. Roughly the same number, 110 respondents, indicated that they would notify the
church or religious community. While almost 80%, 787 respondents, indicated
that they would go to the police at some point, only 38% indicated that they
would go to the police first.
23. In Colombia, this was not the case: The NGO coalition did not require the par-
ticipation of all family members of victim due to different investigatory method-
ologies and case-level dynamics.
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Author Biography
Janice Gallagher is currently an assistant professor of political science at Rutgers
University, Newark. She holds a PhD in government from Cornell University, an MA
in teaching from Brown University, and a BA in political science from Swarthmore
College. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Watson Institute for
International and Public Affairs.

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1Rutgers University–Newark, NJ, USA

The Argument: Activists and Advocates

Figure 1. Activists and advocates.

Table 1. Advocates, Activists, and the Provision of Justice.

Actors present Relative provision of justice

literature in conversation with scholarship focusing on judicial politics, courts,

investigatory information—as opposed to victim demographics—best

1. I develop the concept of the judicial decision-making site, which I

the judicial system that a binary, conviction/nonconviction paradigm

Figure 2. Research design: Levels of analysis and primary findings.

activity during their administrations. Although Colombia is often perceived

Figure 3. Judicial progress in Mexico and Colombia.

Subnational Findings: Organized Citizen Action and Participatory

effectively. As violence suddenly spiked in Nuevo León in 2011, they were

I am convinced that if we truthfully do rigorous, serious work in the

Second, the NGO began to hold bimonthly collaborative meetings with

selling out by former participants and other organizations working on similar

This neighboring organization, now headed by people who previously

Colombia: A scandal makes way for United Nations (UN) advocates. Colombia’s

military—at least 240 of them by 2013—were held legally accountable for

conviction of so many members of the military? I find that the documentation,

Figure 6. Judicial status in Colombia: Disappearances and homicides 2002-2010.

Individuals: Alternative Explanations—Selection Bias and

Would notify a civil 40.14 51 2.34 268

NGO = nongovernmental organization.

the Attorney General’s office; the church or religious community; an NGO or

Conclusion and Implications

Demographic information of family member Demographic information

NGO = nongovernmental organization.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

3. According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, criminal homicides take

Landman, T. (2008). Issues and methods in comparative politics: An introduction

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