Vanda Felbab-Brown, director of the Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors and senior fellow of foreign policy at The Brookings Institution:“High-value targeting (HVT) has failed to reduce the power of drug-trafficking groups in Mexico and has counterproductively contributed to increases in violence in Mexico. The necessary switch to targeting the middle layer of criminal groups in Mexico has been elusive. But the strategy of the Andrés Manuel López Obrador administration to give up on a law enforcement response to drug trafficking groups is even more problematic. HVT has driven up criminal violence in Mexico in multiple ways. It has transformed a more consolidated multipolar market of some five large criminal organizations, which had deterrence capacity vis-à-vis each other into a highly unstable, highly fragmented multipolar criminal market of very many groups. They have constantly struggled to establish enough deterrence control vis-à-vis each other…”