TENANTLA, Mexico – Whoever wins Sunday's presidential election will have to face not only Mexico's drug cartels, but a new kind of crime involving whole neighborhoods defying police and military personnel.
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Such "socialized" or "mass" crimes are spreading in Mexico as entire communities empty freight trains of merchandise or steal hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel from pipelines.
"The logic of the people is that they see politicians and officials stealing big time ... and they see themselves as having the same right to steal as the big-time politicians," said Edgardo Buscaglia, an international crime expert and research fellow at Columbia University. "You begin to create an ethical code in which, 'If the upper-class people can steal and get away with it, we can steal, too, with complete justification.'"
In May, armed men broke the locks on two supermarkets in the southern city of Arcelia in Guerrero state and allowed local residents in to loot them. Police didn't show up for hours.
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