Abstract
During the COVID-19 pandemic, organized criminal groups (OCG) in Mexico adopted various social control strategies to adapt their interests to the health risks stemming from the pandemic. Some used violent measures to enforce social distancing while others provided basic goods to ameliorate the economic consequences of the health crisis. What explains the variation in OCG governance strategies during the pandemic? What are the political consequences of such actions? To answer these questions, we deployed an online survey containing a list experiment to understand the extent and strategies of criminal control during the pandemic. Our research contributes to current knowledge about the manifestations of criminal governance regimes and opens new lines of research for the understanding of the effects of criminal governance on a wide range of behavioral outcomes.