Can Google Win the Drug War?

November 2, 2012 • Commentary • by

Mexico’s war on drugs continues to be deadly and dangerous for everyone. This means that the journalists, who would usually be piecing together local reports at their source, have been less able to do their job. With a new tool from Harvard graduate students, Google might just be able to pick up their (understandable) slack.

MOGO (Making Order using Google as an Oracle) processes data from newspapers over the past twenty years with location and cartel data. Complete with graphs, their analysis shows the spread and increased activity of a variety of cartels since 1990. Nevertheless, the data still represents only what reports had previously published, though it does add a bird’s eye view of the evolution of Mexico’s drug war. Altogether, such analyses could prove valuable to curbing the dangerous presence of these drug cartels.

Read the rest of the student’s reports here.

And while this effort did not have the direct backing of Google, executive chairman Eric Schmidt has expressed a desire to help aid the fight against cartels, one that has cost roughly 47,500 lives since 2006.

Attribution

Foreign Policy

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