A literature-based approach to a Narco-network

Abstract

In this work we used a combined text-mining/manual-curing approach in order to mine the Spanish-written book “Los Señores del Narco” and identify the narco social network. In our method, nodes are book characters and links are created when the closeness between those characters is under a certain threshold value along the text. Results show the network of the principal drug-dealers of México as well as some politicians or members of the national police department. A community analysis shows some separated groups corresponding to well-known drug cartels. The analysis presented here remarks the importance of the text mining tools to understand relationships among individuals –specially the qualitative character of the interactions– which could be difficult by using other approaches.