War in Words: An Intellectual History of the “Narco” in Mexico (review)

TThe radical ideas of Republican politicians – they want to invade Mexico to attack drug cartels that they have labeled as such by terrorist organizations – are a review of Oswaldo Zavala’s The war in the words current. Drug war hawks believe that Mexico is experiencing state failure at the hands of heavily armed drug cartels. The critical manifestation of state failure is the Mexican government’s loss of control over its territory, particularly areas close to the U.S. border. State failure, they argue, gives cartels free rein to smuggle drugs and undocumented migrants into the United States. In response, Zavala claims that the cartels don’t exist (The cards don’t exist was the title of his 2018 book), implying that cartels are discursive objects constructed by policymakers in both the United States and Mexico to facilitate economic and political dominance.

The visual power of drug war images—decapitated heads, mutilated bodies, bodies hung from highway overpasses, the discovery of mass graves—reinforces the idea of ​​the cartels as the new locus of evil in the post-Cold War world. Seen in all their immediacy, cartel narratives and images underscore a terrifying reality of escalating social violence in Mexico. Narco discourse narrates this violence on terms that exonerate political and economic elites in both Mexico and the United States. Images and concepts are linked together in an explanatory framework. Cartels are important actors. They compete fiercely for territory or plazas. They buy protection from corrupt politicians and cops. As Zavala points out, incidents of social violence in Mexico are easily transformed into drug war narratives.

Both the Cold War and the drug war share a knack for eroding the past. In the transition from anticommunism to the drug war, the past was abruptly forgotten. An example of this, as Zavala notes, was Panama’s anticommunist ruler, Manuel Noriega, cocaine dealer, dictator, and CIA agent. Suddenly, in 1989, the Cold War ally became an enemy in the drug war, leading to a U.S. invasion of Panama.

Something similar happened in Mexico: criminal groups reinforced the repressive capacities of the Mexican police and military. After Mexico’s Operation Condor in the 1970s, a US-funded counternarcotics campaign not to be confused with the South American state terror plan of the same name, narcos who were not arrested or killed by the police and military were swept up in an officially protected drug trafficking network. In the aftermath of Condor, the national security documents of the government of Miguel de la Madrid (1982–88) contained no concept of drug trafficking as a threat to national security. Why would they? The narcos were subordinate to the state. In both cultural and official registers, the narco was not a powerful figure but a marginalized one: “the crouching barbarian, the defeated peasant who is not accepted even in the city,” Zavala writes. The state portrayed the peasant rebels repressed during the dirty wars of the 1970s in the state of Guerrero in a similar way: the rebels were criminals and deviants who failed to integrate into modern Mexico.

Both cases emphasized the supremacy of the state rather than the weakness of the state. Narco-discourse reversed this relationship and questioned state power. How did this transition occur?

What changed, Zavala argues, was not the Mexican state, but the discourse through which it represents itself. The agent that fueled this change was the United States. Just as Mexico dutifully accepted the terms of structural adjustment policies dictated by the US and the International Monetary Fund, Mexico also embraced US security doctrines. In both cases, the Mexican state’s economic and security practices have produced a kind of neoliberal amnesia. The popular reappraisals of the Mexican Revolution, enshrined in the 1917 Constitution, have suddenly been transformed into the regrettable excesses of the statist past, just as the state supremacy of the 1970s has suddenly been transformed into the state weakness of the neoliberal era.

Zavala argues that this discursive transformation is rooted in the autonomy of narco-discourse. It functions as a myth in the sense of “a secondary semiotic system,” as defined by literary theorist Roland Barthes, elaborated with signs that stand for real referents. This conception of myth clarifies how myth obscures reality. Myth in this sense is not real, but fabricated. According to Zavala: “Under this myth there is no hidden reality to be discovered, only more language appears, the prior signs that construct the symbolic structure of myth, disconnected from reality.”

The myth then penetrates into reality. In this respect, narco-discourse operates through practices of dissemination. Agents and state officials are the sources of stories about drug trafficking, which journalists, novelists, songwriters, and film directors then process into narco-narratives. One of the critical effects of dissemination is that the state origins of narco-discourse dissolve, so that the discourse is no longer perceived in terms of the point of view of a particular actor, but simply a reflection of reality. This naturalization of narco-discourse erases the social conflicts of the past. The present is only about the struggle between the state and organized crime, which calls into question the very existence of the state.

A vignette from Zavala’s text illustrates this point. On a deserted beach in Sonora, National Geographic interviews a masked narco who is waiting for a weapons shipment from the United States. “Why these weapons?” the reporter asks. “Because,” says the narco, “our bossMenchu ​​​​(head of the Jalisco de Nueva Generación Cartel), wants to defeat all the other cartels and control all of Mexico.” There you have it: living proof of the narcovirus that has infected Mexico. The narco-discourse multiplies these reference points as a continuous stream of information about Mexico, making the country essentially synonymous with the war on drugs.

Zavala characterizes the discourse of the narco as the epistemic platform of the war on drugs from 1975 to 2020. The platform is, of course, a misleading cultural register in which the events related to drug trafficking and organized crime become meaningful. These cultural meanings are merely the perspectives of the powerful, transformed into a kind of cultural common sense of the war on drugs. Part of the work of critique is not only to analyze how this epistemic platform works, but also to see through it. Underneath the misleading platform lies a complex reality of how organized crime groups operate as agents within the social formation of Mexico.

In this regard, Zavala argues that the fundamental relationship between the narcotics squad and the state has not changed. As in the Pax Priista, as the period 1940-1970 is known, the state is the principal and the narcos are merely agents of the state. The state has extorted the narcos and also pushed them to do some of the dirty work of suppressing resistance to the exploitation and dispossession of workers and peasants. This is still the case, although under the neoliberal regime the dirty work of repression has been expanded because neoliberalism demands more exploitation and more dispossession.

This is undoubtedly true, but it is also an oversimplification of how the Mexican state is changing under neoliberalism. It is worth remembering, however, that Zavala’s main task in this book is to analyze the narco as a form of representation in Mexico. But a clear understanding of contemporary Mexico requires that we move beyond the critique of narco-representation and beyond the claim that little has changed with the narco because the state is still in charge. Zavala’s analysis should be complemented by other work that more sharply examines relationships between state, corporate, and criminal actors. One important direction for research is toward greater regional specificity in examining how illicit and legal economies in Mexico have merged into perversely functional wholes.

What emerges here is yet another epistemic platform: in this case, the way in which practices of legality conflate illegal practices of extortion and dispossession into hardened legalized possessions and outcomes. Narco-discourse is not the only epistemic game in town. In this respect, the concept of legality, as Hepzibah Muñoz Martinez points out in her discussion of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, functions as the fetish and obscure constitutive nexus between criminality and state-imposed order. Neoliberalism in Mexico has emerged from this nexus of legality and illegality.

Zavala’s analysis of narco discourse is invaluable because it debunks the myth of the narco that underlies current U.S. proposals to use military force against cartels branded as terrorist organizations. Zavala’s work could not be more timely and important. But it should also be read in conjunction with more empirically driven research that draws attention to other regimes of representation, such as the discourse of legality, that illustrate how the symbolic order of the state not only distorts Mexican reality but also plays a more direct role in constructing that reality.

Richard W. Coughlin is an associate professor of political science at Florida Gulf Coast University. His work has appeared in Latin American Perspectives, Intervención y Coyuntura, Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture, and E-International Relations.