War for the 21st century?: Exploring the pre/postmodern conflict in narco-estado Hannah Croft

Abstract:

Organized crime and drug violence in Mexico is a major national and international

security threat. Current research largely focuses on the traditional economic and

political aspects of this war in an attempt to formulate a new military strategy to defeat

or at least restrict the activities of the drug cartels. The nature of the war, being based

on greed, hyper-materialism and the pioneering of the global freemarket, makes it very

much a war for the 21st century or postmodern. In exploring this idea, this dissertation

will argue that the ‘postmodern war’ concept also assumes various premodern

dynamics or traits, leading to the assertion that the conflict between the cartels, the

state, and Mexican society, translates into a theoretical conflict between pre and

postmoderns.

Introduction

Mexico’s drug war has transformed the country into a slaughter-house. At the end of former

president Felipe Calderón’s administration, the official death toll stood at over 60,000 (Booth, 2012),

whilst recent reports from the government have admitted that the number of people who have

disappeared since 2006, the beginning of Calderon’s presidency, has risen to 22,322 (Zabludovsky,

2014). To put this ‘lowintensity’ conflict into perspective (see Boville, 2004), as of April 2014 the

number of American troops killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan totalled just 6,802 (Costs of

War, 2014). Historically Mexico has been always been something of a bootlegger state, a transit

point between the cocaine-producing countries of Latin America and the United States, with its

insatiable appetite for illegal narcotics. However, in more recent years, Mexico has become a drug-

producing powerhouse, injecting obscene quantities of cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, and

marijuana into the veins of its northern neighbour’s cities and towns. Additional profits are made

from kidnappings, the trafficking of humans and body parts, trade in pirate DVDs, and in less

traditional areas of criminal activity, such as oil, coal, and timber. Estimates of the cartels’ collective

profits vary, but numbers usually range from annual revenues of US$35 to $45 billion (Duff and

Rygler, 2012). Such unprecedented wealth has led to unprecedented political power and territorial

domination, leading some to describe Mexico as a narco-estado – drug state (see Voeten, 2012).

Where the true horror, and morbid academic fascination, lies, however, is in the materialistic nature

of the war itself. A conflict that is so intimately tied to the global neo-liberal economy and its culture

of consumerism is an indicative symptom of our current era. The cartels and their youth recruits

spend their money on highfashion and expensive cars and post pictures on Instagram for the digital

world to see. These images of wealth and power are persistently recycled by Mexico’s media and

popularised in the virtual terrain of Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. The narco have integrated

himself into popular culture; to many, they’re just cool. It is very much, then, argues Vulliamy (2011),

‘a war for the 21st century’. Due to the war’s close proximity to and association with the United

States, Mexico’s criminal conflict has received substantial attention from Washington’s security

analysts and academics, as well as from within Mexico’s own borders. Focus largely dwells upon

traditional national and regional security issues – the black-market economy, political corruption,

border control, and the expansion and modernisation of Mexico’s security forces. Metz’s ‘criminal

insurgency’ thesis (1993) now finds increasing popularity in the security and criminology studies on

Mexico, with the two disciplines often borrowing and intermixing their ideas and data (see Sullivan

and Bunker, 2012). Bunker’s ‘The Mexican Cartel Debate: As Viewed Through Five Divergent Fields of

Security Studies’ anthologizes the critical voices from other fields, such as terrorism studies, future

warfare studies, and gang warfare studies, that are also interjecting on the Mexican problem, all

with varying assessments of threat and conflicting proposals for a security strategy (see Bunker,

b2012: 107-119).

This dissertation does not intend to simply echo these protean positions, nor will it attempt to

suggest a strategy or solution; such a discussion has already received significant meditation in

security circles. Rather, this dissertation will move away from the traditional security discourse and

instead propose a new paradigm with which to understand the nature of this conflict. This concept

will be referred to as the pre/postmodern conflict, a dichotomous relationship that serves to

highlight how the war, which is one of the 21st century or postmodern era, shares various

characteristics of the premodern. This relationship or ‘conflict’ is manifest in the various conflicts

that comprise the landscape of the drug war: cartels against cartels, cartels against state, and cartels

against society. The Mexican drug war provides fertile ground to illustrate this concept, and,

moreover, an understanding of how contemporary criminal insurgency operates. This dissertation

will be organised into four chapters. Chapter One will provide a thorough explanation of the

pre/postmodern conflict concept, with particular emphasis on the notion of postmodernity

(specifically to this thesis). The purpose of this Chapter is really to deliver a conceptual framework to

the empirical analysis that will follow it. Chapter Two will look at the takeover of Mexico and its

transformation into narco-estado with particular emphasis on the reorganisation of physical space as

a result of the drug violence. In this chapter, connections will be made between the Mexican

postmodern globalised state and the premodern or medieval ‘statelet’. It will also discuss the

reconstitution of social space in urban areas between rich and poor which, it will be revealed,

mirrors premodern fortified cities and towns. The third and fourth chapters will zoom in the

analytical lens onto Mexican society and the pathology of the Mexican drug cartels. Chapter Three

will explore the drug war’s consumeristic and superficial subculture, narcocultura, and how it has

been glamorised in Mexican popular culture. There will also be an investigation into the cartels’ use

of social networking, an emerging platform within the terrain of the conflict. Ultimately, this chapter

will illuminate the postmodern nature of the war. Chapter Four, in contrast, will highlight the

premodern nature of the war by investigating the cartels’ revival of premodern ritualism and

spiritualism and how this is connected to postmodern culture/violence. Chapter three and four

should henceforth be read with this comparison in mind.

This dissertation will not purport that it has the definitive definitions of the nature of pre or

postmodernity, for there are many. Nor will it attempt to argue that the topics selected (territorial

space, cultural space, and spiritual space) are the most crucial dynamics of this war as there are a

multitude of different areas that still deserve consideration. Rather, this idea is presented to

stimulate thinking, discussion, and potentially to offer a new paradigm with which future analysts

can comprehend wars for the 21st century.

Chapter One: Exploring the notion of the pre/postmodern

The aim of this chapter is to outline the key themes of pre/postmodern conflict that will later be

examined in relation to the drug war that is currently ravaging Mexico. As most papers that feature

the notion of postmodernity will usually note, there is no one definition or concise conceptual

framework of postmodernity; ‘defining it is like drawing a line on water to demarcate two adjoining

oceans’ (Fronda, 2011: 66). The term has been used in different periods by an assortment of

intellectuals associated with varying scholarly fields, making its ontological status largely unstable

and its genealogy difficult to pin down. Ultimately, scholars of postmodernism are usually in accord

that they cannot agree on one set meaning, and therefore they accept that it can assume a variety of

paradigmatic positions (see, for example, Lyotard, 1984; Jameson, 1991; Baudrillard, 1993; Sontag,

2009). Nonetheless, it may be more effective to embrace postmodernity’s conceptual perplexity

because its perplexity reflects the concept’s disillusionment with the fixed truths and meanings

associated with modernity. Whilst at times discussions of postmodernity may indulge in the diffuse

and periphrastic, this general conceptual obscurity is itself a reflection of the ambiguities of

contemporary social mutations. This uncertainty has also been translated into security studies and IR

theory, where

there are a range of differing attitudes towards and understandings of what we describe as

‘postmodern conflict’ or violence in the postmodern (see Duffield, 1998; Gray, 1998; McRill, 2009;

Lucas Jr., 2010).

It must be mentioned that a holistic exploration into the various aspects of postmodernity (with its

premodern components) and its influence on contemporary conflict lies outside the grasp of the

modest parameters of this dissertation. Instead, three key themes have been identified to illustrate

the mercurial and conflicting nature of Mexico’s brutal postmodern landscape. First, the role of

narco-warfare in the weakening and reanimation of the pre/postmodern state. Second, the culture

of postmodern violence, and third, the revival of the spiritual and rejuvenation of premodern beliefs.

Whilst these microcosmic themes make up just a small part of the expansive mosaic of Mexico’s 21st

century narco-war, they offer a useful starting point for understanding the development of the

pre/postmodern conflict model.

Forming the theoretical underbelly of these themes will be the structural characteristics of

postmodernity that have so meaningfully changed the face of states and warfare – globalisation and

its associated neo-liberalisation – and their connection to postmodernity’s contradictory existential

and societal transformations – hyper-consumerism and hedonism, and uneven development and

societal and individual insecurity.

Postmodern dystopia: The weakening of the state in postmodernity

The literary writers of the 20th century would often characterise the near future as a grim and

oppressive dystopia with a cynical and suspicious emphasis on technology. Orwell’s (2004) 1984

prophesised a dark and authoritarian system of governance where citizens were under constant

surveillance by Big Brother, whilst Huxley’s (2007) Brave New World satirically conveys a ‘perfect’

totalitarian future where humans are bred into caste systems and have an abundance of consumer

goods and resources, whilst their desirability for knowledge is pacified through entertainment and

frivolous sex. The common overarching theme in these works seemed to be the expectation that in

the future power would become even more intensely concentrated into the state, and that

technology would become a substantial apparatus of that power. However, the postmodern era

reveals quite a different portentous reality. The

myriad forces of globalisation – the expansive, ubiquitous and uncontainable flows of trade and

capital (both legal and illegal), the spread of (Westernised) culture, and the innovation of global

technology and real-time digital connections, to name a few, have fostered immense structural

fragmentation and a noticeable weakening and retreat of the modern state (see Lerche, 1998;

Clapham, 2002; Khanna, 2009). The state as a spatial unit of political, economic, and cultural power

now competes with a manifold of new and emerging spaces. The internet and real-time digital

connections on mobile phones through Twitter, Facebook and public blogging has opened up a new

(cyber)space of which the state is absent from (see for example Schultz and Cannon, 2012). The

neoliberal global economy discloses a stateless and timeless space of commerce and trade that the

state can oversee, not control. Global (Western) culture has stretched its tentacles into every corner

of the globe, creating uneven and confusing cultural/temporal aesthetics in developing nations,

rendering states’ borders largely symbolic and their cities new sites/sights of power and social

mediation (see Cameron and Stein, 2000; Roy and Alsayyad, 2004; Read et. al., 2005; St. Clair and

Williams, 2008). If power works through spatial dimensions, as Foucault theorised, than the

emergence of these new spaces has subsequently ruptured and even diminished the power of the

modern Westphalian state (see Foucault, 1980, 1986). The consequent contemporary geography has

now developed into a ‘kaleidoscopic mix of space-times, constantly being built up and torn down…

creating all manner of bizarre and unexpected combinations’ (Thrift, 2004: 91), or what Jameson

refers to as the ‘postmodern hyperspace’ (1991).

Insecurity and materialism: A postmodern pathology?

There was a modernist desire, Friederichs asserts, to unify these dual processes of globalisation and

fragmentation into a single ontological narrative of international transformation; a dynamic of global

progress and development (Friederichs, 2001: 479). However, the liberal homogenisation of the

world, with an emphasis on privatisation and individualism, has generated rampant inequality, not

just between states but within them. This is the ‘dark side’ of globalisation and liberalisation; a

dystopian future-in-present where, instead of an oppressive and powerful state, states are

weakening and citizens and societies are gradually becoming marginalised and insecure. Urban

areas, the hubs of (global) liberal

mechanisation, are becoming overcrowded centres of inequality and unemployment, whilst

simultaneously individuals are being enveloped into the individualistic and anomic arena of neo-

liberal society (see Murray, 2004; Alsayyad and Roy, 2004; Davis, 2007; Muggah, 2012;).

The speed at which these shifts have occurred and their apparent independence from social realities

has ‘homogenized everything to the absolute present’ (Boyer, 1990: 102). The opening of global

information, communication, culture and finance has meant that ‘the world becomes an excess of

things, places, and characters once transversed they can be forgotten’ (Ibid). Hence there is a ‘sense

of pervasive ephemerality and transitoriness’ (Ellin, 1996: 118) that has left in the individual a sense

of anxiety and pessimism about the future and a disassociation to their ‘modern’ past (Baumann,

2000). This existential ‘crisis of meaning’, explains Laidi (1998), is attributed ‘first and foremost *to+

the phenomenon of mass consumption and the values it has put into circulation (a hedonistic and

psychologistic culture) that are responsible for the shift from modernity to postmodernity’ (2005: 9).

Yet this hedonism is not born out of a carpe diem philosophy, Lipovetsky asserts. Rather, this culture,

‘based on attention to the present alone and its desires of enjoyment’, has its foundations in an

‘anxiety about a future fraught with risk and insecurity’ (Lipovetsky, 2005: 45) owing to the

economic and social uncertainties of the contemporary consumer-capitalist culture.

Changing nature of war: Criminality in the postmodern

The dual dialectics of state decline and globalisation, materialism and insecurity, have spawned the

transmogrification of contemporary criminal violence. The uneven progress of neo-liberalisation and

its resultant insecurity and deprivation has fractured social cohesion which can generate a climate

that makes criminality a more appealing option when it offers, as in Mexico, the opportunity for

wealth and power. The expanse of global trade and its independence from state or institutional

control has allowed criminals to integrate themselves into the lucrative black market or ‘shadow

economy’, opening up new avenues for gross affluence. Where the state has become splintered

criminality fills these fertile vacuums of power, leaving ‘multiple, competing, and asymmetrical

sovereignties’ (Rosas, 2012: 20) that haunt the spaces left wild and abandoned. It is this new

landscape of criminal power, state destruction and fiendish wealth-acquirement that embodies what

we refer to as postmodern war. What makes this hyper-criminality a veritable ‘war’ is the fact that

its extremity goes way beyond our current understanding of organised crime, which is primarily

focused on the economic space i.e., illicit trade networks, control of industry, and employment of

members. What we are now witnessing is a politicisation of the criminal, whereby the organisational

capacity, wealth and power of criminal cartels and gangs are reaching such heights as to challenge

the very state they function within. Hence the criminal creeps into the political space as a new

challenger for sovereignty. As one of Mexico’s largest newspapers El Universal lamented in 2010 ‘it is

no longer a matter of organised crime, but rather a loss of the state’ (quoted in Los Angeles Times,

2010).

These developments, as Gregory highlights, have primed the pump for making a direct connection

between cartels and insurgency (2011: 244). In this sense, contemporary violence is postmodern

precisely because it rejects or at least muddies modernity’s fixed binaries of criminality/warfare.

Always distinguished by its aims, criminality has always been defined by its economic or ‘greed’

motive, whilst war is defined by its political and state-centric ‘grievances’ (see Collier and Hoeffler,

2004). Yet the increasing power of criminal organisations within certain states has had, usually the

unintentional, effect of what one might call an insurgency i.e. the collapse of certain state

institutions through corruption, the annexation of territory and a high body count. Moreover, the

capacity of certain cartels to control territories and trade gives them the patina of an insurgent

group, whilst their arms and equipment, even the recruitment of their own protection ‘armies’ or

security rackets, reminds the casual observer of the state or warlord. Complex struggles are

emerging in the political vacuums left by state fragility that are at once blending into each other

leading to what Kan has described as a ‘mosaic cartel war’ (2011); ‘there is the conflict of cartels

among each other, the conflict within cartels, cartels against the Mexican state, cartels and gangs

against the Mexican people and gangs versus gangs’ (Kan, 2011). What emerges, then, are early

manifestations of an anarchic criminal state, the dystopian future of postmodernity (Grimes, 1998).

Visualizing the future in terms of the unknown past: the pre/postmodern state

Of course this idea is not a new one. Hedley Bull’s renowned The Anarchical Society (1977) warned

of the melancholic implications of a post-Westphalian world with dislocated centres of power and

‘more ubiquitous and continuous violence and insecurity than does the modern state system’ (Bull,

1977: 255). But the most important insight in Bull’s infamous work was his willingness to ‘visualize

the unknown future in terms of the unknown past’ (Kobrin, 1998: 6), through a premodern or

‘neomedieval’ metaphor. This metaphor suggests that there are

noticeable similarities between the pre and postmodern systems of rule and spaces of power. In the

premodern or neomedieval era, authority ‘was essentially negotiated, especially in medieval cities,

between religious, economic, and political centres of power’ (Alsayad and Roy, 2006: 10). The

fluidity of authority meant that territory was vulnerable to disorder and banditry; criminals could

profit from uncontrolled corridors of trade. This kind of premodern or pre-state system of irregular

governance echoes the disjointed and patchy spatial configuration of power in postmodernity, on

both national and international levels. This element of the pre/postmodern conflict is one of the

defining features of the narco-war in Mexico and will later be discussed in Chapter One.

Criminal violence in the cultural space

In looking at the fragmenting and expanding spaces of power in postmodernity, this dissertation will

also identify the intrusion of criminal violence into the local and global Mexican cultural space. The

postmodern condition has been described as a veritable ‘state of culture’ (Natoli, 1997: 1), where

consumption and image make up the core social fabric of neoliberal societies. There already exists a

tension between the pre and postmodern, or local and global, cultures in developing states, leaving

a kind of cultural void or swamp of mixed temporalities. Territorial Mexico, specifically, offers a

thought-provoking spatial representation of these cultural and temporal divisions; Mexico is

sandwiched between the over-developed factory of Western popular culture, the United States, and

the under-developed smorgasbord of local and ancient cultures contained within South America.

This pre/postmodern conflict is particular to Mexican culture; ‘the coexistence of indigenous,

mestizo and European cultures – juxtaposed with the uneven effects of mass media and technology

– combine to create a particularly diverse phenomenon’ (Neustadt, 2005: xi). Kantaris, too,

understands ‘the local-global dialectic as it is enacted in the Mexican megapolis as a paradigm for

Latin American urbanization and globalization’ (1998). Mexico is thus the perfect laboratory to

investigate the contradictions or aporia within postmodern culture.

The problem with the culture of postmodernity, however, ‘is *that it is+ increasingly devoid of moral

and aesthetic standards – it is self-centred and consumerist… postmodernism is a consumerist

culture’ (Hartley, 1997: 41-2). This culture not only informs the hedonistic and greedy motives of the

ultra-violent gangs of the 21st century, but it has also begun to adopt or ‘buy into’ the culture of

criminal violence itself. Gangs, cartels, even terrorist groups, have observed the importance of social

media in generating fear and projecting power by posting photos and videos of brutal beheadings

and shootings on YouTube, Facebook or blogging sights, whilst journalists and the mass media

contribute to this swirl of audio-visual culture through the continuous publication of violent

brutalities (see Sullivan and Elkus, 2008; Bunker, 2011). The intrusion of criminal violence into the

mass media propels criminality into a cultural artefact or consumer good. Yet as will be shown in

Chapter Two, Mexico’s scaremongering media is juxtaposed with the popular and cool postmodern

culture of the gangster. The narcos

have accumulated their own specific culture – taxonomy of language, narco fashion, art, music, even

architecture – to be consumed by Mexican and, largely, Mexican-American society. Criminal drug

culture ‘infects the social body’ (Cockrell, 2009) and, when normalised, becomes a commodity to be

consumed, carving out its own space in mass pop-culture. Scholars have long been talking about

‘cultures of violence’ (see Waldmann, 2007; Carroll, 2007; Reyes and de Cardenas, 2014), but really

the issue in Mexico is that narco culture has been assimilated into popular youth culture.

Consequently, the drug-traffickers are made synonymous with real or fictional celebrity ‘gangsters’

like Tupac, Notorious B.I.G or Walter White from Breaking Bad. It is largely those who remain

trapped in the peripheral and underdeveloped urban areas of developing states that have elevated

the criminal or narco to celebrity status or, from the premodern perspective, ‘social bandit’, because

they’ve ‘made it’ out of the ‘hood - the spatial representation of urban marginalisation and poverty.

Where this has occurs we witness a prominent example of the postmodern cultural and socio-

economic condition (see Edberg, 2001; Fricano, 2013). Thus this dissertation will not only approach

criminal violence as a political or economic issue, but also as cultural one, for it too offers another

vital terrain of power and struggle to be examined.

Longing for authenticity: The revival of premodern spirituality

Neoliberalism may have brought about a superficial culture, but as a reaction to this there has been

a rejuvenation of premodern beliefs, myths, folklore and spirituality. The rootlessness of the

postmodern condition is proliferating inflation of memory; the social need to feel a connection to a

more meaningful and authentic past. ‘In other words’, states Lipovetsky, ‘all the memories, all the

universes of meaning, all the forms of the collective imaginary that refer to the past and that can be

drawn on and redeployed to construct identities and enable individuals to find self-fulfilment’ (2005:

67). This revival of archaic or premodern spirituality and ritualism has found its expression in the

Mexican drug war. Ultimately, as Chapter Three will illustrate, the cult of violence has impregnated

the spiritual, and the spiritual has impregnated the violence. The most prominent feature of this

spiritual rejuvenation is the growing cult following of the Santa Muerte, a saint who personifies

death and has become something of a symbol of hope to both Mexican society and to the narcos. In

many ways, argues Cabanas, the growing popularity of this pseudo-religious saint and the dismissal

of mainstream Western religion is ‘a symptom of the crisis of the idea of progress in Mexico’ (2014:

14). For Mexican society, particularly the poor and marginalised, Santa Muerte offers safety in the

insecure and violent arena of Mexican drug politics, whilst for the narco she extends protection and

divine justice against his enemies. The cartels have accumulated the relics and symbols associated

with folk spirituality, suggesting a movement away from the secularity normally associated with

criminality. Rather, some cartels see themselves instead as purveyors of divine justice. This religious

dimension of the Mexican drug war juxtaposed with its consumerist culture embodies the

pre/postmodern tension that characterises this ‘war of the 21st century’. Ultimately, these themes

will highlight how Mexican criminality imposes itself in all spheres – the political and territorial, the

cultural, and the spiritual. It is a phantom that transcends the normal boundaries of organised crime.

Chapter Two: Cartel Consumption of the Pre/Postmodern State

The state was the most significant spatial representation of modernity, a territorial vessel that

symbolised the high point of political, economic, and social organisation and governance. Quite

possibly the ‘greatest fetish’ of modernity (Taussig, 1997), the state acquired its mythical aura from

the sprawl of political philosophers who were in awe of this great power; for Hobbes, the state was

the ‘mortal God’, for Hegel it was the embodiment of reason and progress, a fantastic social and

political organism (see Simic, 2008: 193). For more contemporary social scientists like Foucault, who

concentrated on the relationship between knowledge and technologies of power, the state is the

ultimate institution or space for which

power and knowledge can be exercised over its citizens (see Foucault, 1980). The control of space

and knowledge, in this sense, becomes a technique of governance and the essence of modern

political surveillance and control. The state was a distinctly modern creation because it concentrated

its social and economic control and utilised bureaucratic systems to collect information about its

citizens, a completely altered form of collective organisation to the premodern era which was,

according to Scott, ‘in many crucial respects, partially blind; it knew precious little about its subjects,

their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity’ (1998: 2). This blindness

was, argue Alsayyad and Roy, largely due to the fragmented nature of authority; power was

negotiated between religious, political and economic centres of power (Alsayyad and Roy, 2006: 10).

Hence there was no one single loyalty to a higher authority, rather, the premodern ‘state’ was a

system of ‘complex networks of rival jurisdiction’ (Kobrin, 1999: 171).Disjointed authority bred a

patchwork of baron spaces in the premodern statelet.

Certain areas were ‘no-go zones’; spaces that were co-opted by bandits and gangs and were, as in

myth, designated lands of treachery with threatening signs that read ‘hic sunt dracones’ (here be

dragons) (Williams, 2010: 34). Back to the future: The pre/postmodern narco-estado

The postmodern state has shown signs of regression from the modern to the premodern. The

globalisation of the economy, culture, and information networks has weakened the once

omnipotent power of the modern state, forcing it to retreat into more of an observer of social

change and merely overseeing the expanse of uncontrolled neoliberal trade, cultural exchange and

network communication. The initiation of states into a neoliberal structure has fostered societal

inequality, leaving an unbalanced hodgepodge of rich and poor urban spaces. Loyalty to the state

and community has declined, replaced by loyalty to the individual to survive and succeed on their

own. The consequences of these changes have distinctly premodern or

‘neo-medieval’ characteristics (Cerny, 2004: 7-8).

Competing institutions… Fluid territorial boundaries… Growing alienation between globa innovation,

communication and resource nodes (global cities) one the one hand and disfavoured, fragmented

hinterlands on the other, along with increased inequalities and isolation of permanent sub-castes

(the underclass)… *The spread of+ geographical areas and social contexts where the rule of law does

not run.

These characteristics are radically opposed to the modernist vision of an authoritative and secure

state, where power was concentrated and society united. Rather, in the postmodern, space has

been stretched in a number of different nonterritorial directions, into the virtual, cultural, and

economic, and has been disconnected from government. The postmodern state, as in Mexico,

resembles the premodern ‘statelet’, where loyalties, institutions, and space itself are overlapping,

disjointed and largely uncontrolled. The spread of what Alan Minc called ‘zones grises’ (1993), grey

zones that are fragile and without rule of law, has provided the contemporary bandit with valuable

operation centres. This dissertation understands Mexico to be the ultimate exemplification of the

pre/postmodern state, where territorial space and the power to exercise rule is being contested and

reconfigured between the state and the cartels. The neo-medieval metaphor is particularly effective

in illuminating this argument; where order has broken down in Mexico violence has become the

most effective technique of rule, effectively ushering in mini(premodern) states of nature.

To understand the breakdown of the Mexican state into its premodern archetype, we must apply

the Foucauldian idea that ‘space is fundamental in any exercise of power’ (Foucault, 1986: 252). If

first and foremost power operates through spatial dimensions, then the cartels’ co-option of

territorial space within Mexico suggests that the strength of the drug insurgency may match or even

overtake the power of the state, leaving in its place a premodern or ‘neo-medieval’ spatial/power

structure. According to expert on the Mexican drug war John P. Sullivan, it is estimated that up to

71.5% of municipios (cities and towns) have been captured or are under the control of the narcos

(2014). This figure has steadily risen as the drug war has intensified; in 2006, at the beginning of

Calderon’s ‘war’, the number was at 53% (Sullivan, 2014). These ‘narco-cities’ take on different

forms. Sullivan has found four categories: 1) ‘hyperviolence’ where a kind of feral, failed city exists as

seen in Ciudad Juarez or Michoacán; 2) ‘contested zones’ where cartels challenge political

institutions and civil society to assert power, as seen in Monterrey; 3) ‘narco-controlled’ as in the

case of Culiacan; or, finally 4) ‘hidden financial’ power as seen in Mexico City, where large sums of

money flood different companies and government institutions unseen (Sullivan, 2014). These

categories illustrate how Mexico has been converted into that premodern patchwork of baron or

disorderly ‘zones grises’.

Contested territories, either between cartels or between cartels and autodefensas (self-defence or

vigilante groups), is where most blood is spilt however. Take Michoacán, for example. Once under

the control of La Familia, now overtaken by the Knights Templar cartel, the terror and destruction

has become so intense and state security so weak that it has bred a number of new autodefensas

which has incited more violence and societal disarray; “this is a failed state,” says Commando Cinco,

a self-defence leader in the Michoacán village of Paracuaro (quoted in Grant, 2014). It is within this

context of escalating violence that the Mexican state decided in January 2014 to legalise the

vigilante groups in Michoacán by assimilating them into ‘official’ government forces. Understandably

this decision was made to try and regain control over the conflict in the area. However, we can infer

that by legitimizing these armed civilian groups Mexico has admitted that it no longer has a

monopoly over the legitimate means of force. Although this situation is not being replicated in every

town and city in Mexico it is still fair to argue that the federal state has failed as a security guarantor.

The consequence of this failure is the formation of varying and often conflicting types of order and

authority, analogous with the premodern or neo-medieval system of governance. A fragmented kind

of order has also emerged in Ciudad Juarez - the city with the unfortunate title of most dangerous

city in the world 2010 – as it has been taken under the violent control of the Sinaloa cartel (Curry,

2013). The city’s general lack of state security has transformed it into a shining example of Norton’s

‘feral city’ thesis (2003) ‘where the rule of law has long been replaced by near anarchy in which the

only security available is that which is attained through brute power’ (Norton, 2003: 97). The

government has attempted to tackle the problems in Juarez through the ‘Todos Somos Juaraz’

program, implemented in 2010. This involved pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the

community with funds mostly going into security, public recreation, and employment. However,

citizens are not seeing benefits; ‘what good is it to build a park when you are afraid to go outside for

fear of being murdered’, lamented Juarez’s Citizens Council for Social Development spokesman

Laurencio Barraza (quoted in Chaparro, 2011). Barraza’s statement came true in January 2011, when

seven young men were gunned down in one of the parks built as part of the program. The same

dismay appears in the small towns and villages in the countryside on Mexico’s northern border, what

Campbell and Hansen have deemed ‘failed states with a small “s”’ (2012).

New order(s): The emerging criminal-political complex

‘Failed’ or ‘feral’ does not necessarily imply total anarchy. These terms’ inherent state-centrism

overlooks the manifestation of ‘non-state’ orders in Mexico. The co-option of space by cartels does

not imply a true anarchic society, but rather that, in some spaces, state order is replaced by an

alternative order, albeit a violent and illicit one. The outcome is a kind of ‘neo-feudal situation where

stratified governance exists: the gangs and cartels rule some functions while the state rules others’

(Sullivan, 2014). Hence the drug war has forced the spectrum of power and authority to be

redefined; ‘it ranges from arbitrary violence and pathogenic collapse of social contexts (social

anomy) to the re-establishment of reliable security institutions (see Hills, 2009: 35). In many

respects, the protracted conflict in Mexico should be placed in its postmodern context as an

‘emerging political complex’ (Menkhaus, 2004: 152) where sovereignty is being renegotiated

between rival jurisdictions, as in the premodern or medieval era. Ultimately, what we are witnessing

in Mexico is the politicisation of the criminal, where cartels are assuming the role of the state as it

withers away. As writer and historian Paco Ignacio Taibo (2011) reveals about the postmodern

narcos, they are not simply champions of economic space:

They are companies that charge for protection, for example to all Cancun merchants. They control all

street vendors in Monterrey. They represent justice in entire zones of Michoacán… They are the

controllers on federal roads that charge tolls. They are the ones that offer (and deliver) protection to

a restaurateur in Ciudad Juarez if he pays, and no more health inspectors or Treasury requirements…

They are in a large part of our country, a new state. A state that replaces another state based on

abuse and corruption.

In many respects, then, ‘the lines between the state and organized crime have been blurred in some

areas of Mexico and, in some cases, obliterated altogether’ (quoted in Corchado, 2011). Not only

have the cartels begun taxing citizens, but they are also recruiting youths in some cities as ‘spotters’

to police the towns and cities; Los Zetas, for example, have recruited some 3000 young people in

Nuevo Laredo (Grayson, 2013: 135). Consequently, as Hagedorn opines, cartels are more like

employment agencies or land barons (2007). The cartels are also moving away from the traditional

drug trade into more advanced, ‘state-oriented’ business. Los Zetas, the most powerful of the

cartels, are now capturing oil fields and selling it overseas, whilst La Familia would routinely shake

down logging and mining companies, two of the state’s biggest sources of revenue (World Future

Review, 2011). We should understand the situation in Mexico as an emerging feudal or premodern

patchwork of incomplete governance, a system of ‘fluctuating frontier zones and overlapping

authorities’ that make it challenging to determine precise boundaries between conflict and non-

conflict zones, state and non-state (Kobrin, 1998: 9).

‘Hoods and Fortresses: The social reorganisation of Mexico

What has been left in the place of the modern Mexican state, according to Pi-Sunyer, is a veritable

‘geography of fear, an upside-down universe that is the antithesis of that idealization of order,

structure, and predictability’ (2002: 226). This geography of fear has had profound consequences for

the spatial organisation of social groups in Mexico’s cities, most dramatically between rich and poor.

Whilst the ‘splintering urbanism’ (Alsayyad and Roy, 2006) of developing states is already a global

trend of the postmodern era, this fragmentation and reconfiguration of space between social groups

is heightened in cities that are under threat of violence and/or are experiencing a withdrawal of the

state. The problem is that ‘a widespread feeling of insecurity causes people to restrict their

circulation in public spaces and avoid leaving their homes at night or visiting certain areas. Instead,

people withdraw behind closed doors and move in(to) private spaces’ (Koonings and Koonings, 2007:

22 36). Thus violence affects both the spatial and temporal considerations of society, restricting their

freedoms and breeding social segregation. One common paradigm of these urban transformations is

the ‘gated community’ in Mexico’s cities. As Alsayyad and Roy explained in their thesis on ‘medieval

modernity’, gated communities are a kind of ‘spatial governmentality’ reminiscent of the premodern

era where the elite would live in fortified enclaves, governed by their own unique system of rules

away from the barbaric poor (2006: 6- 8). The gated communities of postmodern Mexico reflect a

similar kind of Manichean divide. The general feeling of insecurity from the drug violence has

significantly altered the architectural organisation of urban territory between the insecure rich and

the insecure poor, creating a kind of ‘network of exclusion’ (Alsayyad and Roy, 2006: 6). Mexico has

one of the highest concentrations of gated communities in the world, their popularity increasing as

the violence has intensified (Provost, 2014). These communities are exclusive spaces with pools and

golf courses; they symbolise that dichotomy between materialism and insecurity.

The commercial activity of the affluent has also been transformed by the violence in Mexico. One

significant effect of the conflict, note Sullivan and Elkus, is its burgeoning private security industry

(2008). In fact, the country is now third in how much security equipment is being purchased

(Koonings and Koonings, 2007: 40). One such business, VIP Protection, will build you a state-of-the-

art panic room, fully bulletproof and equipped with cellular communication, water, food, light, even

climate control (Lida, 2009: 223). Between three and four hundred armoured cars are sold per

month, with profits of around $150 million, whilst in 2006 entrepreneur Miguel Caballero opened a

boutique in Mexico City offering varying lines of high-fashion bullet-proof clothing (Lida, 2009: 223).

The poor, however, are left to dwell in the ‘Free ‘Hood’ (Rosas, 2012: 8), the overpopulated and

disorderly neighbourhood where to be poor is to already be considered a criminal. In his

anthropological research, Rosas found that the poor youth’s experience of insecurity was to be

treated as a problem of insecurity itself; to live in the hood was to ‘suffer the humiliations and

denigrations; to be beaten by Mexican police forces and to be incarcerated; to be called a rat… it

was to be abandoned…’ (Rosas, 2012: 8). Within this laboratory of social stigmatization, future

members of cartels are reproduced whilst those who decide to remain outside the illicit gang

network must fear violence from day to day. Just as with the gated communities that emerge as

symbols of wealth and security, ‘it is at this barrio *neighbourhood+ and street level’, argues

Campbell, that ‘the protracted public crisis in Mexico becomes perceptible in aesthetic form’ (2003:

120). These sites of urban transformation that are born out of poverty and drug violence are given

an identity, much like the gated communities, through the pre/postmodern art forms of graffiti

muralisms (Campbell, 2003: 120). Conforming to the trend of territorial annexation, those who live

in the barrios use graffiti murals as a symbol of the rejection of ‘official politico-legal divisions or

urban space in favour of a nomadic and territorial sense of “la calle” *the street+’ (Campbell, 2003:

122). The gang symbols sprawled in graffiti across the walls of the hood is the postmodern

translation of hic sunt dracones.

Territorial expansion by the cartels suggests to some scholars that Mexico offers a paradigm of

‘criminal insurgency’, where narcos assume in part the role of the state. The spatial reconfiguration

of Mexico due to the drug war has transformed the state into its premodern predecessor, a melange

of overlapping authorities, jurisdictions and loyalties. Yet this territorial takeover does not just

intrude on the workings of the state and its legal-political institutions. Society has been forced to

readjust to new urban temporal and spatial governance, although the readjustments are largely

expressions of a group’s economic standing. One can, then, see why Mexico has truly been turned

into narco-estado. Nevertheless, the ‘battle space’ is not solely confined to the territorial. The

pre/postmodern conflict extends ‘well beyond traditional military-police dimensions to relatively

uncharted political, psychological, socio-economic, and moral dimensions’ (Manwaring, 2005: 17).

Chapter Three: Pop-Culture Anti-Heroes and Narco-War in the Cultural Space

Whilst the more traditional scholarly focus on the territorial, political and economic elements of

Mexico’s criminal insurgency provides an important insight into the breakdown of the Mexican state

and its retreat to a premodern structure, more attention needs to be paid to the cultural dynamics

that lie at the heart of the conflict’s core. This is not to say that Mexico has a ‘culture of violence’, a

statement that reeks of flippant cultural or ethnic reductionism. Rather, narco violence and the

particularities of its criminal sub-cultures have fed into Mexican mass culture and, simultaneously,

Mexican popular culture has influenced the violence, which has

manifested into a fascinating cultural zeitgeist. This chapter will henceforth discuss in detail the

cultural landscape of the Mexican drug violence, which has ultimately morphed into a decisive

terrain of power struggles between the cartels and the state. There is little point in attempting to

define ‘culture’; we have an idea about what it is yet it seems almost impossible to describe. For the

era of postmodernity, however, the cultural realm is by far the most influential and ‘most globalized

arena’, since ‘most of our lives’ meaning-producing activities and transactions take place in that

sphere’ (Palumbo-Liu & Gumbrecht, 1997: 15; Klein, 1999). For that reason, the cultural sphere has

become uncoupled from the fixed geographic points of reference that were so crucial to the spatial

understanding of states and their societies (Dear and Leclerc, 2003: 11). Rather, it remains an

entirely unadulterated composition of a multitude of sites of production and expression. It is more a

sister of the economic system, an aesthetic representation of mass consumption, materialism, and

image production. Within this cultural container are traditional and contemporary forms of media

journalism, social networking and internet blogging, branding and corporate advertising, film and

television, music, fashion – the list seems infinite. Yet all of these components are largely centred on

the notion of identity or the creation or, rather, reproduction of image and representation. With

such an emphasis on

frivolous and extravagant expenditure and economic success, consumer culture fosters a kind of

narcissistic cultural and individual identity, where life centres on ‘buying and using products that

confer status and importance’; what Hall despondently decries a ‘psychological disease’ (2011: 202-

203).

Criminal Identity: Narcocultura

This cultural ‘disease’ has infected the Mexican cartels, in their motives, methods, and particularly in

their self-representation; their violence is an expression of postmodern culture (Jones and Herrera,

2007: 463). Theorist Stephen Metz long ago predicted the eruption of the aptly named ‘commercial

insurgency’, a ‘quasipolitical distortion of materialism’ (Metz, 1993: 15) where insurgents would

move away from political activities and exhibit instead ‘economic’ motives (see also Van Creveld,

1991; Collier, 2004). One such resident from the city of Reynosa, currently in the grip of the Gulf

cartel, decried: ‘*The drug-traffickers] are revolting people who do what they do because they

cannot be seen to wear the same label T-shirt as they wore last year, they must wear another brand,

and more expensive’ (quoted in Vulliamy, 2011). The Mexican drug cartels have developed their own

distinct criminal sub-culture where collective aesthetics and ‘style’ have become important identity

formulators. Katz deemed this the ‘alternative deviant culture’ (1988: 7), in Mexico’s case, however,

it is known as narcocultura:

The production of symbols, rituals and artefacts – slang, religious cults, music, consumer goods – that

allow people involved in the drug trade to recognize themselves as part of a community, to establish

a hierarchy in which the acts they are required to perform acquire positive value and to absorb the

terror inherent in their line of work (Guillermoprieta, 2009: 5).

The important point here is the formation of identity. Dunn argues that consumer culture and its

polarizing effects can ‘problematize processes of identity formation. This can be seen in the way that

the commodity works to reduce culture to highly dispersed, market-based systems of semiotic

exchange and their disunifying effects on the self’ (Dunn, 1998: 8). By manufacturing an aesthetic

criminal sub-culture, the narcos find meaning in an identity that projects power and success. This

emphasis on image, such a crucial component of the postmodern theory (Baudrillard, 1993),

manifests itself most significantly in lower class communities where most narcos originate from.

Rather than ‘revolting people’ (from Vulliamy, 2011), Young believes that criminals should be

understood as the ‘real victims of consumerism’, whose ‘cultural incorporation and structural

rejection produces intense dynamics of resentment; its most dramatic result – violence and crime –

is a transgressive act engaged in for the purpose of dignity and identity reassertion’ (quoted in

Bonino, 2011: 119). Hence, to truly understand why and how the Mexican drug war continues to

adopt so many new members into its expansive cultural community, we must understand the effects

of consumer culture on those who are most isolated by it. ‘Put simply, Mexican drug cartel culture is

cool’ (Taylor, 2013). The problem for the Mexican state is that narcocultura has not remained a ‘sub-

culture’; it has been largely assimilated into Mexican popular culture. This phenomenon follows the

trait of postmodern commodification, which has consequently blurred the distinction between

celebrity icon and savage drugtrafficker. As Cobo (2009) has observed:

The aesthetic code of the drug trafficker… is… ostentatious, exaggerated, disproportionate and laden

with symbols which seek to confer status and legitimize violence… *However, it+ no longer belongs

only to the drug trafficker, but forms part of popular taste, and is viewed with positive eyes and

copies, ensuring its continuity through time and across cities.

In his reporting on the Mexican drug war, Vulliamy has pointed out that ‘the greed for violence

reflects the greed for brands, and becomes a brand in itself’ (2011). The appeal of this ‘brand’

resonates in the poor and anomic Mexican neighbourhoods, where the youth idolise, even imitate,

the iconic stature of the Mexican drugtraffickers, viewing them as contemporary ‘individualistic

resistance fighters’ (Fraser, 1974: 22). Oscar Galicia, a research psychologist from the

Iberoamericana University in Mexico City, asserts that the problem lies in the ‘aspirational crisis in

Mexico today in which young people have lost faith in legal means for social advancement and see

the “narcos” as figures of respect’ (quoted in Tuckman, 2011). Even those that don’t necessarily

emulate the violence begin to emulate the cultural or aesthetic aspects of the drug war, which

indirectly signals resistance against the state. For example, many of the youth in impoverished urban

areas have begun to wear Ralph Lauren polo t-shirts, a trend which came to light in August 2010

after the capture of cartel leader La Barbie who was photographed wearing one of the shirts. On the

streets, original Ralph Laurens cost around $150, but the fake versions are apparently extremely

popular and are going at a tenth of that price; ‘the kids want to look like the bad guys,’ said one

Mexico City vendor (quoted in Tucker, 2011). As Baudrillard once said of postmodern culture, the

body becomes ‘a billboard for consumer advertisements’ (Harden, 2011). So in this sense the t-shirts

advertise and exonerate the drug war lifestyle. The popularity of ‘narcofashion’ has even led to

internet fashion sites publishing articles about it; Style Con recently published ‘Drug Dealer Fashion:

Hits and Misses’ which consisted of photos that cartel members had posted on Instagram and

Twitter of themselves in fashionable clothing and accessories (Bahn, 2014). In another such article

on BuzzFeed, there are streams of pictures that have been posted on Twitter by the ‘sons of

Mexico’s drug cartel leaders’ (Berger, 2014). Most show them with gold-encrusted guns, fancy cars

and exotic animals. One picture even shows a cartel leader with celebrity Paris Hilton.

These articles inflate the persona of cartel leaders to something of a celebrity icon, which indirectly

legitimises or commodifies their violent lifestyle. According to Cabanas, the commodification of

violence is a ‘direct result of the retreat of government and the advance of “market rationale”’

(2014:11). The most illuminating example of this ‘dark side’ of globalisation and capitalism is the

advent of the popular narcocorrdio (drug ballad). This type of music originated from the Mestizo

lower classes of northern Mexico in the early 20th century originally as narratives that celebrated

banditos who offered a ‘paradigm of rebellion’ (Frazer, 2006: 7). Over the past ten years, however,

the narcocorrido has become an extremely popular music trend in Mexico and in the border states

of America. Some fictionalize stories of heroic drug dealers, others tell true tales of violence and

spectacular extravagance. Many scholars (Edberg, 2001; Lane; Simonett, 2006; Muniz, 2013) have

made comparisons to hip hop music, arguing that both paint unrealistic pictures about getting out of

the ‘hood and getting rich. Yet the narcocorridos narrate much darker stories of death and chaos. In

one such song by Bukanas de Culiacan, the lyrics state: ‘With AK-47 and bazooka at the neck, cutting

heads off anyone who crosses us, we are bloodthirsty, crazy and fucked up, we like to kill’ (quoted in

Campbell, 2014: 71). Such lyrical poetry is a distant cry from the supposedly controversial American

rap music of the ‘90s. Nonetheless, as Agiulera’s study has shown, the ‘fantasy lifestyle’ is the most

popular theme in the narcocorridos (Aguilera, 2011: 12). The songs usually mention drug dealers

‘*with+ expensive cars and homes… *Who are+ hosting parties, playing music, and drinking alcoholic

beverages’ (Aguilera, 2011: 13).

Due to their extremely graphic content and the fact that they ‘glorify’ the drugtrafficker lifestyle, a

number of Mexican states have banned narcocorridos from being played on public radio and

television, and even public performances by corrido bands. For example, the Sinaloan government,

after banning such performances in 2011, stated that its intention had been to halt the growing

influence of narcocultura (Wells, 2013). Incidentally, these bans demonstrate that culture is now a

crucial arena of struggle between the state and the cartels. As Edberg notes, the fact that cartels

often commission corrido bands to write songs about them illustrates how one can create a

caricature of the self ‘through the commodified narco-trafficker persona’ (Edberg, 2001: 269). The

‘identity’ is based on economic and social metamorphosis, from destitute to dollar; a narrative that

is bought into by the Mexican youth. Ultimately, though, the corridos are an expression of the

dominant discourse of postmodernity; excessive wealth and material acquisition (Madrid, 2008).

Hyperrealities: Violence in the traditional and digital media

Nevertheless, as cultural criminologist Ferrell argues, ‘to understand the reality of crime and

criminalization, then, a cultural criminology must account not only for the dynamics of criminal

subcultures but for the dynamics of the mass media’ (Ferrell, 1995). The postmodern media’s

emphasis on the audio-visual, its attention to style over substance and its constant reproduction of

symbols and images has placed the atrophic individual in a world where reality has become what

postmodernist Baudrillard described as the ‘hyperreal’, where ‘reality itself, entirely impregnated by

an aesthetic which is inseparable from its own structure, has been confused with its own image’

(Baudrillard, 1983: 151-2). The dilemma we face in this hyper-real environment is that the

relationship individuals have cultivated with their culture is increasingly superficial, and this

superficiality is largely perpetuated by the media; ‘there are so many emotions being portrayed in

the media that we can only have a shallow relationship with them’ (Harden, 2011). According to

social theorist Stjepan Mestrovic, what this shallow dialectic between individual and consumer

culture means is that now ‘no one can ever distinguish fully the sinister from the benign themes’

that are displayed to them on the television, in music, on the Internet or on billboards (1991: 4).

In Mexico, argues Koonings, the ‘phantom of violence’ is exploited by the media and is made into a

spectacle that nourishes both the societal and journalistic desire for morbid entertainment (2007:

36). The constant recycling of images on the front pages of Mexico’s magazines and newspapers of

gruesome beheadings, torture, and mass graves manufactures a normalizing process of the violence,

where it assumes almost an ordinary, prosaic character in the journalistic media (Munck, 2008: 11).

Hence, society becomes detached from the horror and tragedy, a phenomenon particular to Latin

America according to Torres-Rivas who deemed it ‘the banalization of fear’ (1999: 193). The Mexican

government has warned that the media’s onslaught of images and its deliberate conjoining of the

prefix ‘narco’ to every aspect of Mexican society indirectly contribute to the glorification of the

narco. Others have argued that the cartels are seeking infamy through the media; ‘to get a headline

you have to get more heads, or more bodies or do something more horrific’ (McCauley quoted in

The National; 2011). The government’s strategy to counter this has been to curtail the freedoms of

the press. In 2011 most of Mexico’s leading news organisations were made to sign up to a new set of

guidelines on the coverage of the drug war. They agreed, for example, not to publish gruesome

images or portray the narco-traffickers as victims or heroes (Greenslade, 2011). The growing

encroachment of the state of freedom of journalistic and cultural expression in Mexico illustrates

just how deep the infection of the drug war has gone, and, ultimately, how fragile the state’s control

actually is. Yet there is one cultural field where the state’s regulation is entirely impotent. This is the

‘fifth dimensional cultural space’ (Bunker, 2011), the digital or cyber arena, which has not only made

traditional media forms more redundant, but it has also rendered territorial space ‘one again

relational and symbolic, or metaphysical’ (Kobrin, 1998: 11). Mexican cartels have now migrated into

this space, using it as a new platform to enforce a climate of fear and terror quite. Yet, the

proliferation of extraterritorial digital space is not only an example of the postmodern, but also of

the premodern. As Kobrin has noted, ‘external reality seen through the World Wide Web may be

closer to the medieval Christian representations of the world than to a modern atlas’ (Kobrin, 1998:

11). In other words, if one characterises the progression from premodern to modern to postmodern

as a movement ‘from relative to absolute and then back to (new) relative conceptions of space’

(Anderson, 1996: 143), then we can understand the emergence of the fifth digital dimension as a

form of premodern social organisation. The pre/postmodern cyber space offers Mexican drug cartels

an innovative and efficient way to propagandise and incite fear; it becomes a platform for violent

performance. These ‘performances’ are exhibited through the cartel’s use of social media and

Youtube to publish recordings of executions, torture and propaganda speeches. One only has to type

into YouTube ‘Mexican cartel execution video’ and there are 6,020 results, or simply type in ‘Los

Zetas’ into Google and you can watch executions of videos on the controversial Best Gore website.

Gomez (2011) has asserted that there are parallels in pre and postmodern forms of Mexican

theatrical violence. He argues that both pre-Columbian Aztec and narco warfare ‘capitalize on the

spectacle of expressive violence, or lethal violence, whose primary utilitarian end is the expression of

power itself’ (2011). Whilst in Aztec society ‘ritual sacrifice saturated all social functions’, the narcos

use of digital execution videos assumes the role of systematic performative violence (Gomez, 2011).

These forms of new media, he explains, ‘facilitate a new experience of the spectacle of torture’ and,

in doing so, they have ‘shifted traditional power relationships between image, warfare, and violence’

(Gomez, 2011). The accessibility and immediacy of these images further dehumanizes the physical

space, whilst the images again create a sensation of the ‘hyper real’ where the viewer cannot

connect properly to the horror because it is presented in entertainment form. By taking advantage

of the postmodern audio-visual digital culture, the cartels have found new means of power

projection that are entirely outside the jurisdiction of the Mexican state.

These examples have illuminated the intrusion of postmodern culture on the drug conflict, and,

simultaneously, the infusion of the drug conflict on Mexican popular culture. Whilst some may argue

that the cartels are a shallow but extreme product of the competitive and vacuous culture of neo-

liberalism, there are deeper sociological reasons to their emphasis on image and representation in

Mexican and global culture. As scholar Guillermoprieto has argued, ‘*The cartels+ learn to kill, and in

the emptiness and absence of meaning that follows a murder, they look desperately for redemption

and grounding’ (2009: 7). As our postmodern culture dictates, they find meaning ‘in consumer goods

– narcojeans, narcotennis shoes, narcocars…’ but also, as the next section will discuss, ‘in the new

religions, the narcocultos’ (2009: 7), an element to the drug war that poses new questions about the

purely secular criminal nature of the drug-traffickers.

Chapter Four: Spirituality, Saints, and Sacrifice in Narco-Mexico

Scrawled in graffiti on the sewers of the Mexican-American border are the words ‘Cristo te Odia pore

so te dio la vida’, translated as ‘Christ hates you that is why he gave you life’ (quoted in Rosas, 2012:

4). This small act of artistic deviancy echoes the growing sense of religious, especially Catholic,

disconnection or divine abandonment felt by those whose lives have been affected by the chaos,

superficiality, and savagery of the drug war. In one letter written to Pope Benedict by journalist and

poet Javier Sicilia, whose son had been murdered by a narco, this sentiment is poignantly exposed

(quoted in MacCarthy, 2012):

Mexico and Central America, Beloved Benedict, are at this moment the body of Christ abandoned in

the Garden of Gethsemane and crucified between two thieves. A body, like that of Our Lord, on which

has fallen all the force of delinquency, the omissions and grave corruptions of the State and its

governments… a hierarchical Church which, with its exceptions and its best face in its religious,

maintains the silence of an accomplice; and of a world – the American way of life – which has

reduced everything to production, the consumer society and money.

Mexico’s legacy of violence and its chronic awareness of death have produced a new spiritual

climate that has enticed large segments of society away from the mainstream religion of Catholicism

towards more underground, premodern belief systems, rituals and idolatry. Motak has described

this phenomenon in Mexico as a ‘return of the sacred’ (2009); a revival or recycling of pre-Columbian

or premodern saints and folk heroes that are being dug up, dusted off, and repositioned at the

centre of moral and spiritual compasses (Dorraj, 2007). The most popular of these saints are the

Santa Muerte, Saint Death, and Jesus Malverde, a folk hero-turnedpeople’s saint. Both of these

figures have now reached unprecedented cult status,

threatening the established institution of Catholicism and thus deepening the fractures in Mexican

society and culture (Chivis, 2013). Some have argued that this return to premodern spiritualism is a

response to the drug violence; others connect this phenomenon to the ‘ephemeral and chaotic

nature of postmodern culture’ which is highly competitive, individualistic and ‘devoid of emotional

depth’ (Dorraj, 2007).

This chapter will argue that these two arguments are in fact interlinked; it will explore the reasons

for this return to premodern spirituality and how it ‘conflicts’ with postmodernity and postmodern

violence. Before examining the spiritual dimension of the drug war, it will be useful at this point to

briefly look at the anthro-historical interpretations of Mexican religious history. Pre-Colombian

Mexico was a powerful and brutal empire with an exceptionally spiritualistic and ritualistic culture.

Infamously, the Aztecs of Mesoamerican Mexico would sacrifice slaves and prisoners of war to the

sun god as an offering for rain and a good harvest. The ritual of sacrifice merged horrific violence

with performance, with the act being performed’ on the pyramidal ‘theatre’, signifying the ultimate

power of the Aztec leaders and priests (Hollander, 2014). Anthropological research suggests that

there was openness, even a fascination, with death in Mexico (Barton, 1997). This fascination has

continued to the present with festivals such as the Day of the Dead, the following of the Santa

Muerte and its associated image of the skeleton which has become so recognised in Mexican culture

that it deserves, according to art critic Luis Cardoza y Aragon, to be recognised as something of a

‘national totem’ (quoted in Lomnitz, 2005: 23). Life and death were the most important aspects of

spiritual understanding in Mesoamerican Mexico, forming a significant fragment of its cultural

underbelly (see Friedman, 2014). These credal conventions, that largely ‘took the form of a

pantheon inhabited by truculent divinities demanding various forms of bloodletting’ (Preparata,

2008: 173), were, however, largely eradicated when the Spanish conquistadors invaded, thereafter

instigating an ‘imperfect melding of indigenous rite with Catholic ritual’ (Lida, 2009: 126). The

Catholic Spanish attached the notion of sainthood to sacrifice, and replaced pyramids with churches.

Eventually this intriguing enmeshment of pre- Colombian and European spiritual practice culminated

into the advent of the modern state, ‘whose mechanical routines and processes of thrift and

accumulation crushed the kernel of sacred belief and dispersed its fluid in the texture of

contemporary society’ (Preparata, 2008: 173). Religious life became institutionalized and was

remoulded as a private, personal form of spiritualism, gradually ushering in a new era of

secularization and diversification of spiritual belief.

Following the moral compass: Reviving spirituality

Many have regarded the current postmodern era, and its corollary system of neoliberalism and

culture of materialism, as spiritually confused or even hollow. This feeling has correlated in a longing

for new existential and ethical meaning. As Dorraj aptly notes, ‘in the frantic pace of change in

postmodernity… in a world of transient values in which the individual tags along dubious moral

norms in order to get ahead in a ruthless cutthroat and competitive world, the longing for a moral

compass intensifies’ (Dorraj, 2007). As the previous chapter illuminated, the commercialization of

culture, the recycling of image, and the competitiveness of the market all render postmodern

culture as ephemeral and vacuous, creating alienated individuals with a ‘homeless mind’ (Berger,

1973; Pieterse, 2003). As a consequence to this crisis of our epoch, traditional religion and its values

and practices are questioned or even ignored. The metamorphosis of society and culture has

‘generated different expectations for religious life, which are often answered by new spiritualties

and seldom by organised religion’ (Schneiders, 2000: 3). In Mexico there has been a gradual shift

away from the ‘state-sanctioned’ religion of Catholicism and a rise in ‘deviant spirituality’,

particularly among the marginalised youth (Hernandez, 2011; Chivis, 2013). The lure of traditional

religion has been tainted by its association with the state that has been known to be corrupt and

perceived as an illusory entity of authority. For those living in these social and moral vacuums ‘if

[they are] not offered solace via mainstream Catholicism, they will seek comfort elsewhere’ (Chivis,

2013). ‘Elsewhere’ in this sense has largely been the resurrection of premodern saints to offer prayer

and gifts to and in archaic forms of ritual; the number of followers of the Santa Muerte, a pseudo-

Christian saint, for example, has grown to eight million (Hernandez, 2013). The ‘central pull of

sainthood’, explains McPhillips, is that ‘saints are able to embrace the alterity or difference of the

“other”’ (2003); ‘a saintly life is defined as one in which compassion for the other, irrespective of the

cost to the saint, is the primary trait’ (Wychogrod, 1990; xxiii). So for those who feel rejected or

marginalised by the state and its religious foundation, finding solace, protection, cosmological

meaning, and lastly redemption in saints and practices of the premodern can be an opportunity to

fill the void and find salvation. Santa Muerte, for instance, is, ‘from the viewpoint of her devotees,

for all intents and purposes, a free agent… *She is+ a symptom of Mexico’s tenuous relationship to

the state’ (Lomnitz). Not surprisingly, this longing to find meaning, and longing to find protection or

redemption, has most interestingly found its expression in those who have the most tenuous and

destructive relationship with the state of all, the narcos.

A criminal’s saint: Jesus Malverde and Santa Muerte

The drug-trafficker’s revival of archaic spiritualism brilliantly epitomises the pre/postmodern

conflict. The greedy practice of the narcos, their gruesome brutality and their deliberate removal of

themselves from social life places them in the deepest spiritual void of all. To counter this emptiness,

the narcos have reached out to premodern saints and folk-heroes that they relate to. One such folk-

hero-turnednarco- saint is Jesus Malverde, the ‘patron saint of the drug dealers’, ‘the Angel of the

Poor’, or ‘the Mexican Robin Hood’ (Bunker, Campbell, and Bunker, 2010: 163). His existence has not

been historically verified, but supposedly the bandit was from impoverished Sinaloa and stole from

the rich to give to the poor until he was finally executed by the state. Malverde the criminal has been

turned into Malverde the saint by Mexican drug-traffickers. As a hero of the poor who lived in fear of

the state, the myth of Malverde gives new spiritual hope to the narcos living in the shadow of the

law. ‘The multifaceted character – political, ethical, religious, cultural and legal – of the myth of

Malverde’, argue Michel and Park, ‘underscores the aspirations of the persecuted, including those

who economically benefit from globalization and at the same time question the corrupt, unjust and

exclusive official system’ (Michel and Park, 2014: 203).

One of the aspirations of the narco, of course, is to get away with their crimes - to survive. As an icon

of hope to criminals living outside the law, Jesus Malverde is often prayed to and exonerated in

narcocorridos for his protection and love. In one such corrido by Los Cuates de Sinaloa (see

alex040194, 2010), the lyrics illuminate this connection with their protector saint:

Don’t leave me, Malverde / because we are almost there / Before entering Sonora / is the federal

checkpoint / I have hidden in the truck / 30 kilos of crystal / I have faith in your memory / and you

have always protected me / My cargo arrives / safely in the United States / That’s why you are

Malverde / my favourite saint.

The juxtaposition of the sacred with the criminal reflects the pre/postmodern conflict. The

dichotomy of good/evil that forms the philosophical foundation of religion has been reworked,

instigating a strange blend of religious criminality. Credal sentiment has been co-opted by the narcos

to avoid punishment; faith becomes a tool of economic individualism. There are also numerous

examples of narcos offering gifts to Santa Muerte in order to receive protection from her, with such

acts exhibiting sacrificial elements that hark back to the terroristic rituals of the Aztecs. As noted by

Bunker and Sullivan (2012: 142), ‘human body parts and bowls of blood left at Santa Muerte alters,

both public and private, are becoming more common’ in the Mexican drug war. Decapitated heads

have been left at manufactured alters of Santa Muerte whilst it has been reported that the ashes of

one’s deceased enemies have been smoked with cocaine in a ritual to be given strength (Bunker and

Sullivan, 2012: 142).

These examples not only exemplify the growing spiritual dimension of this criminal insurgency, but

they also inform us that the narcos, however powerful they may be, must believe that whilst their

ultimate ‘aspiration’ (see above Michel and Park, 2014) is vitality itself, they acknowledge this is an

increasingly unlikely prospect in the competitive and cutthroat world of drug-trafficking. It is this

knowledge of their immanent and possibly violent death, or at least lengthy incarceration, that gives

saints like Jesus Malverde and Santa Muerte their cultcriminal appeal, for the bandit-turned-people’s

saint lives forever, mythologised and celebrated as a cult-hero and protector. Edberg has made a

fascinating insight on this point. After interviewing a number of imprisoned Mexican drug dealers he

inferred that for the narco:

Death seems to complete the persona; death is not the ending but the “launching” of an individual

into a timeless experience as an iteration of the persona, whose life will float in the popular

imagination, reputation cemented and memorialized forever, free from the barriers that prevented

attainment of full status in this world’ (Edberg, 2001: 273).

He concludes that those who have lived in poverty and have flirted with or succumbed to criminality,

‘where options for being a significant person are limited or perceived as limited… a notable death, in

fact, becomes one way of living, one way of having made a dent in the cosmos’ (Edberg, 2001: 273).

In postmodern Mexico, where there is a culture of transience and immanent death, the merging of

criminality and sanctity in this way ‘shows both the crisis of the state and the inadequacy of religion’

(Edberg, 2001: 212) in offering solace and meaning to those who are trapped in the criminal game. El

Chapo, head of the Sinaloa cartel who was captured in February 2014, has already been

memorialised by the citizens of Sinaloa who believed that he was a saintly benefactor; by many he

was referred to as ‘The Lord’ (Booth and Miroff, 2011). Where nihilistic hedonism reaches its

apotheosis, incarceration or death itself becomes just another means to solidify one’s self in image,

much like the narco has created his own cultural persona of coolness that can be copied and

recycled.

Divine justice: The criminal-as-saint

The desire to be mythologised as a pseudo-religious icon in death is also translated into a desire to

use violence as a means of imposing spiritual beliefs or a new kind of ‘just’ order. Metz described

this phenomenon as a ‘spiritual insurgency’ (Metz, 1993), where criminal-insurgents believe in ‘their

own higher morality’ and where violence is informed by ‘personal meaning, the amelioration of

discontent, and the punishment of injustice’ (Metz, 1993: 15). Metz suggested that by acting as a

powerful agent against some kind of injustice, ‘violence gives meaning to the lives of its advocates.

For the first time in their lives… they are taken seriously by the system… at least they are not

insignificant’ (Metz, 1993: 12-13).

The most well-known of these cartels is La Familia, which controlled the states of Michoacán,

Guerrero, and Halisco until it was disbanded in 2010. This cartel was based on ‘a bizarre fusion of

Christian teachings, the writings of John Eldredge, and the teachings of the original La Familia

leadership’ (Bunker and Sullivan, 2012). ‘The group’, argue Bunker, Campbell, and Bunker, ‘is a study

in contrasts’. On the one hand, ‘they are seen as going beyond the usual “money-only” interests of

drug cartels to seek social and political standing… On the other hand, La Familia has emerged as a

group ruthless in its use of “righteous” violence against its enemies…’ (2010: 171). In essence, La

Familia cartel was an organisation that had delusionary notions of divinity in its rasion d’etre. Their

more ‘positive’ actions have been with their recruits, considered as ‘saved souls’, who were lifted

from the streets, indoctrinated, and weaned off drugs and alcohol. Their delivery of ‘justice’ found

its most brutal expression in September 2006, however, when La Familia members threw five

severed heads on to the floor of a nightclub with an accompanying banner that stated:

The family doesn’t kill for money. It doesn’t kill for women. It doesn’t kill innocent people, only those

who deserve to die. Know that this is divine justice (quoted in Bunker and Sullivan, 2012: 144).

La Familia’s reference to ‘divine justice’ captures the essence of the spiritual elements of the cartel’s

belief system; they believe that they are doing some kind of religious duty. After the destruction and

disbandment of La Familia cartel in 2010, a new cartel was composed out of its remnants – the

Knights Templar. The name itself invokes premodern religious symbolism; the Knights Templar was

amongst the most powerful military elite of the Christian Crusaders in the Middle Ages. The Mexican

cartel has tried to imitate this ‘crusader’ character by copying the same Christian insignia and

tattoos, whilst they have also used banners to instil fear and subservience in Michoacán. In one such

banner the cartel stated (quoted in Bunker and Sullivan, 2012: 146):

We will be at the service of Michoacan society to attend to any situation which threatens the safety

of the Michoacanos. Our commitment to society will be: to safeguard order; avoid robberies,

kidnappings, extortion; and to shield the state from possible rival intrusions.

The Knights are thus blending the role of the state with the divine, like the premodern crusader. In

one such barbaric incident in 2012, a man was found crucified on a road sign in Contepec. His

genitalia was severed and placed in his mouth and a sign was affixed to his chest via two ice picks,

identifying him as a rapist and threatening traitors that ‘this is not a game’ (quoted in Bunker, 2012).

The use of crucifixion or human sacrifice for a greater good is used as religious performance, much

like premodern forms of stake-burning or Aztec offerings to gods. One can interpret the Knights’

methods of violence as a kind of spiritual cleansing or as a way of frightening rivals. In another

example of the criminal-as-saint, cartels have been known to offer their enemies the option of

?Plata O Plomo? – take our silver or we will fill you with our lead – which asks them to give up their

soul (to the narco) and work for them or die, a method associated with the premodern methods of

religious conversion at the tip of a sword (Bunker and Bunker, 2012). The secular nature of Mexican

criminality is being challenged by the actions of these cartels who have taken it upon themselves to

perform the acts of God. One feature of postmodernity is the popularity of ‘new age’ spiritual beliefs

and practices (see Best and Kellner, 1998), and the drug cartels are no different in exhibiting this

trait. Yet this religious dynamic emerges in different forms, with cartels either looking for protection,

redemption, or believing that they themselves can offer divine justice to the citizens they control.

The pre/postmodern conflict is thus illustrated by the correlation between the cartel’s materialistic

motives and their concurrent desire to integrate premodern rituals and connect to a more spiritual

plain.

Conclusions

‘What will become of Mexico?’: that is the question which is resonating in political and academic

circles both north and south of the state’s borders. Now that this thesis’ conceptual exploration is

coming to its end, it may be more appropriate to ask what Mexico has already become. Is it in its

nascent stage of joining the everexpanding group of postmodern ‘fragile’ states, or is it its

premodern predecessor, a medieval land of varying orders and disorders? Otherwise, has the

conflict’s arena been transformed into a mere shopping mall where image and consumerism form

the most crucial component in all social activity, or, rather, has Mexico been converted into a

hecatomb, where enemies and civilians are sacrificed at the hands

of brutal and ritualistic criminal emperors? These fundamental contradictions suggest that this ‘war

of the 21st century’ is in fact a war whose characteristics straddle both the pre and postmodern

eras. These characteristics have been organised into three distinct categories of conflict: the

territorial, the cultural/virtual, and the spiritual. By delving into these areas, this thesis has offered a

more holistic appraisal of the complex dynamics of the drug conflict. Future research into the

Mexican narcoestado should henceforth try to move away from the more traditional or modern

tenets of security studies - the political and the economic - and should instead investigate how the

war operates within the post and premodern arenas of culture and religion.

Throughout the development of this idea, it has been borne in mind that there are problems

associated with the overreliance on binary oppositions in political and security studies. Often, as so

many postmodern and poststructuralist writers have warned, dichotomous relationships insinuate

that one half of the binary is ‘privileged as a higher reality, a regulative ideal, and the [other] term is

understood only in a derivative and negative way, as a failure to live up to this ideal and as

something that endangers this ideal’ (Ashley, 1988: 230). The pre/postmodern conflict, however,

should be understood as simply the antithesis to modernity and its ideals of

progress, security and order. Whilst politicians and journalists point to the extreme barbarism and

primitiveness of the Mexican cartels (discourse which relates primarily to the premodern) what is

sometimes ignored is that this barbarism is an extreme, violent expression of postmodernity’s

pathological and societal tendencies. Therein lays the crux of this exploration: pre and postmodern

forms of warfare, social organisation, and governance are merely two sides of the same coin.

Postmodernity has changed the face of war or, rather, ‘criminal insurgency’. Yet postmodernity, it

would seem, has much in common with the understudied dynamics of pre-modernity.

Conclusively, it is hoped that this paradigm could be employed to assess other areas that are

experiencing chronic criminal violence. In any case, this dissertation has demonstrated that the

rather glib description of the narcos as simply ‘criminal’ actors ignores acknowledge the political,

cultural, and spiritual content of their violence. As revealed in Chapter Two, the drugtraffickers have

fortuitously taken the mantle of the state in a number of rural and urban areas due to the

lawlessness that they have created. The modern state of Mexico, in losing their grip on security and

order, has begun to decompose into thin air, whilst the cartels have triumphed as new political

actors in this neo-medieval state. In being propelled to an unprecedented political platform, the

narcos have also become commoditized cultural celebrities in both the physical and virtual worlds.

Their power and wealth has not only provided them with territory and political influence, but it has

also elevated the stature of narcocultura in the mass media to a shallow but culturally influential

symbol of ‘machismo and narco-coolness’ (Grimes, 1998: 45). Juxtaposed with the popularisation

and legitimisation of the criminalcultural zeitgeist, the cartels and Mexican society are experiencing

a ‘longing for true authenticity’ and a desire to transcend the shallow ‘hyper-reality’ that has defined

postmodern Mexico and its drug war (McAven, 2007: 221). This longing, as Chapter Four illuminated,

has found expression in nostalgia for premodern forms of spirituality and rituals that offer cartels

and communities with a kind of divine protection in an increasingly insecure world. As this desire for

spiritual meaning has intensified, cartels have also taken it upon themselves to distribute what they

believe to be some kind of divine justice. The fact that Saint Death has been invoked by both the

narcos and those seeking protection from them is a contradiction that perhaps needs further

analysis. Ultimately, the cartels are not just creatures of a shallow culture but they are also emerging

spiritualistic actors in Mexico’s ‘deviant’ or underground religious sect.

Conclusively, one must not reduce the Mexican drug-traffickers to mere criminals. Indeed, they hide

behind different masks and operate in various different fields, bringing bloodshed and competition

wherever they go. In that sense, the cartels’ conquest of Mexico stems from their ominous ubiquity

and their ability to fluctuate between and manoeuvre within political and economic, cultural and

spiritual, physical and virtual, local and global, and licit and illicit worlds. The narco is the 21st

century nomad: ‘a hybrid, globalised and stateless wanderer with one foot in each world, able to

deftly manipulate the available resources and technologies of

both’ (Cade, 2013: 70).

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