zavala-imagining the us-mexico drug war

8/10/2019 Zavala-imagining the US-Mexico Drug War

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THE CRITICAL LIMITS OF NARCONARRATIVES / 341

1Corridos were first composed along the U.S.-Mexico border during the 1860s to express theproblems of the region after the U.S.-Mexico war. They later evolved to become story-telling devicesduring the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Most recently, the genre has featured tales related to drugtrade and violence. See Wald and Wilkinson.

2The series finale, which aired on May 30th, was the most watched program of the networksnineteen-year rating history, as well as the number one program regardless of language for thatday, with nearly 4.2 million viewers (Gorman).

3All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.4For a precedent to Prez-Revertes Teresa Mendoza see the title character of Jorge Francos Rosario

Tijeras(1999). The use of the lives of drug traffickers as narrative material can be traced to what Hc-

tor Abad Faciolince has called the Colombian novela sicaresca of the 1990s (Mutis 207). See, espe-cially, Fernando Vallejos La virgen de los sicarios(Our Lady of the Assassins)(1994) and Gabriel GarcaMrquezs Noticia de un secuestro(News of a Kidnapping) (1996). However, despite the commercial suc-cess of these novels, the film adaptations of some of them, and the celebrity of their authors, I arguethat it was only after Prez-Revertes La reina del sur that narcoliteratura became consistently relevantin Latin American literary fields, offering a bestselling formula that many authors across the conti-nent, but specially in Mexico, have sought to reproduce.

del sura cross between the hard-boiled detective fiction of Dashiell Hammettand Raymond Chandler, Alexandre Dumas The Count of Montecristo, James Bond

action movies, and John le Carrs espionage novels became the paradig-matic example of this trend, with its narco queen (the beautiful Teresa Men-doza) a frequent-flyer businesswoman, self-taught avid reader, multi-tasking drugkingpin, high-performance alcoholic, emancipated mother, and cold-bloodedpsychopath in short, a mythic antihero of the post-industrial global village.

Prez-Revertes novel produced a readily identifiable and lucrative model thatreconfigured narcocultura, a term that I employ here as the cultural imaginarysurrounding the drug trade. Narcocultura first emerged in the 1970s through nar-cocorridos (drug ballads) and low-budget action films.1La reina del sur broughtnarcocultura fully into the literary field. Although Prez-Reverte had initially

based his story on the seminal 1972 narcocorrido Contrabando y traicin (Con-traband and Betrayal) recorded by the California-based Los Tigres del Norte, ahighly popular norteo (Mexican polka) band, after the overnight success of Lareina del sur, Los Tigres recorded a new and very successful narcocorrido basedon Teresa Mendoza. The novels popularity eventually led to its television adapta-tion as a soap opera that premiered in February 2011, and it became an unprece-dented blockbuster for the Spanish-language network Telemundo.2In addition toits importance in the TV and music industries, La reina del sur had a decisive impactin Mexican publishing circles. Writer lmer Mendoza, a native of the drug-riddenstate of Sinaloa, the author of several narconovelas, and one of the people to whom

La reina del sur is dedicated, believes that Prez-Reverte was the first respectedwriter in the world who gave us the place that we [Mexican narconovelists]deserved (Ramrez).3Likewise, for Juan Jos Rodrguez (also from Sinaloa) Lareina del sur was a magical book that did a dignified job putting the theme ofdrug trafficking on the [world] map, at a time when no one was talking about it(Baos).4

In what follows, I analyze several representative narconarratives published inMexico during the decade following the unprecedented commercial success of Lareina del sur. I define the term narconarratives as a dispersed but interrelatedcorpus of texts, films, music, and conceptual art focusing on the drug trade,


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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 342

although here I will mainly refer to works of fiction and non-fiction. Specifically, Ipropose a deconstruction of certain textual narconarratives through the articu-

lation of three critiques. First, I contend that the most commercial narconarra-tives are formulaic texts that reinforce the mainstream medias portrayal of drugcartels, itself partially informed by popular narcocultura. Second, I assert thatmost narconarratives comfortably reproduce a mythic notion of narcos mainlyfashioned and disseminated by Mexicos governing political elites at the federal,state, and local levels. According to official discourse, the criminal organizationsprofiting from the drug trade are a threat relegated to the discursive exteriorityoutside the borders of the power and the reason of the state. As such, theMexican government represents drug cartels as criminal entities always readilydistinguishable from state structures. At its worst, the state and here are included

the army, police corps, and the political class is portrayed as weak, with some-times dysfunctional and victimized institutions that the cartels are able to pen-etrate and corrupt. Third, I argue that, with the exception of a few Mexicannovels, onlya particular narrative trend of fiction and non-fiction published inthe United States has been able to articulate a necessary, critical, and subversiveview of the official discourse on drug trafficking and its related organizations inboth countries.

1. The Ethical-Political Impasse of Narconarratives

There are four typical critical approaches to narconarratives: the conceptual-ization of violence as a philosophical and cultural problem (see Herman Herling-haus and Gabriela Polit); a focus on the exceptionality of the cities of northernMexico, the headquarters of major drug cartels, as a post-national space of nega-tivity alternative to the capital (Miguel Rodrguez Lozano); the investigation ofthe narrative strategies and the oral histories of narcocorridos (Elijah Wald andJuan Carlos Ramrez-Pimienta); and, finally, the exploration of mythic and styl-ized narrations (Christopher Domnguez-Michael). The common denominator ofthese approaches is the absence of a critical assessment of the narrations relation-ship to their real referents. They focus instead on systems of representation

peripheral to the problem of the drug trade, thus choosing to elucidate alterna-tive subjectivities, the deconstruction of Mexican nationalism, and the linguisticparticularities attributed to social imaginariesassociated with drug cartels, butnever drug organizations in their concrete and immediate historical and politicalmateriality.

However, as textual devices exploring the phenomenon of drug trafficking,narconarratives must be understood primarily as discursive sociopolitical inter-ventions; as such, they compel us to revisit the classical notion of mimesis, ofteninvoked by critics in a reductive and superficial manner as an attempt to explainthe problematic link between narconarratives and the external reality to which

they refer. From theorizations of literary systems of representation by AntoineCompagnon, Pierre Bourdieu, Alfonso Reyes, and Alain Badiou I derive the fol-lowing critical directives. First, Compagnons notion of mimesis a knowledgeproper to man, the way he constructs and inhabits the world (93) implies that


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THE CRITICAL LIMITS OF NARCONARR ATIVES / 343

5See Snchez Prados discussion of Roberto Fernndez Retamars analysis of ReyessEl deslinde,in which Retamar argues that the central current of Latin Americans literature is in fact ancil-lary, that is, conceived with an emancipating, anti-colonial social function (Snchez Prado, Lasreencarnaciones del centauro 7475).

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National and transnational publishers in Mexico responded to the generalized shock and out-rage against the unprecedented violence unleashed across the country during the six years of Presi-dent Calderns term with a flood of fiction and non-fiction titles about the so-called war on drugs.For example, the prestigious political weekly magazine Proceso and Grijalbo Editorial (a subsidiary ofthe media conglomerate Random House Mondadori) partnered to publish the Organized Crimebook series: 20 journalistic investigations of the various drug cartels and their kingpins, authored by,

narconarratives draw from a direct representation of the political order that hasstructuring effects in the art form. Second, following Bourdieus theorization of

the literary field as temporarily dominated by power vectors (216), this inhabit-ing should be understood as producing a form of sociopolitical knowledge spe-cific to the discursive enunciation about the drug world. Third, Reyess study ofthe ancillary function of literature it is indispensable that literature movesfacts with a certain malice or insistency, with the intention of producing criticalknowledge (47) establishes the imperative that the sociopolitical knowledgearranged in the texts studied here be enunciated from a critical standpointand not just deployed as obvious contextual references to reality.5Finally,Badious proposed ethics of the work of art a truth procedure that arrangesthe forms of knowledge in such a way that some truth may come to pierce a hole

in them (9) suggests that narconarratives can be designatedas the textualsite where the simulacrum of truth conveyed by hegemonic (and official) repre-sentations of the drug trade may intentionally or not be either contested orassimilated.

What I have termed, borrowing from Badiou, the simulacrum of truth refersto official representations of drug cartels as entities that exist outside of stateparameters (see, for example, Guerrero Guitierrez, Los Hoyos negros 35).This identification makes criminal organizations symbolically, and even liter-ally, exterior to civil society, a framing that presupposes an interior composed ofthe Mexican government and people, who are united against a common enemy.

Luis Astorga considers this narrative as a matrix of performative discoursethat creates things by naming them (Mitologa 10). This matrix erases thehistorical presence, activity, and evolution of drug cartels, as well as the govern-ments role in this history over the last four decades. It thus became the primaryjustification for the national deployment of thousands of military and federalagents on Dec. 11, 2006 only ten days into President Felipe Calderns admin-istration to combat all domestic cartels (Guerrero Gutirrez, La estrategiafallida 25). As a result, by the end of Calderns term in 2012, more than100,000 people had been murdered, an unprecedented number of killings,only matched in recent history by the atrocities committed against civilians

during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s (about 130,000 killed) and the U.S.-ledIraq war under President George W. Bush (about 110,000) (Turati 16; see, also,Molloy 17). Unsurprisingly, this atrocity has prompted an abundance of aca-demic studies and journalistic investigations that differ little from one anotherand, even less, from the cultural productions that turn the drug trade and itsactors into commercially successful myths.6This network of images operates as


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among others, award-winning journalists such as Julio Scherer Garca (founder and former direc-tor of Proceso), Jess Blancornelas (the former director of Tijuana-based Zeta magazine), Anabel

Hernndez (who wrote what is perhaps the most widely read history of drug cartels, Los seores delnarco), and Diego Enrique Osorno (whose accounts of the Sinaloa cartel and the Zetas cartel arecurrently considered authoritative). These books, to various degrees, reproduce President Calde-rns thesis that the violence in Mexico during his presidency was caused by a bloody war amongdrug cartels that the Mexican army and the federal police unsuccessfully attempted to end.

a representational paradigm that frames most discussions about the drug trade.In the literary field it has led, often uncritically, to scene after scene of brutality

and senseless bloodshed in narconarratives.Two of the most celebrated narconovelas to date, Yuri HerrerasTrabajos del reino(Works of the Kingdom) (2004) and Orfa Alarcns Perra brava (Fierce Bitch) (2010),are exemplary in this respect. The former traces the life of Lobo (Wolf), a com-poser of corridos, as he joins the court of a drug kingpin known simply as theKing or the Lord. Other characters in the novel are known by roles that are com-monly believed to exist in a drug kingdom: a Jeweler, a Journalist, and a Priest.Wolf, himself, becomes the kingdoms Artist. Stylized and written in a literarylanguage influenced by such prominent writers as Daniel Sada (19532011) andJess Gardea (19392000), Trabajos del reino thus attempts to imagine an arche-

typical drug cartel, from its private chambers to its public halls, from its celebra-tory rituals to its shady business transactions. As Wolf penetrates the organization,he realizes that the King is the center of a self-regulated network that in the endwill produce his own downfall, and the leader is in fact betrayed by his closestaccomplices in a plot whose structure recalls a Greek tragedy. After the king isfinally arrested by federal army commanders who were previously on his payroll,the narrative voice ambiguously explains that the soldiers capture and take awaythe kingpin as if they were in charge (116).

As with official representations of drug cartels, most of Trabajos del reino takesplace in the Kings court, the kingdom, located in the margins of a city in what

appears to be the outer limits of the state. Of particular interest is the spatial dis-position of the Kings quarters, a vast labyrinth of secret corridors, hidden cham-bers, and public areas. Inside, obscure characters are forced to decipher the hid-den meanings of the enigmatic Kings words and movements. The organizationspower also appears so corrosive and absolute that it buys at least symbolically,in the figures of the archetypical characters businessmen (the Jeweler), themedia (the Journalist), the Catholic Church (the Priest), intellectuals and creators(the Artist). Furthermore, the novel does not hesitate to play on popular narcocul-tura mythology by alleging that narcocorridos describe the lives of real druglords: Wolf claims that the King speaks the truth (99), that the Journalist says

clean lies, while true news is the matter of corridos (37). As a city-state of itsown, the Kingdoms sole reason to exist seems to be the exercise of violence as theultimate mechanism of power.

The characters recurrent violence operates much like wrestling does inBarthes Mythologies: a spectacle of iconography representing unmediated, exces-sive human suffering. Trabajos del reino presents a decontextualized collection ofexaggerated gestures that privileges moral forms over dramatized historical con-tents and is enclosed in the space of a melodrama where private and opposing


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THE CRITICAL LIMITS OF NARCONARR ATIVES / 345

interests are made public in order to reestablish a balance broken by rival druglords.Wrestling and narconarratives are seen here as fabricated myths in the

semiotic sense, with myth understood as a type of speech (Barthes 109) derivedfrom intelligible objects (sports, books, music, films) that renders timeless (thebattle of good vs. evil; the ethical Artist lured by corrupt power; inhuman andviolent drug cartels threatening civil society, and so on; see epigraph) a previoussignification that has been extrapolated from an erased historical context. Her-reras novel thus produces an imaginary world dominated by the inhuman deedsof evildoers (the King and his rivals) who fight each other to the death.At the endof the novel, Wolf believes in the almost limitless power of the cartel that devourshis community and, finally, itself, a process faithfully narrated through his inge-nious corridos that he also elevates to the category of a transcendental myth: the

corrido is not a frame decorating the wall. It is a name and it is a weapon (70).This mythic narcocultura, it may be argued following Barthes, points out andit notifies, it makes us understand something and it imposes it on us (Barthes117) that is, the lives of infamous men and their legends(see Foucault epigraph)replace our scarce knowledge of real traffickers.

In an interview, Herrera emphasized the need for articulating a textual critiqueof drug trafficking through works of literature such as his: What art can do isoffer an alternative discourse that accounts for the complexity of the phenome-non, of its long history, its many complicities, and the need to reflect again on eachindividuals responsibility. Good literature being produced today in Mexico . . .

surpasses all Manichaeisms, giving depth to the debate concerning the state of thenation (Colanzi). That Herreras novel demonstrates the same shallow, Mani-chean structure that in his view good literature must avoid is, I hope, clear fromthe analysis above. Nevertheless, Eduardo Antonio Parra, also an author of narco-narratives, contends that Herreras literary strategy is an effective critical approachto the phenomenon, since the author does not waste time in exhaustive descrip-tions or in criminal procedures, but attempts to focus on the hidden meaningsand the psychology of the archetypes that make up his gallery of characters (80).Christopher Domnguez Michael similarly argues that novels such as Herrerasavoid a cheap and commercial realism by sublimating political and social affairs

and so earn autonomy as a critique of the modern (Domnguez). Herrera him-self claims that his project does not seek to be a reflection or a faithful repre-sentation of reality; as a result, he has purposely not employed a drug-related lexi-con that only refers to clichs, to discourses structured from power or the massmedia (Arribas).

The statements above stem from a rhetorical simplification of Platos notion ofmimesis that produces two complementary claims: 1) mimesis is either a faultyand imperfect imitation of reality (thus, the novel should not attempt to repre-sent reality accurately); or 2) mimesis is a nave reworking of the romantic idealthat separates art from social knowledge (thus, the novel should renounce pro-ducing sociopolitical meaning). Both voluntary renunciations are celebrated asessential features of the modern novel in general and of Herreras book in par-ticular. But both ideas are also contested by the more sophisticated reformula-tions of mimesis discussed earlier: because Herreras novel inhabits discursivelythe phenomenon of drug trafficking, it produces a specific knowledge resulting


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7My analysis follows in part Irma Cants insightful paper La construccin del sujeto femeninoen la narrativa del narco en Perra Brava de Orfa Alarcn y Miss Narco de Javier Valdz Crdenas,presented at the XVI Congress of Contemporary Mexican Literature at the University of Texas atEl Paso, March 35, 2011.

from the direct mimeticsignification of that trafficking; the latter is in turn condi-tioned by the fact that Herreras book was written within a literary context tem-

porarily dominated by a field of power that affected the structure and objectivesof his literary project. Furthermore, and I am here following Badiou, Trabajos delreino displays the same ethical impasse found in most narconarratives by repro-ducing the simulacrum of truth about drug cartels promoted by official dis-course.

Orfa Alarcns Perra brava is a more juvenile version of narconarratives thatexploit the popular imaginary of narcocultura. This novel offers readers the sado-masochist fantasy of an upper-class university student, Fernanda Salas, whodecides to move in with a sicario or drug cartel assassin (see Biron 83233). Thestory takes place in the Monterrey of narcos, of reggaeton and hip-hop, to quote

the blurb on the back cover of the book. The plot begins with a graphic scene inwhich Fernanda is raped by the sicario, who enters the house covered in someoneelses blood. As Fernandas character evolves, her banal taste for commercialmusic, shopping, expensive nightclubs, and cruising in her car is overshadowed byviolent outbursts, culminating in a murder that she indirectly commits and cele-brates as a coming-of-age ritual through which she ends her destructive relation-ship with the sicario.

Some critics have hailed the novel for empowering a female protagonist in themale-dominated drug world. Alain Saint Martin, for example, claims that Perrabrava offers an interesting twist by adding to narconarratives a taboo-breaking

treatment of the female protagonists sexuality and affective issues. Similarly, Igna-cio Snchez Prado argues that Alarcns novel fills the void of a feminine charac-ter in the literature of violence. Thus, Fernanda breaks all canons in a muchmore original way than Prez-Revertes La reina del sur, since she does not aspireto iconicity but to inhabit her world (Consideraciones sobre Perra brava). To thecontrary, however, Fernandas violence only reinforces male-dominated positionsin the representation of class and gender as they intersect with drug trafficking.Far from being subversive, the story of Fernanda is that of an impossible and for-bidden love condemned by class structures and gender roles deeply ingrained inthe same conservative ideologies that also feed the mythic imaginary of the drug

trade promoted by the Mexican government.7

Throughout the novel, mythic drugtraffickers appear in full force: violent, sadistic psychopaths who kill rival crimi-nals, abuse their women, victimize civil society in general, and consistently over-power and manipulate weak and corrupt police in occasional, brief confronta-tions. Fernanda herself mutates in the same direction, aspiring to become asviolent as the man who controls and abuses her. Thus, she decides to kill hersicario boyfriends former lover, a woman living in poverty in a slum on the out-skirts of Monterrey. Although that womans child is in the end Fernandas onlyvictim (and accidentally so), Fernanda expresses no remorse and is actuallyexcited, since by navigating the city in order to commit a crime with absoluteimpunity she completes her imitation of the sicario. The murder in essence pro-


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8For example, the plot mechanics of Perra brava parallel those of the 1996 film Laura Garza,directed by Jorge Manrique. This melodrama tells the story of Laura, a rich landowner from thenorthern state of Nuevo Len, whose father kills her mother after she falls in love and runs away withthe haciendas foreman. Laura is seduced by Eduardo, a hitman hired by a local cacique who plans tokill her and take over her estate, but Laura kills Eduardo instead.

vides the climax of the novel, which ultimately differs little from Mexican soapoperas and low-budget action films of the 1980s and 1990s.8

Herrera and Alarcn also make evident, if involuntarily, their uncriticalassimilation of hegemonic official discourse regarding drug cartels throughtheir use of popular commercial music. While Trabajos del reino privileges narco-corridos as the preferred manifestation of narcocultura, Perra brava opts for thehip-hop songs of the band Cartel de Santa, which are quoted throughout thenarration and fully cited at the end of the book. The titles of these gratuitouslyviolent and sexist songs seem to propose a soundtrack to accompany the read-ing: The Car of the Cartel, Saintly Death, and, predictably, Dogs. Both hip-hop and narcocorridos depict a fictitious and glorifying image of powerful drugcriminals and their clandestine culture of inhuman excess. In pointing this

out, I am not advocating that this type of music be banned, an action whichwould only serve to increase publicity and record sales; however, I do wish toemphasize the ethical and political implications of the celebratory magnificationof drug cartels and kingpins. Like narconovelas, this music reinforces the conve-nient discursive illusion that drug cartels threaten civil society and its govern-ment from without and so cancels a priori the possibility of incorporating a cri-tique of the states responsibility in drug trafficking.

The central narrative strategy of both novels is the over-exploitation of violence.Slavoj ieks conceptualization of violence as a phenomenon operating on threedifferent levels helps illustrate how most narconarratives manipulate violence as a

form of sensationalism, but rarely challenge its systemic origins. iek first dis-cusses a subjective violence perpetrated in common crimes, terrorism, civil cri-ses, and international conflicts. He warns, however, that we should learn to stepback, to disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible sub-jective violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent (1), because it threatensto mask more pervasive and systematic levels of violence. The second level of vio-lence, according to iek, is a symbolic violence that affects language and thatmay be expressed in hate-speech, racism, and discrimination. iek calls the thirdlevel systemic the most invisible of all precisely because it is produced withinpolitical and economic systems (12): Were talking here of the violence inherent

in a system: not only direct physical violence, but also the more subtle forms ofcoercion that sustain relations of domination and exploitation, including thethreat of violence (9). The disciplinary disposition of the individual human bodyinscribed in the official strategy of the war on drugs is the resonant backgroundof the systemic violence that remains unaccounted for in most narconarratives,which revel instead in various expressions of subjective violence: scenes of torture,rape, and gruesome murders.

The striking correspondence between official and literary discourse can beunderstood, following Alain Badiou again, as an ideological reiteration of the real.As in the artificial Moscow trials ordered by Stalin in the 1930s to purge the regime


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9Among many comparable examples of this phenomenon,Fiesta en la madriguera(Down the RabitHole) (2010), by Juan Pablo Villalobos, stands out. It narrates the story of a child who lives with hisfather, a drug lord, in what is described as a narco fortress. The child is surrounded by expensivegifts, while witnessing torture and executions and assimilating themacho discourse of powertaught by his father and a designated mentor. All of the characters bear names of indigenous ori-gin, as if referring to a sort of trans-historic, non-Western ancestral source of their violence. See,also, Alejandro AlmaznsEl ms buscado(The Most Wanted) (2012), the autobiographical story ofJoaqun El Chapo Guzmn, a llegedly the head of the Sinaloa cartel; Juan Jos Rodrguezs Mi

nombre es Casablanca(My Name is Casablanca) (2003), the story of a police officer who confronts adrug cartel in the course of his investigation of the serial killings of bricklayers in the state ofSinaloa; Bernardo Fernndez BEFs Tiempo de alacranes(Scorpion Season) (2005), which focuses on aveteran sicario who plans to retire after ki lling a key protected witness who could testify against ElSeor, the head of a cartel operating from a Mexican federal prison; and finally, also by the sameauthor, Hielo negro(Black Ice) (2011), which narrates the life of Lizzy Zubiaga, who interrupts herstudies of visual arts abroad to inherit a drug cartel in Mexico.

of dissidents, we encounter here what Badiou terms the passion of the real (TheCentury 52), the need for a system of discursive fiction that allows for the constant

assertion of the materiality of the real that is, paradoxically, only perceptible fromthe symbolic. Both the prosecutors and those they condemned understood thatthe purge organized by Stalin was nothing short of a mise en scne, but ideologicalends justified their enactment. Likewise, within narcocultura manifestations of vio-lence are organized by the pre-established conditions of hegemonic discourse inorder to corroborate the real of the drug trade that has been enunciated by theState. As a result, the real of the drug trade always emerges as the same in journal-ism, academic research, and cultural productions that seek to represent it. AsJacques Rancire argues, the real must be fictionalized in order to be thought(38), but that fictionalization is constructed through a network of signification that

is established a priori in an archive constituted by specific power vectors. Thearchive of statements that is activated by the hegemonic discourse on the drugtrade thus recalls what Rancire defines as the distribution of the sensible thatis, the audible and visible conditions of possibility of all systems of representation.

This dominating trend in narconarratives can be quickly confirmed througha serial reading of the opening sentences of some of the best-known works:The phone rang and she knew that they were going to kill her (La reina del sur11); I knew that with one hand he could kill me (Orfa Alarcn, Perra brava[FierceBitch] 11); I am dead, Makina told herself when all things winced (Yuri Herrera,Seales que precedern al fin del mundo[Signs Leading Up to the End of the World] 11);

Shark did not know if he was dead. Or alive (Heriberto Ypez, Al otro lado[On theOther Side] 9); Fifteen minutes before his head exploded in pieces, auxiliarypoliceman Ceferino Martnez, alias El Oaxaca, finished his last round of thenight (Bernardo Fernndez BEF, Hielo negro[Black Ice] 11); He knew of bloodand saw that his was different (Yuri Herrera, Trabajos del reino [Works of the King-dom] 9). By opening their works with actual, imminent, or symbolic murders, thesenovels project spectacles of subjective violence as prominent lures for voyeuris -tic consumption to return to ieks description thus masking and seeming toobviate a critique of systemic violence. It is no coincidence that, as expressions ofthe inhumanity of the people involved in drug trade, many of the names and attri-

butes of the characters in these novels are those of animal predators: Shark, Wolf,Dog. The drug lord man or woman is always at the center of a community ofexception, based on an imaginary cult of violence for violences sake.9But while


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10I would like to thank Edmundo Paz Soldn for recommending this novel to me at the confer-ence Crime Narratives in Modern Latin America: From Detectives to Narcos, held at ColumbiaUniversity, April 30May 1, 2010.

the systemic violence that produces drug trafficking frequently disappears underthe recurrent manifestations of subjective violence in the majority of narconar-

ratives, in the last two decades other narratives have articulated critical alterna-tives to this complacent, if commercially successful, representation of officialimaginaries of the drug war. I discuss some examples below.

2. Counterhegemonic Narconarratives in Mexico and the U.S.

The most powerful critical analyses of the intersection between state powerand the drug trade have been articulated in the social sciences (see, for exam-ple, Escalante Gonzalbo,DieTageszietung, and Astorga). However, predating Lareina del sur and the celebratory narcocultura of which the novel is part, a liter-ary deconstruction of the phenomenon also emerged in Mexico in the 1990s. In1991, Vctor Hugo Rascn Banda (19482008) was awarded the Juan Rulfo Prizefor his novel Contrabando(Contraband), narrated in the first person as a fictitioustestimonial recounting the effects of the drug trade in the Sierra Madre of Chi-huahua.10Rascn Banda tells of his travels back to his native Santa Rosa, a smallvillage surrounded by farms and clandestine drug plantations, where he intendsto find the time and space away from Mexico City to fulfill a contract to write amovie script based on songs of the popular norteo singer Antonio Aguilar. Assoon as he arrives, he witnesses at the airport the killing of two young men at thehands of police agents. After the shooting, he speculates that the two were prob-

ably novice drug smugglers whose lives were cut short because of their vulnera-ble position in the global drug business.

This initial episode sets the tone for the entire novel: as the protagonist isexposed to other cases of drug violence in Chihuahua, he gradually realizes thatthe violence consistently originates with police agents and the military patrollingthe region. Thus, despite media reports describing shootings in Santa Rosa amongrival cartel members, Rascn Banda and others in the community observe onlybrutal incursions by the military, federal, and state police, who harass villagersand rob civilians while allegedly fighting drug smugglers.

As he completes the commissioned script, Rascn Banda discovers that his new

perspective no longer fits popular expectations regarding the literary representa-tion of rural life in the north of the country. The script itself tells the story of rivaldrug organizations whose kingpins fight over a woman. The two groups representthe sum of all official and de facto power in their small town, with the womanbeing the ultimate prize. There is no exterior authority beyond their dominion:both cartels command every aspect of daily life, and there is no mention of anyofficial institution from the town, the nearest city, state, or even the federation.In the end, the groups massacre each other, as if the symbolic elimination of bothis the only possible retaliation. The point here is that drug trafficking exists withinthe community and is not a criminal force attacking the community from the out-

side: it is a social construct always inside the state, with organized structures thatalso fulfill the roles of the state when needed. Narcos are not invading criminals;


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11I am referring in particular to Carlos Montemayor (19472010), who was awarded the ColimaPrize for his novel Guerra en el paraso(War in Paradise), a historical account of a rural uprising inthe state of Guerrero during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Also in 1991, Hctor Aguilar Camnpublished La guerra de Galio(Galios War), a roman clef detailing the federal governments repres-sion ofExclsior, the sole Mexican newspaper that refused to join its payroll.

they occupy the top strata of power and civil society. Unfortunately, however,Rascn Bandas viewpoint is so extreme that Antonio Aguilar cancels the con-

tract, arguing that using the script may offend a public accustomed to uncriticalcommercial melodramas and not a narco story of revenge (210).Although written in 1991 and awarded the Juan Rulfo Prize at that time, Contra-

bandowas only published posthumously in 2008, after the death of Rascn Bandathat same year. The reasons for the seventeen-year delay are unclear. RascnBanda was a renowned and prolific playwright, who explored sociopolitical injus-tice regarding immigration, gender violence, and political corruption, frequentlystructuring his searing works as testimonial narratives. In 1991 he wrote a playalso titled Contrabando(a condensed version of which was included as one of thenovels chapters) that had a modest reception (see Adler). The limited success of

both the novel and play can be explained, in part, by the marginal position oftheater and playwrights in Mexicos literary field. But it should also be noted thatthese texts, which appeared 20 years ago, shed a critical light on drug traffickingat a time when the topic had not yet accumulated its current level of symboliccapital or reached todays levels of social and political urgency. Indeed, RascnBandas narconarrative was virtually unknown, especially when compared to thewide attention received by other novels critical of official power published thesame year.11In Fernando Garca Ramrezs words, publishers rejected Contrabandotwenty years ago because no one wanted to see at that moment what was happen-ing. Today that destiny has caught up with us. Today, Rascons novel seems to have

been written yesterday (84).Yet even today, two decades after its first public appearance, Contrabando stillhas been unable to reach a wide audience. The reasons for this may not beentirely different from its initial failure to do so in the 1990s, for Contrabandosportrayal of drug organizations does not adhere to the structures and strate-gies of the most profitable narconarratives currently dominating the literaryfield. Far from the enigmatic mythical kingpin of Herreras Trabajos del reino orAlarcns disturbed hip-hop-dancing upper-class beauty, Rascn Bandas nar-cos are impersonal, unapproachable, and lacking in celebrity appeal. His drugcartels do not inhabit mysterious kingdoms, but appear as dispersed, uniden-

tifiable organizations. In addition, the violence in the novel is perpetrated byobscurely uniformed anonymous commandos, or, more significantly, by clearlyrecognizable police agents and soldiers. At the most basic level, Rascn Bandascriminals fail to follow any of the implied rules for this type of best-selling fic-tion: his are instead nameless figures, usually seen from the perspective of wit-nesses. I would argue, however, that Rascn Bandas refusal to seduce his read-ers with a contradictory and enthralling character such as the protagonist of Lareina del suris a crucial structural condition of his literary project. His novel is acalculated political statement that denounces the decades-long symbiosisbetween the state and drug cartels. As such, his portrayal of drug traffickers isconsistent and, following Badious lead, coextensive with his critical interven-


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tion from an artistic perspective, even if it risks not seducing his readers with amelodramatic action story. The novel assumes the very narrative form that, in

his view of the phenomenon, corresponds to real drug cartels: they are profit-driven organizations that advance their goals with impunity through policeforce and political authority because they are in fact the police and the politicalelites of the region.

While most narconarratives published after La reina del sur seem to be attemptingto reproduce Prez-Revertes bestselling formula, Roberto Bolaos (19532003)acclaimed posthumous novel 2666(2004) provides an alternative representation ofdrug trafficking. An ambitious project consisting of five semi-independent booksconnecting the Holocaust with the murders of hundreds of women in CiudadJurez at the U.S.-Mexico border, 2666 explores in detail various dimensions of

violence in post-industrial societies, from gender hate crimes to killings relatedto the drug trade. In The Part about the Crimes, which focuses on the murdersof women, there is a scene in a bar in which police agent Juan de Dios Martnezspeculates that a rancher, who he sees from behind, must be a narco, a drug traf-ficker. Meanwhile, two young musicians try unsuccessfully to get the ranchersattention: The saddest thing, thought Juan de Dios Martnez, was that the narco,or the suited back of the man he thought was a narco, was hardly paying any atten-tion to them, busy as he was talking to a man with the face of a mongoose and ahooker with the face of a cat (380). When the supposed narco finally notices themusicians, something happens that intrigues the police officer:

The man with the mongoose face rose from his chair and said something into the accordionistsear. Then he sat down again and the accordionists mouth screwed up into a pout. Like a child onthe verge of tears. The violinist had her eyes open and she was smiling. The narco and the womanwith the cat face bent their heads together. The narcos nose was big and bony and aristocratic look-ing. But aristocratic how? There was a wild expression on the accordionists face, except for his lips.Unfamiliar currents surged through the inspectors chest. The world is a strange and fascinatingplace, he thought. (381)

Bolaos alleged narco is anonymous, even faceless. The effects of his actions areonly perceptible in the terrorized grimace of the accordionist and the tense smileof the violinist. The alleged narco is also the only character sitting at the table notdescribed with an animal attribute (mongoose, cat). In fact, his persona does not

require such similes to make evident the violence he commands without even get-ting up. This embodiment of power grants him de facto a specific social functionthat turns him into a self-evident character: he is a narco. When a glimpse of hisprofile is finally visible, the police agent associates him with the aristocracy; inother words, he recognizes him as a member of the elite class. This scene can thusbe read as a critique illustrating the limited way in which the drug trade is beingnarrated in Mexico: brief glances of a phenomenon whose reality cannot be pen-etrated but only transcribed in imaginary constructions involving certain effectsof violence seen from an insurmountable distance, a situation in which someaspects of the power of an elite can be known intuitively, never in full. If in 2666

the reality of the drug trade appears under an oblique light, this is because it is anintegral part of hegemonic power in Santa Teresa, a border city modeled afterCiudad Jurez, where most of the novel takes place.

As a dramatization of the impossibility of knowing the real of the drug trade,Bolaos masterpiece offers a unique narrative that relocates the phenomenon as


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12These include lmer Mendozas first novel, Un asesino solitario(Lone Assassin) (1999), which tellsthe story of a professional assassin hired by a government agency to murder the official presidential

candidate, a plot based on the 1994 assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio; Daniel SadasEl lenguajedel juego (The Language of the Game) (2012), in which the owner of a pizzeria in a small town in thenorth of Mexico faces an emerging drug trade mounted by the local cacique and other de factopowers; and Juan Villoros Arrecife(Reef) (2012), a novel about a post-apocalyptic Mexico in whichtransnational conglomerates profit from ecological disasters and state-regulated drug violence.

a domain controlled and disciplined by local and federal powers. Bolaos narcosare people committed to the particularities of the trade, but never exceptional

criminals or psychopaths challenging state power or threatening civil society.They vary according to their role in a business structure: some work as simplearmed guards or as small-time hoodlums peddling drugs; others, like crime bossPedro Rengifo, are well-recognized businessmen.

The main plotline of The Part about the Crimes focuses on the killing ofwomen in Santa Teresa, a decade-long series of brutal murders that have receivedinternational media attention. Like the crimes themselves, the drug traffickingoccurs within a web of power relations that remains invisible to the majority of soci-ety. The most profitable illegal activities are carried out with a high level of discre-tion and discipline, and this explains why even those closely guarding kingpins

such as Lalo Cura, who was hired to protect Rengifos wife are ignorant of theirinvolvement in organized crime. As the novel progresses, the drug trade is repre-sented as simply one of the many levels of corruption and crime that functionwithin the citys economy. For example, the intimate relationship between policeagents, local caciques, and narcos is suggested by a scene in which Epifanio talks toLalo Cura about the unsolved murder of Isabel Urrea, a radio reporter. Epifaniodecides to take a look into Urreas appointment book, which state policejudicialesdid not even bother to open:I found the phone numbers of three narcos. One of them was Pedro Rengifo. I also found the num-bers of severaljudiciales, including a big boss in Hermosillo. What were those phone numbers doingin an ordinary reporters appointment book? Had she interviewed them, put them on the air? Wasshe friends with them? And if she wasnt, who had given her the numbers? A mystery. (463)

The dispersion of motifs and plotlines in 2666 is Bolaos attempt to represent thecomplexity of a society in which the drug trade is an integral, but not dominant,aspect of organized crime. As in Contrabando, the narcos of 2666 are the elite:police agents, businessmen, politicians. Some believe, like Bolaos police agentJuan de Dios Martnez, that a narco is an enigmatic character whose face cannotbe known and who is capable of the most horrific acts. A closer look, however,reveals that narcos always exist on the surface of civil society, integrated in theeconomy, the political class, and police institutions.

Although there are certainly other notable attempts by Mexican writers tocritique in a similar fashion organized drug crime and hegemonic power,12mostMexican narconarratives continue to operate within the hegemonic discoursethat reinforces the mythology surrounding drug cartels. In the U.S., the oppo-site seems to be the case, and in what followsI briefly discuss two such narconar-ratives whose deconstructive examination of the drug trade mirrors RascnBandas and Bolaos: Don Winslows The Power of the Dog(2005), a novel, andCharles BowdensDown by the River(2002), a work of nonfiction.


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The Power of the Dog begins in 1997, when Art Keller, a DEA agent, walks througha ranch near the town of El Sauzal in the state of Baja California Norte, where an

extended family of nineteen has been murdered, including children and seniors.Keller is indirectly responsible for the massacre, since he framed a young sicario tomake him appear to be a snitch so that his cartel bosses would execute him. ButKeller did not intend the same fate for the sicarios family: He forces himself tolook at the bodies again. Its my fault, Art thinks. I brought this on these people.Im sorry, Art thinks. I am so sorry (5). These deaths are part of an ironic chainof causalities (which includes Kellers murdered DEA partner, Ernie Hidalgo) thatbegan in 1975 with Operation Condor, in which Mexican soldiers and federalpolice destroyed poppy plantations in the state of Sinaloa, where Mexicos firstdrug organization had its headquarters. The operation involved the recently cre-

ated DEA, which hired pilots, mostly former CIA agents, to spray defoliants anddestroy the facilities for producing heroin. Keller joins Miguel ngel Barrera aSinaloan state policeman and a type of Mexican godfather, who asks his friends,including Keller, to call him To (uncle) to form what Keller will later call apartnership made in hell (31). Together they bring down the cartel boss, DonPedro viles, whom Barrera kills even though he does not seem to be resistingarrest: Then Art gets it this wasnt an arrest or an execution. It was an assas-sination (36). Following Tos plan, Keller (whose name sounds almost like killer)takes the dead drug lord as his trophy and makes a name for himself in the DEA.

Just as the Mexican-American agent (Keller has an American father and Mexican

mother) rises in the DEA, so To Barrera makes a parallel ascent as a drug lord.Relocated to the central city of Guadalajara, the state capital of Jalisco, To nowheads the federacin, a conglomerate of smugglers that brings the first massiveshipments of Colombian cocaine to the U.S. market. Keller knows the true origin ofthe federation Operation Condor was intended to cut the Sinaloan cancer out ofMexico, but what it did instead was spread it through the entire body (103) andhe suddenly realizes the larger implications of his relationship with To:He usedyou, set you like a dog on his enemies, and you did it. Then you kept your mouth shut aboutit. While they lauded you as a hero, slapped you on the back, finally let you on the team. Youpathetic son of a bitch, thats what its been about, hasnt it? Your desperation to finally belong. Yousold your soul for it. Now you think you can buy it back. (10607)

Ultimately but only after his persistent investigation of Tos federation leads tothe murder of his partner Ernie Hidalgo Keller realizes that the governments ofboth the U.S. and Mexico approach the drug trade not as a war but as an asset tobe leveraged in a web of international geopolitical affairs. Although they maintainan official discourse that attacks drug cartels, they also selectively and secretlyprotect rings of production and distribution that serve specific state purposes.

The Power of the Dogs complex plot is carefully structured as a roman clef, weav-ing together multiple historical events and figures: Operation Condor; the forma-tion of the drug cartel federation; the 1985 murder of DEA agent Enrique KikiCamarena in Mexico (the fictionalized Ernie Hidalgo); the 1993 assassination ofCardinal Juan Jess Posadas Ocampo (Father Juan Parada in the novel); theTijuana cartel led by the Arellano Flix brothers (Tos nephews, Adn and RalBarrera); the rise of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the Jurez Cartels leader knownas the lord of the skies for smuggling cocaine into the U.S. in airplanes; and


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13A New York Times article reported a news conference at the White House with President Caldern,in which President Obama said Mexico had shown extraordinary courage in its stand against a waveof crime and violence that has left tens of thousands of Mexicans dead since 2006 . . . We are verymindful that the battle President Caldern is fighting in Mexico is not just his, Mr. Obama said. Itsalso ours. We have to take responsibility, just as hes taking responsibility. See Thompson.

However, according to Bowden, the Mexico that claims to be a sister republic to the U.S., with afunctional civil society protected by President Calderns valiant implementation of a policy of zerotolerance against drug cartels (see Thompson), does not exist: There is a second Mexico, wherethe war isfor drugs, for the enormous money to be made in drugs, where the police and the mili-tary fight for their share, where the press is restrained by the murder of reporters and feasts on asteady diet of bribes, and where the line between government and the drug world has never existed(Murder City 18; see, also, Burnett).

14The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)s seventy-one-year rule in Mexico ended with theelection of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) presidential candidate Vicente Fox in 2000.

To himself, a fictionalized combination of such historical drug lords as formerpolice agent Miguel ngel Flix Gallardo and Ernesto To Neto Fonseca Carrillo,

the uncle of Carrillo Fuentes. Yet Winslows narrative strategy manages to main-tain a sense of critical truth throughout his fictionalized account of the drug warwithout ever subjugating the narrative arc to historical referents. And althoughKeller often navigates these events seeking to avenge an episode of personal loss the murder of his partner he nonetheless becomes conscious of how that trag-edy belongs to a wider network of systemic violence, of which the internationaldrug trade is a part. Moreover, he does so without resorting to mythic construc-tions of drug lords and their imagined fantastic and eccentric lives.

Charles Bowdens nonfiction investigationDown by the River provides anothercritical examination of the official discourse surrounding the drug trade.13

Spanning three decades of the history of this phenomenon, it tells the story ofPhil Jordan, a DEA agent obsessed with the murder of his brother, Lionel BrunoJordan, who was killed in El Paso, Texas, in what initially seemed like a carjack-ing. The Jordan family, of Italian descent, had been living for decades in theregion, andFelipeJordan grew up speaking both Spanish and English. The mur-der takes place in 1995, a year after a series of political assassinations in Mexicothat included the murders of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio andthe head of the PRI party, Jos Francisco Ruiz Massieu.14Jordan had earlier beennamed the head of the DEAs El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC), and he soonsuspects that the murder of his brother is a message from the Jurez cartel to

stay away from their business. Frantically pursuing his brothers killers, Jordangradually penetrates the world of international cartels, in which the U.S. andMexican governments have deeply rooted political and economic interests.

The case of Enrique Kiki Camarena is of particular interest, since it helpsreveal to Jordan the complexity of the official war on drugs. Jordan meetsCamarena in 1984 in Mexico City. When Jordan notices that agents from the Mex-ican federal secret police DFS (Federal Security Directorate) are shadowing them,Camarena explains that, although the DFS is trained by the CIA, drug traffickingis another dimension of their duties. Although,Like anyone in DEA, he knowsthat drug investigations always come second to concerns of foreign policy and to

the appetites of trade (Down 149), Jordan is puzzled by the relationship thatCamarena details between the CIA, the DFS, and the drug cartels. What frus-


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15

Similar critiques of the drug trade can be found in Gay Taleses Honor Thy Father (1971), DanBaums Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure (1997), Gary WebbsDark Alli-ance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion(1998), Howard CampbellsDrug War Zone:Frontline Dispatches from the Streets of El Paso and Jurez (2009), and Molly MolloysEl Sicario. The Auto-biography of a Mexican Assassin(2011). See also Gianfranco Rosis award-winning documentary Elsicario: Room 164(2010), available online at .

trates Camarena is the fact that his information linking the Mexican governmentto the cartels never produces a serious DEA investigation, and he is killed in Mex-

ico after discovering a four and a half square mile drug plantation guarded byDFS agents. Bowden then connects the plantation to the Iran-Contra scandal dur-ing the Reagan administration, noting that it is public knowledge that the CIApartially financed the contra war in Nicaragua with money obtained from the saleof narcotics in the U.S. after a Congressional amendment cut off official support(see Webb).

The parallels between Bowdens Phil Jordan and Winslows Art Keller are strik-ing: they both are initially driven by the need for revenge; the sons of immigrantswith close family connections to Mexico, they feel like outsiders in the white male-dominated political world of the U.S. As they navigate the justice systems of both

countries, they realize that they are immersed in a complex and sensitive networkof interests: It is a model of the New Economy, stateless, borderless, global. Itrewards merit, ignores class origins, hires and fires at will. It despises regulationsand ducks tariffs. It is color-blind and judges the work, not skin color (Bowden,Down 214). Far removed from the gratuitously gory scenes of most Mexican nar-conovelas, drug-related violence in these texts is considered a foreseeable conse-quence of a billion-dollar industry rather than the product of senseless outburstsof irritable psychopaths having a bad day:Kill ing still continues it is inevitable in a business lacking access to courts and contract law. With-out death, the business simply cannot function. And in a business rife with problems of industrialespionage the constant danger of snitches murder and torture are inescapable business expenses.As is bribery, the only accepted form of taxation in the drug business. (Bowden,Down 248)

Drug traffickers, Bowden explains in an interview, theyre just people making aliving in a murderous business (Karlin).

3. Coda: Challenging the Narco Archive and Official Discourse

As with other U.S. narconarratives, the sophistication and the depth of docu-mentation and analysis of both The Power of the Dog andDown by the River have fewequivalents in Mexican fiction and non-fiction narconarratives.15Latin American

literature in general, nonetheless, has a long tradition of sociopolitical critique. InMyth and Archive(1990), critic Roberto Gonzlez Echevarra argues that a certaincurrent of the continental production of novels since the nineteenth century hasstriven to adopt what he calls a nonliterary form, here echoing Roberto Fernn-dez Retamars interpretation of Alfonso Reyess theory of the ancillary functionof literature inEl deslinde(see note 6). Approaching Latin America itself as acultural entity, as a context or archive from which to narrate that diachronically(39), Latin American literature exhibits for Gonzlez Echevarra a type of Der-ridean archive fever:


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It is my hypothesis that the novel, having no fixed form of its own, often assumes that of a givenkind of document endowed with truth-bearing power by society at specific moments in time. Thenovel, or what is called the novel at various points in history, mimics such documents to show theirconventionality, their subjection to strategies of textual engenderment similar to those governingliterature, which in turn reflect those of language itself. It is through this simulacrum of legitimacythat the novel makes its contradictory and veiled claim to literariness. (8)

As they adopt non-literary elements, novels construct in turn a literary space inwhich a critical dissection of those referents becomes a constitutive condition ofeach narrative project.While this approach has been adopted by a significantnumber of contemporary Mexican novels, I would venture that the key to achiev-ing critical relevance in a literary work does not lie in its formal elements, evenwhen these aim at a simulacrum of legitimacy through the mimesis of a specificarchive. While narconarratives maintain different degrees of proximity to what

could be conceptualized as the drug war archive government documents,journalistic news stories, testimonials, police and military reports, analyses byhuman rights organizations, narcocorridos, films, websites, and other related cul-tural productions I believe that their potential for having a lasting impact onthe literary canon mostly resides in their political critique of hegemonic positionsinscribed in that same archive. Although this critical relevance may be articulatedas a counternarrative to official representations of the drug war (The Power of DogandDown by the River), it need not resort to realist techniques or a factual engage-ment with the archive (Contrabando and 2666).

The canon of modern Mexican narrative is composed of novels with very dif-

ferent relationships to the countrys various archival imaginaries, but most incor-porate a critical dimension with regard to a specific archive. I would go as faras to say that a current of counterhegemonic narratives lies at the very founda-tion of Mexicos literary tradition. Along with some of the novels mentionedabove (Contrabando, 2666, and others referred to in footnotes 10 and 13), two keytexts from the end of the nineteenth century are exemplary: Manuel PaynosLos bandidos de Ro Fro(188991), which narrates the countrys sociopoliticalcrisis during the first decades after its independence from Spain, when corrup-tion and crime were endemic within the highest levels of official power; andHeriberto Frass Tomchic. Episodios de Campaa(1893), an account of a peasant

uprising in the northern state of Chihuahua that was brutally repressed by Mex-ican dictator Porfirio Daz in 1892. Decades later, and in the context of Mexicos1910 civil war, the narrations referred to as novels of the Mexican Revolution in particular those by Martn Luis Guzmn (18871976), Nellie Campobello(19001986), and Mariano Azuela (18731952) provide critical accounts ofthe human and social carnage that resulted from the fratricidal power ambi-tions of military generals and politicians. This genealogy can be extended tonon-realist works such as Juan Rulfos groundbreaking Pedro Pramo(1955), thehistorical parodies of Jorge Ibargengoitias Los relmpagos de agosto(1964) andLos pasos de Lpez(1982), and the political deconstructions present in Carlos

Montemayors Guerra en el paraso(1991), Vicente Leeros Los periodistas (1978),and Hctor Aguilar Camns La guerra de Galio(1991). These literary precedentssupport Christopher Domnguez Michaels assessment of Yuri Herreras Traba-jos del reino as an important piece of narcoliteratura, but not as a work that canaspire to become a canonic fictionalization of Mexicos drug war: Herrera


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seems to me not the beginning but the end of a road: the narco empire reduced(as only good prose can and should) to the falsely idiotic gaze of a buffoon shel-

tered inside the palace (Domnguez). This ambiguous praise hints at the cen-tral problem both of Herreras novel and most narconarratives: they representliterary dead-ends that reproduce the limited hegemonic vision of drug traf-ficking that even the most skillful narration whether realist or not cannotovercome.

In Julio Cortzars celebrated short story Casa tomada (House Taken Over),two siblings are gradually expelled from their home as invisible forces take overeach room. Since the nature of these forces is never accounted for, the text invitesvirtually endless explanations and interpretations of their exile. As the drug busi-ness expands ubiquitously, corroding all dimensions of the social tissue of both

Mexico and the U.S., it is understandable that narconarratives analogously strug-gle to provide sometimes desperate explanations of the situation. Thus, suchaccounts present a country that is being taken over by dark ahistorical forces thatcan only be expressed in mythic and archetypical terms: spontaneous, exotic,senseless, and random violence; unstoppable corruption; the inevitable triumphof evil. With their romantic focus on death as an ontological destiny and theiremphasis on an imagined narcocultura that makes victims of the official institu-tions of justice, most narconarratives propagate an illusory enemy that the Mexi-can state relies upon in order to legitimize its actions in the drug war. In short,most of the narconarratives written during the last decade in Mexico reify the sim-

ulacrum of truth constructed by official propaganda. Only through the articula-tion of deliberately political counternarratives can light be shed on drug traffick-ing as one of the many dimensions of official power in both countries. To achievethis, critical narconarratives must abandon the exhausted myths of drug lords andtheir fantastic kingdoms and stop objectifying drug trafficking as a problem exter-nal to official power in Mexico and the U.S. and instead propose a careful histori-cal revision of its place inside that power: drug trafficking as power itself.

College of Staten Island and The Graduate Center, City University of New York

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