War for the 21stcentury?:

Exploring thepre/postmodern

conflict in narco-estado

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

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drug cartels. The nature of the war, being based on greed,

hyper-materialism and the pioneering of the global free-

market, 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

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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 ‘low-intensity’ 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

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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 high-fashion 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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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;).

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 global innovation, communication and resource nodes (global cities)

one the one hand and disfavoured, fragmented hinterlands on the other,

26

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 non-

territorial 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

27

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

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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

29

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

30

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

31

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.

32

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).

33

‘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: 36). Thus

violence affects both the spatial and temporal considerations

of society, restricting their freedoms and breeding social

segregation.

34

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

35

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

36

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

37

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

38

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

39

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

40

long ago predicted the eruption of the aptly named ‘commercial

insurgency’, a ‘quasi-political 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).

41

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

42

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

drug-trafficker. 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 drug-traffickers, viewing them

43

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

44

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

45

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).

46

Due to their extremely graphic content and the fact that

they ‘glorify’ the drug-trafficker 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,

47

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).

48

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

49

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

50

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

51

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

52

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):

53

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-turned-people’s

saint. Both of these figures have now reached unprecedented

cult status, threatening the established institution of

54

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,

55

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

56

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’

57

(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

58

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

59

emptiness, the narcos have reached out to premodern saints and

folk-heroes that they relate to. One such folk-hero-turned-

narco-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

60

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

61

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 cult-criminal 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

62

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

63

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

64

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

65

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

66

‘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

67

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 ever-expanding 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.

68

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 narco-

estado 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

69

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 drug-traffickers 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

70

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 criminal-cultural

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

71

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).

72

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