The radical ideas of Republican politicians—they want to invade Mexico to attack drug cartels they have branded by terrorist organizations—make a review of Oswaldo Zavala's La Guerra en las Palabras timely. The drug war hawks think that Mexico is experiencing state failure at the hands of heavily armed drug cartels. The critical manifestation of state failure is the Mexican government's loss of control over its territory, particularly areas close to the U.S. border. State failure, they argue, gives the cartels a free hand to smuggle drugs and undocumented migrants into the United States. In response to all of this, Zavala contends that the cartels do not exist (Los carteles no existen was the title of his 2018 book), meaning that cartels are discursive objects constructed by policy elites in both the United States and Mexico to facilitate economic and political domination.
The visual power of war-on-drugs images—severed heads, mutilated bodies, bodies hung from highway overpasses, the discovery of mass graves—reinforces the idea of the cartels as the new locus of evil in the post-Cold War world. Seen in all their immediacy, cartel stories and images underscore a terrifying reality of escalating social violence in Mexico. The discourse of the narco narrativizes this violence on terms that are exculpatory for political and economic elites in both Mexico and the United States. Images and concepts become tied together in an explanatory framework. Cartels are significant actors. They compete violently for turf or plazas. They purchase protection from corrupt politicians and cops. As Zavala emphasizes, incidents of social violence in Mexico are readily converted into drug war narratives.
Both the Cold War and the war on drugs share a talent for eviscerating the past. In the shift from anti-communism to the war on drugs, the past was precipitously forgotten. One example of this, as Zavala notes, was the anti-communist ruler of Panama Manuel Noriega—cocaine trafficker, dictator, and CIA asset. Suddenly, in 1989, the Cold War ally became a war-on-drugs enemy, sparking a U.S. invasion of Panama.
Something similar transpired in Mexico as well: criminal groups augmented the repressive capacities of Mexico's police and military apparatus. Following Mexico's Operation Condor of the 1970s—a U.S.-funded drug interdiction campaign not to be confused with the South American state terror plan of the same name—narcos not arrested or killed by the police and military became swept up into an officially protected narcotrafficking network. In the wake of Condor, the national security documents of the Miguel de la Madrid (1982-1988) administration did not include any conception of narcotrafficking as a threat to national security. Why should they? The narcos were subordinated to the state. In both cultural and official registers, the narco was not a powerful figure but a marginalized one—"the crouching barbarian, the defeated peasant which is not accepted in the city either," Zavala writes. The state depicted peasant insurgents repressed during the dirty wars of the 1970s in the state of Guerrero in similar terms: the insurgents were criminals and deviants unable to integrate themselves into modern Mexico.
Both cases underscored state supremacy rather than state weakness. Narco discourse reversed this relationship, putting state power into question. How did this transition occur?
What changed, contends Zavala, was not the Mexican state but the discourse through which it represents itself. The agent prompting this change was the United States. Just as Mexico dutifully accepted the terms of structural adjustment policies dictated by the U.S. and the International Monetary Fund, Mexico also embraced U.S. security doctrines. In both cases, the economic and security practices of the Mexican state have affected a kind of neoliberal amnesia. The popular revindications of the Mexican Revolution, inscribed in the 1917 Constitution, suddenly morphed into the regrettable excesses of the statist past, just as the state supremacy of the 1970s was suddenly transmuted into the state weakness of the neoliberal era.
Zavala argues that this discursive transformation is rooted in the autonomy of narco discourse. It functions as a myth in the sense of “a secondary semiotic system,” as defined by literary theorist Roland Barthes, elaborated with signs that stand for real referents. This conception of myth clarifies how myth occludes reality. Myth is, in this sense, not real but fabricated. According to Zavala: “Below this myth, there is no hidden reality to be discovered, there just appears more language, the antecedent signs which construct the symbolic structure of myth, uncoupled from reality.”
The myth then proceeds to penetrate reality. In this regard, narco discourse operates through practices of dissemination. Cops and state officials are the sources for stories about narcotrafficking, which journalists, novelists, songwriters, and screen directors then process into narco-narratives. One of the critical effects of the dissemination is for the state origins of the narco discourse to dissolve so that the discourse is no longer perceived in terms of the point of view of a given actor but simply a reflection of reality. This naturalization of the narco discourse erases the social conflicts of the past. The present is only about the struggle between the state and organized crime, which questions the state's survival.
A vignette from Zavala’s text illustrates this point. On a deserted beach in Sonora, National Geographic interviews a hooded narco who is awaiting a shipment of weapons from the United States. “Why these weapons?” asks the reporter. “Because,” says the narco, “our jefe, Menchu (head of the Jalisco de Nueva Generación Cartel), wants to defeat all the other cartels and control all of Mexico.” There you have it: living proof of the narco-virus that has infected Mexico. The narco discourse multiplies these points of reference as a continuous flow of information about Mexico, making the country essentially synonymous with the war on drugs.
Zavala characterizes the discourse of the narco as the epistemic platform of the war on drugs from 1975 to 2020. The platform is, of course, a misleading cultural register in which the events associated with narcotrafficking and organized crime become meaningful. These cultural meanings are just the perspectives of the powerful, transmuted into a kind of cultural common sense of the war on drugs. Part of the work of criticism is not only to analyze how this epistemic platform works but also to see through it. Below the misleading platform is a complex reality of how organized crime groups operate as agents within Mexico’s social formation.
In this regard, Zavala suggests that the fundamental relationship between the narco and the state has not changed. As in the Pax Priista, as the 1940-1970 period is known, the state is the principal, and the narcos are just agents of the state. The state extorted the narcos and also got them to engage in some of the dirty business of repressing resistance to exploitation and dispossession on the part of workers and peasants. This is still the case, although, under the neoliberal dispensation, the dirty work of repression has expanded because neoliberalism requires more exploitation and more dispossession.
This is undoubtedly true, but it is also an oversimplification of how the Mexican state is changing under neoliberalism. It is worth recalling, though, that Zavala's main task in this book is to analyze the narco as a mode of representation in Mexico. But a clear understanding of contemporary Mexico entails reaching beyond the critique of narco-representation and beyond the assertion that little has changed with the narco because the state is still in charge. Zavala's analysis should be supplemented by other work that inquires more incisively into relationships between state, corporate, and criminal actors. One important direction for research has been toward greater regional specificity in examining how illegal and legal economies in Mexico have become fused into perversely functional wholes.
What emerges here is yet another epistemic platform: in this instance, the way practices of the legality blend illegal practices of extortion and dispossession into hardened legalized holdings and outcomes. Narco-discourse is not the only epistemic game in town. In this respect, the concept of legality functions, as Hepzibah Muñoz Martinez points out in her discussion of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, as the fetish and obscures constitutive links between criminality and state-imposed order. Neoliberalism in Mexico has emerged out of this nexus of legality and illegality.
Zavala’s analysis of narco discourse is invaluable because it dispels the myth of the narco, which is at the root of current U.S. proposals to use military force against cartels branded at terrorist organizations. Zavala’s work could not be timelier and more important. But it also needs to be read in conjunction with more empirically driven research, which calls attention to other regimes of representation—such as the discourse of legality—that illustrate how the symbolic order of the state not only distorts the Mexican reality but also plays a more direct role in constructing that reality.
Richard W. Coughlin is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Florida Gulf Coast University whose work has appeared in Latin American Perspectives, Intervención y Coyuntura, Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture, and E-International Relations.
