Attacks against journalists and civil society actors aren’t designed to silence, but rather to shape the power relations and public perceptions of the narcos. Blockades, banners, corpse-messaging (leaving a message on a corpse), messages or communiqués, and graffiti accompany acts of violence and are often transmitted via social media and through folk songs to amplify the cartels’ ethos. Narco-folk saints like Santa Muerte and Jesus Malverde are venerated to bond narcos into a cohesive social structure that provides justification for their actions and spiritual protection for their deeds. Narcocultura frames the drug traffickers as powerful heroes for the disenfranchised. The victim was tortured, castrated and crucified in a symbolic ritual that projected cartel power while eroding the legitimacy of municipal police and the state. In a September 2012 crucifixion in Michoacán, an alleged rapist was seized by cartel operatives (allegedly members of the Caballeros Templarios/Knights Templar) from police custody. Kidnappings, assassinations, drive-by shootings, grenade attacks, car bombings, dismemberment, beheadings, mass murders and now crucifixion are the symbolic and instrumental means used by the cartels to demonstrate raw power. Journalists, mayors, police, the military and members of civil society are among the victims of the violence. About 99,667 persons have been killed in the sustained narco-conflict, with an additional 24,000 persons reported missing or disappeared. While brutality and hyper-violence punctuate this conflict - indeed, violence is the narrative of the narco - corruption, impunity and state confrontation are core elements of the cartel threat. The battle is for dominance of the drug trafficking plazas (zones) in Mexico and the illicit flows that extend to the United States, Europe and Latin America at large.
They seek to operate freely without interference from the government of Mexico or its constituent organs. During the intense confrontation among drug cartels, gangs and state institutions at all levels, the cartels have battled for freedom of movement. Mexico’s drug war has challenged state solvency throughout the sexenio, or six-year-term, of President Felipe Calderón. Guest writer John Sullivan, a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department lieutenant writing his dissertation on criminal insurgency, leads off with a discussion of Mexico’s hyper-violent drug cartels:
#Blog del narco 2021 series#
The series will run each day through Thursday. In the fourth installment of Baker Institute Viewpoints, an institute postdoctoral fellow in drug policy and two outside scholars conducting doctoral research on these issues explain why some armed groups utilize extreme symbolic forms of violence, and how they justify their actions.
In order for decision-makers to understand what can be done about the increasing brutality, they must understand what’s behind it. Despite taboos and lost legitimacy, armed groups around the world engage in extreme acts of violence, symbolic and otherwise.
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