Mediations of War: Formations of Statehood and Criminality in Mexico’s “War on Drug Trafficking”
My dissertation explores the processes of mediation that constitute Mexico’s “war on drug trafficking”—the nationwide deployment of the military to combat the drug trade, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives—in the public sphere. It examines how the global prohibitionist regime of drugs and its production of criminality and militarized violence are rendered intelligible and meaningful in Mexico’s national community.
My research engages the “drug war” as a problem of mass mediation: a realm of struggle for dominant narratives around the kind of event the war constitutes (epistemically, morally, and affectively), around the identity of its victims and perpetrators, and around the forms of accountability and justice for redressing drug-related violence. It explores how different media formations attempt to harness a range of often contradictory meanings and affective forces attached to the actors, patterns, and aftermath of the war. It argues that such representations of contemporary forms of warfare reveal societal tensions that run deeper than the militarized combat of organized criminality.
When the war was first deployed in 2006, it was accompanied by a large-scale media campaign that aimed to mobilize nationalist sentiment in favor of the state. This campaign, which articulated the “drug war” as a confrontation between the state, on behalf of ‘good’ Mexicans, and ‘bad’ criminals, was partly a response to the mass mediated violence that accompanied drug cartels’ public presence. This framing of the “drug war,” however, encountered limits early on, due to the strength of drug traffickers’ mass appeal, the blurred lines between drug trafficking and the state, and the hundreds of thousands of lives that the war has claimed. My research traces this media ecology’s genealogy since the official onset of the war. It examines the semiotic and affective formations articulated around the figure of the state, the drug trafficker, and the victims of violence, particularly women. It shows how these figures invoke ideas of charismatic criminality and social justice, rally antagonism against a corrupt, criminal state, and exploit or challenge the spectacularity of violence. I analyze how such affectively potent figurations travel across media objects and genres, sometimes producing misalignments with respect to embodied experiences violence or becoming the object of mass mobilization. The dissertation shows how this dynamic media ecology—materialized through state spectacles, the television industry, journalistic work, and mass protests—reveals the fraught and partial process of constructing the ideological dimension of this event of mass violence. It demonstrates how the fractures at the heart of the Mexican nation—patterns of state violence, longstanding class antagonisms, and heightened forms of gender oppression—mediate the ways in which the “drug war’s” violence is assessed and given meaning among broader publics. The hypermediated nature of Mexico’s drug war makes it a fruitful site to explore the transformation of unfolding collective experiences of violence into discourse. My dissertation thus proposes that the mass mediation of events of generalized violence constitute moments of flux and possibility, historical resonance and rearticulation.
My research extends debates in the social sciences and humanities on the affective, ideological, and imaginary dimensions of the state, the politics of representation of criminality, and the intertwinement of gender and class oppression in a context of nontraditional forms of warfare in the Global South. It theorizes the state, and its relation to violence, criminality, and victimhood, as an always incomplete and partial process of semiotic and affective struggle and mobilization. It takes the epistemic murk (Taussig 1987)–or generalized opacity around the war—as an ongoing feature that forecloses certain possibilities for knowledge but enables other forms of reckoning in a context where media forms about the war proliferate. My dissertation also extends discussions on the politics of representation of criminality (Benjamin 1978; Blok 1972; Hobsbawm 1981; Mendoza 2012; Roitman 2006) beyond debates about the ‘true’ or imagined moral qualities of criminals. I explore how the multiple notions indexed in drug traffickers’ representations lead to variegated, often deeply masculine, stances toward oppression, agency, and social justice. I also draw on literature on the interplay between political economy and gender politics (Brown 1992; Federici 2004) to analyze how the feminist collective resistance to this violence produces new forms of gender politics in Mexico that challenge the fallout of these hypermasculine forms of warfare.
Ethnographic research for this project was conducted between 2017 and 2020 (15 months combined) in Mexico City, following five key sites of the drug war’s mass mediation, analyzed in each of the chapters. My research engagements included participant observation, dozens of semi-structured interviews with interlocutors engaged in these forms of mediation in myriad capacities, and media analysis.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter, “Critique of Violence” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, New York: Harcourt, 1978
Blok, Anton, “The peasant and the brigand: social banditry reconsidered”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 14:495–504, 1972
Brown, Wendy, “Finding the Man in the State” in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, pp. 166–96
Federici, Silvia, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation New York: Autonomedia, 2004
Hobsbawm, Eric, Bandits, New York: New Press, 2000 [1969]
Mendoza, Natalia, Conversaciones en el desierto: Cultura y tráfico de drogas, second edition, Mexico City: CIDE, 2017
Roitman, Janet, “The Ethics of Illegality in the Chad Basin,” in Comaroff and Comaroff, 2006 pp. 247-272
Taussig, Michael, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: a Study in Terror and Healing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986