The performativity of violence: abducting agency in Mexico’s drug war

Abstract

In recent years, violence related to the so-called Mexican Drug War has escalated to unprecedented levels. As cartels seek to undermine the sovereignty of the Mexican State, they convey their message of social control to the public through various means, including corpse messaging, or leaving threatening and signatory messages on or around the bodies of their victims. Cartels use intimidation and brutality to scare the public into complicity, paralyzing its will to act by making violence a pertinent presence in quotidian Mexican life. This ever-present threat makes for an interesting relationship between the cartels and Mexican citizens. While self-defense militias have formed recently, many citizens seem to revere their social captors, or at least view them as the better of two evils, recognizing the criminal organizations as more legitimate authoritative figures than the Mexican officials, and the propaganda of the narcoculture industry perpetuates this reverence. This paper frames cartels as a ‘counterpublic’ in order to explore how drug organizations rely on the ‘reflexive circulation of discourse’ and the abduction of victim agency for the establishment of the social space needed to legitimize their conduct and how this new normality of performative violence can influence socio-political behavior.

Keywords:

• Affect
• agency
• drug war
• Mexico
• sovereignty
• violence

Six heads roll onto the dance floor in Tijuana

to say something about

saying something.

– Jules Gibbs 2012, ‘Corpse Messaging’¹

On September 6, 2006, the now disbanded La Familia Michoacana cartel announced their presence in the drug-trafficking trade in a brutal and effective fashion. According to first-hand testimony, several men burst into the dilapidated Sol y Sombra nightclub in Uruapan, Michoacán. After firing a round of shots into the air, they ordered the patrons to lie on their stomachs, tore open a plastic bag, and tossed five severed human heads across the dance floor. On the blood-stained tile next to the heads, the bandits left the following message: ‘La Familia doesn’t kill for money; it doesn’t kill women; it doesn’t kill innocent people; only those who deserve to die, die. Everyone should know ... this is divine justice’² (Grayson 2010: 1).

Although this represents just one incident amongst several decades of narco violence, the discursive strategies utilized by La Familia to convey the potency of their message can serve as a microcosm for understanding the ways in which Mexican drug cartels have adapted their communicative methods in the past several years, particularly since former President Felipe Calderón declared an all-out war on the industry upon his inauguration in December 2006. For La Familia, rolling five heads across the floor accomplished a number of things: it conveyed their efficacy to other cartels, challenged the sovereignty of the State, exhibited their ideology of divine justice and social control, shocked and intimidated the public, and exemplified the now popular communication framework of ‘corpse messaging’,³ in which dead bodies are conflated with the message itself.

In this article, I scrutinize the last of these semiotic functions by examining the ways in which contemporary forms of narco-related violence operate to circulate affect⁴ through the abduction of victim agency. While the present-day violence in Mexico, which has reached qualitative and quantitative levels perhaps only rivaled during the Mexican Revolution or La Cristiada, must be considered within the neoliberal, post-national context in which it emerged, one can also draw parallels between this circulation of affect and the punitive methods of pre-modernity reviewed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish. Foucault describes how public participation in torture and execution once revolved around crime literature, which was centered on the convict’s last words, and how punishment as a discourse hinged on this one unstable moment of allowing the accused to speak. I argue that the cartels’ use of corpse messaging, by contrast, appropriates victims’ agency by figuratively and, at times, literally putting words in their mouths.

La Familia and others utilize a wide variety of communicative methods that establish them as what Michael Warner might call an influential ‘counterpublic’, a group structured by alternative dispositions, one that makes different assumptions about what can be said or done (2002: 86). Finally, I propose that Alfred Gell’s theories of object agency provide a useful framework for understanding the cartels’ modern manifestation of a pre-modern performativity of violence.

While one could rightly associate the actions of drug cartels as a demonstration of radical evil, at stake in my situating the contemporary Mexican situation within the realm of the pre-modern is not an effort to characterize their torturous methods as particularly barbarous or overly and irrationally brutal. On the contrary, I examine the parallels between these modern and pre-modern systems in order to reflect upon how the cartels’ use of public displays of torture and violence work to symbolically perpetuate yet challenge State (or, in the case of the cartels, State-like) sovereignty. In this sense, instead of being mere haphazard expressions of monstrosity, these practices serve a ritualistic and regulatory purpose as part of a larger system of social control.

While this article focuses on the Mexican case, it also seeks to situate itself within wider discussions of the representation, transmission, and performance of violence more broadly. By contributing to our understanding of the circulation of violent acts and images within the Mexican narco political economy, its aim is to better equip us, as scholars, with the tools to examine, as does Jean Franco in Cruel Modernity, ‘under what conditions [cruelty] became the instrument of armies, governments, and rogue groups’ and how the various ‘lure[s] of modernity’ (2013: 2) led (narco) states to kill in such heinous fashion.

Contemporary levels of violence and narco sovereignty

In recent years, the amount of blood shed by narco activity has escalated to unprecedented levels. Until the 1980s, however, existing drug cartels abided by a set of guidelines strictly enforced by the then-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which governed as somewhat of a faux-dictatorship for most of the twentieth century. Barons offered mordidas, or bribes, to government officials in exchange for protection and mobility while the drug lords agreed to spurn high-tech weapons and overt displays of violence. The crime bosses deferred to public officials and even attended family functions of the political elite (Lovelace 2011: iii), and cartels respected the established boundaries of their geographic enclaves.

This all changed, however, when U.S. authorities partially crippled the Colombian drug networks, allowing Mexico to become the main avenue for Andean cocaine shipments. Along with the inherent increase in profits involved in the transition from trafficking marijuana to harder drugs, the passage of NAFTA in 1994 substantially boosted economic activity, and the previous stakes of the Mexican drug trade were dramatically eclipsed. Finally, the reformative and confrontational approach of the Vicente Fox administration (2000–2006) deteriorated cartel-government relations even further, which set the stage for Calderón’s declaration of war in 2006, a move that threw Mexico into a state of violence unsurpassed since its revolutionary era.

As a result, counting deaths has become the new way to measure violence in Mexico (Jiménez 2010: 120), and the numbers speak for themselves. During 2007, the first full year of Calderón’s presidency, approximately 2,275 narco-related executions occurred. The numbers rose significantly over the next several years, and in 2010 there were a total of 11,583 deaths (Martin 2012: 76). All in all, the drug-related death toll since 2006 stood at a staggering 60,000⁵ people when Enrique Peña Nieto succeeded Calderón in December 2012.

The extremely high level of violence carried out by the cartels has led some to predict the failure of the Mexican state. William Finnegan, the New Yorker journalist responsible for coining the term ‘corpse messaging,’ acknowledges that the cartels have essentially ‘captured’ the State⁶ and are effectively running significant parts of Mexico where their power has surpassed that of elected officials. Finnegan partially attributes this to a ‘fundamental cynicism’ and disenchantment that people have with government. When traditional authoritative bodies develop a reputation of corruptibility, other groups have the chance to fill the vacuum of control, and it appears the cartels have seized upon this opportunity.

Contributing to this distrust of Mexican authorities was the exponential militarization of the state’s security forces that accompanied former President Calderón’s aggressive declaration of war upon his inauguration. While the effective merits of such policies underwent deservedly intense scrutiny, these critiques were only amplified in light of the highly controversial electoral process that put Calderón in power. Some have argued that this disputed victory led him to pursue a hard line against the cartels as a ‘push for legitimation’ (Jiménez del Val 2011: 282), a move leading to an aggressive overreach of state-sanctioned violence. The type of violence exercised by the drug cartels, then, gave Felipe Calderón’s administration the means to justify the deployment of high levels of military intervention, sending troops into the streets of many Mexican cities⁷ in an attempt to restore control. Narco violence provided justification for the suspension and transcendence of legal order by the Mexican state, or governance in a Schmittian ‘state of exception’,⁸ in order to maintain control over its constituency. Of course, the drug cartels notably operate under this same logic of social control.⁹

Especially in states like Michoacán, where the La Familia cartel undertook a significant social control campaign, criminal organizations in Mexico have established a parallel system of government with that of the elected officials, a phenomenon of ‘dual sovereignty’.¹⁰ This narco-administration carries out many of the duties of a traditionally elected government, such as generating employment, keeping order, performing civic functions, collecting taxes, and screening newcomers to the municipality (Grayson 2010: 61–62).

Performing these functions allows cartels to more easily communicate their message, but no discursive strategy effects more action and exhibits more power than the public display of killings. While narco-related executions used to be kept out of the limelight, with cartels depositing bodies in narcofosas (mass graves) or disposing of them in obscure locations, the announcement of death now invades public space. Tortured victims left lying on street corners signal the ultimate expression of biopolitical sovereignty: having the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. Moreover, the performative aspect of these killings ensures that their heinousness remains a palpable memory in the public’s mind.

The use of ‘performative’ and ‘performativity’ has an extensive, interdisciplinary lineage. In this particular context, I refer to perhaps the most commonly used definition developed by J.L. Austin 1962 and Judith Butler 1993,¹¹ among others, that is, the capacity of semiotic expression (in this case, corpse messaging) to produce extra-semiotic results (the exercise of sovereignty and social control). At the same time, by ‘performance’ I also refer to the ways in which cartels mindfully stage the display of their victims and the accompanying messages, thus giving their brutal deeds an effective degree of ‘spectacularity’.

We can observe this sort of public spectacle of sovereignty in Foucault’s discussion of pre-modern French execution practices. Gallows and scaffolds populated roadsides and public squares, and executed bodies would often be left near the scene for days as symbols of state power. ‘Not only must people know’, Foucault writes, ‘they must see it with their own eyes. Because they must be made to be afraid; but also because they must be the witnesses, the guarantors, of the punishment, and because they must to a certain extent take part in it’ (1995: 58). In his death penalty seminars, Jacques Derrida echoes the importance of this visibility: ‘The spectacle and the spectator are required. The state, the polis, the whole of politics, the co-citizenry – itself or mediated through representation – must attend and attest, it must testify publicly that death was dealt or inflicted, it must see die the condemned one’ (2013: 25; emphasis in original). Particularly in the past several years, Mexican cartels have invaded public space and forced this widespread involvement in their executions.

Especially in the case of La Familia, the group most notorious for leaving narco-messages, cartels establish sets of imagery to place themselves above both the civilian population and the authorities. The doctrine of divine justice¹² employed by La Familia justifies all acts, no matter how gruesome, in the name of social justice and security, and its implementation can be interpreted as a way to establish transnational governmentality¹³ and to challenge the power of the state as a non-state actor. Cartels use intimidation and brutality to scare the public into complicity, yet many citizens recognize the criminal organizations as legitimate and even caring authoritative figures. One Michoacán woman claimed that ‘if you were sick and had no money, [cartel members would] take you to the hospital and pay for medicine. If you couldn’t afford tortillas, they’d buy some for you’ (Grayson 2010: 41). In what might be termed a form of Stockholm syndrome at a societal level, some citizens revere their social captors, or, at the very least, view them as the better of two evils.

In this sense, cartels represent the ‘great criminal’ figure introduced by Walter Benjamin in his ‘Critique of Violence’. While the State enacts sanctioned uses of force, cartels operate outside of the law, thus threatening the government’s monopoly of these violent means. No matter how gruesome the cartels become, then, the public may tend to develop a ‘secret admiration’ resulting from the violence to which their acts of brutality bear witness (Benjamin 1986: 281).¹⁴

This reverence, where present, is undoubtedly aided by the massive popular culture display of Robin Hood-like heroes of narco-society, particularly in narcocorridos and narcocine, which I will return to later. It seems, however, that the relationship that cartels establish with the public goes far beyond cultural expression and enters into the realm of sovereignty usually reserved for official state actors. The perpetual existence of any state relies on at least two factors: the constant monopolization of (justifiable) violence and the ability to retain the acquiescence of its populace. While the utilization of state-sanctioned violence may be at the core of maintaining sovereignty, the more implicit, subversive, and therefore perhaps more effective means of governmentality involves what Foucault famously called the ‘conduct of conduct’, which entails forming citizens in a manner that best suits the interests of the governing body.

While Mexican drug cartels are most infamously known for their violent practices, they also carry out these other, more psychologically effective methods of social control, because, as Rita Laura Segato, drawing on Foucault, asserts, ‘… sovereign power that is only physical does not exist. Without the moral and psychological subordination of another, the only thing that exists is the power of death, and the power of death, on its own, is not sovereignty. Complete sovereignty is, in its most extreme phase, that of “making live or letting die”’ (2006: 17).¹⁵ According to this formula, the cartels do the sovereignty-wielding work of building schools, supporting local businesses (even if for the sole purpose of laundering money), and providing social welfare programs that, in some cases, eventually lead to the sort of gratification exhibited by the Michoacana woman above. By carrying out these practices, cartels supplement the use of violent means with those that work toward the development and control of a public, a public the government also works to interpellate and control.

Violent practices are also supplemented by corpse messaging, which enables cartels to assert power over the narrative of violence through authorial voice, fueling the establishment of power over a constituency. The social control doctrine, when accompanied by a performance of strength, permits cartels to effectively speak through their victims. For example, the cartel maintains power by discouraging local delinquency. One message left next to a corpse in February 2009 read, ‘this is for all the rats that rob houses, businesses and shatter car windows’,¹⁶ while a note by another body stated, ‘Car-robbing partners, unfortunately it was my turn to be the First. There is no tolerance, whoever it is is going to die’ (Jiménez 2010: 126). The use of the first person in the latter instance is a method often used by cartels that personalizes the message and makes the victim ‘speak’.

Next to a decapitated body in February 2009 were two notes: ‘This happened to me because of extorting businesses’ and ‘and this is how everyone will end up that tries to extort, kidnap, rob or rape …’ (Jiménez 2010: 126). In other instances, the cartels will not kill their victims but will still use them as a means of communication. In January 2010, after torturing six presumed criminals, La Familia forced them to silently parade around an intersection in Zamora, Michoacán, holding signs reading: ‘Keep an eye out, you rats, we are coming for you, sincerely La Familia’, ‘I am a rat and that is why La Familia punished me’, and ‘This is for all delinquents, La Familia is here citizens, don’t judge us, we are cleaning your city’ (Grayson 2010: 36). While these men were not executed, they still underwent a sort of corporeal commodification; their tortured bodies, hand-written placards, and forced movement all combined to create a public, performative spectacle of social control.

Here we can see another parallel between cartel practices and those that Foucault discusses. Just as narco-sovereignty involves forcing victims to communicate foreboding, self-condemning messages, accused criminals in France were made to consecrate their own punishment. The secretive nature of judicial procedures gave absolute privilege of knowledge to the prosecution; like narco victims, the accused had no means of recourse against a more formidable power, and they remained voiceless until the very last moments of the proceedings when, with all eyes of the public upon them, they were given the chance to confess or speak their final words. This would give rise to the ‘last words of a condemned man’ genre, whose significance depended on the circulation of broadsheets and pamphlets containing victims’ apocryphal, self-reproachful final utterances. As we will see, the transmission and efficacy of these materials mirrors that of narco-messages.

Given the important role that public perception and complicity play in this ‘mini totalitarianism’¹⁷ enacted by cartels, it is no wonder that a majority of these messages address those not involved in the business. In one study, for example, 85% of messages left by the Milenio Cartel were judged to have the intended purpose of influencing public opinion and policy. For La Familia, this number was 48%, and for Las Zetas, 43%. In a twelve-month period, this amounted to 346 total messages between these three cartels alone (Martin 2012: 81). This communication with the public clearly serves a self-preserving purpose.

Public denouncement of killings, which could be a tool of the State to pursue narcos, is generally kept at bay by intimidation and scare tactics.¹⁸ In February 2009, one cartel left the following message next to a police officer’s corpse: ‘this happens to gossips for dialing 066.’ In local terms, this can be understood to be addressed to civil society, and, more specifically, to antagonistic groups who utilize the number 066 to inform the authorities about suspicious behavior, armed persons, the location of bodies, or any other activities associated with organized crime (Jiménez 2010: 125).

Especially considering the apparent vulnerability of the Mexican state during this period of ‘suspended sovereignty’,¹⁹ one can see the potential role of narco messaging in facilitating new forms of power. Perhaps the suspension of state power caused by the increasing authority of cartels allows for a scenario in which traditional notions of hegemony (namely those developed by Antonio Gramsci and reformulated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe) must be questioned, leading the way for a theorization of the roles of narco-States within what has been termed a post-hegemonic paradigm. According to Jon Beasley-Murray 2010, arguably the foremost proponent of such thought, the circulation of affect acts as one of the three cornerstones of securing social order within posthegemony.²⁰ The importance afforded to affect-inducing messages of violence, then, could be considered a central aspect of this new conceptualization.

In any case, one thing that is very clear is that the cartels have the full attention of the media, the government, and the creators of popular cultural forms on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Narco-violence has fueled the creation of such successful television shows as ‘Weeds’ (Showtime, 2005), ‘Breaking Bad’ (AMC, 2008), and ‘The Bridge’ (FX, 2013) and feature films like ‘Bordertown’ (Möbius Entertainment, 2006), ‘El infierno’ (Bandidos Films, 2010), and ‘Miss Bala’ (IMCINE, 2011), not to mention a steady proliferation of narconarratives²¹ and scholarly texts. Guillermo Gómez-Peña, an accomplished performance artist, incorporates these issues into his acts, and he even penned an open letter to a Mexican crime boss in 2011. In it, he touches upon the performative aspect of cartel violence: ‘Your exhibitionist cruelty sows fear .... The gruesome images that document and (indirectly) perpetrate this fear appear daily in the front pages of the newspapers and comprise half of the national newscasts ....Your sadism is carefully staged, but for whom are you performing?’ (2011: 1).

Forms of narco communication and a language of torture

For the narcos, these performances come in many forms of communication that reach all levels of society. Among their means of developing discourse with the public are utilizing the mass media (such as taking out advertisements in newspapers, writing editorials, or calling in during tapings of television programs), commissioning narcocorridos (a variation of the norteño folk corrido tradition), narcocine (a category that includes both mainstream films with narco-related themes and straight-to-DVD, black-market movies, or videohomes, occasionally financed by narcos as self-celebratory propaganda), and narcomantas (huge banners containing threatening messages, usually placed in highly trafficked public places).

Some cartels even use social media to disseminate information. During the Mexican Independence Day celebrations in 2009, two men hurled grenades into the crowds in Morelia, Michoacán. La Familia, looking to skirt responsibility for the eight dead and over 110 wounded citizens, sent scores of emails and text messages blaming the Zetas or the Gulf Cartel for the attack. La Familia framed itself as the ‘good’ cartel, disassociating itself from the ‘bad’ outsiders. Clearly, the cartels concern themselves with the reputation that they maintain with citizens because they recognize the potential impact of a public denouncement of their actions.

The various forms of communication employed by drug cartels attempt to interpellate their recipients, the public, into a dissident subculture of greater society that celebrates subversion and the organization of a new system of power. In Michael Warner’s terms, the narcos could be seen to operate as somewhat of a counterpublic: a group structured by alternative dispositions, one ‘formed by their conflict with the norms and contexts of their cultural environment’ (2002: 63). Counterpublics make different assumptions about what can be said or done, and the subsequent counteractions often manifest themselves in cultural forms. In the case of the cartels, they operate under an assumption of power that goes counter to, challenges, and perhaps even usurps discourses of state sovereignty. Through the extensive proliferation and distribution of cultural texts and, more explicitly, through extreme violence, cartel members afford themselves a substantial degree of agency in defying dominant group formation and communicating their presence to the public.

This necessary relationship with the public manifests itself in the ways in which the cartels choose to exercise blatant displays of violence in an indiscreet manner, and this has transformed the traditional notion of public space in Mexico. In general, public areas carry with them a sense of safety because people do not expect criminal activity to occur in the presence of others. Along with this safety in numbers, public spaces also involve a greater likelihood of denouncement and identification if an attack were to take place. Narco-violence, however, has challenged these common perceptions of public security (Jiménez 2010: 120).

Bloodshed occurs daily and seemingly indiscriminately in towns across Mexico, and a majority of narco-related deaths are accompanied by messages. In a study from October 2009 to October 2010, Carlos Martin categorized all reported narco-messaging and found that messages occurred in 28 of 32 states, and, of the 1,375 incidents, 53% of messages were left on corpses (2012: 77–78). Bodies are left where citizens and news outlets will easily discover them, such as on roads, hanging from bridges, or as remains dispersed around various parts of a city. Indeed, the efficacy of these actions relies on their wider dissemination, so violent deeds are carefully staged in anticipation of the resultant media attention and circulation; the public learns of each incident, and the perpetual discourse of violence continues on its path.

The saturation of violence has created a new language of torture and execution methods, and both members and nonmembers of cartels are becoming fluent in its forms. This new lexicon adequately describes the nature of crimes in which there is decapitation (decapitado) or quartering (descuartizado), when a body is put in a car trunk (encajuelado), wrapped in a blanket (encobijado), stuffed into a drum (entambado), dissolved in acid (pozoleado or guisado), and when the eyes and mouth of the corpse are taped shut (enteipado), which is often used for people who have informed authorities of narco-related activity (Bunker, Campbell, and Bunker 2010: 146).

Sometimes the methods employed during torture sessions make leaving written messages unnecessary, as certain punishments adequately carry the intended meaning. For example, ‘dedos’ are those victims found with their index finger cut, which means they were most likely killed for alerting the authorities; in other words, they ‘pointed out’ the narcos. Those found with their tongues cut out were likely executed for the same reason. Men who have sexual relations with cartel members’ girlfriends are often found castrated with their testicles stuffed into their mouths. The act of killing in each of these instances is not enough; narcos practice a sort of ‘macabre theater’ (Franco 2013: 15) in their employment of grotesque methods of corporeal punishment that cause the intended meaning to be conflated with the corpse itself; essentially, the message is the body, and the body is the message.

The appropriation of victim agency

The commodification of human corpses raises interesting questions about the agency of narco victims, particularly in cases of decapitation and other instances in which victims’ faces are mutilated (such as in January 2010, when the Sinaloa Cartel sewed a man’s face onto a soccer ball). One’s identity is most closely associated with one’s face, so separating a head from its body or destroying this symbol of singularity essentially destroys the being; in other words, it makes the victim invisible (Ovalle 2010: 110). The loss of agency associated with death is thus exacerbated by post-mortem practices of mutilation.

Ritualized forms of execution employed by the narcos consist of completely removing a victim’s capacity to answer to such violence. These acts make people vulnerable and ultimately unable to muster any sort of response to the brutality enacted upon them (Ovalle 2010: 105). Admittedly, this is not so different than any other form of execution, for a loss of agency is bound to accompany methodical torture, and we have already seen how this relates to certain practices Foucault describes. The inscription of narco-messages, however, adds a unique element that deserves further examination.

Whether messages are written on scraps of cardboard, spray painted onto body-bearing blankets, or carved into the victim’s skin itself, narcos in effect engage in acts of ventriloquism, hijacking their victims’ agency and voice and using them for their own purposes. The dead are made to ‘speak’ the interests of the cartels. In these acts of commodification, human beings become no different than other objects of communication, such as the narcomantas.

The corpse plays a symbolic and propagandistic role in the narco world; whether branded, decapitated, wrapped in a blanket, quartered, burned, or subjected to any other gruesome treatment, its value is one of exhibition. The dead body is deconstructed and reduced to an image or ephemeral symbol. The markings and mutilations become ‘corporal signals reduced to mere surface-level signs to be read ...’ (Aguiluz-Ibarguen 2004: 2; emphasis mine). Bodies, then, become objects whose importance relies not on their existence but on their efficacy.

Here we can see the importance of a public ‘reading’ of these practices, just as Foucault emphasized the significance of the actual reading of the broadsheets and ‘death songs’ in France. These materials were ‘the sequel to the trial [the narco-related execution?]; or rather, they pursued that mechanism by which the public execution transferred the secret, written truth of the procedure to the body, gesture, and speech of the criminal’ (Foucault 1995: 66; emphasis mine). Corpse messages ascribe legitimacy to the victim’s transgressions, and the body-message conflation reproduces the justification for heinous acts. Whether these final messages are grounded in truth is superfluous; the importance lies in their transmission, however accomplished.

The cartels rely on the performative nature of killings to more effectively communicate their messages and to make them more easily read. Corpses become props: mobile, disposable, and a means to an end. A performative, in the traditional sense, can be conceptualized as ‘a type of utterance that through its very enunciation accomplishes or generates a particular effect’ (Parker and Sedgwick 1995: 3). These rituals gain social and political capital by being highly repetitive; in the Bakhtinian sense of dialogistic relationships, each killing draws on the ones before it, and, by doing so, generates particular meanings with its audience.

Corpses are made into immediate emblems of narco propaganda. Katherine Verdery argues that the undeniable presence and mobility of bodies make them perfect political signs:

…they are indisputably there, as our senses of sight, touch, and smell can confirm. As such, a body’s materiality can be critical to its symbolic efficacy: unlike notions such as ‘patriotism’ or ‘civil society,’ for instance, a corpse can be moved around, displayed, and strategically located in specific places. Bodies have the advantage of concreteness that nonetheless transcends time, making past immediately present. (1999: 27; emphasis in original)

Judging by their widespread use of corpse messaging, cartels clearly recognize the poignant reaction generated by appropriating the agency of their victims and displaying them in public spaces.

Joost Fontein, in his study of recently resurfaced skeletons from wartime Zimbabwe, describes this ‘affective presence’ that human remains can have on people as an ‘emotive materiality’ (2010: 432). Much like the victims of narco crimes, the Zimbabwean casualties act as symbols whose manipulability rests in the hands of the perpetrators, media, and government. The living appropriate meaning in order to delegitimize, subvert, and challenge extreme performances of sovereignty (Fontein 2010: 435), thus utilizing the emotive materiality of dead bodies as a communicative tool.

Clearly, then, the theatrical manner in which narcos expose and exhibit bodies leads one to infer that their objectives go beyond the murderous deed. The purposes of such performances align themselves more with the communication and production of fear, terror, and social control. What these bodies ‘do’ relies on the intentionality of living human subjects that abduct and exploit victims’ agency.

One may ask, however, what kind of agency a corpse possesses in the first place. Alfred Gell’s theory of object agency provides a useful means of examining this issue. Gell addresses the subjective nature of an object and theorizes that works of art, or art objects, act as social agents within a network of social relationships (1998: 5). Art objects, he argues, possess an inherent social agency, regardless of cultural conventions. To explain how objects form an active part of social relationships, Gell develops a relational theory of agency based on the interaction between four ‘terms’: index (an influential material entity), artist (he or she who is responsible for the characteristics of the index), recipients (those upon whom the index exerts agency), and prototype (an entity represented in the index, often through virtue of visual resemblance).²² Any of these terms can play the role of ‘agent’ (that which performs social action) or ‘patient’ (that upon which the agent acts), and the interaction between these terms is possible due to ‘abduction’, a cognitive process of inference (Harper 2010: 311–312). Agents act upon patients by virtue of the patient’s abduction.

While the theory of object agency describes art and not human bodies, it can arguably manifest itself in ways that apply to our current consideration of Mexican narco violence. In her study of viewing practices of the dead at American and British funeral homes, Sheila Harper provides a useful application of Gell’s theoretical model that parallels narco execution forms. Harper concludes that a relationship of agency abduction exists between dead bodies, morticians, and mourners who visit the deceased for the last time. During their liminal viewing time, mourners (who act as recipients in Gell’s model) are presented with an altered version of the once-living body (the prototype), so their viewing experience is inevitably influenced by the mortician’s preparation of the dead body. In Harper’s estimation, then, mourners essentially ‘abduct’ the agency of the pre-deceased insofar as the meaning and value they ascribe to the physical remains are mediated by the ways in which they have been altered and displayed.

If we apply Harper’s analysis to the performativity of deaths orchestrated by narcos, we can develop the following framework:

Table

Term		Reference
index	=	dead body/narco-message
artist	=	narco perpetrators
recipient	=	public, State, other narcos
prototype	=	pre-deceased

In these instances, the narcos act as ‘agents’ while the victims’ bodies are appropriated as ‘patients’; they ascribe intentional agency to their victims, which the public then interprets and abducts.

While bodies left on street corners may not be living things, they have an ‘intentional psychology’ (Gell 1998: 129) attributed to them due to the adornment process inherent in narco-messaging. In a funeral-home setting, mourning relatives place objects in and around the casket to ascribe agency to their loved ones. In narco-related executions, cartel members speak through their victims and stage a performance of ventriloquial agency through the use of the corporeal communicative methods previously discussed. While cultural forms like narcocorridos and narcocine surely help enable the proliferation of narco-sovereignty, the body-message conflation involved in these execution-related practices is surely the cartels’ most powerful symbolic means of challenging the state’s monopoly of violence, and the abduction of victim agency in these settings affords them an effective path toward influencing public perception and policy.

Theorizing narco-related killings in relation to Alfred Gell’s theory of object agency also allows us another approach toward understanding the drug cartels’ practice of what Sara Ahmed calls ‘affective politics’. Through the appropriation of corpses as communicative tools, cartels seek to disseminate messages to the public, Mexican authorities, and rival groups. Ultimately, these messages are predicated on fear and, thus, a subsequent paralysis of action. In Ahmed’s terms, fear both constrains and liberates, as it is ‘the regulation of bodies in space through the uneven distribution of fear which allows spaces to become territories, claimed as rights by some bodies and not others’ (2004:70). The fear provoked through corpse messaging inhibits the Mexican public, containing them in space, while it affords the cartels a self-preserving mobility.

In these ways, the invasive prevalence of narco-related executions, their increasingly exhibitionist and performative nature, and the ways in which these practices appropriate the agency of their victims all speak to the extremely conflictive nature of contemporary Mexico, which has seemingly been overrun by a pervasive narco political economy. The drug cartels assume and exercise sovereignty over the populace by demonstrating their capacity to decide who deserves to live and who should die, and their performative abduction of victim agency for propagandistic purposes disseminates paralyzing messages of social control. While cartels employ a wide variety of communicative methods, it would seem that the brutal objectification of human beings via corpse messaging provokes the most visceral, affective, and, thus, effective response.

These unrelenting control tactics grounded in terror allow drug gangs to establish what Jean Franco terms ‘mini-totalitarianisms’ that situate themselves within the already existent ‘culture of fear that dominates many areas of Latin America’ (2012: 22). Franco’s comprehensive study examines the conditions of modernity that have enabled cruelty to become regrettably commonplace in Latin America. In order to contribute to ‘a better understanding of the social vacuum that allows cruel acts’ (2012: 22) in and outside of Latin America, my examination of corpse messaging by Mexican drug cartels has attempted to further theorize the powerful operation of perhaps the most visibly and psychologically jarring method of social control enacted by what could be deemed contemporary Latin America’s greatest perpetrators of extreme violence. I have attempted to show how the circulation of affect through execution practices allows cartels to maintain authority while symbolically challenging the sovereignty of the state and its monopolization of violence. A further understanding of the operations of the Mexican narco political economy and its contestation of modern notions of sovereignty can, I believe, move us closer to going beyond mere descriptive explanations of such instances of cruelty.

Ultimately, the power of the cartel executions depends on visibility, on being seen and circulated, so the massive and mediatized consumption of these performative acts is the site of their constitution. The cartels rely on the ‘reflexive circulation of discourse’ and the abduction of victim agency for the establishment of the social space needed to legitimize their conduct. Until this circulation is somehow disrupted, then, this normality of performative violence will continue to forcibly shape Mexican society, and the physical and discursive war will continue to be waged on the bodies of its victims.

Notes on contributor

Andrew Lantz is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M University with a specialization in cinema studies. He is the author of several upcoming publications, including five entries in the film section of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. His dissertation focuses on the relationship between the state and Bolivian cinematic cultural production of the so-called proceso de cambio initiated by the Evo Morales administration.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgements

All academic efforts are collective ones, so the people deserving of recognition are too many to list here. I especially wish to thank Silvia Posocco, Martin Fotta, and Frank Smith for their efforts in organizing this Special Issue; the three anonymous reviewers whose comments on previous versions of this article helped me sharpen and strengthen my argument; and my friends and colleagues at Texas A&M, whose comradery makes all the hard work worthwhile.

Notes

1. My thanks to Jules Gibbs for allowing me to reproduce her text here, a poem that, in her words, now causes her discomfort precisely because of the way it ‘abducts agency’ and ‘performs violence’. The full poem is part of a larger collection; see Gibbs 2012.

2. This appeal to divinity would prove to be commonplace for La Familia, as its leader, Nazario Moreno González, became notorious for his messianism. Upon enlistment, new cartel members received an indoctrinating reading list, which included La Familia’s philosophy-laden ‘bible’ (written by Moreno) and Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul (2001), by the Christian evangelist author John Eldredge. In 2010, then-President Calderón and his administration hailed the reported death of Moreno after a lengthy shootout between the cartel and armed forces. Neither his body nor fingerprints were found at the scene, however, prompting rumors that Moreno was still alive. Just over three years later, the truth of these rumors was confirmed when Mexican authorities killed him ‘again’ in March 2014, this time providing irrefutable fingerprint evidence. Moreno’s death fueled the La Familia’s eventual splintering into the Knights Templar cartel, but not before peace parades occurred in which Moreno’s image and that of the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared side by side, reaffirming his status as a religious icon.

3. This term was first coined in an article of The New Yorker. See Finnegan.

4. Throughout the article, I use the term ‘affect’ as defined by Brian Massumi in his translation of the work of Deleuze and Guattari 1987. In describing affect/affection, Massumi writes: ‘Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattari 1987). L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act. L’affection (Spinoza’s affection) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting body …’ (xvi). For my purposes, then, the circulation of affect implies a circulation of power structures that enable Mexican drug cartels, through the use of corpse messaging, to demonstrate and maintain authority. The bodies of their victims, along with the accompanying messages, purport to inhibit the public’s power of activity (or, more specifically, of resistance). For further reading, see Deleuze.

5. Human Rights Watch. 2005. Mexico’s Disappeared: The Enduring Cost of a Crisis Ignored. Human Rights Watch.

6. Finnegan discusses this and related concepts in his podcast interview with Blake Eskin in: State Capture. 2010. The New Yorker Outloud. The New Yorker. 31 May 2010.

7. During the six years of Calderon’s presidency, there was a widespread militarization of Mexican security forces. Some of the most noteworthy and organized operations occurred in the states of Michoacán (December 2006), Baja California (January 2007), Chihuahua (March 2008), Sinaloa (May 2008), and Quintana Roo (February 2009).

8. For a particularly compelling look into the possible overreach of the Calderón administration, in which the war on drugs was used to justify the repression of indigenous communities, see Fault Lines 2011.

9. Moreover, the government and the cartels have displayed a degree of visual symmetry in their public and mediated exhibition of power. In this regard, Nasheli Jiménez del Val’s article, in which she examines the circulation of images surrounding the government’s killing of kingpin Beltrán Leyva, is particularly useful and could be considered a counterpart to the current one.

10. This concept was originally described in the classic text: Brinton, Cane. 1938. The Anatomy of Revolution. New York: Random House. The author’s observations.emerge from a study of four major political revolutions (English Civil War,. American, French, and Russian of 1917). While one might argue that the characteristics of the Mexican Drug War do not align with those studied by Brinton, I would suggest that the competition for concentrations of power between cartels and the fledgling Mexican State (and, indeed, between and amongst the cartels themselves) allows for a useful employment of Brinton’s concept.

11. See Austin, Butler.

12. The employment of religious language by the cartels as justification for their executions should come as no surprise if one considers the popularity of the Santa Muerte, a venerated folk saint and personification of death. As Derrida asserts, ‘The theologico-political is a system, an apparatus of sovereignty in which the death penalty is necessarily inscribed. There is theologico-political wherever there is death penalty’ (2013: 51). A topic for further analysis, then, might be the consideration of the intersection between theology and politics in a situation of narco-sovereignty.

13. The idea of ‘transnational governmentality’, of course, stems from Foucault’s concept of governmentality, which ‘draws attention to all the processes by which the conduct of a population is governed: by institutions and agencies, including the state; by discourses, norms and identities; and by self-regulation, techniques for the disciplining and care of the self’ (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 989).

14. It is perhaps the immense popularity of the so-called narcocorrido industry that best epitomizes the not-so-secret nature of this ‘secret admiration’ that certain people hold for the drug cartel kings. Like U.S. ‘gangster rap’, narcocorrido messages contest the hegemonic entities of neoliberalism, and the industry forms a well-oiled, subjectivity-creating piece of the narco-machine. For further reading, see Wald 2001.

15. In her discussion of the femicide of Ciudad Juárez, Segato asserts that rape is the allegorical act par excellence of Schmittian sovereignty. While the narco-related deaths discussed here do not generally involve rape, one can certainly draw parallels due to the elimination of victim agency and the forced penetration of their bodies. The translation of this citation is my own.

16. This and all other translations of narco messages are my own.

17. Jean Franco introduces this term in her fascinating yet harrowing examination of the practices of extreme cruelty that have occurred within many of contemporary Latin America’s governments, rebels, and rogue groups, such as drug cartels. See Franco.

18. While public outcry has generally been limited, recent signs of resistance by armed citizen groups may provide future areas of research. While Grayson (2011) has examined a surge in vigilantism across Mexico during the Calderón presidency, a new phenomenon of social justice has gained traction with the emergence of bona fide self-defense militias, especially those created in 2013 in the state of Michoacán in response to the rampant violence of the Knights Templar cartel. Despite their successes, skepticism remains as to the legitimacy and motives of these groups, as they are clearly imbricated within larger, multi-layered struggles for power. In early 2014, the federal government had agreed to cooperate with the militia but later rescinded support and instead proposed a deal for eventual disarmament and incorporation into the Rural State Police body. In December 2014, Hipólito Mora, one of the defense-groups’ founders, was jailed after a deadly shootout with a rival group, further delegitimizing the movement. At the time of writing, the government claims that members of Los Viagra, one of the Knights Templar’s rival cartels, have infiltrated the vigilante groups while the group members deny these accusations and refuse to disarm.

19. I borrow this term from Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott 2013, whose theoretical discussion of the Chilean interregnum can be found in his important 2013 text.

20. The other two are habit (or ‘affect at standstill’) and multitude (‘affect become subject’). See Beasley-Murray.

21. See Zavala 2014.

22. Gell fully defines these terms in the following way:

Index: material entities which motivate abductive inferences, cognitive interpretations, etc. Artists: to whom are ascribed, by abduction, causal responsibility for the existence and characteristics of the index. Recipients: those in relation to whom, by abduction, indexes are considered to exert agency, or who exert agency via the index. Prototypes: entities held, by abduction, to be represented in the index; often by virtue of visual resemblance, but not necessarily (1998: 27).