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.