Zavala-imagining the US-Mexico Drug War

OSWALDO ZAVALA

Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Drug War: The Critical Critical Limi Limitts of Narconarratives In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, vi sible, it organ organize izess a world which wh ich is i s without w ithout contrad cont radictions ictions becau because se it is without depth, a world wide w ide open and wallow w allowing ing in i n the evident, it estabest ablishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves. — Roland Barthes, Mythologies A “legend” because, becau se, as in all legends, there is a certain ambiguity ambigu ity between the fictional and the real — but it occurs for opposite reasons. Whatever its kernel of reality, the legendary is nothing else, finally, but the sum of what is said about it. It is indifferent to the existence or nonexistence of the persons whose glory it transmits. If they existed, the legend covers them with wit h so many ma ny wonders, wonder s, embell emb ellish ishing ing them t hem with w ith so many m any impos i mpossibi sibilit lities, ies, that it’s almost as if they had never lived. And if they are purely imaginary, the legend reports so many insistent tales about them that they take ta ke on the historical histo rical thickness t hickness of someone who existed. — Michel Foucault, Foucault, “Lives “L ives of Infamous Inf amous Men”

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HE PUBLICATION IN 2002 of La reina del sur ( (The Queen of the South ), ), a novel by Spanish author Arturo Art uro Pérez-Reverte, ignited in Mexico a literary mini-boom that has come to be known as “narcoliteratura” (Ramírez). This label, often employed employed in publishing publi shing advertisements, refers to a discontinuous corpus of novels (“narconovelas”) whose central theme is drug trafficking. La reina I would like to express my deep gratitude to Sarah S arah Pollack for suggestions that substantially substantial ly improved the present article. During the XVI Congress of Contemporary Mexican Literature at the Uni ver sity of Texas Texa s at El Pas Paso, o, March M arch 3 –5, 2011, where I first fir st present pr esented ed t his arg argument ument,, Irma I rma Cant Cantú, ú, Oswaldo Estrada, Ryan Long, Viviane Mahieux, Marta Piña, José Ramón Ruisánchez, Ana Sabau, Dante Salgado, Ignacio Sánchez Prado, and B erenice Villagómez provided many insightful obser vations vat ions and suggest s uggestions. ions. Finall Fi nally, y, this art article icle could coul d not have been be en written wr itten without w ithout the val valiant, iant, committed work of Mexican journalists Ignacio A lvarado and Julián Cardona, whose expert knowledge has provided me with a sophisticated critical v iew of drug cartels that t hat I hope to have reproduced reproduced in these pages. 66:3 DOI 10.1215 10.1215/00104124/00104124-2764 2764088 088 © 2014 by Universi University ty of Oregon Comparative Literature

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del sur — a cross

between the hard-boiled detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Montecristo , James Bond action movies, mov ies, and John le Carré’s C arré’s espionage novels — became the paradigpa radigmatic example of this trend, with its narco queen (the beautiful Teresa Mendoza) a frequent-flyer business woman, business woman, self-taugh self-taughtt avid reader reader,, multi-tasking drug dr ug kingpin, high-performance alcoholic, emancipated mother, and cold-blooded psychopath psych opath —in — in short, a mythic antihero of the post-industrial global village. Pérez-Reverte’s novel produced a readily identifiable and lucrative model that reconfigured reco nfigured “narcocultura,” “narcocultura,” a term that I employ here here as the t he cultural imaginar imaginaryy surrounding surroundi ng the drug trade. tr ade. Narcocultura first fir st emerged emerged in the 1970s 1970s through nar1 cocorridos coco rridos (“drug (“ drug ballads”) ba llads”) and low-budget action action films. La reina del sur brought narcocultura fully into the literary field. Although Pérez-Reverte had initially based his story on the seminal 1972 narcocorrido “Contrabando “Contrab ando y traición” (“Contraband and Betrayal”) Betrayal ”) recorded by the California-based California-ba sed Los Tigres del Norte, Norte, a highly popular “norteño” (Mexican polka) band, after the overnight success of La reina del sur , Los Tigres recorded a new — and very succ successful essful — narcocorrido based on Teresa Mendoza. The novel’s popularity eventually led to its television adaptation as a soap opera that premiered in February 2011, and it became an unprecedented blockbuster for the Spanish-la Span ish-language nguage network Telemundo Telemundo.. 2 In addition to its importance in the TV and music industries, La reina del sur had a decisive impact in Mexican publishing circles. Writer Élmer Mendoza, a native of the drug-ridden state of Sinaloa, the author of several narconovelas, narconovelas, and one of the people to whom La reina del sur is dedicated, believes that Pérez-Reverte “was the first respected writer wr iter in the world who gave us the place tha thatt we [Mexic [Mexican an narco narconovelis novelists] ts] 3 deserved” (Ramírez). Likewise, for Juan José Rodríguez (also from Sinaloa) La reina del sur was “a magical mag ical book” book ” that “did “ did a dignified dig nified job putting the theme t heme of drug trafficking on the [world] map, at a time when no one was talking about it” (Baños).4 In what follows, I analyze several representative narconarratives published in Mexico during the t he decade following the unprecedented commercial success of La reina del sur . I define the term “narconarratives” as a dispersed but interrelated corpus of texts, films, music, and conceptual art focusing on the drug trade, Corridos were first composed along the U.S.-Mexico border during the 1860s to express the problems probl ems of the region after a fter the U.S.-Mexico war. They later evolved to become story-telling dev ices during the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Most recently, the genre has featured tales related to drug trade and violen v iolence. ce. See Wald and Wilkinson. 2 The series finale, which aired on May 30th, was the most watched program of the network’s nineteen-year rating history, as well as the number one program regardless of language for that day, with nearly 4.2 million viewers (Gorman). 3 All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. 4 For a precedent to Pérez-Reverte’s Pérez-R everte’s Teresa Teresa Mendoza see the t he title character cha racter of Jorge Franco’s Franco’s Rosario Tijeras (1999). (1999). The use of the lives of drug traffickers traf fickers as narrative material can be traced tr aced to what Héctor Abad Faciolince has called the Colombian “novela sicaresca” of the 1990s (Mutis 207). See, especially, Fernando Vallejo’s La virgen de los sicarios ( (Our Lady of the Assassins ) (1 (1994) 994) and Gabriel García G arcía Márquez’s Noticia de un secuestro ( (News of a Kidnapping ) (1996). However, However, despite the t he commercial success of these novels, the film adaptations of some of them, and the celebrity of their authors, I argue that it was only after Pérez-Reverte’s Pérez-R everte’s La reina del sur that narcoliteratura became consistently relevant in Latin American literary fields, offering a bestselling formula that many authors across the continent, but specially in Mexico, have sought to reproduce. 1

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although here I will mainly refer to works of fiction and non-fiction. Specifically, I propose a deconstruction of certain textual narconarratives through the articulation of three critiques. First, I contend that the most commercial narconarratives are formulaic texts that reinforce the mainstream media’s portrayal of drug cartels, itself partially informed by popular narcocultura. Second, I assert that most narconarratives comfortably reproduce a mythic notion of narcos mainly fashioned and disseminated by Mexico’s governing political elites at the federal, state, and local levels. According to official discourse, the criminal organizations profiting from the drug trade are a threat relegated to the discursive exteriority — outside the borders — of the power and the reason of the state. As such, the Mexican government represents drug cartels as criminal entities always readily distinguishable from state structures. At its worst, the state —and here are included the army, police corps, and the political class —is portrayed as weak, with sometimes dysfunctional and victimized institutions that the cartels are able to penetrate and corrupt. Third, I argue that, with the exception of a few Mexican novels, only a particular narrative trend of fiction and non-fiction published in the United States has been able to articulate a necessary, critical, and subversive view of the official discourse on drug trafficking and its related organizations in both countries. 1. The Ethical-Political Impasse of Narconarratives

There are four typical critical approaches to narconarratives: the conceptualization of violence as a philosophical and cultural problem (see Herman Herlinghaus and Gabriela Polit); a focus on the exceptionality of the cities of northern Mexico, the headquarters of major drug cartels, as a post-national space of negativity alternative to the capital (Miguel Rodríguez Lozano); the investigation of the narrative strategies and the oral histories of narcocorridos (Elijah Wald and Juan Carlos Ramírez-Pimienta); and, finally, the exploration of mythic and stylized narrations (Christopher Domínguez-Michael). The common denominator of these approaches is the absence of a critical assessment of the narrations’ relationship to their real referents. They focus instead on systems of representation peripheral to the problem of the drug trade, thus choosing to elucidate alternative subjectivities, the deconstruction of Mexican nationalism, and the linguistic particularities attributed to social imaginaries associated with drug cartels, but never drug organizations in their concrete and immediate historical and political materiality. However, as textual devices exploring the phenomenon of drug trafficking, narconarratives must be understood primarily as discursive sociopolitical inter ventions; as such, they compel us to revisit the classical notion of mimesis, of ten invoked by critics in a reductive and superficial manner as an attempt to explain the problematic link between narconarratives and the external reality to which they refer. From theorizations of literary systems of representation by Antoine Compagnon, Pierre Bourdieu, Alfonso Reyes, and Alain Badiou I derive the following critical directives. First, Compagnon’s notion of mimesis —“a knowledge proper to man, the way he constructs and inhabits the world” (93) —implies that

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narconarratives draw from a direct representation of the political order that has structuring effects in the art form. Second, following Bourdieu’s theorization of the literary field as temporarily dominated by power vectors (216), this inhabiting should be understood as producing a form of sociopolitical knowledge specific to the discursive enunciation about the drug world. Third, Reyes’s study of the ancillary function of literature — “it is indispensable that literature moves facts with a certain malice or insistency, with the intention of producing critical knowledge” (47) — establishes the imperative that the sociopolitical knowledge arranged in the texts studied here be enunciated from a “critical” standpoint and not just deployed as “obvious” contextual references to reality. 5 Finally, Badiou’s proposed ethics of the work of art —a “truth procedure” that arranges “the forms of knowledge in such a way that some truth may come to pierce a hole in them” (9) — suggests that narconarratives can be designated as the textual site where the simulacrum of truth conveyed by hegemonic (and official) representations of the drug trade may —intentionally or not —be either contested or assimilated. What I have termed, borrowing from Badiou, the “simulacrum of truth” refers to official representations of drug cartels as entities that exist outside of state parameters (see, for example, Guerrero Guitierrez, “Los Hoyos negros” 35). This identification makes criminal organizations symbolically, and even literally, exterior to civil society, a framing that presupposes an interior composed of the Mexican government and people, who are united against a common enemy. Luis Astorga considers this narrative as a matrix of performative discourse “that creates things by naming them” ( Mitología 10). This matrix erases the historical presence, activity, and evolution of drug cartels, as well as the government’s role in this history over the last four decades. It thus became the primary justification for the national deployment of thousands of military and federal agents on Dec. 11, 2006 — only ten days into President Felipe Calderón’s administration —to combat all domestic cartels (Guerrero Gutiérrez, “La estrategia fallida” 25). As a result, by the end of Calderón’s term in 2012, more than 100,000 people had been murdered, an unprecedented number of killings, only matched in recent history by the atrocities committed against civilians during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s (about 130,000 killed) and the U.S.-led Iraq war under President George W. Bush (about 110,000) (Turati 16; see, also, Molloy 17). Unsurprisingly, this atrocity has prompted an abundance of academic studies and journalistic investigations that differ little from one another and, even less, from the cultural productions that turn the drug trade and its actors into commercially successful myths. 6 This network of images operates as See Sánchez Prado’s discussion of Roberto Fernández Retamar’s analysis of Reyes’s El deslinde , in which Retamar argues that the central current of Latin American’s literature is in fact “ancillary,” that is, conceived with an emancipating, anti-colonial social function (Sánchez Prado, “Las reencarnaciones del centauro” 74–75). 6 National and transnational publishers in Mexico responded to the generalized shock and outrage against the unprecedented violence unleashed across the country during the six years of President Calderón’s term with a flood of fiction and non-fiction titles about the so-called war on drugs. For example, the prestigious political weekly magazine Proceso and Grijalbo Editorial (a subsidiary of the media conglomerate Random House Mondadori) partnered to publish the “Organized Crime” book series: 20 journalistic investigations of the various drug cartels and their kingpins, authored by, 5


a representational paradigm that frames most discussions about the drug trade. In the literary field it has led, often uncritically, to scene after scene of brutality and senseless bloodshed in narconarratives. Two of the most celebrated narconovelas to date, Yuri Herrera’s Trabajos del reino (Works of the Kingdom ) (2004) and Orfa Alarcón’s Perra brava ( Fierce Bitch ) (2010), are exemplary in this respect. The former traces the life of Lobo (Wolf), a composer of corridos, as he joins the court of a drug kingpin known simply as the King or the Lord. Other characters in the novel are known by roles that are commonly believed to exist in a drug “kingdom”: a Jeweler, a Journalist, and a Priest. Wolf, himself, becomes the kingdom’s Artist. Stylized and written in a literary language influenced by such prominent writers as Daniel Sada (1953–2011) and Jesús Gardea (1939–2000), Trabajos del reino thus attempts to imagine an archetypical drug cartel, from its private chambers to its public halls, from its celebratory rituals to its shady business transactions. As Wolf penetrates the organization, he realizes that the King is the center of a self-regulated network that in the end will produce his own downfall, and the leader is in fact betrayed by his closest accomplices in a plot whose structure recalls a Greek tragedy. After the king is finally arrested by federal army commanders who were previously on his payroll, the narrative voice ambiguously explains that the soldiers capture and take away the kingpin “as if they were in charge” (116). As with official representations of drug cartels, most of Trabajos del reino takes place in the King’s court, the “kingdom,” located in the margins of a city in what appears to be the outer limits of the state. Of particular interest is the spatial disposition of the King’s quarters, a vast labyrinth of secret corridors, hidden chambers, and public areas. Inside, obscure characters are forced to decipher the hidden meanings of the enigmatic King’s words and movements. The organization’s power also appears so corrosive and absolute that it “buys” —at least symbolically, in the figures of the archetypical characters — businessmen (the Jeweler), the media (the Journalist), the Catholic Church (the Priest), intellectuals and creators (the Artist). Furthermore, the novel does not hesitate to play on popular narcocultura mythology by alleging that narcocorridos describe the lives of “real” drug lords: Wolf claims that “the King speaks the truth” (99), that the Journalist says “clean lies,” while “true news” is “the matter of corridos” (37). As a city-state of its own, the Kingdom’s sole reason to exist seems to be the exercise of violence as the ultimate mechanism of power. The characters’ recurrent violence operates much like wrestling does in Barthes’ Mythologies : a spectacle of iconography representing unmediated, excessive human suffering. Trabajos del reino presents a decontextualized collection of exaggerated gestures that privileges moral forms over dramatized historical contents and is enclosed in the space of a melodrama where private and opposing among others, award-winning journalists such as Julio Scherer García (founder and former director of Proceso ), Jesús Blancornelas (the former director of Tijuana-based Zeta magazine), Anabel Hernández (who wrote what is perhaps the most widely read history of dr ug cartels, Los señores del narco ), and Diego Enrique Osorno (whose accounts of the Sinaloa cartel and the Zetas cartel are currently considered authoritative). These books, to various degrees, reproduce President Calderón’s thesis that the violence in Mexico during his presidency was caused by a bloody war among drug cartels that the Mexican army and the federal police unsuccessfully attempted to end.


interests are made public in order to reestablish a balance broken by rival drug lords. Wrestling and narconarratives are seen here as fabricated myths in the semiotic sense, with myth understood as “a type of speech” (Barthes 109) derived from intelligible objects (sports, books, music, films) that renders timeless (the battle of good vs. evil; the ethical Artist lured by corrupt power; inhuman and violent drug cartels threatening civil society, and so on; see epigraph) a previous signification that has been extrapolated from an erased historical context. Herrera’s novel thus produces an imaginary world dominated by the inhuman deeds of evildoers (the King and his rivals) who fight each other to the death. At the end of the novel, Wolf believes in the almost limitless power of the cartel that devours his community and, finally, itself, a process faithfully narrated through his ingenious corridos that he also elevates to the category of a transcendental myth: “the corrido is not a frame decorating the wall. It is a name and it is a weapon” (70). This mythic “narcocultura,” it may be argued following Barthes, “points out and it notifies, it makes us understand something and it imposes it on us” (Barthes 117) —that is, the lives of infamous men and their legends (see Foucault epigraph) replace our scarce knowledge of real traffickers. In an interview, Herrera emphasized the need for articulating a textual critique of drug trafficking through works of literature such as his: “What art can do is offer an alternative discourse that accounts for the complexity of the phenomenon, of its long history, its many complicities, and the need to reflect again on each individual’s responsibility. Good literature being produced today in Mexico . . . surpasses all Manichaeisms, giving depth to the debate concerning the state of the nation” (Colanzi). That Herrera’s novel demonstrates the same shallow, Manichean structure that in his view “good literature” must avoid is, I hope, clear from the analysis above. Nevertheless, Eduardo Antonio Parra, also an author of narconarratives, contends that Herrera’s literary strategy is an effective critical approach to the phenomenon, since “the author does not waste time in exhaustive descriptions or in criminal procedures, but attempts to focus on the hidden meanings and the psychology of the archetypes that make up his gallery of characters” (80). Christopher Domínguez Michael similarly argues that novels such as Herrera’s avoid a “cheap and commercial realism” by sublimating political and social affairs and so earn “autonomy as a critique of the modern” (Domínguez). Herrera himself claims that his project does not seek to be “a reflection or a faithful representation” of reality; as a result, he has purposely not employed a drug-related lexicon that “only refers to clichés, to discourses structured from power or the mass media” (Arribas). The statements above stem from a rhetorical simplification of Plato’s notion of mimesis that produces two complementary claims: 1) mimesis is either a faulty and imperfect imitation of reality (thus, the novel should not attempt to represent reality accurately); or 2) mimesis is a naïve reworking of the romantic ideal that separates art from social knowledge (thus, the novel should renounce producing sociopolitical meaning). Both voluntary renunciations are celebrated as essential features of the modern novel in general and of Herrera’s book in particular. But both ideas are also contested by the more sophisticated reformulations of mimesis discussed earlier: because Herrera’s novel inhabits discursively the phenomenon of drug trafficking, it produces a specific knowledge resulting


from the direct mimetic signification of that trafficking; the latter is in turn conditioned by the fact that Herrera’s book was written within a literary context temporarily dominated by a field of power that affected the structure and objectives of his literary project. Furthermore, and I am here following Badiou, Trabajos del reino displays the same ethical impasse found in most narconarratives by reproducing the simulacrum of truth about drug cartels promoted by official discourse. Orfa Alarcón’s Perra brava is a more juvenile version of narconarratives that exploit the popular imaginary of narcocultura. This novel offers readers the sadomasochist fantasy of an upper-class university student, Fernanda Salas, who decides to move in with a sicario or drug cartel assassin (see Biron 832–33). The story takes place in “the Monterrey of narcos, of reggaeton and hip-hop,” to quote the blurb on the back cover of the book. The plot begins with a graphic scene in which Fernanda is raped by the sicario, who enters the house covered in someone else’s blood. As Fernanda’s character evolves, her banal taste for commercial music, shopping, expensive nightclubs, and cruising in her car is overshadowed by violent outbursts, culminating in a murder that she indirectly commits and celebrates as a coming-of-age ritual through which she ends her destructive relationship with the sicario. Some critics have hailed the novel for empowering a female protagonist in the male-dominated drug world. Alain Saint Martin, for example, claims that Perra brava offers “an interesting twist” by adding to narconarratives a taboo-breaking treatment of the female protagonist’s sexuality and affective issues. Similarly, Ignacio Sánchez Prado argues that Alarcón’s novel fills “the void of a feminine character in the literature of violence.” Thus, “Fernanda breaks all canons in a much more original way than Pérez-Reverte’s La reina del sur ,” since “she does not aspire to iconicity but to inhabit her world” (“Consideraciones sobre Perra brava ”). To the contrary, however, Fernanda’s violence only reinforces male-dominated positions in the representation of class and gender as they intersect with drug trafficking. Far from being subversive, the story of Fernanda is that of an impossible and forbidden love condemned by class structures and gender roles deeply ingrained in the same conservative ideologies that also feed the mythic imaginary of the drug trade promoted by the Mexican government.7 Throughout the novel, mythic drug traffickers appear in full force: violent, sadistic psychopaths who kill rival criminals, abuse their women, victimize civil society in general, and consistently overpower and manipulate weak and corrupt police in occasional, brief confrontations. Fernanda herself mutates in the same direction, aspiring to become as violent as the man who controls and abuses her. Thus, she decides to kill her sicario boyfriend’s former lover, a woman living in poverty in a slum on the outskirts of Monterrey. Although that woman’s child is in the end Fernanda’s only victim (and accidentally so), Fernanda expresses no remorse and is actually excited, since by navigating the city in order to commit a crime with absolute impunity she completes her imitation of the sicario. The murder in essence pro My analysis follows in part Irma Cantú’s insightful paper “La construcción del sujeto femenino en la narrativa del narco en Perra Brava de Orfa Alarcón y Miss Narco de Javier Valdéz Cárdenas,” presented at the XVI Congress of Contemporary Mexica n Literature at the University of Texas at El Paso, March 3–5, 2011. 7


vides the climax of the novel, which ultimately differs little from Mexican soap operas and low-budget action films of the 1980s and 1990s. 8 Herrera and Alarcón also make evident, if involuntarily, their uncritical assimilation of hegemonic official discourse regarding drug cartels through their use of popular commercial music. While Trabajos del reino privileges narcocorridos as the preferred manifestation of narcocultura, Perra brava opts for the hip-hop songs of the band “Cartel de Santa,” which are quoted throughout the narration and fully cited at the end of the book. The titles of these gratuitously violent and sexist songs seem to propose a soundtrack to accompany the reading: “The Car of the Cartel,” “Saintly Death,” and, predictably, “Dogs.” Both hiphop and narcocorridos depict a fictitious and glorifying image of powerful drug criminals and their clandestine “culture” of inhuman excess. In pointing this out, I am not advocating that this type of music be banned, an action which would only serve to increase publicity and record sales; however, I do wish to emphasize the ethical and political implications of the celebratory magnification of drug cartels and kingpins. Like narconovelas, this music reinforces the convenient discursive illusion that drug cartels threaten civil society and its government from without and so cancels a priori the possibility of incorporating a critique of the state’s responsibility in drug trafficking. The central narrative strategy of both novels is the over-exploitation of violence. Slavoj Žižek’s conceptualization of violence as a phenomenon operating on three different levels helps illustrate how most narconarratives manipulate violence as a form of sensationalism, but rarely challenge its systemic origins. Žižek first discusses a “subjective” violence perpetrated in common crimes, terrorism, civil crises, and international conflicts. He warns, however, that “we should learn to step back, to disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible ‘sub jective’ violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent” (1), because it threatens to mask more pervasive and systematic levels of violence. The second level of violence, according to Žižek, is a “symbolic” violence that affects language and that may be expressed in hate-speech, racism, and discrimination. Žižek calls the third level “systemic” —the most invisible of all —precisely because it is produced within political and economic systems (1–2): “We’re talking here of the violence inherent in a system: not only direct physical violence, but also the more subtle forms of coercion that sustain relations of domination and exploitation, including the threat of violence” (9). The disciplinary disposition of the individual human body inscribed in the official strategy of the war on drugs is the resonant background of the systemic violence that remains unaccounted for in most narconarratives, which revel instead in various expressions of subjective violence: scenes of torture, rape, and gruesome murders. The striking correspondence between official and literary discourse can be understood, following Alain Badiou again, as an ideological reiteration of the real. As in the artificial Moscow trials ordered by Stalin in the 1930s to purge the regime For example, the plot mechanics of Perra brava parallel those of the 1996 film Laura Garza , directed by Jorge Manrique. This melodrama tells the story of Laura, a rich landowner from the northern state of Nuevo León, whose father kills her mother after she falls in love and run s away with the hacienda’s foreman. Laura is seduced by Eduardo, a hitman hired by a local cacique who plans to kill her and take over her estate, but Laura kills Eduardo instead. 8


of dissidents, we encounter here what Badiou terms “the passion of the real” ( The Century 52), the need for a system of discursive fiction that allows for the constant assertion of the materiality of the real that is, paradoxically, only perceptible from the symbolic. Both the prosecutors and those they condemned understood that the purge organized by Stalin was nothing short of a mise en scène , but ideological ends justified their enactment. Likewise, within narcocultura manifestations of violence are organized by the pre-established conditions of hegemonic discourse in order to corroborate the real of the drug trade that has been enunciated by the State. As a result, the real of the drug trade always emerges as the same in journalism, academic research, and cultural productions that seek to represent it. As Jacques Rancière argues, “the real must be fictionalized in order to be thought” (38), but that fictionalization is constructed through a network of signification that is established a priori in an archive constituted by specific power vectors. The archive of statements that is activated by the hegemonic discourse on the drug trade thus recalls what Rancière defines as the “distribution of the sensible” —that is, the audible and visible conditions of possibility of all systems of representation. This dominating trend in narconarratives can be quickly confirmed through a serial reading of the opening sentences of some of the best-known works: “The phone rang and she knew that they were going to kill her” (La reina del sur 11); “I knew that with one hand he could kill me” (Orfa Alarcón, Perra brava [ Fierce Bitch ] 11); “I am dead, Makina told herself when all things winced” (Yuri Herrera, Señales que precederán al fin del mundo [Signs Leading Up to the End of the World ] 11); “Shark did not know if he was dead. Or alive” (Heriberto Yépez, Al otro lado [On the Other Side ] 9); “Fifteen minutes before his head exploded in pieces, auxiliary policeman Ceferino Martínez, alias ‘El Oaxaca,’ finished his last round of the night” (Bernardo Fernández BEF, Hielo negro [Black Ice ] 11); “He knew of blood and saw that his was different” (Yuri Herrera, Trabajos del reino [Works of the King- dom ] 9). By opening their works with actual, imminent, or symbolic murders, these novels project spectacles of subjective violence as prominent “lures” for voyeuristic consumption—to return to Žižek’s description —thus masking and seeming to obviate a critique of systemic violence. It is no coincidence that, as expressions of the inhumanity of the people involved in drug trade, many of the names and attributes of the characters in these novels are those of animal predators: Shark, Wolf, Dog. The drug lord —man or woman — is always at the center of a community of exception, based on an imaginary cult of violence for violence’s sake.9 But while Among many comparable examples of this phenomenon, Fiesta en la madr iguera ( Down the Rabit Hole ) (2010), by Juan Pablo Villalobos, stands out. It nar rates the story of a child who lives with his father, a drug lord, in what is described as a narco fortress. The child is surrounded by expensive gifts, while witnessing torture and executions and assimilating the macho discourse of power taught by his father and a designated mentor. All of the characters b ear names of indigenous origin, as if referring to a sort of trans-historic, non-Western ancestral source of their violence. See, also, Alejandro Almazán’s El más buscado (The Most Wanted ) (2012), the autobiographical story of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, allegedly the head of the Sinaloa cartel; Juan José Rodríguez’s Mi nombre es Casablanca (My Name is Casablanca ) (2003), the story of a police officer who confronts a drug cartel in the course of his investigation of the serial killings of bricklayers in the state of Sinaloa; Bernardo Fernández BEF’s Tiempo de alacranes (Scorpion Season ) (2005), which focuses on a veteran sicario who plans to retire after killing a key protected witness who could testify against “El Señor,” the head of a cartel operating from a Mexican federal prison; and finally, also by the same author, Hielo negro (Black Ice ) (2011), which narrates the life of Lizzy Zubiaga, who interrupts her studies of visual arts abroad to inherit a drug cartel in Mexico. 9

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the systemic violence that produces drug trafficking frequently disappears under the recurrent manifestations of subjective violence in the majority of narconarratives, in the last two decades other narratives have articulated critical alternatives to this complacent, if commercially successful, representation of official imaginaries of the drug war. I discuss some examples below. 2. Counterhegemonic Narconar ratives in Mexico and the U.S.

The most powerful critical analyses of the intersection between state power and the drug trade have been articulated in the social sciences (see, for example, Escalante Gonzalbo, Die Tageszietung , and Astorga). However, predating La reina del sur and the celebratory narcocultura of which the novel is part, a literary deconstruction of the phenomenon also emerged in Mexico in the 1990s. In 1991, Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda (1948–2008) was awarded the Juan Rulfo Prize for his novel Contrabando (Contraband ), narrated in the first person as a fictitious testimonial recounting the effects of the drug trade in the Sierra Madre of Chihuahua.10 Rascón Banda tells of his travels back to his native Santa Rosa, a small village surrounded by farms and clandestine drug plantations, where he intends to find the time and space away from Mexico City to fulfill a contract to write a movie script based on songs of the popular norteño singer Antonio Aguilar. As soon as he arrives, he witnesses at the airport the killing of two young men at the hands of police agents. After the shooting, he speculates that the two were probably novice drug smugglers whose lives were cut short because of their vulnerable position in the global drug business. This initial episode sets the tone for the entire novel: as the protagonist is exposed to other cases of drug violence in Chihuahua, he gradually realizes that the violence consistently originates with police agents and the military patrolling the region. Thus, despite media reports describing shootings in Santa Rosa among rival cartel members, Rascón Banda and others in the community observe only brutal incursions by the military, federal, and state police, who harass villagers and rob civilians while allegedly fighting drug smugglers. As he completes the commissioned script, Rascón Banda discovers that his new perspective no longer fits popular expectations regarding the literary representation of rural life in the north of the country. The script itself tells the story of rival drug organizations whose kingpins fight over a woman. The two groups represent the sum of all official and de facto power in their small town, with the woman being the ultimate prize. There is no exterior authority beyond their dominion: both cartels command every aspect of daily life, and there is no mention of any official institution from the town, the nearest city, state, or even the federation. In the end, the groups massacre each other, as if the symbolic elimination of both is the only possible retaliation. The point here is that drug trafficking exists within the community and is not a criminal force attacking the community from the outside: it is a social construct always inside the state, with organized structures that also fulfill the roles of the state when needed. Narcos are not invading criminals; I would like to thank Edmundo Paz Soldán for recommending this novel to me at the conference “Crime Narratives in Modern Latin America: From Detectives to Narcos,” held at Columbia University, April 30–May 1, 2010. 10


they occupy the top strata of power and civil society. Unfortunately, however, Rascón Banda’s viewpoint is so “extreme” that Antonio Aguilar cancels the contract, arguing that using the script may offend a public accustomed to uncritical commercial melodramas “and not a narco story of revenge” (210). Although written in 1991 and awarded the Juan Rulfo Prize at that time, Contra- bando was only published posthumously in 2008, after the death of Rascón Banda that same year. The reasons for the seventeen-year delay are unclear. Rascón Banda was a renowned and prolific playwright, who explored sociopolitical injustice regarding immigration, gender violence, and political corruption, frequently structuring his searing works as testimonial narratives. In 1991 he wrote a play also titled Contrabando (a condensed version of which was included as one of the novel’s chapters) that had a modest reception (see Adler). The limited success of both the novel and play can be explained, in part, by the marginal position of theater and playwrights in Mexico’s literary field. But it should also be noted that these texts, which appeared 20 years ago, shed a critical light on drug trafficking at a time when the topic had not yet accumulated its current level of symbolic capital or reached today’s levels of social and political urgency. Indeed, Rascón Banda’s narconarrative was virtually unknown, especially when compared to the wide attention received by other novels critical of official power published the same year.11 In Fernando García Ramírez’s words, publishers rejected Contrabando twenty years ago because “no one wanted to see at that moment what was happening. Today that destiny has caught up with us. Today, Rascon’s novel seems to have been written yesterday” (84). Yet even today, two decades after its first public appearance, Contrabando still has been unable to reach a wide audience. The reasons for this may not be entirely different from its initial failure to do so in the 1990s, for Contrabando ’s portrayal of drug organizations does not adhere to the structures and strategies of the most profitable narconarratives currently dominating the literary field. Far from the enigmatic mythical kingpin of Herrera’s Trabajos del reino or Alarcón’s disturbed hip-hop- dancing upper-class beauty, Rascón Banda’s narcos are impersonal, unapproachable, and lacking in celebrity appeal. His dr ug cartels do not inhabit mysterious kingdoms, but appear as dispersed, unidentifiable organizations. In addition, the violence in the novel is perpetrated by obscurely uniformed anonymous commandos, or, more significantly, by clearly recognizable police agents and soldiers. At the most basic level, Rascón Banda’s criminals fail to follow any of the implied rules for this type of best-selling fiction: his are instead nameless figures, usually seen from the perspective of witnesses. I would argue, however, that Rascón Banda’s refusal to seduce his readers with a contradictory and enthralling character such as the protagonist of La reina del sur is a crucial structural condition of his literary project. His novel is a calculated political statement that denounces the decades-long symbiosis between the state and drug cartels. As such, his portrayal of drug traffickers is consistent and, following Badiou’s lead, coextensive with his critical interven I am referring in particular to Carlos Montemayor (1947–2010), who was awarded the Colima Prize for his novel Guerra en el paraíso (War in Paradise ), a historical account of a rural uprising in the state of Guerrero during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Also in 1991, Héctor Aguilar Camín published La guerra de Galio (Galio’s War ), a roman à clef detailing the federal government’s repression of Excélsior , the sole Mexican newspaper that refused to join its payroll. 11


tion from an artistic perspective, even if it risks not seducing his readers with a melodramatic action story. The novel assumes the very narrative form that, in his view of the phenomenon, corresponds to real drug cartels: they are profitdriven organizations that advance their goals with impunity through police force and political authority because they are in fact the police and the political elites of the region. While most narconarratives published after La reina del sur seem to be attempting to reproduce Pérez-Reverte’s bestselling formula, Roberto Bolaño’s (1953–2003) acclaimed posthumous novel 2666 (2004) provides an alternative representation of drug trafficking. An ambitious project consisting of five semi-independent books connecting the Holocaust with the murders of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez at the U.S.-Mexico border, 2666 explores in detail various dimensions of violence in post-industrial societies, from gender hate crimes to killings related to the drug trade. In “The Part about the Crimes,” which focuses on the murders of women, there is a scene in a bar in which police agent Juan de Dios Martínez speculates that a rancher, who he sees from behind, must be a “narco,” a drug trafficker. Meanwhile, two young musicians try unsuccessfully to get the rancher’s attention: “The saddest thing, thought Juan de Dios Martínez, was that the narco , or the suited back of the man he thought was a narco , was hardly paying any attention to them, busy as he was talking to a man with the face of a mongoose and a hooker with the face of a cat” (380). When the supposed narco finally notices the musicians, something happens that intrigues the police officer: The man with the mongoose face rose from his chair and said something into the accordionist’s ear. Then he sat down again and the accordionist’s mouth screwed up into a pout. Like a child on the verge of tears. The violinist had her eyes open and she was smiling. The narco and the woman with the cat face bent their heads together. The narco ’s nose was big and bony and aristocratic looking. But aristocratic how? There was a wild expression on the accordionist’s face, except for his lips. Unfamiliar currents surged through the inspector’s chest. The world is a strange and fascinating place, he thought. (381)

Bolaño’s alleged narco is anonymous, even faceless. The effects of his actions are only perceptible in the terrorized grimace of the accordionist and the tense smile of the violinist. The alleged narco is also the only character sitting at the table not described with an animal attribute (mongoose, cat). In fact, his persona does not require such similes to make evident the violence he commands without even getting up. This embodiment of power grants him de facto a specific social function that turns him into a self-evident character: he is a narco. When a glimpse of his profile is finally visible, the police agent associates him with the aristocracy; in other words, he recognizes him as a member of the elite class. This scene can thus be read as a critique illustrating the limited way in which the drug trade is being narrated in Mexico: brief glances of a phenomenon whose reality cannot be penetrated but only transcribed in imaginary constructions involving certain effects of violence seen from an insurmountable distance, a situation in which some aspects of the power of an elite can be known intuitively, never in full. If in 2666 the reality of the drug trade appears under an oblique light, this is because it is an integral part of hegemonic power in Santa Teresa, a border city modeled after Ciudad Juárez, where most of the novel takes place. As a dramatization of the impossibility of knowing the real of the drug trade, Bolaño’s masterpiece offers a unique narrative that relocates the phenomenon as


a domain controlled and disciplined by local and federal powers. Bolaño’s narcos are people committed to the particularities of the trade, but never exceptional criminals or psychopaths challenging state power or threatening civil society. They vary according to their role in a business structure: some work as simple armed guards or as small-time hoodlums peddling drugs; others, like crime boss Pedro Rengifo, are well-recognized businessmen. The main plotline of “The Part about the Crimes” focuses on the killing of women in Santa Teresa, a decade-long series of brutal murders that have received international media attention. Like the crimes themselves, the drug trafficking occurs within a web of power relations that remains invisible to the majority of society. The most profitable illegal activities are carried out with a high level of discretion and discipline, and this explains why even those closely guarding kingpins — such as Lalo Cura, who was hired to protect Rengifo’s wife —are ignorant of their involvement in organized crime. As the novel progresses, the drug trade is represented as simply one of the many levels of corruption and crime that function within the city’s economy. For example, the intimate relationship between police agents, local caciques, and narcos is suggested by a scene in which Epifanio talks to Lalo Cura about the unsolved murder of Isabel Urrea, a radio reporter. Epifanio decides to take a look into Urrea’s appointment book, which state police judiciales did not even bother to open: I found the phone numbers of three narcos . One of them was Pedro Rengifo. I also found the numbers of several judiciales , including a big boss in Hermosillo. What were those phone numbers doing in an ordinar y reporter’s appointment book? Had she interviewed t hem, put them on the air? Was she friends with them? And if she wasn’t, who had given her the numbers? A mystery. (463)

The dispersion of motifs and plotlines in 2666 is Bolaño’s attempt to represent the complexity of a society in which the drug trade is an integral, but not dominant, aspect of organized crime. As in Contrabando , the narcos of 2666 are the elite: police agents, businessmen, politicians. Some believe, like Bolaño’s police agent Juan de Dios Martínez, that a narco is an enigmatic character whose face cannot be known and who is capable of the most horrific acts. A closer look, however, reveals that narcos always exist on the surface of civil society, integrated in the economy, the political class, and police institutions. Although there are certainly other notable attempts by Mexican writers to critique in a similar fashion organized drug crime and hegemonic power,12 most Mexican narconarratives continue to operate within the hegemonic discourse that reinforces the mythology surrounding drug cartels. In the U.S., the opposite seems to be the case, and in what follows I briefly discuss two such narconarratives whose deconstructive examination of the drug trade mirrors Rascón Banda’s and Bolaño’s: Don Winslow’s The Power of the Dog (2005), a novel, and Charles Bowden’s Down by the River (2002), a work of nonfiction. These include Élmer Mendoza’s first novel, Un asesino solitario (Lone Assassin ) (1999), which tells the story of a professional assassin hired by a government agency to murder the official presidential candidate, a plot based on the 1994 assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio; Daniel Sada’s El lenguaje del juego (The Language of the Game ) (2012), in which the owner of a pizzeria in a small tow n in the north of Mexico faces an emerging drug trade mounted by the local cacique and other de facto powers; and Juan Villoro’s Arrecife (Reef ) (2012), a novel about a post-apocalyptic Mexico in which transnational conglomerates profit from ecological disasters and state-regulated drug violence. 12


The Power of the Dog begins in 1997, when Art Keller, a DEA agent, walks through

a ranch near the town of El Sauzal in the state of Baja California Norte, where an extended family of nineteen has been murdered, including children and seniors. Keller is indirectly responsible for the massacre, since he framed a young sicario to make him appear to be a snitch so that his cartel bosses would execute him. But Keller did not intend the same fate for the sicario’s family: “He forces himself to look at the bodies again. It’s my fault, Art thinks. I brought this on these people. I’m sorry, Art thinks. I am so sorry” (5). These deaths are part of an ironic chain of causalities (which includes Keller’s murdered DEA partner, Ernie Hidalgo) that began in 1975 with Operation Condor, in which Mexican soldiers and federal police destroyed poppy plantations in the state of Sinaloa, where Mexico’s first drug organization had its headquarters. The operation involved the recently created DEA, which hired pilots, mostly former CIA agents, to spray defoliants and destroy the facilities for producing heroin. Keller joins Miguel Ángel Barrera — a Sinaloan state policeman and a type of Mexican godfather, who asks his friends, including Keller, to call him “Tío” (uncle) —to form what Keller will later call “a partnership made in hell” (31). Together they bring down the cartel boss, Don Pedro Áviles, whom Barrera kills even though he does not seem to be resisting arrest: “Then Art gets it — this wasn’t an arrest or an execution. It was an assassination” (36). Following Tío’s plan, Keller (whose name sounds almost like killer ) takes the dead drug lord as his trophy and makes a name for himself in the DEA. Just as the Mexican-American agent (Keller has an American father and Mexican mother) rises in the DEA, so Tío Barrera makes a parallel ascent as a drug lord. Relocated to the central city of Guadalajara, the state capital of Jalisco, Tío now heads the “federación,” a conglomerate of smugglers that brings the first massive shipments of Colombian cocaine to the U.S. market. Keller knows the true origin of the federation —“Operation Condor was intended to cut the Sinaloan cancer out of Mexico, but what it did instead was spread it through the entire body” (103) —and he suddenly realizes the larger implications of his relationship with Tío: He used you, set you like a dog on his enemies, and you did it. Then you kept your mouth shut about it. While they lauded you as a hero, slapped you on the back, finally let you on the team. You pathetic son of a bitch, that’s what it’s been about, hasn’t it? Your desperation to finally belong. You sold your soul for it. Now you think you can buy it back. (106–07)

Ultimately —but only after his persistent investigation of Tío’s federation leads to the murder of his partner Ernie Hidalgo —Keller realizes that the governments of both the U.S. and Mexico approach the drug trade not as a war but as an asset to be leveraged in a web of international geopolitical affairs. Although they maintain an official discourse that attacks drug cartels, they also selectively and secretly protect rings of production and distribution that serve specific state purposes. The Power of the Dog ’s complex plot is carefully structured as a roman à clef, weaving together multiple historical events and figures: Operation Condor; the formation of the drug cartel federation; the 1985 murder of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena in Mexico (the fictionalized Ernie Hidalgo); the 1993 assassination of Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo (Father Juan Parada in the novel); the Tijuana cartel led by the Arellano Félix brothers (Tío’s nephews, Adán and Raúl Barrera); the rise of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the Juárez Cartel’s leader known as “the lord of the skies” for smuggling cocaine into the U.S. in airplanes; and


Tío himself, a fictionalized combination of such historical drug lords as former police agent Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo and Ernesto “Tío Neto” Fonseca Carrillo, the uncle of Carrillo Fuentes. Yet Winslow’s narrative strategy manages to maintain a sense of critical truth throughout his fictionalized account of the drug war without ever subjugating the narrative arc to historical referents. And although Keller often navigates these events seeking to avenge an episode of personal loss — the murder of his partner —he nonetheless becomes conscious of how that tragedy belongs to a wider network of systemic violence, of which the international drug trade is a part. Moreover, he does so without resorting to mythic constructions of drug lords and their imagined fantastic and eccentric lives. Charles Bowden’s nonfiction investigation Down by the River provides another critical examination of the official discourse surrounding the drug trade. 13 Spanning three decades of the history of this phenomenon, it tells the story of Phil Jordan, a DEA agent obsessed with the murder of his brother, Lionel Bruno Jordan, who was killed in El Paso, Texas, in what initially seemed like a carjacking. The Jordan family, of Italian descent, had been living for decades in the region, and Felipe Jordan grew up speaking both Spanish and English. The murder takes place in 1995, a year after a series of political assassinations in Mexico that included the murders of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio and the head of the PRI party, José Francisco Ruiz Massieu.14 Jordan had earlier been named the head of the DEA’s El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC), and he soon suspects that the murder of his brother is a message from the Juárez cartel to stay away from their business. Frantically pursuing his brother’s killers, Jordan gradually penetrates the world of international cartels, in which the U.S. and Mexican governments have deeply rooted political and economic interests. The case of Enrique “Kiki” Camarena is of particular interest, since it helps reveal to Jordan the complexity of the official war on drugs. Jordan meets Camarena in 1984 in Mexico City. When Jordan notices that agents from the Mexican federal secret police DFS (Federal Security Directorate) are shadowing them, Camarena explains that, although the DFS is trained by the CIA, drug trafficking is another dimension of their duties. Although, “Like anyone in DEA, he knows that drug investigations always come second to concerns of foreign policy and to the appetites of trade” ( Down 149), Jordan is puzzled by the relationship that Camarena details between the CIA, the DFS, and the drug cartels. What frus A New York Times article reported a news conference at the White House with P resident Calderón, in which President Obama “said Mexico had shown ‘extraordinary courage’ in its stand against a wave of crime and violence that has left tens of thousands of Mexicans dead since 2006 . . . ‘We are very mindful that the battle President Calderón is fighting in Mexico is not just his,’ Mr. Obama said. ‘It’s also ours. We have to take responsibility, just a s he’s taking responsibility.’” See Thompson. However, according to Bowden, the Mexico that claims to be a sister republic to the U.S., with a functional civil society protected by President Calderón’s valiant implementation of a policy of zero tolerance against drug cartels (see Thompson), “does not exist”: “There is a second Mexico, where the war is for drugs, for the enormous money to be made in drugs, where the police and the military fight for their share, where the press is restrained by the murder of reporters and feasts on a steady diet of bribes, and where the line between government and the drug world has never existed” (Murder City 18; see, also, Burnett). 14 The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)’s seventy-one-year rule in Mexico ended with the election of the conservative National Action Part y (PAN) presidential candidate Vicente Fox in 2000. 13


trates Camarena is the fact that his information linking the Mexican government to the cartels never produces a serious DEA investigation, and he is killed in Mexico after discovering a four and a half square mile drug plantation guarded by DFS agents. Bowden then connects the plantation to the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, noting that it is public knowledge that the CIA partially financed the contra war in Nicaragua with money obtained from the sale of narcotics in the U.S. after a Congressional amendment cut off official support (see Webb). The parallels between Bowden’s Phil Jordan and Winslow’s Art Keller are striking: they both are initially driven by the need for revenge; the sons of immigrants with close family connections to Mexico, they feel like outsiders in the white maledominated political world of the U.S. As they navigate the justice systems of both countries, they realize that they are immersed in a complex and sensitive network of interests: “It is a model of the New Economy, stateless, borderless, global. It rewards merit, ignores class origins, hires and fires at w ill. It despises regulations and ducks tariffs. It is color-blind and judges the work, not skin color” (Bowden, Down 214). Far removed from the gratuitously gory scenes of most Mexican narconovelas, drug-related violence in these texts is considered a foreseeable consequence of a billion-dollar industry rather than the product of senseless outbursts of irritable psychopaths having a bad day: Killing still continues —it is inevitable in a business lacking access to courts and contract law. Without death, the business simply cannot function. And in a business rife with problems of industrial espionage —the constant danger of snitches —murder and torture are inescapable business expenses. As is bribery, the only accepted form of taxation in the drug business. (Bowden, Down 248)

Drug traffickers, Bowden explains in an interview, “they’re just people making a living in a murderous business” (Karlin). 3. Coda: Challenging the Narco Archive and Official Discourse

As with other U.S. narconarratives, the sophistication and the depth of documentation and analysis of both The Power of the Dog and Down by the River have few equivalents in Mexican fiction and non-fiction narconarratives.15 Latin American literature in general, nonetheless, has a long tradition of sociopolitical critique. In Myth and Archive (1990), critic Roberto González Echevarría argues that a certain current of the continental production of novels since the nineteenth century has striven to adopt what he calls a “nonliterary” form, here echoing Roberto Fernández Retamar’s interpretation of Alfonso Reyes’s theory of the “ancillary function” of literature in El deslinde (see note 6). Approaching “Latin America itself as a cultural entity, as a context or archive from which to narrate that diachronically” (39), Latin American literature exhibits for González Echevarría a type of Derridean archive fever: Similar critiques of the drug trade can be found in Gay Talese’s Honor Thy Father (1971), Dan Baum’s Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure (1997), Gary Webb’s Dark Alli- ance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (1998), Howard Campbell’s Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from the Streets of El Paso and Juárez (2009), and Molly Molloy’s El Sicario. The Auto- biography of a Mexican Assassin (2011). See also Gianfranco Rosi’s award-winning documentary El sicario: Room 164 (2010), available online at . 15


It is my hypothesis that the novel, having no fixed form of its own, often assumes that of a given kind of document endowed with truth-bearing power by society at specific moments in time. The novel, or what is called the novel at various points in history, mimics such documents to show their conventionality, their subjection to strateg ies of textual engenderment similar to those governing literature, which in turn reflect those of language itself. It is through this simulacrum of legitimacy that the novel makes its contradictory and veiled claim to literariness. (8)

As they adopt non-literar y elements, novels construct in turn a literary space in which a critical dissection of those referents becomes a constitutive condition of each narrative project. While this approach has been adopted by a significant number of contemporary Mexican novels, I would venture that the key to achieving critical relevance in a literary work does not lie in its formal elements, even when these aim at a “simulacrum of legitimacy” through the mimesis of a specific archive. While narconarratives maintain different degrees of proximity to what could be conceptualized as the “drug war archive” — government documents, journalistic news stories, testimonials, police and military reports, analyses by human rights organizations, narcocorridos, films, websites, and other related cultural productions —I believe that their potential for having a lasting impact on the literary canon mostly resides in their political critique of hegemonic positions inscribed in that same archive. Although this critical relevance may be articulated as a counternarrative to official representations of the drug war (The Power of Dog and Down by the River ), it need not resort to realist techniques or a factual engagement with the archive (Contrabando and 2666 ). The canon of modern Mexican narrative is composed of novels with very different relationships to the country’s various archival imaginaries, but most incorporate a critical dimension with regard to a specific archive. I would go as far as to say that a current of counterhegemonic narratives lies at the very foundation of Mexico’s literary tradition. Along with some of the novels mentioned above (Contrabando , 2666 , and others referred to in footnotes 10 and 13), two key texts from the end of the nineteenth century are exemplary: Manuel Payno’s Los bandidos de Río Frío (1889–91), which narrates the country’s sociopolitical crisis during the first decades after its independence from Spain, when corruption and crime were endemic within the highest levels of official power; and Heriberto Frías’s Tomóchic. Episodios de Campaña (1893), an account of a peasant uprising in the northern state of Chihuahua that was brutally repressed by Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz in 1892. Decades later, and in the context of Mexico’s 1910 civil war, the narrations referred to as “novels of the Mexican Revolution” — in particular those by Martín Luis Guzmán (1887–1976), Nellie Campobello (1900–1986), and Mariano Azuela (1873–1952) — provide critical accounts of the human and social carnage that resulted from the fratricidal power ambitions of military generals and politicians. This genealogy can be extended to non-realist works such as Juan Rulfo’s groundbreaking Pedro Páramo (1955), the historical parodies of Jorge Ibargüengoitia’s Los relámpagos de agosto (1964) and Los pasos de López (1982), and the political deconstructions present in Carlos Montemayor’s Guerra en el paraíso (1991), Vicente Leñero’s Los periodistas (1978), and Héctor Aguilar Camín’s La guerra de Galio (1991). These literary precedents support Christopher Domínguez Michael’s assessment of Yuri Herrera’s Traba- jos del reino as an important piece of narcoliteratura, but not as a work that can aspire to become a canonic fictionalization of Mexico’s drug war: “Herrera


seems to me not the beginning but the end of a road: the narco empire reduced (as only good prose can and should) to the falsely idiotic gaze of a buf foon sheltered inside the palace” (Domínguez). This ambiguous praise hints at the central problem both of Herrera’s novel and most narconarratives: they represent literary dead-ends that reproduce the limited hegemonic vision of drug trafficking that even the most skillful narration — whether realist or not —cannot overcome. In Julio Cortázar’s celebrated short story “Casa tomada” (“House Taken Over”), two siblings are gradually expelled from their home as invisible forces take over each room. Since the nature of these forces is never accounted for, the text invites virtually endless explanations and interpretations of their exile. As the drug business expands ubiquitously, corroding all dimensions of the social tissue of both Mexico and the U.S., it is understandable that narconarratives analogously struggle to provide sometimes desperate explanations of the situation. Thus, such accounts present a country that is being taken over by dark ahistorical forces that can only be expressed in mythic and archetypical terms: spontaneous, exotic, senseless, and random violence; unstoppable corruption; the inevitable triumph of evil. With their romantic focus on death as an ontological destiny and their emphasis on an imagined narcocultura that makes victims of the official institutions of justice, most narconarratives propagate an illusory enemy that the Mexican state relies upon in order to legitimize its actions in the drug war. In short, most of the narconarratives written during the last decade in Mexico reify the simulacrum of truth constructed by official propaganda. Only through the articulation of deliberately political counternarratives can light be shed on drug trafficking as one of the many dimensions of official power in both countries. To achieve this, critical narconarratives must abandon the exhausted myths of drug lords and their fantastic kingdoms and stop objectifying drug trafficking as a problem external to official power in Mexico and the U.S. and instead propose a careful historical revision of its place inside that power: drug trafficking as power itself. College of Staten Island and The Graduate Center, City University of New York

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Zavala-imagining the US-Mexico Drug War

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