SWJ El Centro Book Review – Drug Cartels Do Not Exist

Oswaldo Zavala (William Savinar, Trans.), Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican Culture. Critical Mexican Studies. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2022 [ISBN: 978- 0826504685, Ebook, 206 pages]

Dr. Oswaldo Zavala is a renowned professor of contemporary Latin American literature and culture at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and holds two PhDs, one from the University of Texas at Austin and one from the Université de Paris III, Sorbonne Nouvelle. He has reported extensively on US-Mexico border issues—which includes a focus on ‘narcos’—and the modern discourse surrounding Latin American modernity. He has authored earlier books (translated from Spanish) such as A Return to Modernity: Mexican Literary Genealogies of the Fin-de-Siècle (Albatros, 2017) and Insufferable Modernity: Robert Bolaño in the Limits of Contemporary Latin American Literature (University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

His 2022 English version work, Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican Culture (originally published in 2018 as Los cárteles no existen: Narcotráfico y cultura en México), is a culmination of Zavala’s meticulous research and extensive knowledge, presented through a cultural lens. He argues that the language used to describe the drug cartels in Mexico is lazy and fails to address the root cause of violence against its people. Zavala’s quest for understanding the decades-long history of homicidal violence and drug-related crime in Mexico, which began during his time as a journalist writing for El Diario de Juárez in the 1990s, is a testament to his deep understanding of the subject matter.

By referencing numerous literary works and cultural representations of the ‘narco,’ Zavala aims to prove that by creating a ‘cartel myth,’ a singular group of criminals led by a boss as depicted in contemporary pop culture historical fiction novels and mythologized drama shows like Narcos and The Queen of the South, creates a ‘permanent enemy’ in response to which the US and Mexican authorities can justify a militarized policy retaining control over Mexico’s energy sector. Zavala also claims that the violence perpetrated by drug trafficking organizations is a symptom of policing strategies although he offers minimal quantitative evidence to support this contention. At the core of his argument, Zavala points to Operation Condor in 1977 targeting the ‘Golden Triangle’ states of Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua that displaced peasants and led to the eventual creation of the Center for Investigation and National Security (CISEN) in 1989 and a militarized approach toward drug trafficking which incrementally proliferated in Mexican governmental policies over time. Zavala’s main argument in this work is that:

“Since Calderón’s war [2006], Mexico’s security agenda has mobilized the military and police to confront wars between cartels that had never existed before but that, according to the official discourse, are solely responsible for the tens of thousands of killings across the whole country. This new cartel war isn’t new, nor a war, nor between cartels. It is the political system’s permanent state of exception that has been exercising its violent control and sovereignty over organized crime in Mexico for more than half a century” (p. 156).

Zavala frames his argument through four chapters, an epilogue, an afterword for the English edition, notes, and an index.

The chapters are framed as follows:

• Chapter 1. Narco Culture Depoliticized: Explores how the ‘narco’ narrative was born in Mexico, how it was shaped by cultural and media forces in the U.S. and Mexico, and how the narco became an object of national security.
• Chapter 2. Drug Cartels Do Not Exist (but State Violence Does): Analyze three historical periods and how the narco has been represented in three novels.
• Chapter 3. Four Writers Subverting the Narco Narrative: Investigates how the works of four authors challenge the narco-mainstream narrative.
• Chapter 4. Drug Trafficking, Soldiers, and Police on the Border: Unpacks the relationship between drug criminals, the military, and police forces, and the perpetuation of violence along the Border.

Ultimately, Zavala draws heavily on the works of other journalists and novelists to make the argument that cartels— and the language used to describe them—are a lazy attempt to justify capitalist and imperialist strategies by the US and Mexico. Much of the book’s focus is on the literary imagination used by novelists to purportedly show the ‘true’ nature of violence and its causes in places like Ciudad Juarez, including the many works by Charles Bowden and the massive tome 2666 by Roberto Bolaño (Editorial Anagrama, 2004).

His work thus best serves as a commentary on the literature surrounding the narco itself rather than an analysis of why the language describing the narco is misleading. His primary evidence for claiming that the narco ‘does not exist’ points to novels that hyperinflate and misinterpret that persona. The only tangible evidence Zavala offers towards one of his arguments is the statistic that government policies made the homicide rate worse and that “before Calderon’s War on Drugs, according to the figures, there was no national security emergency” (p. 58).

Overall, Zavala’s book effectively illustrates how popular media embraces the myth of the narco and how most depictions fail to capture the nuance of his character and motivations. The book’s primary goal is to understand the language describing the narco and the importance of providing quantitative research methods to inform policy against drug-related violence. In the end, it presents a firm position against the militarized policies of Calderon’s presidency that perpetuated past his tenure and led to a further militarized police force and National Guard under President Andrés Manual López Obrador’s term beginning in 2018.

However, Zavala, for all his advanced education and experience, retains an inherent leftist (anti-state and anti-capitalist) intellectual bias which must be considered when reading his work. While this in itself is not inherently detrimental—free and open discourse and debate requires widely differing perceptions and is encouraged—it does appear to color his ability to accept certain realities of contemporary organized crime challenging both the Mexican state and its people. Such criminal groups, whether labeled as ‘cartels’ or not (or for that matter viewed as centralized or networked), cannot be solely viewed as “constructed by policy elites in both the United States and Mexico to facilitate economic and political domination” and thus dismissed outright.[1] They still exist and the criminal insurgencies they are actively promoting in various regions of Mexico must be addressed.

Addendum: More recently Zavala has published La guerra en las palabras: Una historia intelectual del “narco” en México (1975-2020) (Penguin Random House, 2022)—In English: War put into words: An intellectual history of “narco” in Mexico (1975-2020). It can be viewed as a follow-on work published four years after the critical studies (constructivist) work Drug Cartels Do Not Exist focused upon on in this book review.[2]

Endnotes

[1] Richard W. Coughlin, “War in Words: An Intellectual History of the ‘Narco’ in Mexico (Review).” NACLA. 30 August 2024, https://nacla.org/war-in-words-intellectual-history-narco-Mexico.

[2] Ibid., See Dr. Coughlin’s review of this Spanish language 512-page work.

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