No mas sangre

Over the last decade in Mexico the ‘war against drugs’ has destroyed the lives of at least 35,000 people, without counting everyone else that has been affected. The political elite have made us believe that it is through armed confrontation that the problem can be solved. Drug cartels and drug dealers have been predominately framed as a source of risk. Narco is, in itself, a risk for the power and image of the nation-state, due to the fact that it represents a transnational threat and possesses a gross economic influence. Criminals are, hence, the agents of threat; they are those who embody the risk. The need for a ‘war against drugs’ gravitates around the notion that if the drug lord falls, the trade stops. However, cartels are not centralized organisms of power that can be destroyed by killing or arresting drug lords. Due to the fact that Mexican drug trafficking organizations have penetrated the apparatuses of the nation-state, American journalists and scholars have often labeled Mexico as a ‘narcocracy’ or a failed state; however, this status is not the sole responsibility of the Mexican state. Some American policies and initiatives have also facilitated the means through which cartels gain the tools, conditions and resources needed to undermine the Mexican state apparatus. Journalists also started to be perceived by the government as a source of risk and they became at risk themselves, due to the fact that narco started killing them in order to control what is being said about them in the media. This thesis, therefore, looks to the causes and implications of the neighborhoods of narco, journalists and US political power, which have pressured the Mexican government into executing a ‘war against drugs’ since 2006.