The State and the Caudillo

Derrière chaque grand fortune se cache un grand crime.

After Mexico’s institutionalized revolution put a host of bandit warlords or caudillos in power, these mixed with the old bourgeoisie and created a new ruling class that, starting in the 1960s, began to alienate the underprivileged classes of the country via domineering centralization and a closure of the paths to power. Nowadays we have a new iteration of the bandit caudillo: the narco, or drug dealer. This article focuses on a drug dealer in Yuri Herrera’s novel Trabajos del reino and his Kingdom, a nation-within-a-nation in northern Mexico. I will show that this creates the possibility of a political identity for the dispossessed ¹ in a city that, despite having no name and being populated by characters with abstract names, is very similar to Ciudad Juárez. I will suggest that the drug cartels and the state share an organizational structure, the differences between them being mostly stylistic and only secondarily political, and that, in any case, these differences have little significance in comparison with the large number of casualties produced by the war between them—an estimated 150,000 people. ²

Yuri Herrera’s novel is about a singer and composer of corridos, called “the Artist,” who becomes part of the court of “the King” and finds a place there that society has previously denied him. From his position in the “Palace” he is able to observe how the cartel functions and realizes that the members of this para-state are part of a machine that keeps the political entity operating. After a legitimacy crisis involving the King, he realizes that his feeling of belonging was illusory and decides to leave the cartel as the Heir replaces the King. My analysis of the novel focuses on the theory of a social contract from the perspective of those who are not represented in formal government structures or in the society to which they allegedly belong. Using E. K. Hobsbawm’s notion of the “social bandit,” I will seriously question the concept of the law and its justification with regard to the groups that are part of the social fabric but not part of the institutions that produce the laws that rule them.

Best known from the Robin Hood archetype, the social bandit is a category developed by Hobsbawm (1965) in an exploration of the way bandits interact with the population to create a proto-state within the state. In his analysis of Italian robbers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Hobsbawm shows how these characters place themselves between the people and the state, replacing the latter while carrying out some governmental functions on behalf of the excluded. In his analysis of Carlo Levi’s (1963) book Christ Stopped at Eboli, which deals with the bandits of southern Italy, Hobsbawm discusses “how profound the memory of the bandit-heroes is among the Southern peasants, for whom the ‘years of the brigands’ are among the few parts of history which are alive and real, because, unlike the kings and wars, they belong to them” (1965: 21). The affinity of these characters to a population that the state views as surplus while nevertheless benefiting from its production and consumption generates the illusion of a community with something akin to genuine political representation.

In Hobsbawm’s reading of Levi’s text, the environment is significantly, if deceptively, similar to our subject area. The peasants surrounding Levi are regarded as people who cannot escape their place of origin; they are residues, surplus. As Levi (1963: 28) puts it, “Those who are left in the villages are the discarded, who have no talents, the physically deformed, the inept and the lazy; greed and boredom combine to dispose them to evil. . . . It is, therefore, a matter of life and death to have the rule in their own hands, to hoist themselves or their relatives and friends into top jobs.” The narrative generated by this explanation of the state of things creates a vicious circle whereby those who are already alienated become increasingly excluded for the same reason that they are being barred from privilege. The use of words like “inept” and “lazy” contributes to the naturalization of this imbalance. At the same time that he is trying to revalue the inhabitants of Gagliano and other villages in southern Italy, Levi reproduces the paradigm that reinforces the status quo. His assertion that Gagliano was “a tiny village far from the traffic of men; the passions that reigned there were simpler and more primitive, but no less intense than those of the world without” (1963: 22) is a significant logical leap, one that takes off from the fact that the subjects are poor. As does Hobsbawm, Levi finds a deep affinity between the society of the have-nots and his own but is unable to acknowledge it in these terms and has to describe the former as “primitive.”

When Hobsbawm tries to explain how the bandit conceives law and lawlessness, he is forced to fall back on the notion of a stateless society. Thus he points to the origin of the legal alienation of these bandits: “In stateless societies, where ‘law’ takes the form of blood-feud or negotiated settlement between the kin of offenders and the kin of victims, those who kill are not outlaws but, as it were, belligerents. They only become outlaws, and punishable as such, where they are judged by a criterion of public law and order which is not theirs” (Hobsbawm, 1959: 7). The criterion of public law and order that categorizes them as fugitives or beings outside the law does not belong to them; a different approach is required, but the same external criterion is still applied. “Stateless” is a term that indicates precisely what this society is not and manages to avoid the need to consider what it is.

Herrera’s King comes from a sector that is often euphemistically described, in political discourse, as “poorly represented”—poorly represented in legislative bodies and separated from the making of the laws that govern it or, as the Artist, reflecting on his relationship with “respectable” people (those with money), puts it (Herrera, 2010: 58),

So they do not want him . . . so he is a small fry for the moneyed, so he makes their ears itch. It was far from the hundredth time they had scorned him, but this time he didn’t feel humiliated, he felt provoked, he felt aggrandized. He clenched his teeth and realized, all of a sudden, that he could think with great clarity. Being rejected by others defined him.

Considering oneself as rejected by the moneyed, the ones who have access to the nation, means that the law is identified with the enemy. As in the days of the charros, the law is seen as a vehicle of violence against one’s group. Most of the criticism of drug trafficking focuses (not unreasonably) on the violence generated by the traffickers; few analyses pay attention to the horrific violence inflicted on the groups from which the cartels conscript their soldiers. At the same time that the cartels violate the social contract implicitly assumed by the state, the state breaks it as far as the “poorly represented” communities are concerned.

In many cases, this situation leads those who are forced into this role to seek their own cultural representation in opposition to the society that excludes them, leading to what the press has called a “narco culture.” This term may be inadequate for referring to the complex sociocultural environment of organized crime in Mexico. Decidedly polymorphous, this manifestation of popular culture cannot be reduced to a single definition. In the complex system that surrounds the drug trade, as Astorga (1995: 24) points out, “the terms [‘traffic’ and ‘narco’] only partially signify what they purport to cover, but their symbolic power makes us believe that what they actually do is summed up in what they say.” The narco is not only a drug dealer but a guarantor of social order, sometimes murderer and sometimes benefactor—an outlaw in almost all his manifestations but occasionally also a source of law, as was Pablo Escobar during his stint in the Colombian Congress. Built in opposition to the culture of the state and strongly regional in nature, the narco culture combines elements of a popular culture that precedes the dominance of organized crime in Mexico with the definition of a region, the Mexican North (including the U.S. Southwest), the political propaganda of organized crime groups, a ballad tradition (the corrido) that can be traced back to medieval romances or the Claros varones de Castilla, and many others, although the privileged representations of the narco emphasize his relationship with hired assassins.

Trabajos del reino is a milestone in the literature surrounding the narco culture, for Herrera refuses to place it within the presumed criminal framework imposed by the nation-state. His work becomes part of a political discourse based on the point of view of inadequately represented political subjects. Rather than finding stories of hired assassins, we are taken to a different arena that, although perhaps erroneously, is ascribed to social bandits. This way of conceiving the segments of society that the system fails to incorporate not only separates this stateless society from the one possessing a state but renders it dependent, in need of guidance. That this population does not feel that it belongs in the social contract should not come as a surprise.

When from the center of the country the inhabitants of the Northern slums are viewed as stateless barbarians or social bandits, we fall into an error similar to that noted by Juan Pablo Dabove (2007: 54) regarding Darwin’s description of the Rosistas in Argentina: “The analogy between Rosas’s army and a gang of bandits is for Darwin little more than a commonplace literary hyperbole well suited to the exotic surroundings. Moreover, by quoting Salvatore Rosa, the seventeenth-century painter whose images of bandits and forbidding landscapes were well known, Darwin was linking the Argentine rural scene to European classical art.” Here, of course, we are not dealing with a Rosista army or Rosa’s painting, Colombian drug lords, or fugitives from Hollywood. In spite of all the similarities, it is inappropriate to resort to the Robin Hood archetype when speaking of Herrera’s King. If we attempt to describe the novel via familiar archetypes of social banditry we may fail to understand what is happening in the text and, more important, the project that the protagonist, the Artist, pursues throughout the narrative: self-representation. Simply put, he seeks to represent himself and his environment freely.

Representation is central to the ideological constructions of the King and his court. The actual situation faced by poor people in drug territories is not very different from that portrayed in the novel; in the midst of the prevailing violence caused by lack of membership in the surrounding society, mass migration, and the absence of positive prospects, all poor young men have been criminalized a priori. Those under 30 are barred from any participation in the social contract. In political discourse, “Every young man executed is considered, a priori, a member of a criminal gang. This presumed lack of innocence turns these male corpses into mere bodies lacking subjectivity, a biography, and, often, funeral honors. Their citizenship denied, they are reduced to thugs. In this drama of violence, the voice most ignored is that of young people” (Domínguez Ruvalcaba, 2010).

This environment leads to the flowering of parallel societies, and some people in this situation are forced, willingly or not, to play a role similar to that of the King. Hobsbawm’s analysis addresses and separates the functions of this archetype ³ and is useful in that many of its theoretical foci can be applied to the figure of the drug lord. One of Hobsbawm’s proposed archetypal requirements for the social bandit can be seen in Herrera’s novel: “The noble robber begins his career of outlawry not by crime, but as the victim of injustice, or through being persecuted by the authorities for some act which they, but not the custom of his people, consider as criminal” (Hobsbawm, 1959: 47). Drug traffickers find themselves profoundly dislocated between the system of values through which their society operates and the laws imposed on them. While other crimes committed are recognized as such, the crime that identifies the drug trafficker (since he is not being prosecuted for murder, kidnapping, or illegal weapon possession) produces justified resentment, as Hobsbawm (1986), writing on Colombia, points out:

As they see it, cocaine is just one more crop in the history of tropical countries producing such crops, from sugar to tobacco through coffee. Exporting it is a business like any other, and in this instance one that exists simply because the U.S. insists on snorting or smoking the stuff in ever more astronomic quantities. Left to themselves and the principles of Adam Smith, the consortia of Medellín investors would no more see themselves as criminals than did the Dutch or English venturers into the Indies trade (including opium), who organized their speculative cargoes in much the same way. The trade rightly resents being called a mafia.

The King sees himself as a legitimate businessman and feels that others, the “respectable” people, are hypocrites—people who seek to apply to him a value system different from the one that they may or may not, depending on the circumstances, apply to themselves. This drives him to work with culture producers to create a system of meaning that is consistent with the world in which he lives.

This separation between law and reality creates a mythology that provides a bipolar view of the world (Astorga, 1995: 12): “The distance between the actual traffickers and their world and the symbolic production that speaks of them is so great that there seems to be no other actual and feasible way of referring to the subject than a mythological discourse the poles of which could be represented by legal codification and drug-trafficker corridos.” Inasmuch as the social construct seeks to create a legitimate view of reality as conceived from and about drug trafficking, as is the case with the Artist in the King’s court, we can approach the novel as addressing these conflicts of representation in a way that is analogous to that of the narcocorridos. This genre of epic poetry often serves as a political form of resistance and a source of unity for the less privileged sectors in a state that barely takes them into consideration.

It is not surprising that communities that are massively criminalized, such as undocumented immigrants or the young men of northern Mexico, who are readily assumed to be criminals if they die in violent circumstances, do not feel part of society. ⁴ The a priori regarding of these subjects as outlaws further erodes the possibility of incorporating them into a legal framework, creating illegal identities inspired by persecution and deliberately erroneous representations. Ramón Saldívar (2006: 152) gives an example of how banditry as a political category has been used by both the Mexican and the U.S. authorities to delegitimize sociopolitical movements such as the Aniceto Pizaña uprising in Texas: “Dismissed in official histories by Anglo-American historians as ‘Mexican bandits,’ the sediciosos [seditionists] were in fact acting under a carefully considered revolutionary manifesto, the ‘Plan de San Diego.’ That manifesto called for a union of Texas Mexicans with American Indians, African Americans, and Asian Americans to fight social and political injustice.” Since the rioters were classified as bandits rather than as a political movement and their leader as a plunderer and not as a warlord, consideration of their political project was rejected.

These stories of persecution and extralegality have contributed to the environment in which drug traffickers can take advantage of imaginaries of illegality to develop their approaches to sovereignty. ⁵ As Cabañas (2008: 525) puts it, “The issue of ‘illegal identity’ has marked the metaphorical connections between drug trafficking and illegal immigration. Both were crucial aspects for a Northern, border audience because by eluding the ‘rinches’ or ‘rangers’ the drug lord hero offered a model that stressed the Mexican’s resilience in the face of persecution.” The tendency to establish fixed sides supplies a large part of the discursive basis for the environment created by drug lords. When one of his followers, the Pocho (named for his use of Spanish heavily interspersed with English), who has worked for law enforcement agencies on the other side of the border, finds himself in a position to capture the King, the narrator explains that he suddenly realizes that the status of “good guy” is arbitrary—that he operates in more than one system and can choose or negotiate between them. Even so, it would be difficult to argue that the King is an example of a primitive tendency toward state construction. Rather, he evidences the decline of the nation-state under which he operates and the erosion of the social contract that that state uses to justify its existence, giving rise to other systems that stand as representatives and organizers of the communities in question.

Thus the caudillo begins constructing a parallel state, one that enables the community to live its own history and replaces the nation-state with a popular political organization that can operate in its place or at least appear to do so. At this point the cultural products known as narcocorridos (drug-trafficker corridos) come into conflict with cultural products of the nation-state such as journalism. Cabañas (2008: 527) says that “competition between narcocorridos and journalism is commonplace, since the former offer a very tough critique of the co-opting of the media.” As access to the mass media becomes increasingly difficult, the corrido singer campaigns against the media’s apparent legitimacy. As Herrera’s narrator says, “To keep fools busy with clean lies, the Journalist had to make them resemble truth. The real news was his, the subject of corridos” (2010: 35). Here the presumed objectivity of journalism and the subjectivity of narrative have changed places as their styles are employed to address the field of action originally assigned to their opposites.

In this environment, corridos become a way of telling true stories, even if they are fictitious. Corridos such as Mario Quintero Lara’s 2008 “Propiedad privada” (Private Property), performed by Los Tucanes de Tijuana, represent a political manifesto, a proposal for a social and commercial organization that explicitly states its operating values: “He who won’t pay won’t cross the line/and he who crosses the line will pay/You’d better be careful, friends/so that nothing will befall you/You know this is your house/but it’s private property.” This is a product that closely follows the key economic doctrine of the continent, neoliberalism, which favors private ownership as its main right and laissez-faire as the organizational system of the body politic. Other corridos chronicle the deeds of important characters in the drug wars, sometimes in much more powerful ways than those of the official discourse. In Gerardo Ortiz’s 2009 “En preparación” (In Preparation), performed by Banda MS, for example, the degree to which the war is based on violence is clear: “If you’re no good at killing/then you’re good for killing.” This corrido also remarks on the esprit de corps among these groups: “I’m preparing/to join the team/My code name is respected/and I carry a badass badge/which is why I’m effective/known in the mafia/number one among my people/active collaborator.” The word “collaborator” is characteristic of this environment and indicates loyalty to a community.

Another very interesting case is Teodoro Bello’s 2009 “La granja” (The Farm), performed by Los Tigres del Norte, in which the collective viewpoint portrayed is distanced from any focal power point, belonging neither to the state nor to any of the established surrounding powers but to the people themselves, equally alienated from the state and the cartels. ⁶ The song portrays the people as farmers alienated from political actors, which are presented as animals: “Nowadays we have/lots of insecurity/because the bitch got loose/made a total mess/among all the farmers/We need to tie her up.” In this corrido we find the cartels represented by a raging bitch, politicians as pigs, the media as chickens, and the president as a fox. This allegorical rendition of the Mexican political situation at the end of the 2000s is a parody and a call to action comparable to Orwell’s Animal Farm.

As we can see from these few examples, corridos do not all have the same kind of message, nor are they all located on only one side of the border. The farm, for example, is about the Mexican body politic, with Los Angeles as the place of enunciation. Not all corridos come from the same community, although generally speaking they tend to appeal to any of the political collectives in the territory. The people spoken of are a group that sees itself as a deeply regional as well as deeply transnational. In a way, the role of the corrido has to do with the creation of an identity, a citizenry that does not belong to any of the states that exclude it. “This step of becoming ‘a citizen’ is presented as the corrido’s project: restoring the pride and dignity of the individual in the transnational space” (Cabañas, 2008: 533). It is this drive to find pride and dignity in the local environment that provides the drug dealer with a certain legitimacy in his progress toward the image of the caudillo while his sights are set on pulling together the significant system around him like Žižek’s (1991: 19) monarch: “The King is undoubtedly the point of the ‘suture’ of social totality, the point whose intervention transforms a contingent collection of individuals into a rational totality.” The naturalizing function of the state creates value for its members in that it organizes the relationship between the social body and reality; at the same time, it diminishes that value and makes this relationship happen through the King or his symbol. Žižek (1991: 20) tells us how this function forces the members of the state to justify their membership in the body politic:

Precisely as such, as the point which “sutures” Nature and Culture, as the point at which a cultural-symbolic function (that of being a king) immediately coincides with a natural determination . . ., the King radically “desutures” all other subjects; makes them lose their roots in some preordained organic social body that would fix their place in society in advance and forces them to acquire their social status by means of hard labour. It is therefore not sufficient to define the King as the only immediate junction of Nature and Culture—the point is rather that this very gesture by means of which the King is posited as their “suture” de-sutures all other subjects, makes them lose their footing; throws them into a void where they must, so to speak, create themselves.

Herrera’s characters feel themselves clearly subordinated to the King. They all have a role to play in the court and understand that they owe this position to his power. The Jeweler, for example, recognizes his role, which is to be available on the days when court is held: “This is what we’re good for . . . to give him power. On his own, what good is any one of us? Nothing. But in him we are strong, in him, in his blood” (Herrera, 2010: 60). In more than one way, the drug lord takes the place of an absent nation-state, developing a kind of corporate state that carries out its functions, administers justice, and restructures the social order in a way that favors some of the dispossessed. ⁷ Hobsbawm (1965: 21) reports something similar with regarding to one of the Italian social bandits: “When he arrived in any village, it is reported ‘he had a tribunal set up, heard the litigants, pronounced sentence and fulfilled all the offices of a magistrate.’ He is even supposed to have prosecuted common-law offenders. He ordered grain-prices to be lowered, confiscated the grain-stores held by the rich and distributed them to the poor.” Herrera (2010: 59) describes the King and his activities in a similar fashion: “Deep in the room, surrounded by the Court, the King looked everyone in the eye, listened to their pleas, gestured to the Manager and the Manager took note.” The King here serves as an arbiter of society, the personification of an immediate and decisive state that provides efficient and necessary services for its client population. ⁸

Thus, the cultural products of caudillo states such as the one portrayed by Herrera point us toward notions of sovereignty and politics rather than banditry. After all, if it looks like a state, sounds like a state, and smells like a state, why is it not a state? And if the state acts like a kind of social bandit, sounds like one, and smells like one, can we not then describe both of the states involved as bandits (social or otherwise)? This kind of “banditry,” perhaps best described as caudillismo, is not a primitive version of the state; rather, it represents a tradition and a path toward political thought much more pertinent to actual state building than the fictions proffered by social contracts or Hobbes’s Leviathan. When Charles Tilly (1985: 174) talks about the state as a crystallization of the relation between organized crime and its constituents, he emphasizes the tendency to consider external problems much more important than internal ones, giving greater weight to external agents that could replace it than to the individuals that, in theory, should pose a bigger threat. The nation-state is much more like a cartel than like a social contract.

The characters in the novel choose the functions of a state for themselves and their political organizations in order to set themselves up as the main referents for the body politic to which they belong. The lack of ability or willingness on the part of any of these nation-states to recognize the conflicts of most of its constituents represents the breaking point of its political legitimacy and the fact that the caudillo, “bandit,” or founder occupies a position of legitimized power. The situation is similar to the one described by Dabove (2007: 139) in his discussion of Astucia: “The law of the bandits is the ‘original’ law, a law in connection with justice, emanating from the constituent power of the insurgent multitude, before the constituted power lost contact with its origin and became a husk or a skeleton, one mobilized for perverse purposes.” In a way, according to this argument, we could say that what is sometimes described as a proto-state is even closer to the original law, since this aspect is what appears in the use of the legitimacy machinery (corridos) employed by Herrera’s cartel, building legal systems and laws opposed to the laws and systems of the nation-state within which their own states exist. The “bandits” in question present a solution to a problem that the nation-state is not solving or perhaps even acknowledging. ⁹ Constituted not as a force of chaos but as a necessary tool of environmental order, they do not quite conform to Hobsbawm’s definition of the social bandit.

Similarly, speaking of the bandits of nineteenth-century Mexico, Dabove (2007: 204) reflects that they may have constituted the power behind the system organizing the modernization process pushed and then rejected by the Díaz regime: “Order and progress are what bandits bring to Mexico, because in [Manuel Payno’s novel] Los bandidos de Río Frío [in contrast to Hobsbawm’s version] banditry does not resist modernity.” The nation-state, with its projects of improvement and economic expansion, is, for the King, incidental at best. In the absence of prospects within a nation-state that appears strange and foreign, the emergence of an independent parallel organization presents itself as a fair and useful alternative. As the King tells the Artist, “Why would you sweeten these fuckers’ ears? It’s enough that what we are fits us. Let them be scared, let the decent folk be astonished, put them under. Why else would you be an artist?” (Herrera, 2010: 62). This exemplifies the rebellion against the representation of reality exercised by the instruments of the nation-state. And that is exactly the nightmare of the state, of the “lettered city”: being replaced as barbarism presents itself as more civilized than civilization and the informal state becomes a sign of order. Herrera (2010: 64) shows us how the Artist conceives this fear of the other:

They are scared One might bring unto himself everybody’s flesh, that That One will be keeper of everybody’s strength. They are scared of who he is, and how he is, and how he says it. . . . They’d rather hear just the pretty parts, right?, but ours are not songs to get permission. A corrido isn’t a picture looking pretty on the wall. It’s a name and a weapon.

Funny they’re all scared.

Perhaps, who knows?, in the end they’ll find out they’re maggot meat.

The fear described here is at the center of the power that law and letters give the state, the representation of “All” in “One.” Reflecting on this, we can refer to the events narrated in Nightmares of the Lettered City, in which it is precisely those who have inherited the lettered city and the mechanisms that deny power to the dispossessed who are frightened by the corridos. The use of letters and their institutions to create the spectacle of a city, a state, and a nation that are then superimposed on the experience of the majority of the population loses most of its ideological power as it loses its referents in reality and as other discourses expose this loss. The legitimacy crisis faced by the depopulated lettered city leads to the emergence of alternative powers with their own claims to legitimacy.

In this representational conflict, the figure of the Artist is trapped between the two bandits, the “respectable” state and the King. On one hand, the respectable state is food for maggots, disassociated from the reality of most of its population—a seller of protection unable to deliver the goods it advertises. On the other hand, the King is the central node of an organized crime group. The legitimizing propaganda that the Artist produces for the King may indicate the decline and the criminality of the respectable state, but this does not make the King any less a criminal, even though he is ideologically closer to the Artist than the nation-state leaders are. The woman with whom he is sleeping reminds him of this when she says, “What else will it be, you dumb fuck? . . . That they’re sons of bitches and you are a clown”. (Herrera, 2010: 68). Her calling him a clown refers to his inability to control the state machinery in any meaningful way, regardless of his beliefs. He keeps the machinery going but does not influence its direction.

There is a parallel story in corridos operating outside of Herrera’s novel. Songs such as Teodoro Bello’s 1993 “Pacas de a kilo” (One-Kilo Bales), for example, create an identity discourse around the figure of the caudillo/bandit/drug trafficker. When Los Tigres del Norte sing, “I like riding through the mountains,/I grew up among the bushes,/I learned my math out there/just by counting sacks,” they are placing the drug dealer within a tradition of heroism related to the foundational narratives of the Mexicans who inhabited the lands north of the plateau, including the nineteenth-century nomadic bandits. Interestingly, this figure is linked to a landscape that binds it to the territory and separates it from the respectable state, which is seen as belonging to faraway Mexico City. The traditional Northern agricultural occupations are also linked to drug trafficking: “Very close to the mountain range,/I have a cattle ranch/cattle that will get no ticks/that I take abroad/How pretty look my cows/with little lamb tails.” ¹⁰ Like the cowboy, the drug dealer is a merchant, transporting desired goods from their place of origin to a place of consumption. All this creates an imaginary that invests him with positive regional values.

This signifying device suggests a revolutionary potential that it unfortunately does not have. As the Artist discovers, the finery worn by the drug lord does not change him any more than the spectacular apparatus with which the United States and Mexico invest their presidents changes those presidents. Watching the King deposed and replaced by the Heir, the Artist “had a minutely detailed image of the King’s face. As if through a magnifying lens he saw the loose tissue of his skin, of as precarious a constitution as that of anyone in the place” (Herrera, 2010: 95). He thus realizes that the epic narrative his corridos have contributed to the Kingdom is to be found only in songs. Recognizing that, like any politician, the King pursued the interests of others only in terms of his own, the Artist understands that “the only peculiar thing was him, who saw it all from the outside. The only one who was special was him” (Herrera, 2010: 94). The cartel is too much like a nation-state.

Failure to recognize the similarities between the state and its bandit counterpart becomes a blind spot that prevents the creation of a stable environment that can offer peace to its citizens; it impedes the establishment of a social contract. The construction of others as ignorant and politically disabled leads to a political corporation built on an empty historical dialectic, one that lacks memory and does not recognize the lives of all the subjects that make up the body politic. If we cannot understand what is going on in the head of a man who is willing to leave his position in the state and enter a political organization so brutal that it uses heads to communicate its intentions, how can we understand the conflicts posed by banditry in this country? There is a tendency to use ignorance and poverty as explanations for the state of desperation in which a large sector of the population lives, alienated from a state that cannot provide a solution to a political conflict between two socioeconomic and cultural forces that, at least in principle, should be made up of equals. There is a tendency to criminalize a priori all those who are pushed to the periphery of the social contract, generating a political reaction that answers violence with violence. Organized crime and social banditry, the nightmares of the modern state, are generated by the same process and for the same purpose. It is not that the sleep of reason produces monsters but that the dream is seen from the outside. The cartel is founded upon gaps in the nation-state.