The Narcomedia

From Narco Society to Network Society

As readers of the narcomedia we would do well to begin with context, that is, by framing our understanding of narcomessaging in terms of its historical precedents and cultural setting. Quite simply: where do the narcomedia come from?

One might, for instance, begin with a deep history of the meaning and politics of death in Mexico. Here we would follow the historical anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz, who calls Mexico a “nation [that has chosen] Death for its tutelary sign” (2005: 27). “The cult of death,” Lomnitz writes, “could be thought of as the oldest, most seminal, and most authentic element of Mexico’s popular culture” (24). We might juxtapose the macabre messages to the traditional offerings and festivities of the Day of the Dead, to the iconic works of the famous late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century printmaker, illustrator, and political cartoonist José Guadalupe Posada, or to the unorthodox popular veneration of Santa Muerte, or “Saint Death” (Chesnut, 2012). Or, following the historian Pablo Piccato, we might situate them in the context of nota roja, or crime-beat journalism—the popular press tradition of explicit, graphic, and sensationalist coverage of crime, violence, and gory accidents (Piccato, 2011).

None of these precedents, however, explains why the appearance of mensajes, mantas, and videos has been attended by such a degree of shock and sense of deep impending crisis. Here we might place the messages in the context of the history of drug trafficking in Mexico, where the practice has deep historical roots in connection with cross-border contraband smuggling (Knight, 2012). With the heyday of the Colombian cartels in the 1970s and 1980s, Mexican traffickers acted as intermediaries in the transnational drug trade. In the 1990s—with the Colombian cartels on the wane—Mexican traffickers took increasing control of the trade, soon achieving unprecedented wealth and power in Mexico. The rise of the Mexican cartels was driven by developments in the transnational cocaine trade but abetted by economic and political changes that made Mexico into a hothouse for trafficking, especially in the era of neoliberal reforms and capitalist restructuring, which reached its apex in the presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Measures, including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), that aimed to facilitate the movement of capital and commodities between Mexico and the United States also facilitated the movement of drugs, money, and arms (in 1998 a confidential U.S. Customs report quoted a onetime Drug Enforcement Administration [DEA] agent as calling NAFTA “a deal made in narco heaven” [Eaton, 1998]). Bribery, cronyism, and protection rackets opened the government to the influence and money of the ascendant traffickers; the privatization of public agencies and deregulation of financial institutions eased money laundering. While the neoliberal reform measures facilitated the continued enrichment of the wealthy, for the working and lower middle classes the progressive dismantling of agrarian ejidos, unions, and many of the Mexican government’s long-standing mechanisms for distributing wealth and supporting subsistence and employment had the opposite effect (Otero, 2004). From 1982 to 1996 real wages in Mexico dropped by 74 percent (Hanson and Spilimbergo, 1999: 1343), creating a reserve army of young unemployed or underemployed men, some of whom found work with the traffickers.

The expansion of drug trafficking in Colombia and Mexico has spawned an unrestrainable tendency to neologism. A slew of words beginning with the prefix “narco” has been invented to evoke the pervasive presence and influence of trafficking or money derived from it. Such terms as “narcoterrorism,” “narcoguerrilla,” and “narcostate” have spread quickly throughout the hemisphere. In Mexico, terms like narcotienda, narcomandatario, and narcogobierno have been joined by words like narcocorridos (for corridos, or popular ballads, glorifying the traffickers [e.g., Edberg, 2004; Wald, 2002]), narcomansión (a palatial home purchased with the profits from trafficking), and narcosanto (Jesús Malverde, considered to be a patron saint of smugglers and traffickers in Sinaloa)—all of them signs of the burgeoning of what has been referred to as a distinctively Mexican “narcoculture.”

Within this lexicon, narcovideo, narcomensaje, and narcomanta are distinguished by their recent pedigree. The term narcovideo made its first appearance in early 2005, and narcomensaje began to appear in the media in mid-2006; both climbed steadily in frequency of usage thereafter. Narcomanta seems to be of even more recent coinage, making a first appearance in mid-2007 but achieving frequent and steady usage in the media only from April 2008 forward. The recency of these terms, in distinction from other words in the narco-lexicon, suggests a correlation with one “context” above all: that of the advent of Mexico’s so-called drug war and the forms of violence associated with it. These stem from increasing competition between traffickers over trafficking routes and from the progressive militarization of Mexican counternarcotics policy beginning in the last years of Vicente Fox’s presidency. The full-scale onset of the “drug war” is generally dated to December 2006, when Mexican President Felipe Calderón assumed the presidency and announced a crackdown on the traffickers (Grayson, 2010; Serrano, 2012). Since then, notwithstanding occasional, largely theatrical public demonstrations of the restoration of law and order in particular locations (Gibler, 2011: 68), the crackdown has escalated into something like a civil war, characterized by more than 60,000 killings, dramatic armed conflicts between and among various traffickers and military, security, and police forces, assassinations and human rights abuses by all sides, and military occupation of large swaths of northern Mexico (Campbell, 2009; Grayson, 2010).

The first narcovideo came to light in January 2005, when the Dallas Morning News received a copy of a DVD bearing a video that soon appeared on YouTube as well. Likely produced under the inspiration of the videotaped execution of Nicholas Berg and others in Iraq and Pakistan by Al Qaeda operatives in 2004, the video depicted the torture and execution of a group of four presumed Zetas (a group led by renegade deserters from Mexico’s special forces, the Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales [see Grayson and Logan, 2012]). While not yet labeled as such, the characteristics of what subsequently came to be called a narcovideo were already clear: graphic depiction of torture and execution, verbal exhortations regarding the power of a rival cartel (here the Sinaloa cartel), and production of a digitized document for the purpose of subsequent dissemination. Of 11 men arrested for presumed involvement, 8 were agents of the Agencia Federal de Investigación (Federal Investigation Agency—AFI), who were accused of being in the pay of the Sinaloa cartel to target its rivals, the Gulf cartel and the Zetas. Thus, in the first narcovideo, the tangled identifications of victims and executioners alike—as both security forces and hitmen—suggested the permeability of the boundaries between the parties to the conflict.

The narcomensaje made its debut a few months later. In the state of Guerrero on April 20, 2006, two policemen who had been involved a few days before in a shootout with drug dealers were captured and beheaded. Their heads were thrown through the doorway of a government office accompanied by a red sign with black lettering that warned, “So that you learn to respect [us]” (Habana de los Santos, 2006). This first narcomensaje was not named as such, though, until the tactic was repeated, soon becoming a central technique of violence within the repertoire of various trafficking groups. In the state of Michoacán, the cartel La Familia made spectacular and frequent use of the tactic. On September 6, 2006, its men threw five heads onto the dance floor of a crowded dance bar, accompanied by a placard that read “La Familia does not kill for money, does not kill women, does not kill the innocent, those who die are those who must die, let it be known by all, this is: divine justice.” Over the course of 2006, at least 17 decapitations in Michoacán, most incorporating narcomensajes, were attributed to La Familia. Some narcovideos have featured embedded narcomensajes in the form of signs featured in the videos or even messages written on the skin of victims. Decapitation, dismemberment, and the deployment of narcomensajes have been tightly linked as key elements of what Paula Ovalle (2010) has called the “visual narrative” of the killings.

The term narcomanta, for its part, was first used in June 2007 to refer to large sheets bearing narcomessages hung in public places—by major highways or near the offices of news stations. One of the earliest examples, hung opposite the offices of TV Azteca in Mexico City, was a lengthy threat against the Zetas, evidently from a rival group. From mid-2008 on most narcomantas have been large banners that impugn government officials from the president down for connections with one cartel or another and typically demand, in the name of “the people” or “the citizens,” that those officials cease protecting those cartels or resign. While the narcomensajes are typically handwritten and singular in content, the narcomantas are formulaic in composition and phrasing, to the extent that large numbers of identically or nearly identically phrased narcomantas have been displayed simultaneously at multiple locations in particular cities or even in multiple cities. In August 2008, for instance, narcomantas attacking the federal government for presumed collaboration with the Sinaloa cartel appeared in various states. Presumably the work of the Gulf cartel, the mantas showed a striking degree of uniformity in content and wording. One of them admonished President Calderón, “If you want an end to the anarchy of narcotrafficking, why doesn’t your government attack narcos like Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán? . . . Your government protects them and they enjoy absolute impunity. Citizens are fed up with this.” In the immediate wake of Enrique Peña Nieto’s assumption of the presidency in late 2012, after a campaign in which he had promised to reassess Calderón’s drug war policies, mantas posted by the trafficking group known as the Knights Templar (Caballeros Templarios) in the states of Michoacán and Guerrero welcomed the new president with an offer and a threat: “If you fulfill what you promised in your campaign, we will hand over our weapons, leaving our security in your hands. But if not, then once again we will defend our lands” (La Jornada, May 14, 2012).

In the rhetoric of the drug war and, indeed, that of most analyses of the violence, the videos, mensajes, and mantas tend to be depicted as the product of one side of the “war” (the narco traffickers) in distinction from the other (the government). The effect of these gruesome messages, however, has often been to belie such clear distinctions, whether in the context of the narcomedia or in that of the wider “war,” showing both to be staged in what Javier Auyero (2007: 32) has called the “gray area where the activities of those perpetrating the violence and those presumably seeking to control them coalesce” (see also Pansters, 2012: 24). Narcovideos have sometimes been produced by present or onetime members of the police or the military, and mensajes and mantas link elements of the police or government with one cartel or another, often referring to the president as a “narco-president” or “narco-leader.” Authors of narcomantas often don the mantle of “the people”—itself a gray-zone entity—in leveling accusations at the government, turning them into what Campbell (in this issue) calls “the main face of public opposition to the government today.” Undermining characterizations of the conflict as a war with clear sides, narcomensaje, narcovideo, and narcomanta become expressions of what Michael Taussig (1984: 492) has called the “epistemic murk” typical of cultures of terror and their spaces of death.

On no occasion has the conflict been murkier than in the aftermath of the killing of Arturo Beltrán Leyva, a.k.a. “El Jefe de Jefes,” the leader of the Beltrán Leyva cartel. On December 16, 2009, he fell to a hail of gunfire during an attack by 200 Mexican marines, two navy helicopters, and two army tanks that had cornered him in an apartment building in Cuernavaca. The attack, as has been confirmed by a released Wikileaks diplomatic cable, was made possible by a joint U.S.-Mexican intelligence and surveillance operation. Immediately after Beltrán Leyva’s death someone—perhaps soldiers or forensic doctors or the masked men wearing civilian clothes who appeared in several photos of the aftermath of the event—rearranged the Jefe’s body, pulling his pants down and placing his body in a splayed position. Bloodied high-denomination Mexican and U.S. currency was piled atop the corpse.

A series of photographs was posted on the Internet within hours of Beltrán Leyva’s death. The most widely circulated image shared with the narcomensaje the characteristics of bodily desecration, the proximate placement of a textual message (here in the form of the bills—with the story they told of the drug trade’s true rewards), and even, in effect, the decapitation of the victim by the manner of the photograph’s framing. Against any representation of the violence as a war of government versus narco and good guys versus bad guys, the photographs, in the words of the writer and critic Carlos Monsiváis (2009), put on display the “barbaric semiotics” of state violence. The federal government quickly disavowed the photographs and condemned their staging and release; in the ensuing days, Beltrán Leyva’s men targeted the families of soldiers involved in the operation, killing the mother and several relatives of one deceased marine, and subsequently posted a narcomanta on a school threatening further reprisals. The denouement of the episode may certainly be read as evidence of the inability of the current Mexican government to legitimate itself through the violence of the “war” (Jiménez del Val, 2011). Yet it was also a demonstration of how the narcomensaje might become not merely a tactic employed by the drug traffickers against each other or the government but a potent technique in the repertoires of all parties to the conflict.

Official State and mainstream media discourse in Mexico in the United States tends to reify and obscure the violence of the “war,” labeling it, along with the narcomedia, as a product of the drug traffickers and their struggles against government attempts to protect or restore order. Events like the killing of Beltrán Leyva, however, suggest the critical role of violence as a practice of state making in contemporary Mexico—a practice through which the Mexican state is being not only defended but refashioned (cf. Skurski and Coronil, 2005). To read mensajes, videos, or mantas in the context of the “drug war” is to interpret them not only in terms of their literal meaning or authorship or even their “barbaric semiotics” but also, more importantly, in terms of their social and political effects. One of their primary effects—as in the display of Beltrán Leyva’s body—is to force viewers and readers out of the binaristic representations of the “war” to ask a most unsettling question about the violence, about the narcos, and about the state itself: Who is who?

Our reading of such narcomensajes would remain limited, however, if we were to consider only their content as signifiers of “drug war” violence. We must also consider the form of their production and circulation: the medium, as Marshall McLuhan (1964) would say, is a large part of their message. Here, mensaje, video, and manta must be understood in the context of the transforming terms of the use of and access to digital media in Mexico, as part and parcel of the global advent of what some, following Manuel Castells (1996), have called the ”network society.” In their combination, technological, economic, and social changes make possible what Castells termed the “culture of real virtuality”: “a system,” he writes evocatively if problematically, “in which reality itself (that is people’s material/symbolic existence) is entirely captured, fully immersed in a virtual image setting, in the world of make believe, in which appearances are not just on the screen through which experience is communicated, but they become the experience” (373).

In 2000, only 5 percent of Mexico’s population had access to the Internet; by 2010, according to the World Bank, one-third of the population had access (World Bank, 2012). As of June 2012, more than 33 million people, 30 percent of the population, were members of Facebook (Socialbakers, 2012). Mexico thus ranks fifth in the world in total number of Facebook users. Such developments are part of the rise of the new media—new technologies of information and communication related to the digital revolution and especially to the mediating role of computers and software in media and cultural production. Some of the characteristics of the new media in distinction from traditional mass media, according to analysts such as Lev Manovich (2002), are virtuality, immediacy, interactivity, automatization, and transcodification. Henry Jenkins (2008) has pointed to what he calls a “convergence culture” made manifest not only in the capacity of the media for multimedia hybridization but also in the growing ability of consumers or users to take a much more active role in the use and transformation of the media.

The timing of these developments—which have played in counterpoint to the rise of the Mexican drug cartels—is no accident. In 1990—as part of the government’s raft of neoliberal privatization schemes—Telmex, Mexico’s public telephone company, was sold to the wealthy entrepreneur Carlos Slim in a deal leveraged with loans from the World Bank. Telmex strengthened its monopoly in the wake of privatization, coming to control about 90 percent of land lines. In 1995 it made its entry into the cellular phone market, quickly acquiring about 80 percent of that market, and it now controls over 80 percent of the Internet services market as well. As Telmex completed its transformation from public utility into a major transnational communications empire, Slim became the wealthiest man in the world, a title he has enjoyed for several years. Despite laws dictating the separation of communications from content media (television, radio, newspapers), in recent years Telmex has been engaged in a struggle of monopolies as it has sought entry into those domains, and the “duopoly” of Mexico’s two principal media companies—Televisa and TV Azteca, which as corporate media consortia have consolidated their control over most mainstream media outlets—has reciprocated with attempts to enter the mobile phone market (Villamil, 2010).

In Mexico as in other countries, the recent rise of the Internet and of the new media has had important implications as a key dimension of globalization and technological change: the crisis of mass media such as traditional newspapers, which analysts like Castells (1996) have followed Joseph Schumpeter (1975 [1942]) in terming “creative destruction,” the emergence of new ways of organizing opposition movements or mobilizing “counterpublics” via social media, attempts by governmental institutions to censure or control the use of the Internet in response, and so on. In Mexico as elsewhere, the new media have tended to challenge the dominance of the traditional mass media, and they have also changed the nature and functioning of social networks and mobilizations—even as early as the mid-1990s, with the use of networks and the Internet by Zapatista insurgents in Chiapas (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 2001).

In Mexico, however, one of the distinguishing consequences of the recent expansion of access to the net and to social media has been precisely that of making possible the appearance of narcomessaging. The narcovideo is filmed digitally, with a videocamera or cellular phone; later it is uploaded to YouTube or other web sites for wide dissemination, subject to modifications or commentaries each time it is reproduced in distinct contexts and formats. Narcomensajes and narcomantas, while not digital in their original form, are created in the expectation of their subsequent documentation and circulation in digital form as well. This is the most relevant context for a critical reading of what I have termed the narcomedia: the recent convergence of escalating “drug war” violence with the advent of the new media as the culmination of fundamental economic, political, and social changes in Mexico over the past two decades. Narco society and network society are two sides of a coin.

Incidents of Trafficking in Yucatán

To arrive at a deeper reading of the narcomedia, one must understand not only the social context of the phenomenon but its historicity—a term I adopt here, in part, as a way of qualifying my analysis to this point and particularly sweeping statements about the general characteristics of such abstract entities as “narcomedia,” “media,” and “network society.” Every message is produced in a particular time and place, embedded within and intervening in a surrounding field of social action characterized by what historian and sociologist William Sewell (2005: 9) calls “eventful” temporality. To understand the narcomedia, we must read them not only writ large in the context of national media spectacle but writ small: ethnographically and historically. What might such a reading—less a case study than a reading of messaging as an event, with “micro” dynamics but “macro” consequences and implications—reveal about the narcomedia? I will proceed now with one such reading from a state generally considered to be on the margins of the “drug war”: Yucatán.

On August 28, 2008, two children were walking through scrubby woods adjoining Chichí Suárez, a former hacienda located on the outskirts of Mérida, when they noticed the pile: bodies, scraps of clothes, blankets. There were 11 corpses of 25–30-year-old men; they were naked, leaving their tattoos—figures of dragons and demons—in plain sight. All were headless, with heads nowhere to be found. Nearby were some handwritten signs inscribed with cryptic messages for a named state government official whom I will identify merely as “L.” (“L., you are next”; “L., this is your mirror”). Another decapitated body was found wrapped in a black plastic bag in the town of Buctzotz, 180 kilometers east, also with a narcomensaje: “For violating the agreements, you are guilty of whatever happens, L.” (Diario de Yucatán, La Jornada, El Universal, and El Correo, August 28–30, 2008).

Until August 2008, Yucatán—with much of its formal economy dependent on the tourist industry—enjoyed the reputation of one of the stablest and safest states in Mexico and one almost entirely free of drug-related violence. Perhaps that was why, when U.S. and Mexican authorities drafted plans for intensified antinarcotics-related aid and security coordination in 2007, they did so in Mérida, calling the formal agreement they reached the “Mérida Initiative” (Carlsen, 2008). But that favorable image belied the region’s status as a principal crossroads of the drug trade. By 2006, most cocaine shipped from South America to the United States transited through Yucatán and even Mérida, its capital city. Traffickers unloaded cocaine from planes and ships, which was then stored in the region, before embarking over land routes to Villahermosa, Veracruz, and Matamoros (Jiménez, 2007). While the Gulf cartel initially held uncontested control over the route, in the wake of the arrest of Gulf cartel leader Cárdenas Guillén in 2003 other groups, notably the Federación and the Sinaloa cartel, began to challenge the Gulf’s regional dominance (Grayson, 2010).

By 2008, the competition among the narcos had begun to erupt into open confrontations and violence, including a possible assassination attempt against L. L. had occupied high-level police positions, serving in 1984 as chief of security for then interim governor Víctor Cervera Pacheco and later in 1995 as head of the Department of Safety and Motor Vehicles. Later he served as director of municipal police in Cancún, where he was reputed to be involved in protection rackets involving various drug traffickers and was charged with involvement in the killings of three AFI agents. In May 2007, however, he was cleared of those charges (Noticaribe, May 3, 2007) and soon thereafter assumed his position as director of Yucatán’s Department of Public Safety, under Governor Ivonne Ortega Pacheco of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party—PRI). In January 2008, when several heavily armed gunmen were captured by police near a restaurant where L. was dining, Governor Ortega was at pains to deny that the episode was a botched assassination owed to what the president of Yucatán’s chapter of the Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party—PAN) called L.’s “well-known connections to drug trafficking.” Ortega scolded the press and bloggers for “spreading incorrect information that might confuse or terrify the population.” While public critique was, she conceded, an “essential element of the freedom of expression,” it was important that information on events be “trustworthy” to avoid the insidious effects of rumor and misinformation. Only the police and the government, she declared, could be trusted to provide such “social communication” (Diario de Yucatán, January 15, 2008).

Governor Ortega’s declaration set the stage for state attempts both to implement visible antinarcotics measures and to control coverage of the expanding narco presence in Yucatán. In May 2008, after the Department of Public Safety ordered police and security forces to increase surveillance and road stops, government officials began receiving threats from the dealers, who demanded an end to restrictions on their activities. The public image of the state, however, remained that of a placid tropical refuge from the narcos. On August 24, in a press conference delivered during a visit to Mérida just a few days after the ratification of a new national program to combat trafficking and corruption, a high federal official of the National System of Public Safety declared, “Yucatán is one of the five safest states in the nation.” Mérida, he noted, was free of the “score-settling” between the cartels that had left so many dead elsewhere in Mexico. A representative of Mexico’s attorney general’s office seconded those views, dismissing rumors about the presence of cartel operatives or hitmen in the state. “Fortunately,” he declared, “Yucatán is clean” (Diario de Yucatán, August 25, 2008).

The very next day, a narcomanta was placed on a bridge near Cancún’s international airport, a few hours from Mérida in the state of Quintana Roo: “To the entire federal, state, and municipal government: If you want the violence to end, stop protecting and supporting Chapo Guzmán, Mayo Zambada, Nacho Coronel, and Oscar Valencia. P.S. Say no to Chapo Guzmán and all the traitors.” On the same day, similar mantas appeared elsewhere: in Monterrey, Saltillo, Ciudad Acuña, Tamaulipas, San Luis Potosí, and other cities throughout Mexico. Government officials in Quintana Roo, however, immediately dismissed their significance. “Some joker,” Governor Félix González Canto suggested, “wanted to play this joke on the authorities” (Agencias via Nuevo León, August 26, 2008; Enfoque Radio, August 26, 2008).

When the decapitated bodies appeared two days later in Mérida, the authorities repeatedly attempted to represent the killings as a mere matter of “score-settling.” Mérida’s mayor stated that the killings were “an isolated case and not part of a strategy to destabilize the state”; such events, he declared somewhat surreally, “never happen here [in Yucatán].” The narcomantas, however, provided a retroactive political contextualization for the killings, relating them to national politics and the federal government, even as the narcomensajes left with the bodies directly implicated L. and, with him, the state government for connections to the narcos. In response, President Calderón immediately issued orders for federal police to implement what he named “Operation Mérida.” Hundreds of heavily armed soldiers and judicial agents arrived in the state, establishing control points, patrols, and road searches and mounting guards outside government buildings and other public sites, as well as offices of newspapers and television and radio stations (La República, August 30, 2008; Diario de Yucatán, August 29, 2008). In a television interview, Governor Ortega emphasized that Yucatecan authorities were on high alert, awaiting the appearance of the severed heads: “Surely,” she said, “they will try to make a spectacle of that, in order to frighten members of Yucatecan society, so that they place pressure on the government” (Primero Noticias, August 29, 2008).

When the next attacks came, however, they were electronic in nature. Via text message and e-mail rumors and warnings were disseminated about imminent attacks: piles of bodies and heads were soon to be scattered across the peninsula. On August 30 there was another twist, as the heads finally made their spectacular appearance, albeit in digital form. A video was posted to YouTube showing 12 headless bodies inside a building. Some of them were strung up by their feet like cattle in a slaughterhouse. Finally, the video cut to 12 heads arranged in a neat line against a wall. After six hours the video, which also included images of the narcomensajes, was removed from YouTube but not before it had been downloaded and posted elsewhere and featured in television and newspaper coverage in Yucatán and throughout Mexico. It was not merely the content of the narcovideo but the medium that attracted attention; the headline of the Diario de Yucatán on August 30, for instance, read “NARCOS USE INTERNET.” In early September a new video appeared, this one disseminated as a text-message attachment. Unlike the first video, this one had sound—a voice that threatened L. and yelled mockingly, “Let’s finish off all the narcos!” and “¡Arriba Yucatán!” (Diario de Yucatán, September 9, 12, and 22, 2008).

The appearance of the heads in digital rather than physical form made the spectacle of their reappearance that much harder for government officials to control or to contain. The coordinated emergence of the narcomedia in Yucatán—first mantas, then mensajes and videos—attracted considerable attention internationally. Eight agents of the DEA arrived in Mérida the week after the killings, in response not so much to the killings as to the use of video, text messages, and other media by the traffickers. They considered the YouTube narcovideo a “new strategy of the drug cartels, since the only precedents for this were a couple of similar cases in the northern part of the country, though those recordings were not placed on the Web but rather were sent to the police” (Diario de Yucatán, September 3, 2008). Commentators in Yucatán blamed the social media for the expanding presence of the narcos, with sites like Facebook doubling, according to one, as a means for spreading terrifying rumors and as a “data base for organized crime.” Government officials vehemently denounced the effects of what they called a “cybernetic network used to generate terror and psychosis,” with Governor Ortega issuing a statement declaring that those who “traffic in rumors are as harmful as those who traffic in drugs and violence.” Ortega urged residents of Yucatán to “allow the government of all Yucatecans to be our information channel.” A new state police unit, the “cybernetic police,” was created and charged with the task of locating the message or messages that had fomented a state of collective terror in the wake of the killings (Diario de Yucatán. September 2 and 7–9, 2008).

But despite all of the aggressive measures—road stops, house searches, and patrols, a few arrests of low-level dealers, surveillance of cell-phone users and tracking of text messages, restrictions on the use of heavy tinting on automobile windows—Operation Mérida made little if any progress in locating the narcos or their collaborators. It was—many surmised in the news media and on blogs—as if informers from the police or army had alerted the narcos to the raids in advance, allowing them an easy escape. The lack of clear results from the operation, when added to the insinuations of the mensajes, videos, and mantas, left the details of the decapitations themselves ever murkier. From a state performance of the reestablishment of law and order, Operation Mérida became the opposite: a demonstration of state incapacity or, worse, collusion with the narcos. In early September, a telephone survey of the views of residents of 400 households in Mérida revealed that 88 percent of respondents believed that the police themselves were involved in the killings, with less than 8 percent believing that there was no police involvement (Diario de Yucatán, September 11, 12, and 14, 2008). No conclusive explanation of the killings was ever presented by government authorities or police.

Even if the causes or authors of the killings at Chichí Suárez remained obscure, government officials, political parties, and news commentators at the national level were not slow in drawing conclusions about their significance. As the capstone to August 2008—a month that one reporter for the Mexico City newspaper El Universal (August 30, 2008) termed the “month of decapitations”—events in Yucatán drove national debate over drug-war violence to new levels of intensity. In the Mexican Chamber of Deputies and Senate, representatives from all three major political parties (the PRI, the PAN, and the Partido de la Revolución Democrática [Party of the Democratic Revolution—PRD]), took the opportunity to denounce violence and “impunity” in Mexico and to declare their support for continued use of the Mexican army to patrol cities throughout the country (El Universal, August 30 and September 27, 2008). Columnists and editorialists cited the killings at Chichí Suárez as the most outrageous to date in the long series of violent episodes connected with the drug war. A widely circulated (via blog postings) article by Rosa Santana of Proceso entitled “Yucatán: El horror” (Santana, 2008) provided a Conradian take on Chichí Suárez as Mexico’s heart of darkness. While Yucatán had figured as a region relatively free of drug violence, now the decapitations provided gruesome evidence, for another reporter, that “the drug gangs today control important cities and regions, from Chihuahua to Yucatán, leaving a long trail of cadavers, killings in broad daylight, attacks on military installations, decapitated bodies, kidnappings, and protection rackets against countless businesses, from innocent taco stands to noisy strip clubs” (Avilés, 2008). The jurist Néstor de Buen (2008) perceived the violence in Yucatán as of “a clearly political nature, which is directed against the very structure of the State.” As the traffickers seemed to be forming a political insurgency, he argued, Calderón would do well to declare a state of emergency and military rule as during a time of invasion by foreign troops.

The killings were found so significant largely because of the role of the narcomedia in transmitting and captioning gruesome images of the dead. Criminologists opined on the decapitations and the accompanying messaging as “expressions of maximal violence” marked by a “criminal semiotics” that not only asserted a gang or cartel’s power but aimed at establishing a reign of terror at all levels, extending to media organizations, government officials, and the general public (Castillo and Olivares, 2008). In an extensive commentary (La Jornada, August 28, 2008), the editors of the Mexican daily newspaper La Jornada described the digital decapitations as “loaded . . . with mediatic intention.” The massacre was meant as an “unequivocal message for federal, state, and municipal authorities” that “underlines the unreality of the well-published agreement arrived at in the Palacio Nacional a few days ago to arrive at measures to reduce criminality and public security in the country.” The conflict had become a mere “exchange of gestures of force between formal authorities and criminal organizations, as the borders between one side and the other have blurred, due to the decay of institutions of justice and security, due to the old connections between police and kidnappers, and the infiltration of drug trafficking in the spheres of politics, business, and the media.” Initially, the editors wrote, they had resisted publishing the narcomensajes as headline news in La Jornada to avoid making that newspaper “a tribune for groups of miscreants looking for publicity.” Nonetheless, they had decided do so, powerless before new media technologies that would make the images immediately and widely available notwithstanding all efforts at restricting their propagation.

The August 2008 events in Yucatán make clear several implications for reading the narcomedia. First, narcomensajes, narcovideos, and narcomantas are not discrete phenomena but interlinked forms whose use is highly political, both regionally embedded and nationally framed. In Yucatán it was the narcomedia that transformed a mass murder into a regional and national crisis. Second, the narcomedia are not isolated or distinct from the traditional mass media but phenomena of convergence (cf. Jenkins, 2008) that straddle the divide between “new” and “old” media. Indeed, the narcomedia must be read through the mass media; it is precisely their presence or reproduction in the mainstream media that holds the potential to trigger deep crises in their role as mediators between government and “public opinion.” Finally, in Yucatán the spectacular emergence of the narcomedia triggered governmental and editorial attempts at distinguishing “good” or “useful” information from “harmful” information and at distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate media and political constituencies. Despite the blurred boundaries between government and narcos and between the mainstream media and the narcomedia, controversies over the narcomedia had the potential to convey the binaristic logic of the drug war into the domain of political culture: first as a fracture that seemed to divide government against itself and second as a conflict between a legitimate public sphere and what might be termed “narcopublics” that seem to be emerging, consolidating themselves with the production and circulation of every mensaje, manta, and video.

From (NARCO)Politics to (NARCO)Publics

On May 13, 2012, troops and police sealed off a section of the highway between Monterrey and Reynosa. A pile of 49 decapitated and dismembered bodies had been found there, accompanied by a narcomanta. Along with other newspapers and mainstream news outlets, La Jornada did not print a photograph or transcription of the banner. Rather, it described it, tersely, as “a manta signed by the criminal group, the Zetas.” Nuevo León’s Procurador General de Justicia was just as curt, reportedly characterizing it as a “typical message that attacked their opponents and the authorities” (La Jornada, May 14, 2012). The event was front-page news for a day or two—as one more narco killing, remarkable only for the body count—before the news cycle moved on. Blogs and social media, however, conveyed details omitted or suppressed in newspapers like La Jornada: the text of the manta, taunting “gulfos, Chapos, Marines, Huachos and [the] government,” and a narcovideo presumably posted by the killers, displaying piles of torsos before and after their placement directly adjacent to the manta. Finally, blogs—again, unlike mainstream news outlets—featured a series of mantas hung in Zacatecas, Guadalupe, San Luis Potosí, and Fresnillo in which the Zetas disavowed the killings in Nuevo León (while admitting to others). The mantas pointed to inconsistencies in the wording of the narcomanta left with the bodies suggesting that it had been left to frame them and declared sarcastically, “THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT SHOULD INVESTIGATE THINGS” (Blog del Narco, 2012).

Why might such an event—strikingly similar to the killings in Mérida in 2008 in the conjuncture of narcoviolence and narcomedia and in the political overtones of the messages—have failed to provoke anything akin to the upheaval triggered by events in Yucatán? Part of the explanation might be the normalization or routinization of the narcoviolence and the narcomedia as an outcome of the intervening four years of slaughter, mass dismemberment, and messaging, especially in northern states like Nuevo León. At least as important, though, have been attempts by diverse parties to restrict the publication of narcomessaging and a resulting crisis of and over mass media and the public sphere in Mexico.

Journalism in Mexico, from newspapers to radio and television, is now beset by a variety of direct threats. According to the watchdog group Reporters Without Borders, over the course of the years of the drug war Mexico has surpassed Afghanistan and other war zones atop the list of countries with the greatest frequency of violence against journalists. From 2000 to early 2012, more than 80 reporters were killed; at least 13 more disappeared. Often these killings are committed by traffickers in retaliation for coverage relating to drug trafficking (Reporters Without Borders, 2012). Groups like the Sinaloa cartel have threatened and undertaken reprisals against newspapers that reprint the mensajes or mantas of rival groups, with the result that many newspapers avoid quoting the content of messages in reportage and sharply limit related coverage to avoid offending the narcos (Gibler, 2011: 65, 83).

Federal and state governments have done little if anything to investigate such crimes or prosecute those responsible (Gibler, 2011; Reporters Without Borders, 2012); moreover, some reports indicate that as many as 50 percent of recorded acts of violence and intimidation against reporters have been carried out not by cartel hit men but by government security forces, police, or government officials from the local to federal levels (Díaz, 2010). President Calderón contributed to the situation through rhetoric that characterized journalists and the news media as subservient to the drug traffickers because of their textual or photographic retransmission of narcomensajes and narcomantas. In a widely publicized February 2010 statement—made in Yucatán with Governor Ortega standing at his side—Calderón scolded the “national press” for reprinting “mantas . . . in full color and on the front page,” effectively giving the narcos free advertising. Journalists had made themselves accomplices by “amplifying” Mexico’s insecurity and “harming the country” in the process (Beltrán Herrera, 2010). Calderón’s position found no shortage of support even among journalists. Pascal Beltrán del Río (2010), editor of the newspaper Excélsior, faulted the media in similar terms for providing “free” space to the traffickers and for facilitating their deliberate attempts to insinuate mensajes and mantas into the mainstream news media.

In northern Mexico in particular, the press faces a dire predicament, with newspaper and television journalists caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. On September 19, 2010, in the wake of the killing of two of their reporters, the editors of El Diario, the largest-circulation newspaper in Ciudad Juárez, published a front-page plea to the traffickers that referred both to narcomensajes and narcomantas that threatened the news media and to a statement the day before by a state government official blaming the press for contributing to “psychological terrorism” in Juárez by reprinting and reporting on the messages. The statement denounced the lack of protection of members of the press by the government and challenged the supposition that the press should cover only “good” or “positive” news rather than reporting on the traffickers’ threats and the insecurity of city residents. Recognizing that the traffickers had “imposed the force of their law” in Juárez, becoming the “de facto authorities,” the editors proffered a “truce.” They asked, “What do you want from us? Tell us what is it that you want us to publish or that you want us to stop publishing, so we can know how to proceed” (El Diario, September 19, 2010). For similar reasons, on May 13, 2012—the day after a grenade attack against its headquarters in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas—El Mañana de Nuevo Laredo announced an editorial decision to “abstain, as long as necessary, from publishing any information relating to the violent conflicts taking place in our city and other regions of the country.”

The statements by El Diario and El Mañana suggest that since 2010 the narcomedia have become the focal point of a consequential debate over the nature and limits of the role of the press and other media in fulfilling—or abandoning—their mission as organs of public information and criticism independent of government control. In an August 2010 meeting, President Calderón invited the heads of the principal media companies to “become part of his strategy” in the war on the drug traffickers (Olmos, 2011). On March 24, 2011, in response to that meeting and at the joint invitation of Mexico’s media conglomerates Televisa and Televisión Azteca, a group of more than 60 media groups representing hundreds of newspapers and television and radio stations took part in a televised accord relating to media coverage of drug-related violence.

Signatories agreed not to divulge information that might endanger government operations against the traffickers and to refrain from publishing images and texts—such as photographs of decapitation victims and the accompanying messages—that were the product of the “propagandistic aims” of the narcos or might play into their attempts to present themselves as “victims or public heroes.” Those signing the accord—which included major newspapers such as El Universal and Excélsior but not others such as La Reforma and La Jornada—also agreed to apply “editorial criteria” in their coverage, in order to “make clear that the violence has been caused by the criminals,” not by the actions of government forces (Martínez, 2011). Thus, coverage was to be drawn in black-and-white rather than shades of gray. Sensitive to the possibility that the accord might be interpreted as self-censorship or capitulation to the government’s desires to control the content and tone of coverage of the drug war, several of those signing were at pains to make clear that their action was merely a sensible and ethical application of editorial criteria. A Televisa news anchorman declared, “I have never presented a manta [on the news] . . . I have never read out a narcomensaje. I have always made sure to avoid using the terminology of the delinquents, beginning with their nicknames” (Castillo, 2011).

The March 2011 accord fit neatly with an array of measures aimed at the censorship or restriction of Mexico’s emerging “narcoculture.” State governments have been the testing ground for such measures, from decrees in the states of Sinaloa, Chihuahua, and Baja California outlawing or restricting the performance of narcocorridos (Ordaz, 2011) to legislative measures adopted in the state of Veracruz penalizing the dissemination via Twitter of information found to “disturb public order,” typically by conveying falsehoods or rumors regarding outbreaks of violence or impending attacks (Ávila Pérez, 2011). The government of President Enrique Peña Nieto built upon such foundations in April 2013, when the Department of the Interior sent all the state governments a directive entitled Nueva narrativa en materia de Seguridad (New Narrative on Security Issues). In the new policy Peña Nieto’s government adopted a series of measures aimed at diminishing the glamour associated with the drug trade and reducing the surfeit of violent images in the media: the public display and humiliation of recently arrested narcos, along with their money and weapons (a frequent practice in the Calderón years), was ended, as was the use of nicknames and terminology of the narcos in news coverage, or public descriptions or discussion of the traffickers and cartels in ways that seemed to legitimate them as social actors (Prados, 2013). At the same time state officials in Nuevo León and other states have relayed the principles of the “new narrative” to the press, advising them that their news coverage and communiqués should always emphasize the effective involvement of federal authorities in combating trafficking, that federal involvement has been at the behest the local citizenry, and that any killings or casualties that might result from antitrafficking operations resulted from the “legitimate and responsible use of force by the authorities” in hot pursuit of the traffickers (Cepeda, 2013).

Ironically, perhaps, such measures dovetail neatly with the threats of traffickers and security forces against journalists and news organizations, encouraging self-censorship, radically curtailing freedom and protection of the press in contemporary Mexico, and deepening the fractures in a public sphere that finds itself under increasing threat and constraint. But for the narcomedia all such efforts seem like rearguard actions, at best presenting restrictions and obstacles that are easily circumvented by anyone with access to the Internet or a smartphone. Restrictive measures may even have the unintended effect of speeding the expansion of the narcomedia and public exposure to them as those seeking information about drug violence abandon traditional news media for fora in which information may be more freely acquired. Chief among the latter is Blog del Narco, an anonymous blog established in March 2010 that provides exhaustive information on drug-related violence and operations throughout Mexico, including photographs of killings, torture, and other acts of violence, as well as narcovideos, narcomantas, and narcomensajes. As a clearinghouse for information about the drug war, Blog del Narco is regularly consulted and updated by various groups—members of the public eager for information relating to dangerous situations in their vicinity, the traffickers, and perhaps even government officials and police agents in Mexico and the United States. Six months after its creation, the site had 3 million monthly visitors; within the year it had become one of the most widely consulted news sites in the world (Fabian, 2011).

Blog del Narco has been subject to the same kinds of criticism as other media outlets for facilitating the “propaganda” of the drug traffickers. The blog has also suffered reprisals, as for instance in September 2011 when, in two separate incidents, people who had used the user comment section of the blog were brutally executed with accompanying narcomensajes in Nuevo Laredo. Moreover, the site’s rapid expansion—and persistent complaints by the Mexican government—led Google to restrict access to the site and its archives (Fabian, 2011). In May 2013, after the authors of Blog del Narco published a widely publicized book about the site entitled Dying for the Truth (Blog del Narco, 2013), it was reported that one of the authors had disappeared, shortly after warning another author with a single word message—“run”—that led her to flee Mexico to Spain. At the time of this writing she still lives there in anonymity, known by the pseudonym “Lucy” (Carroll, 2013).

But Blog del Narco continues to function and to be widely consulted, and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have been used to great effect by groups seeking and providing information about drug-related violence, as well as human rights abuses by military and police. One such was a group that described itself as a “community of denunciation” of abuses by all parties to the conflict. The group’s very name—the Twitter Cartel—indicated clear awareness of the relationship between social media and the narcomedia. A web site called Wikinarco used crowd-sourcing and geo-location techniques to provide users with the kind of current, geographically organized, and constantly updated information that is hard to find in the traditional mass media, especially in the wake of restrictions on coverage. Appeals for the defense of “freedom of information” in Mexico were featured on the site, implying that the restrictions on the publication of narcomessages have become a subject of public political struggle over elemental rights, with blogs and social media as that struggle’s principal staging areas. While the Twitter Cartel and Wikinarco no longer exist, there is no shortage of similar sites and blogs, which are easily located on the Internet.

Where do such developments leave this reader’s guide? We have traveled far, from reading the narcomedia as the products of the intentions or territorial claims of particular drug traffickers to understanding them in the convergence of drug-war violence and the new media; from considering examples of narcomedia as mere instances of a general phenomenon to exploring them as historical events; and from interpreting messages as acts of (narco)political propaganda to considering their profound implications as the focal point of a radical questioning, even erosion, of the functioning and role of the government, the press, and the public sphere in Mexico.

It is in this last domain that the narcomedia—as a point and place of contention over and between the mass and social media—are encouraging the emergence of challenges and alternatives to Mexico’s beleaguered conventional public sphere. Not so much in the content of the narcomedia or in the intentions of its producers as in the way narcomessages are circulated and used, we may read the emergence of new counterpublics, defined by Nancy Fraser (1990: 68) as “spaces of withdrawal and regroupment . . . [and also] as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics” (see also Asen and Brouwer, 2001). The narcomedia do not provide a forum for expression of a single group identity or voice but rather tie together groups with strikingly divergent positions, interests, and stakes (from narcos to journalists, government officials, CIA agents, human rights activists, community groups, etc.). Whether emerging narcopublics like the counterpublics described by Fraser may be said to have “emancipatory potential” is open to question. They do, however, offer possibilities for critique and even social and political mobilization in ways that undercut the very binaries and ideological assumptions of the drug war in the process.

The rapidly changing contours of the drug war and its political entailments make further speculation about the narcomedia an exercise in predicting the future that I am reluctant to undertake. This much, though, is clear: the narcomedia have had and will continue to have profound impacts far beyond the battlegrounds of the conflict. If there is ever a declared end to that war, the narcomedia seem certain to survive it.