“Everything we say and think comes from official sources”: the book that analyzes the narco discourse

Drug trafficking is a problem that Mexico has been facing for decades and this phenomenon has always been determined by language, as Mexican writer Oswaldo Zavala, author of the book War in the Words, said Monday.

“The book is an in-depth exploration of official discourse, because everything we normally say, talk about, think about drug trafficking actually comes from official sources,” Zavala said in an interview with the EFE agency.

The war in words, he said, is an intellectual history of drug trafficking in Mexico that spans four decades — from 1975 to 2020 — where it shows how official discourse creates legends of drug trafficking by responding to political and anti-drug agendas.

The volume is divided into four sections and begins with the first operation to eradicate marijuana and poppy plantations, continues with the murder of DEA agent Kiki Camarena in 1985 and follows other phenomena such as the reinvention of drug cartels and the rise of figures such as Amado Carrillo Fuentes.

The book goes all the way to Felipe Calderón's war on drug trafficking (2006-2012) and the pacification proposed by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2024).

Zavala explained that for more than four decades the Mexican political system has managed to impose a narrative about “narco” that society in general has accepted, such as that organized crime is the dominant explanation for the high rates of violence in the country.

“Violence is real, but the dominant official explanation is a political trick, a fantasy that has allowed the authorities to exercise the most cruel policy of the Government against the population, but always legitimized by the recyclable fabric of the war on drugs,” he said.

Ignorance of drug traffickers

Zavala pointed out that the idea of what is said, thought or imagined about drug trafficking “usually comes from official sources, not from direct knowledge of drug trafficking.”

These sources, he said, are mainly from Mexican and US authorities who, on many occasions, depend on certain interests.

The writer said that there is often talk of the language used to talk about the subject in art and journalism, but that “it was still pending to understand the very history of that discourse”.

So, he said, the idea of this book was to give a history of both official and unofficial language that has been built over 40 years, which describes the phenomenon of drug trafficking and also imposes a political meaning.

“It is an investigation of archives, the presidential libraries of the United States, newspaper libraries, academic and journalistic works to try to trace and understand how (the discourse) changed and even radicalized in the following decades,” he said.

THE DRUG TRAFFICKER, THE BAD GUY

The journalist and professor of literature said that it is very difficult to determine what is the real role that drug trafficking has in the violence that the country is currently experiencing because the official discourse shows an image of the power of organized crime that has little to do with reality.

“We are facing a flood of information that prevents us from knowing for sure who the actors of violence are and who are doing what exactly,” he said.

In 2021 alone, Mexico recorded 33,315 homicides after the two most violent years in its history, under the leadership of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, with 34,690 murder victims in 2019 and 34,554 in 2020.

“What the official speech does is give us a quick and standardized explanation where if there is a shooting, the trafficker is quickly blamed,” he said.

And he said that one approach that the population should make is that “in a country with such impunity, and with a rather dubious police system, it should be hard to believe what official sources say that all this violence is the product of traffickers waging war,” he questioned.

During the development of the book, he explained, he found that many of the words used to talk about that world and that are used in television series have, for the most part, an official origin.

“The institutions themselves are the ones that speak that way and are responsible for circulating them, appearing in the imagination and attributing them to drug trafficking,” he said.

And these words, he said, have led to the idealization of the drug trafficker as someone “powerful, as in the running 'Chief of Boss' of the gang Los Tigres del Norte, who apparently speaks of a drug trafficker “although he doesn't really name him 100%”.

He also denied that there is “a verifiable or demonstrable relationship” between speech and violence.

“It doesn't mean that the number of series about a character suddenly causes people to naturalize or normalize violence. This is a way to blame consumers of cultural products and think of them as having little intelligence,” he said.

Finally, he remarked that his book is not a story about “narcos”, but about the language that made them internal enemies, a threat to “national security”.

“They are the myth that justifies the atrocities of the US security agenda implemented in Mexico by the political-business class,” he concluded.