Despite taboos and lost legitimacy, armed groups around the world engage in extreme acts of violence, symbolic and otherwise. In order for decision-makers to understand what can be done about the increasing brutality, they must understand what’s behind it. In the fourth installment of Baker Institute Viewpoints, an institute postdoctoral fellow in drug policy and two outside scholars conducting doctoral research on these issues explain why some armed groups utilize extreme symbolic forms of violence, and how they justify their actions. The series will run each day through Thursday.
Guest writer John Sullivan, a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department lieutenant writing his dissertation on criminal insurgency, leads off with a discussion of Mexico’s hyper-violent drug cartels:
Mexico’s drug war has challenged state solvency throughout the sexenio, or six-year-term, of President Felipe Calderón. During the intense confrontation among drug cartels, gangs and state institutions at all levels, the cartels have battled for freedom of movement. They seek to operate freely without interference from the government of Mexico or its constituent organs. The battle is for dominance of the drug trafficking plazas (zones) in Mexico and the illicit flows that extend to the United States, Europe and Latin America at large.
Extreme and Hyper Violence
While brutality and hyper-violence punctuate this conflict — indeed, violence is the narrative of the narco — corruption, impunity and state confrontation are core elements of the cartel threat. About 99,667 persons have been killed in the sustained narco-conflict, with an additional 24,000 persons reported missing or disappeared. Journalists, mayors, police, the military and members of civil society are among the victims of the violence.
Kidnappings, assassinations, drive-by shootings, grenade attacks, car bombings, dismemberment, beheadings, mass murders and now crucifixion are the symbolic and instrumental means used by the cartels to demonstrate raw power. In a September 2012 crucifixion in Michoacán, an alleged rapist was seized by cartel operatives (allegedly members of the Caballeros Templarios/Knights Templar) from police custody. The victim was tortured, castrated and crucified in a symbolic ritual that projected cartel power while eroding the legitimacy of municipal police and the state.
Narcocultura frames the drug traffickers as powerful heroes for the disenfranchised. Narco-folk saints like Santa Muerte and Jesus Malverde are venerated to bond narcos into a cohesive social structure that provides justification for their actions and spiritual protection for their deeds. Blockades, banners, corpse-messaging (leaving a message on a corpse), messages or communiqués, and graffiti accompany acts of violence and are often transmitted via social media and through folk songs to amplify the cartels’ ethos. Attacks against journalists and civil society actors aren’t designed to silence, but rather to shape the power relations and public perceptions of the narcos.
Assault on the State
Traditionally, organized crime seeks to avoid the state and minimize violence. When that fails, they seek to co-opt the state through public corruption. If their efforts are successful, a balance between the underworld and public power becomes the norm — an equilibrium in the interaction between the state and organized crime. When the equilibrium breaks — as when Calderón cracked down on cartels — organized crime confronts the state. The confrontation — a state of siege and “battle of all against all” — has characterized Mexico’s sexenio de sange (regime of blood), or the past six years of unabated brutality and violence.
Here I’m not being critical of Calderón. The president of the Republic had little choice.
The cartels were increasingly gaining control of territory and turf, transitioning from criminal elites into true centers of power. Impunity reigned and brutal narcopolitics were consuming state organs, municipalities and penetrating many Mexican states. The federal center in Mexico City was strong, but many parts of the nation were hollow. Not only were police (municipal, state and federal elements) corrupted, oftentimes they acted as extensions of the cartels: effectively a “black” paramilitary militia serving criminal mafias. The cartels combined traditional gangster intimidation and brutality with infantry tactics — including deploying improvised armored vehicles — wearing uniforms and marking their vehicles with distinctive cartel insignia.
Collectively, the cartels began forging criminal enclaves where they could operate without state interference by using extreme violence, exerting control over turf (zones of impunity), co-opting public officials, collecting “street taxes” and attacking and plundering oil and natural gas resources from PEMEX, the state oil monopoly. Nuevo León and Tamaulipas are exemplary in this regard. Terror reigns in this combat zone where Los Zetas are eradicating the Gulf cartel to effectively dominate northeast Mexico. Here lawlessness reigns in the Zetas’ bloody confrontation with both the Sinaloa Federation and Mexican government.
State Reconfiguration: From Drug War to Criminal Insurgency
The result of cartel confrontation with the state is what I and others have termed a “criminal insurgency.” The cartels — essentially criminal networks — seek not overt, formal recognition of power, but rather freedom of movement and informal, but raw, unadulterated power and control. In effect they create what author George Grayson calls “dual sovereignty” in Mexico and beyond. The result is a radical redistribution of power within states that fuels and permeates illicit global economic circuits. States are reconfigured and co-opted to support the global illicit political economy. The impact of this transition is a potentially radical, hence insurgent, reconfiguration of the monopoly of violence to non-state violent actors, criminal states and criminal soldiers with a concomitant redistribution of power.
John P. Sullivan is a career police officer. He currently serves as a lieutenant with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. He is also an adjunct researcher at the Vortex Foundation in Bogotá, Colombia; a senior research fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies on Terrorism (CAST); and a senior fellow at Small Wars Journal-El Centro. He is co-author of “Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency: A Small Wars Journal-El Centro Anthology” (iUniverse, 2011). His current research focus is the impact of transnational organized crime on sovereignty in Mexico and other countries.