The Medium is the Narco-message: Analysis of Criminal Communication in Mexico

• In Event: The Politics of Policing and Security

Abstract

The early 2000s were a time of change and uncertainty in Mexico. Liberalizing reforms led to the end of decades of single party rule, and a peaceful transition towards a more open and democratic society, but at the same time, criminal organizations that had previously kept a low profile began to advertise themselves with spectacular acts and displays in urban centers. This paradigm shift among criminal groups is most often analyzed in terms of the frequency or visibility of violence. Violence is, however, only one tool in the criminal repertoire. This project shifts the analytical focus from how criminal groups use violence, to how they use language. It does so by analyzing the phenomenon of narco-messages in Mexico.

The paper asks: how do criminal groups present themselves to the public in narco-messages? The prevailing scholarly understanding of organized crime expects criminal groups to cultivate a low profile. Highly visible, spectacular acts of public engagement on the part of criminal groups make little sense, within this understanding. Analysis of narco-messages should thus offer insight into this puzzling group behavior, and into how criminal groups aim to influence the public.

This project defines narco-messages as: written text displayed in public by criminal groups. Narco-messages first appeared in 2004, and range from scraps of cardboard left at crime scenes, to printed banners displayed simultaneously throughout a city, blanketing public space with written text. I argue that narco-messages follow a different strategic logic to other criminal or violent acts, owing to the meaning-making power of language.

This paper focuses on the form and content of narco-messages. These messages are strategic texts, and must be read carefully and critically. The analysis follows Austin and his interlocutors in examining what messages explicitly say, and what they implicitly do. The analysis of form also follows Bakhtin’s approach to speech genres, and to the way communication is socially and dialectically constituted. Narco-messages exhibit striking consistency of form across all known cases, suggesting strong social conventions underpinning their commission and display. Analysis of the content of messages addresses both the meaning and grammar of the language used. Analyzing the form and content of narco-messages demonstrates a substantial gap between how criminal groups present themselves, and how their public audience understands these groups.

The data for this analysis comes from an original database of 6,180 narco-messages, covering the period from 2004 and 2013. Data was collected from one national and nine regional newspapers, and triangulated with a leaked government database. It is the most comprehensive collection of narco-message data currently available. The size of the database facilitates more rigorous discourse analysis, as the observed patterns in form and content can be precisely situated across time and space. I supplement this data with interviews conducted in Mexico.

Analysis of the content of narco-messages demonstrates that these messages present criminal groups as protectors of local justice and order, and as adjuncts of the state. The messages often claim to defend the pueblo, drawing upon a long tradition of vigilantism and social cleansing in Mexico. Many messages specify activities that will be punished with violence. Narco-messages are also surprisingly deferential to federal political figures and institutions, offering to aid these figures through use of extralegal violence.

Analysis of the form of narco-messages, however, demonstrates that these foster little actual connection with or confidence on the part of local communities. Narco-messages are fundamentally anonymous texts: authorship is often attributed but virtually never verifiable. Indeed, most people encounter narco-messages in the pages of newspaper or through social media, enforcing a sense of distance between unknown authors and audience. Furthermore, interviews indicate that messages are read with a degree of skepticism; they are neither trusted nor easily dismissed, and as such generate more uncertainty than confidence.

This paper offers important implications for the study of organized crime. First, despite the reputation of criminal groups in Mexico for spectacular violence, the content of narco-messages suggests that legitimacy still matters to such groups. Next, the paradigm shift among criminal groups involved more than just a change in capacity to use violence; it also involved a reconfiguration of crime-society relations, with a shift from informal, discrete communication, to spectacular display and circulation in mass media. Finally, liberalizing reforms create new domains for criminal groups to contest. This is usually understood in terms of geographic territory, but narco-messages demonstrate that liberalization also opens public space and public discourse to contestation by criminal groups.

Author

• Philip Luke Johnson, The Graduate Center, City University of New York