The Narrative Logics of Mass Violence: A case study in central Mexico

• In Event: Crimen, inseguridad y sociedad en México

Abstract

Death toll of Mexico’s “war on drugs” has reached unprecedented dimensions. From 2006 to 2017, over 240,000 people were killed, and it is estimated at least 30,000 have gone missing in the country —many of them disappeared by state and non-state actors. Much of the scholarship has focused on the political economy of drug trafficking as well as on the consequences of the militarized war on drugs to explain the causality of lethal violence in Mexico. An instrumentalist logic—whether economic or political—of violence has prevailed within these explanations. This paper, however, takes a different approach. It follows recent cultural and discursive approaches on the structures of meaning which facilitate and legitimize lethal violence—and where the expressive logics of violence become central. This paper is placed at intersection between the field of mass violence studies, and the narrative approach to violent conflict. Violence, thus, is understood as the product (and the producer) of a process of stabilization of the narratives—and their inner logics—that the parties have about the conflict and themselves (Cobb, 2013). The paper draws on a case study in the state of Guanajuato to ask how narratives of violence frame killings, define victims and perpetrators, and navigate the axiological terrain in which violence can become legitimized—if not normalized. Answering these questions will offer insights on the complexities of how processes of mass violence generate the very same stories and logics which facilitate their reproduction.

Author

• César Estrada Pérez, George Mason University