Extreme violence in Mexico from the Perspective of a Cultural-Conceptual History

Dr. Lizette Jacinto

University of Cologne, Germany

In this work I propose a theoretical approach to analyse and problematize the different aspects
of the extreme violence that has been taking place in Mexico during the last decade, from the
point of view of Cultural and Conceptual History. I must note that these ideas are in a stage of
development and can be understood as an intellectual reaction to the awful reality that has
plagued Mexico and affected negatively the lives of 112 million Mexicans. Even though this
analysis focuses on Mexico, it has implications for other regions in the world as well.
Violence, as we know it, respects no borders. This work attempts to analyse and explain an
everyday problem using certain theoretical tools in a specific and systematic way.
Before I continue, I would like to warn the audience that I am about to show a short video
that contains images with a high content of violence, that although edited to diminish their
visual impact, are still very explicit and crude. These images are the foundation and the
justification of this work. So, if there are people in the audience that may have a problem due
to the visual content of these images, they might want to leave the room and return in about 4
minutes. What I am about to show you is not fiction, it is not a trailer for a new film by
Quentin Tarantino, it is the reality that is part of what Mexico has become.

The main goal of my research is to carry out a critical analysis of the current extreme violence
in Mexico, from the point of view of Cultural and Conceptual Histories, to comprehend its
origins, its cultural implications as well as its aesthetic manifestations. To achieve this I will
take certain historical moments of conjunction of events1 in the history of Mexico which
would allow me to study and comparatively analyse through certain concepts the history of
the culture of violence in Mexico. For this, I will define a methodological synthesis that

The moment of conjunction of events: It is a period of time in which many different sub-regional, local or
national experiences of the relation between the society and the State converge with certain conflictive intensity.
The moment of conjunction of events is at the same time the moment in time that allows an analysis about the
complexity of the modus operandi of the different structures and tendencies throughout the events established in
a medium and a long duration. It is important to mention that in said moments of conjunction of events the
central elements and actuators of the social relations manifest themselves, which determine the historical,
political and cultural courses of a specific country, region or society. In a nutshell, synthesis, by analysing these
moments of conjunction of events, a possibility arises to re-problematize them through the analysis of the
relation between the immediate experience and the structural developments, considering the cultural-historical
processes and their tight entailment to the Conceptual History. Cfr. Oliver, Lucio: Discutir la coyuntura, in:
Poltica y Cultura. 2012, N 37, p. 113-131. 19 p.
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would allow me to contemplate the Violence in the broadest sense as a historical process of
long duration without the necessity of a total historical reconstruction.
History is plagued with events related to conquests, wars and the violence in general. It is in
this way how the history of violence is interwoven with the history of civilization. As Walter
Benjamin used to say, there is no single document addressing culture that is not at the same
time a document of barbarism. He was not wrong. As a paradox, violence turns out to be an
essential component of human culture. Our contemporary societies experiment with violence
on an everyday basis. While in certain societies violence is being consumed for entertainment
and exploited for this purpose by the media, the video games or the cinema, in other societies
the violence is experienced as an everyday terror manifested through assassination of men and
women, old and young, accompanied by the complete destruction of the social fabric. These
societies are the ones that generate the terrible examples of the manifestation of violence, that
provide the dead and mutilated bodies, the societies that have to live with the terror, and that
far from observing the violence in a showcase are forced to look at it from within. These are
the societies that seem to be caught without any possibility of escape in a reality without any
brighter future; a future, if any that contains their self destruction.

As pointed out by Slavoj Zizek, it is worth the effort to try to see the violence in the
contemporary societies from the point of view proposed by Karl Marx, i.e. as a consequence
of the Capitalism, especially if addressing the culture of violence in the 20th and the 21st
centuries. And when talking about Capitalism we are also addressing the circulation of capital
and its normally uneven distribution. According to several reports issued during the last
decades by the different institutions of the, e.g. the United Nations, Latin America is perhaps
the continent with the highest indexes of economic inequality. It is the continent where the
smallest proportion of the population owns the highest proportion of the gross domestic
product (GDP) and vice versa, the biggest part of the population, the poor, own the smallest
proportion of the GDP. Taking Mexico as an example, according to the reports for the year
2013 of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)2, there 35
millions of people (31.25% of the total population) must survive with less than 2$ a day, and
10 millions (approx. 9% of the total population) must survive with less than 1$ a day. This
means, and corroborated by the Mexican National Council for the Evaluation of Social

OECD(2013),OECDEconomicSurveys:Mexico2013,OECDPublishing.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/eco_surveysmex2013en

Development Policy (COVAL) in 20113, that 46.2 % of the Mexican population lives in
poverty according to the United Nations poverty standards. On the other hand, according to
the billionaires list of Forbes magazine, the Mexican (billionaire) Carlos Slim Hel has the
very first place among the wealthiest men on earth with $73 Billions, accompanied by another
two Mexicans among the first 100 wealthiest men on earth, and making altogether 9
Mexicans in the first 650 places of the list, the sum of their wealth being approximately 10 %
of the gross domestic product of Mexico.

Nevertheless, it is important to take into account other elements too in order to analyse the
culture of violence present in Mexico. This analysis can reach back in history even before the
appearance of the Spanish conquerors and their cultural justification of the extreme violence,
practiced within their theocratic society -promoting slavery and human sacrifices in the
manner of death penalties ordered, for example, by the Inquisition to reinforce their own
theories about the origin of the Universe-, not really different in these aspects to the Aztec
society they found in America.
(Foto 1, 2, 3: Cipactli Tezcatlipoca-Quetzalcotl)

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During the last 20 years the violence in Mexico has been constantly growing. This tendency
increased in the years between the 2006 and 2012, during the Presidency of Felipe Caldern
Hinojosa member of the conservative Partido Accin Nacional (PAN), promoted in the first
place by the openly declared so called war on drugs, a war carried out by the Mexican
government and the Mexican army against the different drug dealers organizations, the so
called cartels. The war on drugs created favourable conditions for violent confrontations
between the federal government and the different cartels, as well as between the different
cartels themselves for the control and empowerment of different illegal drug markets, where
new actors appeared, the so called sicarios, assassins or hitmen, hired by the different
cartel bosses to fight the competition in a specially bloody manner. The armed
confrontation between all these actors turned into a routine causing as a collateral damage a
huge amount of civilian casualties, where civilians are defined as any person with no
known affiliation to any of the drug cartels or the Mexican army or federal police. The
number of civilian casualties oscillates between 40,000 and 90,000 for the period since
December 1, 2006, depending on the source. The identity of approximately 40% of the

http://www.coneval.gob.mx/Medicion/Paginas/Pobrezaporingresosen.aspx

victims is still not known. Additionally, there are approximately 25,000 missing persons and a
similar amount of displaced. An uncertain number of common graves (narco-fosas) has
been also found since 2006.
(Foto 4 y 5: Tablas Watt-Zepeda basados en el diario mexicano Reforma).
One of the big problems when dealing with the facts surrounding this war on drugs is the
lack of precise official statistics : we still lack any official confirmation of the identity and
real number of the dead, displaced or missing persons.
The current academic studies dealing with the violence in Mexico are mainly focused on the
interfamily violence, as well as -and based on the painful case of Ciudad Jurez-, the so called
feminicides: the brutal and normally unpunished torture and assassination of mostly poor
young women, workers at local factories. Another part of the academic production deals with
the geographic extensions of the so called Narcozonas, the regions where the most powerful
cartels have succeeded to conquer through violence. The other topics addressed
thoroughly in different studies are the biographies of the most influential cartel bosses and
drug dealers, as well as the commercial and political networks created around them, where the
appearance of members of the Mexican political elite is no exception. One of the most
representative studies dealing with these topics is the book Los seores del narco by Anabel
Hernndez. Finally, there is the aspect of social activists and activist groups being directly
affected for their sometimes uncomfortable discoveries in the matter of public policies and
levels of corruption within all the layers of the Mexican political system. The generalized
war on drugs scenario facilitates the disappearance of several activist groups, as part of
the collateral casualties of this war.
(Foto: 7 y 8 : Jurez fronteras y feminicidios, narcozones)
In this particular study nevertheless, we attempt to contextualize the explosion of the extreme
violence in Mexico and its cultural manifestations during the last decade as part of the culture
of violence that has existed and evolved in Mexico throughout its entire history. For this, our
main aim is to extend the focus beyond the 21st century and focus the analysis of the extreme
violence as a historical process of long duration, as defined by the French historian Fernand
Braudel.
As stressed by Zigmunt Baumann, Max Weber defined the modern state as that entity which
upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement
of its order, not subject to any appellation or compensation of any kind (Baumann 2002:10
La sociedad sitiada). In the case of Mexico, the monopoly of violence has stopped to be the
exclusive matter of the Mexican state, at least in certain geographic extensions, claimed by

the fittest, most violent and best organized group of individuals, not being part of the legal
State, and normally engaged in criminal acts. The explosion of the extreme violence in
Mexico is a consequence of a failed state policy defined to eradicate the illegal drug market in
Mexico starting in 2006, the poorly chosen strategy for this purpose, and a very high index of
corruption within the Mexican political elite as well as its armed forces and local and federal
police organizations. The Frontal strikes on existing drug-dealing organizations in 2006 has
multiplied the number of newly organized ones, currently spread all over the national territory
in contrast to the clear territorial concentration it had before the beginning of the war on
drugs. Several other authors point out as another reason the urge president Caldern had in
2006 to legitimize the controversial elections which he won in suspicious circumstances with
only 0.56 % advance ahead of his opponents in the ballots.
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Before I continue, I would like to stress that this study is not based on the premise that there
are certain societies more prone to violence than others. Nevertheless, this study focuses on
the cultural manifestation and the aesthetic dimension of the current extreme violence in
Mexico -an approach not much pursued so far-, that seeks to understand the cultural
dimension of this phenomenon in opposition to the studies focused only on its immediate
causes. Perhaps there is a profound root of the culture of violence in the society inhabiting
the territory nowadays known as Mexico dating from the pre-columbine period that evolved
over the years of the colonial period, merged with the Eurasian tradition brought by the
Spanish from the Iberian peninsula, and finally got transformed during the Mexican war for
independence, the Mexican revolution, and Mexican contemporary history only to manifest
itself in the way it does in the beginning of the 21st century. Thus, the main questions in this
work are: how did we turn so extremely violent?, where do the practices of
dismemberment of the human body come from?, what is the significance of practices of
over-killing? or how is it possible that ordinary people become capable of such acts in a
contemporary society?.

In each period of time or each moment of conjunction of historical events, as it is called

within this study, chosen for a thorough analysis of the Concepts chosen, many characteristic
features can be found defined by a certain historicity predating that moment: trails that can be
followed to understand the way in which the Violence was thought of and the role it played in
the society under study in that certain period of time. In this work, the ritual of human
sacrifice in the prehispanic central plateau of todays Mexico will be considered as the first

moment of conjunction of historical events. Its characteristics can by no means be applied to

the analysis of the manifestation of extreme violence in its current form, context or its
consequences for the future of the Mexican society. It must be redefined. In another moment
in history, the culture of violence gets much more explicit: it is analysed during the Spanish
conquest of Latin America, where instead of speaking about a clash of cultures or -in a
more euphemistic manner- about an encounter of cultures, we should be speaking about a
classical case of a military, cultural and symbolic conquest of the territories across the sea
justified as a quest for spiritual salvation of the indigenous population through evangelization.
Moreover, if we analyse now the culture of violence during the colonial times, it must be
considered in a close relation to the culture of resistance practiced by indigenous
individuals or whole tribes. The terrible result was that from a total of 90 million people
estimated to have lived in Mexico at the beginning of the 16th century, there was only 5 % of
this number of indigenous inhabitants of Mexico left in the 17th century. Considering the
European roots of the current culture of violence brought to America by the first
conquerors, in the third place the study of the baroque movement in its cultural, aesthetic and
philosophical aspects will be carried out, giving us an opportunity to understand its influence
on the cultural and philosophical developments during the colonial times. The aesthetic
dimension of the everyday life to be found in the architecture, the paintings and other artistic
expressions from this period, the melodramatic aspects of the everyday life, especially in the
mestizo middle class of the New Spain, also found their inspiration in the similar
developments occurring in Europe at that time, imitating the values of the Spanish catholic
and conservative society, taking them sometimes to an extreme, but also mixing them with
influences coming from the indigenous population on the one side, but also (from) the slaves
brought from Africa or the traditions merged into the Iberian culture throughout the 800 years
of Arabic presence on the peninsula on the other. The human body, the presence of which was
almost erased during the middle Ages, found in the baroque world a place to express itself
constructing a peculiar mystique experience of the body in its secular and sensorial aspects.
The study of the aesthetic expressions of the baroque allows us to analyse the concepts of
rituality and human body and their relation with the key concept of violence. The baroque
thought is defined through ethos, a principle of construction of the world of life that
operates based on the intentions of the individuals (Echeverra, 2011:37)
(Foto 6: Caravaggio)
In the colonial world, the fourth moment of history addressed in this work, we confront
uprising insurgent movements against the colonial ruling system. Nevertheless, the culture of

violence in Mexico of that time is not only nurtured by this type of open violence exercised
by the insurgents on the one side, and the established State on the other. There are also
expressions of violence elsewhere; for example, hidden in the very complex system of casts
dividing the society in many different levels, based on racial studies of the time, or present in
the constant fights taking place between the numerous criminal groups dedicated to large
scale smuggling of goods and the soldiers of the Spanish crown. Later, and specially during
the war for Independence and the consolidation of the nation state in the 19th century,
violence turns out to be an unavoidable element of the novels describing everyday life and
customs of the independent Mexico, as it is the case of the novel Los bandidos de Ro Fro
(The bandits of Ro Fro) by Manuel Payno. All this violence, experienced in an open or a
hidden manner, during the chaotic Mexican 19th century paved the road toward the Mexican
revolution that started in 1910 as the first revolution of the 20th century worldwide with a
dominant agrarian content, in response to the long dictatorship of the General Porfirio Daz,
who ruled between 1876 and 1911 and managed to concentrate the monopoly of violence in
his hands and the hands of his repressive apparatus in these years, with fatal consequences. As
stated by Friedrich Katz, an Austrian historian, the Mexican revolution was, among many
other attributes, a response against dispossession. The Mexican revolution caused the loss of
approximately one million lives. The culture of violence and death evolved once again and
found a new meaning in the collective subconscious of the Mexican society. The graphic
work of Jos Guadalupe Posada is one illustrative example of the re-significance of the motif
of the Death present in the major part of his work.
(Foto: Catrina-Posada)
The history of Mexico offers an interesting opportunity to reconsider the violence and the
theory used for its study from another perspective: to open new queries within a process of
long duration and not exclusively considering one single event or one single period of time, as
it could be the so called war on drugs started by the Mexican former President Felipe
Caldern Hinojosa in 2006.

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Conceptual History, as defined by Reinhardt Koselleck, focuses on concepts related to the
political changes within a society and the changes in the significance of those concepts in
different periods of time within that society. In this work, I try to find a thread I could follow
throughout a historical process of long duration, which in this case is the culture of
Violence, using Concepts or Schlsselbegriffe, applying the approach proposed by Koselleck

to a completely different discipline: Cultural History. If we assume that cultural changes are
almost imperceptible and can be seized only after several generations on a social level, than
we must admit that analysing historical developments on a long duration scale and describing
them all would require a life time or even more of historical work. But, what would happen if
instead of analysing all the different historical aspects of all the events (or as many as
possible) taking place in a society over a long period of time, we could only analyze the
changes in the significance of certain Concepts describing the process of long duration of our
interest, in our case the culture of Violence, and the relations among these Concepts, and do
this not by considering the entire history, but only choosing certain decisive moments of
conjunction of historical events of the society under study to do it.
The proposed theoretical approach aims at the possibility of finding behavioural patterns
within the society that could indicate a development on the practical and symbolic planes in
the culture of violence in Mexico, or any other territory or society for that matter.
Bearing the latter in mind, four main Concepts were defined to be analysed, separately and in
their relation to the culture of violence as well as the relation among themselves; in both, a
synchronic and a diachronic form. These four main Concepts are: 1) Rituality, 2) Body, 3)
Gender, and 4) Identity-Mexicanity.
1) Rituality
This is a rather unexplored concept in the context of extreme violence. In her book Ritual and
Violence, the Canadian historian Natalie Zemon Davis wonders how different areas of
knowledge can be combined to allow a better comprehension of different patterns of human
behaviour that we might, up to a certain level, define as traditional. In this sense, cultural
anthropology, ethnography and critical literature interact in order to problematize and
contextualize the topic of extreme violence, especially if studied from the point of view of the
long duration. In the concept of Rituality there are different and fully differentiated
behavioural patterns that interact in the process of adopting certain identities and social
aspirations as well as religious beliefs. The certain specific cultural phenomena that has
evolved around the activities of Mexican drug dealers, sometimes denominated the
Narcocultura (Foto: Santa Muerte) is one of the most recent cultural phenomenon related to
the violence surrounding the cartels and their reality, that reflects in a very plastic way this
newly established tradition and the apprehension of this system of beliefs by this entire
social group. The study of the concept of Rituality involves a symbolic reinterpretation of the
reality, in this case the extreme violence. Some of the questions that arise with relation to this
concept are, for example, how does a ritual of death implying assassination of a human being

looks like?, how do criminals and hired assassins sicarios associate to commit crime, to
assassin or to torture?, how do they interact or even recognize each other while committing
crime, murder, mutilation or kidnapping?, is an act of extreme violence planned or does it
normally happen spontaneously?, basically what is the role of a ritual in the conformation
of the atmosphere of extreme violence in Mexico?, can we talk about certain behavioural
patterns? Our main goal in this sense would be to try and define patterns within the social
behaviour ignored by historians that could indicate the manner in which the extreme violence
arises; the way in which several individuals get together to commit an act of such extreme
violence. An important characteristic to be taken into account for the study of the concept of
Rituality is the heterogeneous analysis that must be undertaken for this purpose. The rituals
and their symbolic forms should not be understood as homogeneous within a certain society,
not even when these rituals have as a common goal incitement toward a recurrent criminal
behaviour. The Rituality combines the cultural implications of tradition (even a new
tradition) and performance giving birth to new forms of expression, in this case the culture
of extreme violence as it is currently experienced in Mexico.
2) Body
Almost all the studies involving an interaction between the body and violence make an almost
intrinsic connection between the body and the gender or sexual violence. These studies focus
on the concept of the punished body, the body understood as an object. What I would like to
stress is that in situations involving violence or extreme violence, the Body experiences a
constant transition between being the object of violence on the one side, and being an
embodiment of that violence, in a sense defined by Bourdieu, and reflect that experienced
violence in a process of reconfiguration of social practices that would in other circumstances
be completely unacceptable, on the other. It is a complex phenomenon. The reconfiguration of
the way in which a society experiences the forms of violence takes place and turns
expressions of extreme violence that were unacceptable in the beginning of this process into a
socially accepted everyday life which, although not justified, becomes at least bearable,
multiplying itself. This phenomenon embodiment of extreme violence can be observed
within the societies specially exposed to violent acts perpetrated by the cartels in Mexico,
expression of which becomes more and more brutal. In his book Discipline and Punish: The
Birth of Prison (1967), Michel Foucault describes a terrible example of how a justification for
the use of extreme violence in prisons conforms with the Modern State based on the
monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of order. The exemplary
punishment of the parricide Damiens, described by Foucault, found guilty of assassination of

his father, is condemned, in a practice inherited from the middle ages, to die dismembered
pulled by four horses, burned by fire and dragged through the streets of

Paris. This

punishment is described in an order written in 1760 in which it was stated that during this
terrible torture in what the spectacle is concerned, the culprit does not suffer much nor for a
long time. What happens currently in Mexico where the news about the dismembered, the
asphyxiated, the beheaded, the stabbed, those whose bodies are hidden in barrels, those whose
bodies get disintegrated through chemical reactions, those assassinated by machineguns,
pistols or grenades have become everyday news? A distinctive body (again Bourdieu) within
the world of extreme violence plays the main role. It is through these punished bodies
(dismembered, beheaded, asphyxiated, tortured) how threatening (messages) are being
communicated to the rival organizations on the one hand, and the responsible authorities (the
police, the army members, the State) on the other. On the other hand, the same government in
Mexico carries out a necrophileous communication policy, where day after day new numbers
of the dead are communicated to the public, a policy which should justify the efforts for
pacification of this State still claiming that it has the monopoly of the legitimate use of
physical force in the enforcement of its order. Simultaneously, the capos -the cartel
bosses- use these dead bodies, normally showing written massages on papers stabbed to their
chests or even through huge announcements hanging on highway bridges, to show to the
society the power they really have, even over human lives, without being apprehended,
judged or sentenced. There is no state of law, no right to live, no second chances. The body
becomes an object; the opponent gets depersonified becoming just a warning, a simple
message: a death threat. The embodiment of power takes place and through it the violence
gets monopolized and fear spreads.
3) Gender-Masculinity
The main concept of Gender is a socially constructed category that generates behavioural
patterns related to interaction of power and expresses itself through cultural manifestations.
According to Elisabeth Lienert, the gender roles, masculinity and femininity, are known to
be social constructs in a constant historical transformation. Violence is one key component
of said social constructs. The concepts such as disposition towards violence, the monopoly of
violence, the delinquents or the role of the victims have been well studied. The concept of
Gender necessarily implies the construction of an identity, the same that determines the
behavioural patterns. It is a category that is normally defined only in terms of gender in
general, as well as the amounts of masculinity, the femininity and the differences between
different hierarchies, hegemonies that practice violence (Messerschmidt 2005) and (Schlper
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2008). From my point of view, gender and violence are tied together in the spectrum of
escalation of extreme violence in the contemporary Mexico.

4) Identity construction: Mexicanity (Mexicaness - Leopoldo Zea)

The concept of Mexicanity has as a predecessor the concept of Identity, the creation of which
must necessarily be understood as a process of long duration. Mexicanity has been used as a
concept only recently, basically since the period of the so called mexican nationalism taking
place during the Presidency of the General Lzaro Crdenas in the 1930s and 1940s. This
term has been used in the first place to refer to the behavioural characteristics of a Mexican, to
the construction of the Mexican identity and its different features, but also in reference to the
aesthetic developed within the cultural and artistic expressions in Mexico, especially
immediately after the Mexican Revolution. The concept Mexicanity denotes an aesthetic
tendency inspired primarily by the rescued indigenous cultures in Mexico in those years (this
can be observed, for example, in the exhibition entitled Mexicanity that took place in
Berlin, where the work of the Mexican artists Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo,
Francisco Toledo and Adolfo Riestra was shown to the public. But in this work, the concept
of Mexicanity also includes the realities such as marginality, femaleness / maleness,
passiveness, or submissiveness that interact with many other characteristics to define the
behavioural patterns of a Mexican. There is even an aspect of Mexicanity defined as a hybrid
experience gained through contacts, exchange and culture mixture between Mexicans and
other cultural experiences. It is an attempt to free this concept from the superficial stereotypes
that accompany the Mexicans. Finally, bearing in mind that this study is not based on the
premise that there are certain societies more prone to violence than others, the main
question is what causes such extreme violence within any society, and also what are its
characteristics from the point of view of the cultural history of that particular society.

Thank you very much for your attention!

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