Making the Cartel

What is a drug cartel? The term conjures a familiar image: a coherent and hierarchical criminal enterprise operating outside the state and confronting it through violence. A critical investigation complicates this picture. In Mexico, “the cartel” refers to shifting networks of traffickers and armed groups dependent on relationships with business, police, soldiers, and political officials. What is gained—and by whom—when these archetypes are applied to Mexico? What is lost or omitted when we accept them? Recognizing this historical construction does not render trafficking violence fictional; rather, it demands we ask how heterogeneous organizations came to be rendered as cartels, and what political work is performed by imagining them as coherent, external enemies.

This course examines the making of “the cartel” across the unequal U.S.-Mexico relationship. We situate drug trafficking squarely within histories of prohibition, capitalist accumulation, state formation, and U.S. power. American appetites, firearms, financial systems, policing strategies, and foreign policy actively produce the drug trade and its violence. Mexico contributes its own intersecting histories of political protection, coercion, counterinsurgency, and state-trafficker accommodation.

We trace the Colombian archetype’s imposition on Mexican organizations, reading histories of the drug trade alongside Oswaldo Zavala’s critique of cartel discourse. We then analyze drugs and other illicit activities within circuits of capital, tracking labor and profit across borders as well as within them. The conventional narrative presents the state as the cartel’s principal antagonist, operating according to an entirely different logic. Charles Tilly’s sociology of state-building as organized crime disrupts this binary: if states and criminal organizations both extract resources, sell protection, and organize violence, how do we locate the boundary between them? What happens when that boundary proves permeable? Moving to the border itself, we examine how the Cold War, counterinsurgency, and the U.S.-led drug war transformed policing and military power in Mexico.

The seminar resists two easy conclusions: that cartels are self-contained enemies attacking the state from the outside, and that they are merely inventions of official discourse. We ask instead what relationships the cartel framework reveals, what it conceals, and what kinds of power the war against it has built.