Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Visualizing Narcocultura
Visualizing Narcocultura
Visualizing Narcocultura
In recent years, as the drug war has intensified, the Mexican military has allowed media professionals to explore its
Museum of Drugs, which is used primarily to train soldiers, and to introduce the Museums exhibits of narcocultura,
or drug trafficking culture, to the larger public. Drawing on observations in the Museum, this article argues that the
exhibits of narcocultura, by authorizing visualizations of drug traffickers for the military and the larger public and
modeling the transformative logic of culture, both support the militarys professionalization and serve as the basis for
a campaign that calls for the watchfulness and support of civilians. [cultural knowledge, drug wars, exhibit design,
militarization, modernization, museum studies, narcocultura, narco saints, self-reform, visualization]
Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 30, Issue 2, pp. 151163, ISSN 1058-7187, online ISSN 1548-7458.
152
Ethan Sharp teaches in the Department of Anthropology at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. He received the Ph.D.
in folklore from Indiana University. His dissertation research addressed the relationships between religious practice and
transnational migration in Mexican communities. From August 2009 to June 2010, he conducted ethnographic research on drug
addiction, drug addiction treatment, and the drug war in Monterrey, Mexico, with a Fulbright fellowship. During this time, he was
affiliated with the Programa Noreste of the Centro de Investigaciones y de Estudios Superiores en Antropologa Social (CIESAS).
Visualizing Narcocultura
SHARP
153
tated the exportation and importation of various commodities (see Harvey 2007). These changes created
incentives for transferring investments from legitimate
small-scale agriculture to the production of marijuana
and methamphetamines (see Maldonando Aranda 2012),
expanded the possibilities for moving cocaine from
countries to the south through Mexico as cross-border
movements and exchanges increased, and contributed
to increases in competition among drug traffickers. In
turn, the Mexican federal government began to devote
increasingly more resources to drug enforcement year
after year. At the same time, the democratization of
Mexicos electoral system in the 1990s and 2000s
undermined traditional systems of interjurisdictional
accountability (see Astorga and Shirk 2010), and in
many areas of Mexico, the military emerged as the only
institution that was widely trusted to confront drug
traffickers (Camp 2010:307). As the military has become
more involved in the provision of domestic security and
the pursuit of drug traffickers, however, it has directly
contributed to an increase in violent events associated
with the drug war.
As I have addressed elsewhere (Sharp 2009), the
adoption of neoliberal programs, amid the creation of a
more competitive electoral system, has involved greater
emphases in public discourse on entrepreneurship and
creative governance in Mexico. The greater emphases
on these values have coincided withand to a degree,
have supportedthe expansion of institutions and
media dedicated to culture as well as an increase in
access to and reliance on digital technologies among
many segments of Mexican society. Although the discourse that promotes entrepreneurship and creative
governance is not especially novel or crucial to the
implementation of neoliberal reforms, it has taken on
greater urgency amid the economic and political
restructurings that have occurred in Mexico in recent
years. As educational and cultural institutions have
adjusted to these changes, they have reinforced the
transformative logic that has been integral to their formation over the course of many decades and sustained
the ongoing revival of interest in culture as a domain of
commercial innovation and market development as well
as a resource for self-reform. In this regard, they have
benefited from innovations in and the growth of televised and digital media in Mexico, which have required
adaptations across a range of institutions and social
groups. As more people in Mexico have gained access to
a broader array of television programming, the Internet,
and mobile operating systems, it has become possible
for them to watch and to rewatch the drug war as it
unfolds and for representations of drug traffickers and
narcocultura to develop into lucrative enterprises.
154
Visualizing Narcocultura
SHARP
155
156
FIGURE 3. A display case featuring replicas of objects that indigenous peoples used for the consumption of drug-like substances,
including hallucinogenic mushrooms, before the arrival of the
Europeans.
Visualizing Narcocultura
SHARP
157
158
Transformations of Narcocultura
Captain Montane, who at the time of the tour had
completed 27 years of service in the army and had been
overseeing the museum for two years, explained that
the original purpose of the Museum had been to teach
military personnel to identify drugs and to learn about
drug traffickers modes of hiding drugs, but as the
military learned more about drug trafficking it
expanded the Museums collection of media in order to
offer a broader spectrum of information. He remarked,
We need to know our enemy to be able to combat it
efficiently. This explanation suggests that the collection expanded according to the logic that the Museum,
as a museum, must be comprehensive and adaptive and
requires the ongoing development and reinterpretation
of its collection. This logic, however, has required the
military to trace the evolution of drug traffickers from a
regional and easily managed problem into a national
and much more complex problem. Captain Montane
commented that the Museum has more recently
acquired a new purpose: to serve as a bridge for
informing the civilian population about our advances
and the risks to national security that drug trafficking
and organized crime presents. This comment indicates
that as the struggle against drug traffickers has intensified, the military has opened up the Museums collection in order to build confidence in the militarys
knowledge and leadership and to guide civilians in
reflections about the drug war.
For the exhibits that are organized under the title
La Narcocultura, the third stage of the Museum,
Captain Montane provided more extensive explanations
than he did for any of the other exhibits, demonstrating
the kinds of reflections and interpretations that
narcocultura requires. The exhibits begin with a mannequin that represents a narcotraficante (drug trafficker). He is dressed like a sophisticated cowboy, in blue
jeans and an expensive shirt, with gold chains around
his neck and gold bracelets on his wrist (Figure 5). The
mannequin is positioned between two horse saddles,
with large silver-plated horns, which the military confiscated from drug traffickers. The clothing of the mannequin, along with the saddles, establishes connections
between the exhibits of narcocultura and the installa-
FIGURE 5. A mannequin dressed as a drug trafficker, with a goldplated cellular telephone in his hand. The mannequin marks the
beginning of a series of displays dedicated to narcocultura. The
text on the plate behind the mannequin identifies different elements of narcocultura.
Visualizing Narcocultura
SHARP
159
160
Visualizing Narcocultura
Conclusions
The images of and information about the drug war that
have recently circulated and shaped an interest in drug
traffickers have included scenes and news of assassinations, shootouts, and other violent acts in newspapers
and on the Internet, representations of drug traffickers
in telenovelas and narcocorridos, and the rumors and
descriptions of drug traffickers extravagance that
people share with one another in face-to-face interactions. Amid these circulations, photographs and videos
of the Museums exhibits of narcocultura have been
especially valuable, deriving authority from both the
militarys commitment to modernization and its successful deployment of the museum idea (Buntix and
Karp 2006:208), and they have become points of reference for many different projects. As they are represented across different formats and contexts, however,
some of these photographs and videos suggest that the
Museum commemorates the way of life and achievements of drug traffickers as a kind of national heritage,
as the National Museum of Anthropology does for the
indigenous peoples of Mexico (Coffey 2003:220). As I
toured the Museum, I found that the military has, in
fact, made the exhibits of narcocultura more elaborate
and captivating than the Museums other exhibits in
order to make the Museum into a more comprehensive
and appealing resource, one that can participate in the
shaping of a national identity as it traces the development of both the military and drug trafficking organizations. As individuals move through the Museum or
review a series of images that feature the Museums
exhibits on television or the Internet, they can survey
and identify the different landscapes, structures, objects,
techniques, and personalities that military personnel
have encountered in the course of drug enforcement
operations. As these visual exercises focus on expressions of narcoculturafrom images of sloppy campesinos keeping watch in the mountains to images of
SHARP
161
162
Notes
1
2
References
Agha, Asif
2011 Meet Mediatization. Language and Communication
31:163170.
Astorga, Luis, and David A. Shirk
2010 Drug Trafficking Organizations and Counter-Drug
Strategies in the USMexico Context. In Shared
Responsibility: USMexico Policy Options for Confronting Organized Crime. Eric Olson, David A.
Shirk, and Andrew Selee, eds. Pp. 3162. Washington,
DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Benavides, Hugo
2008 Drugs, Thugs and Divas: Telenovelas and NarcoDramas in Latin America. Austin: University of
Texas Press.
Bentez Manaut, Ral
2010 Reforming CivilMilitary Relations during Democratization. In Mexicos Democratic Challenges: Politics,
Government and Society. Andrew Selee and Jacqueline Peschard, eds. Pp. 162186. Washington, DC:
Woodrow Wilson Center Press.
Bennett, Tony
1995 The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics.
New York: Routledge.
2006 Exhibition, Difference and the Logic of Culture. In
Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations. Ivan Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Swaja,
and Thomas Ybarra-Fausto, eds. Pp. 4669. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
2013 Making Culture, Changing Society. New York:
Routledge.
Booth, William
2010 In Harsh Reflection of Reality, Mexicos Museum
of Drugs Outgrowing Its Space. Washington
Post, January 14, http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Visualizing Narcocultura
wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/13/
AR2010011304573.html.
Buntix, Gustavo, and Ivan Karp
2006 Tactical Museologies. In Museum Frictions: Public
Cultures/Global Transformations. Ivan Karp, Corinne
A. Kratz, Lynn Swaja, and Thomas Ybarra-Fausto,
eds. Pp. 207218. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Camp, Roderic Ai.
2010 Armed Forces and Drugs: Public Perceptions and
Institutional Challenges. In Shared Responsibility:
USMexico Policy Options for Confronting Organized Crime. Eric Olson, David A. Shirk, and Andrew
Selee, eds. Pp. 291326. Washington, DC: Woodrow
Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Campbell, Howard
2009 Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from the
Streets of El Paso and Jurez. Austin: University of
Texas Press.
Coffey, Mary K.
2003 From Nation to Community: Museums and the
Reconfiguration of Mexican Society under
Neoliberalism. In Foucault, Cultural Studies and
Governmentality. Jack Z. Bratich, Jeremy Packer,
and Cameron McCarthy, eds. Pp. 207242. Albany:
State University of New York Press.
2012 How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture:
Murals, Museums and the Mexican State. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Crdova Sols, Nery
2012 La Narcocultura: Poder, Realidad, Iconografa Y
Mito. Cultura y Representaciones Sociales
6(12):209237.
Feldman, Allen
2005 On the Actuarial Gaze: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib.
Cultural Studies 19(2):203226.
Graziano, Frank
2007 Cultures of Devotion: Folk Saints of Spanish
America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Grillo, Ioan
2011 El Narco: Inside Mexicos Criminal Insurgency. New
York: Bloomsbury Press.
Harvey, David
2007 Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction. Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Sciences
610:2144.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara
1998 Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums and Heritage. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kratz, Corinne A.
2011 Rhetorics of Value: Constituting Worth and Meaning
through Cultural Displays. Visual Anthropology
Review 27(1):2148.
SHARP
163
Macdonald, Sharon
2005 Enchantment and Its Dilemmas: The Museum as a
Ritual Site. In Science, Magic and Religion: The
Ritual Processes of Museum Magic. Mary Bouquet
and Nuno Porto, eds. Pp. 209228. New York:
Berghan Books.
Maldonado Aranda, Salvador
2013 Stories of Drug Trafficking in Rural Mexico: Territories, Drugs and Cartels in Michoacn. European
Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
94:4366.
Marez, Curtis
2004 Drug Wars: The Political Economy of Narcotics.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
McDowell, John
2012 The Ballad of Narcomexico. Journal of Folklore
Research 49(3):249274.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas
2009 War Is Culture: Global Counterinsurgency, Visuality
and the Petraeus Doctrine. PMLA 124(5):17371746.
Orr, Jackie
2004 The Militarization of Inner Space. Critical Sociology
30:451481.
Prez Montfort, Ricardo
2000 Avatares Del Nacionalismo Popular: Cinco Ensayos.
Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones y de Estudios
Superiores en Antropologa Social.
Pink, Sarah
2012 Visual Ethnography and the Internet: Visuality, Virtuality and the Spatial Turn. In Advances in Visual
Methodology. Sarah Pink, ed. Pp. 113130. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Secretara de Seguridad Pblica del Gobierno Federal
2010 Jovenes y narcocultura. Direccin de Estudios y
Diagnosticos, Direccin General de Prevencin del
Delito y Participacin Ciudadana, Secretara de
Seguridad
Pblica.
http://www.ssp.gob.mx/
portalWebApp/ShowBinary?nodeId=/
BEA%20Repository/1214169//archivo.
Sharp, Ethan
2009 Waging the War on Drugs: Neoliberal Governance
and the Formation of Faith-Based Organizations in
Urban Mexico. In Bridging the Gaps: Faith-Based
Organizations, Neoliberalism and Development in
Latin America and the Caribbean. Tara Hefferan,
Julie Adkins, and Laurie Occhipinti, eds. Pp. 3550.
Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Valenzuela Arce, Jos Manuel
2002 Jefe De Jefes: Corridos Y Narcocultura En Mxico.
Havana: Fondo Editorial Casa de las Amricas.