Campbell, Howard. 2014 “Narco-Propaganda in the Mexican ‘Drug War.’” Latin American Perspective 41 (195): 60-77. doi: 10.1177/0094582X12443519.

Violence and organized crimes produced by narcotic selling cartels have ravaged Mexico for 20 years. The drug business in Mexico boomed after filling in for the power vacuum left behind after the U.S. shut down the Colombian organizations. In 2006, President Felipe Calderon’s aggressive new policy to shutdown the largest Mexican cartels exacerbated the tension, causing 50,000 deaths and thousands still missing. Howard Campbell conducted an anthropological study on the current cartels and how they are embedded in Mexican culture to find a better solution in the future. His research question asked how the various forms of narco-propaganda in Mexico form their own kind of criminal and quasi-political and how we should treat them.

In collecting the propaganda and its effects, Campbell had to collect reports of acts and behaviors. The reports of these events come in the form of journalism articles and books on Mexican drug cartels. He coded the propaganda into 4-types: public spectacles of violence, written narco messages, videos and internet posts, music and lyrics, and control/censorship of the media. He analyzed each of the examples of propaganda qualitatively, explaining how they are more political statements than just criminal acts. They carried out acts of violence to terrify people, force passive coercion and ensure a certain desired reaction from the government. Their violence is “excessive but stylized” and not meaningless criminal acts. They made banners, posters, and manifestos, glorifying their organizations while criticizing and defacing rivals and the government. They used these written messages to declare that everything evil is done by a certain other rival cartel while they would never commit heinous act, or they justified their violence because they believed those whom they killed deserved it. They also used propaganda like music to recruit and enforce loyalty like any state actor. They also paid off the media to tell their version of the story and killed a large amount of journalists who tried to expose them in the past.

Howard Campbell concluded that by analyzing Narco-propaganda with an anthropology study, he saw that the cartel used it as a strategy to capture territory, control police force, and the Mexican people. He believed that the political statements they are making with the propaganda is extremely dangerous “unorthodox politics.” In order to deal with them, he suggested controlling the information they put out, rather than a kinetic war like President Felipe Calderon attempted in 2006 which backfired.