El Ciudadano
Original article: Luchas por la vida… más allá del narco: Una docuserie de los territorios para los territorios
By Patricio Azócar Donoso and Javier Moreno Apablaza.
In sensitive regions where «narcoterrorism» manifests as an interventionist program that oppresses yet also catalyzes rapid responses to crises resulting from societal models, the docuseries and podcast «Struggles for Life Beyond the Narcos» kicks off its new season.
Produced by the platform RETRATOS Vidas-en-común, a co-production between Cooperativa Espacio .tierra and Estudios Baret, this series aims to connect territories, social-community organizations, and research centers from Chile, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. It explores the everyday aspects of lives often unheard and unseen under the label of «insecurity» and the demand for «more police»: focusing on time, health, community, and emotional connections.
Understanding «Narcoterrorism» in Latin America
While Trump encapsulated U.S. policy on the Middle East through direct military intervention in Iran, the kidnapping of Maduro following the «extraction» of Mayo Zambada, and the death of Mencho, leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, mark significant turning points in interventionist politics for our region: the path of «narcoterrorism» in Latin America.
It’s important to recall that in 2004, the democratically elected president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, accused France and the United States of orchestrating his kidnapping after he demanded reparations for slavery. This event plunged the country into a conflict marked by criminal faction wars and human rights violations, perpetuated by the same UN peacekeeping forces up to this day.
Similarly, 17 years later in 2021, Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated by a gang of former Colombian soldiers turned hitmen, whom the United States admitted to training during its intervention in Colombia. This crime highlighted the existence of transnational mercenary and paramilitary networks capable of illegal actions in international conflicts.
The same issue, localized, currently keeps the entire Bolsonaro government in Rio de Janeiro embroiled in corruption and bribery scandals with «militias» in the most impoverished sectors of society. This government also unleashed a massacre last year in the favelas of El Complejo del Alemán and La Peña.
These «militias» are paramilitary groups funded by elites and far-right factions to control services in territories contested by criminal factions. This parallels the case that led former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe, known as «presidente paraco,» to court over bribing witnesses in extrajudicial killings.
It’s worth noting that «paraco» refers to paramilitaries from the Colombian far-right, supported and funded by the United States during its interventions in the country and linked to the assassination of the Haitian president in 2021.
Among many crimes, they are blamed for the extrajudicial kidnapping and killing of 6402 young people in what is internationally recognized as the «false positives» case.
In this regional context, in 2026, through Mencho’s death and the earlier kidnapping of Mayo Zambada—the oldest head of the Sinaloa cartel—there’s a push to justify and claim power over Venezuela’s oil. This aims to exploit the economic and military influence of the United States, inducing bloody wars, multiplying factions, and dispersing power at local scales across Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Chile, and Paraguay.
The Drug War as Extractivism
Over the past 30 years, interventionist policies have been grounded in a consistent imperial technology or rationale, infiltrating complex local and regional power struggles through civilian, military, and paramilitary means. They utilize the moral degradation linked to narcotics to discredit social processes and manage war, terror, and destabilization scenarios they themselves induce.
This strategy has solidified techniques of control over social, economic, and political life boundaries that have become increasingly opaque between what is legal and illegal: the common.
The «parastatal» opacity transforms daily life in areas legitimately controlled by «invisible» forces that pave the way for the development of new markets and industries, such as real estate, forestry, and pharmaceuticals. We must consider that «narcoterrorism» has not spared violence to deepen its roots, reaching a point where its operational zones are labeled similarly to extractivist capitalism’s: «sacrifice zones.»
Although «the market of illegalities» has been a critical piece of macropolitical power, ensuring the economic stabilization of the world post various wars and geopolitical struggles—as illustrated by the film industry with shows like «Peaky Blinders,» «Breaking Bad,» and «Narcos»—in Latin America, «narcoterrorism» constitutes a different intervention technology.
This approach seeks to consolidate a shift in political and economic capital accumulation strategies with a strong commitment to reproductive, intimate, and affective life. If drug trafficking had become the scapegoat for the consensus of state sovereignties, safeguarding the specter of «public law» against «private interest» and the impotence of «social rights,» «narcoterrorism» aims to overcome the triad of «public-private-social» and its old antagonisms, claiming total influence over living beings at a micropolitical level for financial speculation.
In its demand to subject daily life to debt and dependency relationships, it amalgamates a single large criminal consortium encompassing state, industrial, corporate, and civilian elements controlled by big, «invisible» international holdings and their mafias.
When discussing narcoterrorism, we address a regime that blurs the lines among companies, cartels, and governments, as well as technological, military, health, pharmaceutical, therapeutic, and financial markets. This regime consolidates a phase of value extraction and profit accumulation mainly based on impoverishing and precarizing effects imposed by vicious circles of inequality, flexibility, and uncertainty on everyday life in neighborhoods, communities, and ecosystems.
Its main expressions of power include neighborhood indebtedness or «home loans,» internal wars in impoverished neighborhoods, habilitation/reincidence economies stemming from addiction, community socialization through distrust and suspicion, incarceration for drug trafficking or micro-trafficking, especially among women, and the provision of precocious futures to impoverished youth and children in the crime industry.
The objective of narcoterrorism is not the «production of illegal goods and their circulation,» as media claims state, when they say the «war is against drugs.» Its aim is to increase profit and control through the escalation of social and emotional conflicts. In other words, it seeks to dispossess and exploit connections, interdependencies, and dignified conditions to expand and diversify the reproduction and care of communal life.
Narcoterrorism is corporate terrorism.
To summarize, extensive research shows that when we talk about «narcoterrorism,» we refer to not «security,» but a vast, opaque network of associations among criminal groups, police, military forces, extractive mining, extractive forestry, landowners, real estate companies, cultural industries, the pharmaceutical industry, new sanitary-therapeutic regimes, and agents and financial institutions involved in money laundering.
Illegal mining in Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador; coyotes and urban sacrifice zones amid the Chilean real estate bubble; money laundering points of factions and militias in Faria Lima (the financial center) in Brazil; American mercenarism as a technology for the internationalization of Colombian hitmen; the murder of ecological leaders and ancestral indigenous authorities for the forestry industry across Latin America; the diversification of the penal industry with the increased female incarceration due to micro-trafficking; the malicious use of public money by evangelical therapeutic communities in Brazil, among others.
All these are expressions of «narcoterrorism» as a pathway for developing financial capitalism, exacerbating its predation in three functions.
As Suely Rolnik states, its pimping, meaning the capability to break conservative moral consensuses to publicly celebrate the abuse of women’s bodies, particularly within realms of reproduction and care. As Sayak Valencia points out, its Gore function, expanding the global sphere of wealth accumulation and value extraction through violence over colonized territories and their informational uses. Lastly, as Rossana Reguillo notes, its necromachine function, arranging the realm of death as a space where people can continue working alive or dead, whether through contract killing or by rendering their own bodies as corpses in the public and media sphere.
As Rossana will illustrate from an interview with a young hitman, «in this game, it’s no longer enough to just die.»
In these terms, «narcoterrorism» demonstrates that the aim of intervention is no longer the production and circulation of drugs but the accumulation of power that illegal activities have exerted over the most diverse depths of communities’ and territories’ lives.
A web of power structures is tasked with controlling the movements of precarized populations between countries devastated by economics, weakening or confronting social and collective struggles, managing the destruction of biomes and ecosystems, soothing or pacifying psychological-affective suffering, and profiting from updated forms of precarious-slave work.
All these «illegal» threads have greater operational and action capacities in a context where misery stops being entrenched in global and local peripheries to become «circulating,» redefining neighborhoods, wars, and armed borders across the continent and worldwide.
A few days ago, an Uber driver in Brazil shared how the «boss of the cars» from whom he rented his work tool was looking to establish fixed hours based on a verbal agreement. It reminded me of another Uber driver in Tijuana, ten years ago, who told me he was renting his work car through an unusual form of «compadrazgo» labor arrangement with «the car guy.»
Neighborhood and community relations have become subjugated to forms of work that emulate what large corporations demand from their employees: «putting on the shirt» for the boss or «death.» This rearticulates a network of intimate codes of friendship and solidarity through a labor and dominion lens.
In addition, «narco» promotes new cultural patterns of socialization, sexuality, eroticism, consumption, performativity, and ways of being, being seen, and appearing on the streets. Codes of respect, hierarchization, and control of the neighborhood, populace, and home are established.
We could assert that the object of «narcoterrorism» is the delicate affective and symbolic infrastructure upon which lived miseries, territorial memories, family stories, personal struggles, gender experiences, ethical codes, moral principles, transgenerational challenges, family epics, individual capabilities, and shared dreams or futures are embodied across the continent.
This last great collective effort for life that neighborhoods once had to seek and envision other possible futures for their communities is now subjected to savage financialization. Memories, affections, and territorial narratives are absorbed by «narco» as a moral and individualizing pattern of «motivation,» «performance,» «entrepreneurship,» “leadership,” and social overcoming.
However, as Ainhoa Vásquez points out, they also represent forms of resistance. Grammars that will utilize cultural genres to counteract the social miseries that engender them, seeking swifter affective and economic responses to abandonment, exclusion, and societal hierarchies.
Struggles for Life: A Docuseries
In each monthly episode, insights produced by community leaders, researchers, youth activists, and community projects will allow us to navigate the atmosphere of uncertainty imposed by the strategy of «narcoterrorism» on the most intimate and everyday aspects of our communities and territories.
We will examine its effects, the concepts generated to comprehend it, and the practices and strategies developed locally to contain, resist, and translate it. Additionally, we will encounter a broad spectrum of contradictions and ethical crossroads where the notion of a dignified life for territories clashes with increasingly cruel and ineffable notions of good and evil.
Undoubtedly, narcoterrorism as a path for Latin America compels us to seek narratives and clues in the continent’s real life. We must understand the regional forms that «narco» has taken after 55 years of being implemented as an intervention strategy for Latin America by the Nixon administration in the United States, promoting ongoing state agendas and rhetorics.
Moreover, we must recognize, listen to, and give visibility to collective processes, the tireless efforts of communities and networks to impose ethical, social, and affective limits on a heartbreaking horizon based on kidnapping, disappearance, profit, and unlimited accumulation of power and wealth over life in all its forms.
Watch the first episode of the series HERE
Patricio Azócar Donoso is a researcher with Cooperativa Espacio .tierra. He is a PhD candidate in Psychiatry at UFRGS and Anthropology at Universitat Rovira i Virgili, and a member of the research group on violence Intemperie.
Javier Moreno Apablaza is a documentarian, photographer, and audiovisual creator, founder of Estudios Baret.
La entrada Struggles for Life Beyond the Narcos: A Groundbreaking Docuseries Examining Societal Realities se publicó primero en El Ciudadano.
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