ESS AY S

The Narco ­Uncanny

Shaylih Muehlmann

The term narco is one of the most loaded in the contempo-

rary global lexicon, and the fear and othering it evokes is comparable to the effect
terrorist has worldwide and communist had during the Cold War. In Mexico,
in particular, the term narcotraficante and the related assumptions and narra-
tives that describe the illegal trafficking of drugs have strongly informed official
and media discourses about the causes of the extreme levels of drug-­related vio-
lence that have devastated the country.1 Since 2006, when former President Felipe
Calderón officially militarized the so-­called war on drugs, more than 235,000
people have been killed nationwide and many more have disappeared (SEGOB
2018). By some estimates only 5 percent of these deaths and disappearances are
ever investigated, which means little evidence is collected as to whether the vic-
tims were indeed active or armed members of narcotrafficking cartels (Paley
2014).
The Mexican government has justified its unwillingness to investigate the
majority of these murders by claiming that they consist simply of criminals kill-
ing each other off. Almost all the people I have met who have lost a relative or
friend, whether disappeared or found murdered, received the same response from
the police and the government when they demanded an investigation: they must
have been involved. These accusations of involvement oversimplify the nature
of contemporary drug war violence, which has been created by multiple actors,

I am grateful for excellent comments I received from anonymous reviews as well as the feed-
back from the editorial committee of Public Culture. Previous versions of this paper also received
helpful feedback from Joe Masco, Louise Lamphere, Kirsten Bell, Kendra Jewell, and Gastón Gor-
dillo. Funding for this research was provided by the Wenner-­Gren Foundation for Anthropological
Research.
1. Narco originated as an abbreviation of narcotraficante and is now commonly used in collo-
quial speech in Mexico. In this article I use both versions of the word.

Public Culture 32:2 doi 10.1215/08992363-8090101

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 Public Culture including drug-­trafficking organizations, the police, and the military, often form-
ing entangled and deeply corrupt alliances. The impunity implied by these drug
war discourses also creates a deeply fraught atmosphere for local people who
experience firsthand the liminality, uncertainty, and contradictions inherent in
current drug war policies.
In this article, I explore the elusive, haunting positionalities and experiences
produced by narco-­accusations in rural areas of northern Mexico. In particular,
I reflect on the political and affective consequences of these accusations for the
working-­class poor who are most explicitly implicated by them. The term narco,
on the one hand, names the members of organizations devoted to producing, trans-
porting, and selling illegal drugs. But the narco is also a nebulous category that
has been thoroughly stigmatized, reified, and dehumanized by the state and the
media. This dehumanization has clear implications when officials assert that those
murdered in the war on drugs are simply narcos, therefore implying that because
of this identity they are unworthy of justice and due process. My analysis draws
on the concept of the uncanny to highlight the discomfort created among the rural
poor of northern Mexico by the experience of partly recognizing oneself in the
ever-­encompassing category of the narco.
Since the mid-­2000s, I have been researching the often subtle ways in which
accusations of narco involvement are haunted by a crucial slippage that includes
both distancing from and identifying with the everyday presence of drug traf-
ficking in the region. In particular, I became interested in the continual process
of naming the narco I encountered over several stretches of fieldwork in different
villages of northern Mexico among economically marginalized Indigenous people
who were often accused of being narcos by local elites and officials independently
of whether they were involved in the drug trade. What struck me was, first, that
sometimes ordinary people would find themselves in the precarious position of
occupying the category of the narco without intending to or even knowing how
they got there.2 And second, that this process of being assumed to be implicated in
narco-­related violence produced among many people I met what Sigmund Freud
would call a distinctly uncanny experience.
One such person was Miguel, a twenty-­six-­year-­old taxi driver I met in Los
Angeles in 2012 at a series of protests against drug war violence in Mexico. He
was from Monterrey, Nuevo León, and his sister had disappeared several years
earlier. After talking with me for some time about his family’s search for his sister

2. In this article I use the term ordinary people to distinguish from governmental officials, politi-
cians, and drug capos rather than as a normative prescription.

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 and what life was like in Monterrey, he said, in a confessional tone, that he ends The Narco ­Uncanny
up “driving narcos around” in his taxi all the time.3 “You can’t help it,” he said.
“You don’t get to choose what people you pick up. And you can’t tell anyway
because they could be anyone, niños y viejitos [children and old people], working
as narcos.” He said they would use his taxi to observe and monitor the movement
of soldiers in the city or the location of checkpoints. He had no other option but to
do as they asked. Then he added, defensively, “But, I’m just a taxi driver!”
Miguel made these remarks while we were participating in the 2012 “Peace
Caravan,” a tour through the United States organized by relatives of victims of the
violence created by the war on drugs in Mexico. The goal of the caravan was to
visit several US cities and bring attention to the very high human cost created by
drug policies in both Mexico and the United States. On this tour, activists argued
forcefully that their missing loved ones and many others who have died as a result
of narco-­violence were “not involved” and “were not narcos.” In doing so, they
challenged the official narrative promoted by the Mexican government and media
that the extreme violence afflicting the nation since the mid-­2000s is simply the
result of “narcos killing each other off.”
When Miguel emphasized, “But I’m just a taxi driver,” he seemed to be both
clarifying his profession to me and reassuring himself that he was, indeed, a regu-
lar taxi driver, if one occasionally forced by narcos to drive them around to spy
on the military. Over the last few days of the Peace Caravan he had heard, over
and over again, that the relatives of the tour’s participants who had been killed
or “disappeared” were “not involved with drugs” and that, therefore, their deaths
were unfair. It was clear from our conversation that Miguel was unsettled by the
activists’ conflation of innocence with a lack of any contact with criminal groups
or criminal behaviors. Miguel’s discomfort revealed his own awareness that his
identification as a “taxi driver” was not sufficient to protect him from the charge
of being a narco. The implications of this positioning can be dire, since once you
are labeled as a narco in Mexico your life becomes expendable in official perspec-
tives. Miguel was experiencing uncertainty because he regularly drove narcos
around in his taxi despite never intending to. Was he involved? Was he a narco?
No, he was “just a taxi driver.” He was both rejecting the category and uncomfort-
ably recognizing that he could easily be seen by others as a narco and that, indeed,
at some level he could see himself as such.

3. All interviews for this article come from fieldwork conducted in northern Mexico and Los
Angeles between 2005 and 2018. Interviewees are cited by pseudonym and quotations are from
recorded interviews or from detailed notes.

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 Public Culture The Narcos and Their Proliferation

Freud ([1919] 2003) elaborated the concept of the uncanny to name an affective
reaction to something felt by the subject as simultaneously strange and familiar.
He argued that the experience of the uncanny is a variation of the experience of
feeling frightened. Yet this is a fear generated by elements that are not totally
new or strange, but actually familiar. While Freud is commonly touted as having
elevated the phenomenon of the uncanny to a theoretical concept, it has since
then far exceeded the boundaries of a strict psychoanalytic framework. After a
fairly long period of latency, the concept reemerged in the 1960s and, influenced
by interpretations by philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida,
it was particularly popular in the fields of aesthetics, literary criticism, art history,
and philosophy to name a “subdued” form of anxiety that is often pleasurable. As
work on the uncanny shifted focus from representations to experience, ethnog-
raphers have increasingly turned to the concept (Ginsburg 2018; Johnson 2013;
Lepselter 2016; Masco 2006; Marinelli and Ricatti 2013; Trnka 2011).4
Several scholars have emphasized that the uncanny is an affect produced by
uncertainty and, in the words of one, “associated with an experience of the thresh-
old, liminality, margins, borders” (Royle 2003: 4). Lauren Berlant (2011: 80)
explains the relevance of this emphasis in her work on trauma, writing that this
uncertainty “produces something in the air without that thing having to be more
concrete than a sense of the uncanny — free floating anxiety in the room, negativ-
ity on the street, a scenario seeming to unfold within the ordinary without clear
margins, even when a happening is also specific.”
While existing scholarship on the uncanny is thus broad ranging and diffuse, in
this essay I will follow through on a particular point of Freud’s that is especially
relevant for my analysis: that the uncanny often involves the haunting presence of
an “other” experienced as a “double.” Freud illustrated this point with an experi-
ence he had while riding a train. He was sitting alone in his sleeping compartment
when the train lurched and the door of the toilet across the hall swung open. An
elderly gentleman in a dressing gown and traveling cap had suddenly entered his
compartment. Freud assumed the man had turned the wrong way when leaving the
toilet and so he jumped up to redirect him. It was then that he realized the intruder

4. This work has ranged in ethnographic focus from using the concept of the uncanny to explore
experiences of Italian migrants and settlers to Australasia (Marinelli and Ricatti 2013), the connec-
tions between historical American Indian captivity narratives and UFO abduction accounts (Lepsel-
ter 2016), the threat of nuclear radiation in New Mexico (Masco 2006), depictions of a political coup
that took place in Fiji (Trnka 2011), to stories of “lurking populations” in Thailand’s communities of
exclusion (Johnson 2013).

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 was his own image reflected in the mirror of the connecting door. Freud ([1919] The Narco ­Uncanny
2003: 161 – 62) writes that he found the appearance thoroughly unpleasant and
suggests this displeasure was a reaction to “the double” as something uncanny, an
expression of affective unease. If we return to the example of Miguel, the appear-
ance of the double emerges as well. Miguel saw himself as matching the profile of
those dead people the media and officials accuse of being “narcos.” And he found
this resonance both startling and unpleasant.
“The double” and its many close relations — iteration, repetition, imitation,
mimesis, and simulation — have long been central to critical and social theory,
philosophy, postcolonial theory, and anthropology (Benjamin 1978; Bhabha 1997;
Hayden 2010; Kokoli 2016; Taussig 1993). But the uncanny has a specific analyti-
cal purchase in the doubling I will describe here, because it draws our attention to
how people experience the blurring of boundaries necessary to maintain a sense
of the normal and familiar in their lives in an uncertain, precarious environment
of pervasive violence and impunity. In a context where the drug trade is an omni-
present element of everyday life in northern Mexico, the always-­real possibility
of being seen by others as a narco destabilizes many people’s perceptions of their
selves and their neighbors.
One of the most notable dimensions of the war on drugs is that, by all accounts,
this war is not accomplishing what it purportedly set out to, which is to stop the
flow of illegal drugs and to reduce addiction rates. Instead, the war on drugs
has made illegal drugs more accessible and violence more widespread than ever
before. A question then arises: If a powerful political discourse persists, despite
not doing what it says it is doing, what, then, is it actually doing? On the one hand,
instead of stopping cartels and stifling the drug trade, the war on drugs can be
seen, rather, as creating the figure of the narco. As it happened with alcohol during
Prohibition in the 1920s, the illegality of drugs is causing more people to actively
take up this identity by creating more unmet demand for the illegal substance.
This is what Michel Foucault (1973, 1977) outlined in his seminal analyses of
how the psychiatric hospital and the prison create the madman and the criminal,
respectively, not just as discursive categories but also as subject positions. The
war on drugs, likewise, marks out and isolates the “abnormal” or illegal elements
of society and creates the narcos as a social category that has to be fought and
controlled by the state.
Certainly, narcos are not just a discursive construct. Organizations devoted
to trafficking illegal drugs do exist and mobilize impressive numbers of armed
combatants as well as the many men and women hired, regularly or occasionally,
to produce, move, and store and sell drugs. More importantly, these organizations

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 Public Culture are profoundly enmeshed with sectors from the legal economy. Several authors
have analyzed how key legal sectors obtain huge financial profits from current
antidrugs policies as well as from illegal trafficking. For example, the military-­
industrial complex benefits from inflated antibudgets (Andreas 2009; Becker 2014)
as do infrastructural and construction enterprises more generally (O’Neill 2016)
and the financial sector launders billions of US dollars for the cartels (Enciso
2010). The private-­prison complex in the United States also profits from the high
number of racialized drug-­related incarcerations (Alexander 2012; Sudbury 2008),
as do corrupt governments and corporations (Hernández 2012; Paley 2014). The
existence of narco organizations is also behind the financial benefits reaped by
Mexican and especially US government agencies, which receive generous budgets
to combat them (Astorga 2005b; Wright 2014). The narcos exist, in short, because
they run a very profitable capitalist operation that many fully legal and visible
actors (from banks to the Drug Enforcement Administration) benefit from.
The studies that have outlined this top-­down dynamic at work in drug war poli-
cies have been crucial in destabilizing commonsense notions about drug-­related
violence that too often re-­entrench neoliberal ideologies (see Maldonado 2010 and
Tate 2015). But the diverse ways in which the very category of the narco comes
to resonate with people’s lives in Mexico have received less scrutiny. This lack of
attention to the everyday lives and experiences of those people labeled as narcos
by the state has inadvertently contributed to the dismissal of their violent deaths.
This impact of narcotrafficking organizations on much wider social actors and
spaces is also clear in northern Mexico, where these organizations often rely on
the labor, tools, or local spaces used by residents who do not necessarily see
themselves as narcos. As I have argued elsewhere (Muehlmann 2013), some local
people involved in the lower echelons of the drug economy do identify as narcos,
often to overemphasize their importance or enhance their local prestige. But the
category of the narco often resonates with people’s lives in diverse, conjunctural,
and contradictory ways, particularly when accusations of narco-­involvement origi-
nate from ordinary people themselves. In the next section, I elaborate on the role
of the uncanny in blurring boundaries between neighbors and strangers, the home
and the “unhomely,” self and other.

What Do Narcos Look Like? Between the Invisible and the Revealed

Narcotrafficking activities in contemporary Mexico rely on a fundamental tension

between what is hidden about them and what is not. Because of the illegal nature
of the business, people working for drug cartels necessarily conceal many of their

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 practices, contacts, and routines from state agents and many ordinary people. The Narco ­Uncanny
The success of drug networks relies on a secret knowledge that protects them
from state agents. Who are the people selling or shipping the drugs of particular
cartels? Where are their smuggling routes? And how are they laundering money?
By design, this is knowledge most people and the state do not have direct access
to. An example of the anxiety this invisibility produces is the excess of discus-
sion around precisely the ways narco activities become visible. For these reasons,
speculation about what make narcos visible and how to identify what a narco
looks like has emerged as a national preoccupation and become an increasingly
difficult task in Mexico.
When I first made visits to northern Mexico, in the early 2000s, local people
told me narcos looked like Mexican cowboys, wearing cowboy hats and boots like
cheros (from ranchero). As Javier, the nineteen-­year-­old man in the home where I
first lived explained, the alligator skin boots were the signature touch of real nar-
cos. He said, “You might see people dressed as cheros, but the alligator skin boots
are how you tell the real narcotraficantes.” This look and this attire were linked to
the work, and the ways of life, of the cattle ranches where much of the production
of drugs was historically rooted in the north. But the alligator skin boots, much
more expensive than cowhide boots, supposedly distinguished those involved in
the drug trade from regular Mexican cowboys. And indeed, in my fieldwork I met
several men working in the illegal trade who wore those alligator boots with pride,
fully aware they signaled the narco status of the wearer.
Popular culture permanently shapes these perceptions and clothing styles. Spe-
cifically, “narco-­culture” — the myriad creative forms that have emerged in Mex-
ico over the past few decades to celebrate different aspects of the drug economy
and the social and artistic assemblages it generates — has been a source of salient
imaginaries of the figure of the narcotraficante. Narconovellas, Spanish-­language
soap operas that use the lives of narcotraffickers for their storylines are one such
example. Music, and in particular the narcocorrido, has also been a major source
of these perceptions. The corrido is a genre of folk song that was used to venerate
the lives of heroes of the Mexican Revolution from the early 1900s such as Pancho
Villa. But contemporary corridos celebrate the lives and deeds of drug traffickers.
And the musicians that play these songs often impersonate and take on the identi-
ties of powerful drug capos and dress to look like them (Astorga 2005a).
Generally famous capos are not well photographed until the time of their
arrest. The photos published in the media are often the first time the public puts
a face to the stories of their brutal exploits. And sometimes these photos capture
a reality that upsets ideas about what narcos look like. For example, when Edgar

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 Public Culture Valdez Villarreal (aka “La Barbie”) was finally captured in 2010, after eight years
of being hunted by Mexican and US authorities, he was paraded in front of the
media in shackles wearing a Ralph Lauren “Big Pony” Polo shirt in green with
“London” emblazoned on the front. This preppy look was not the reigning image
of the narco as depicted in the media at the time. Yet the affective power of these
images also redefined stereotypes of narcos. Within a three-­month period in 2011,
seven high-­ranking drug traffickers were arrested wearing similar shirts. By 2012
knock-­offs of those shirts were everywhere in street market stalls all over the
north of Mexico, sold for 160 pesos (US$13.50).
Increasingly, therefore, the image of the narco has been urbanized and glo-
balized. Now narcos are said to wear “bling” such as jewel-­encrusted rosaries
and guns, designer clothes and sunglasses. A longtime informant and smuggler,
Andrés, summarized this transition well during a conversation we had in 2011. He
said only the old narcos still wear cowboy boots. “What do narcos wear now?”
I asked. “Now they wear tennis shoes,” he said. Indeed, according to contempo-
rary portrayals, narcos more closely resemble rappers than ranchers (Muehlmann
2013: 170). The diversification of aesthetic identifications and associated forms of
labor among members of drug-­trafficking organizations, however, has made the
efforts to identify what a narco looks like all the more difficult. This is happening
at a time when efforts to distinguish who is in or out of the trade are increasingly
made by both law enforcement authorities and laypeople. In practice, though,
these attempts at identification are often hindered by the fact that those working
for narco organizations seek to make their action opaque. This was something
Miguel highlighted when he said he cannot tell who the narcos are because no
one knows what they look like. As he pointed out, they could even be little kids
or old people.
This uncertainty has serious implications for the ability of local people to estab-
lish a sense of normalcy in their daily routines. Joseph Masco (2006) describes
a similar instance of the uncanny in his analysis of the experience of radiation in
the nuclear borderlands of New Mexico. Because there is a time lag between the
moment when radiation exposure occurs and when it has an effect on people’s
health, potentially exposed individuals realize they are not able to evaluate the
risks of radiation exposure in everyday life. This tension creates a profusion of
anxieties and a sense of uncertainty. People living near nuclear facilities therefore
tend to explain all manner of illness and misfortune by reference to radiation
exposure. There, people experience what Masco terms a “theft of sensibility”
(32), the loss of their ability to trust sensory experience to identify the dangers of
radioactive materials in the environment.

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 In the case of the narco u­ ncanny, a similar experience of uncertainty involves The Narco ­Uncanny
everyday economic activities. In northern Mexico, the infrastructure that supports
formal economic sectors such as banks, finance, transportation, or food services
also undergirds the illegal economy. This creates a dynamic where, through the
necessity of work, many people find themselves inevitably positioned at the mar-
gins of illegal economies, whether they know it or not. People in their otherwise
legal jobs often provide services for local gangs, or discover that the legal indus-
tries they work for are owned by cartels. For example, I met people who work as
trackers in the desert and who lead groups of hunters, archaeologists, and some-
times smugglers through their lands. They learn not to ask people what they are
doing, only where they need to go. In the border city of Mexicali, likewise, I met
truck drivers who found themselves working for companies that had been bought
out by cartels. No official notice is given to the drivers about such changes of man-
agement, which often means they continue working without learning who their
new bosses are. While the blurred line between the legal and illegal economy is
a constant feature of life and work in the borderlands, the uncertainty about who
is involved in the drug trade hits closest to home in speculation about what the
neighbors are up to.

The Narcotraficante Always Lives in the Next House Over

When I first moved into a home in a small fishing village in northern Mexico to
begin research, in 2004, I did what any eager ethnographer would. I made friends
with the neighbors. In the course of several casual conversations, the neighbors
told me that Javier, the son of the family I had moved in with, had not just gotten
out of jail for having stolen a boat (as his mother had told me), but rather because
he had been caught in that boat with a large shipment of drugs. The family I was
living with, in turn, claimed that the people living in the next house over had
bought their car “with drug money.” It took me some time to assess both the truth
of these perceptions and the atmosphere they created in the village. But after a
while it became clear that most people in the village accused at least one of their
neighbors of being a narcotraficante. And the accusers were, in turn, viewed as
narcos in one capacity or another by other neighbors.
The spatial proximity between neighbors in northern fishing villages, where
many are small and contiguous to each other, adds to this entanglement of specu-
lar perceptions. If one characteristic of the home is that it is “removed from the
eyes of strangers” (Freud [1919] 2003: 133), then the neighbors occupy a liminal
position. The neighbors’ spatial proximity means one’s home is never entirely

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 Public Culture withdrawn from their field of vision and awareness. As a result, in the village
where I lived with Javier’s family, the uncertainty about what one’s neighbors were
really up to, given seemingly suspicious actions or unexpected expenditures of
money, was one of the sources of ambivalence around the specter of narcos. At
one point, in conversation with one of my neighbors, Manuela, who was particu-
larly eager in her condemnation of local people’s involvement as narcos, I brought
up just how encompassing and vague the category of the narco was. In a rare
moment of candid reflection on this topic, she admitted that in fishing villages like
her own, when a certain kind of boat pulls up, obviously full of drugs, everybody
sends their kids down to earn a few pesos helping unload. She did so herself, she
said, laughing a little uneasily, as did even the most conservative and otherwise
“law-­abiding” of families in the village. Manuela admitted, in other words, that
the narco is a slippery category, whose boundaries are elastic and conjunctural, in
this case because narcotrafficking organizations occasionally recruit local labor.
Since almost anyone can be accused of minor forms of involvement, these rumors
contributed to a sense of mutual suspicion throughout the village.
Michael Taussig’s analysis of local perceptions of the location of shamans in
Colombia is pertinent here. He described how people in Puerto Tejada say the
most powerful brujos (shamans) are in the Choco. But if you go to the Choco,
locals say the great shamans are in Puerto Tejada. “Wherever you go,” Taussig
wrote, “the great brujos are elsewhere” (Taussig 1986: 179). In some rural villages
in northern Mexico, what is different about such perceived spatial displacement
is the scale: the narcos are elsewhere not in another town, but in the next house
over. This phenomenon marked by slippage and displacement is similar to the one
long noted by anthropologists regarding witchcraft accusations. As E. E. Evans-­
Pritchard ([1937] 1980: 2 – 3) famously argued in his study of witchcraft among
the Zande, and as James Siegel (2006: 95) recalled in his analysis of the uncanny
elements of witchcraft accusations, the possibility that anyone can be accused of
being a witch means that everyone is potentially a witch.
I experienced this disquieting potential for narco-­self-­recognition myself at
a few points during my fieldwork. This happened in the context of my relation-
ship with the local Indigenous chief, who was often accused by political enemies
within the village of being a “narco boss,” one with high-­level involvement in
drug-­trafficking organizations. I would frequently give rides to the chief so he
could run errands or go to meetings. Eventually my host family in the village
informed me about the neighbors’ gossip. The whispers were that the anthropolo-
gist was a narco too. These accusations quickly blew over but nonetheless left me
with an unpleasant sense of unease. Accusations about narcos were sometimes

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 politically or personally motivated, as witchcraft accusations tend to be. The chief, The Narco ­Uncanny
in particular, suffered the accusation of being a powerful narco despite living in
abject poverty in a small, humble shack and like most in the village not owning
a car of his own.
While many such accusations were unfounded, not all of them were, of course,
and there were also some locals who self-­identified as narcotraficantes. As I exam-
ine elsewhere (Muehlmann 2013), for many local people drug-trafficking brings
a sense of pride and defiance drawn from the cultural salience of the northern
Mexican persona of the narcotraficante. My point in drawing attention to the per-
vasiveness of the narco world on an everyday level is to underscore that the US-­
Mexico borderlands are a region in which the categories of the narco and the poor
are often conflated, as has been the case in other parts of Latin America (Grisaffi
2010; Ramírez 2011). This conflation is partially made possible by the fact that, as
Cruz, the father in the house where I stayed, commented, the narco-­economy in
this region “has touched everyone somehow at some time.”
This confusion of identities related to the category of the narcotraficante
reaches farther still. As we have seen from the kinds of secrecy that enfold mul-
tiple actors into the narco world, the line between the narcotraficante and other
professions — police officer, government official, anthropologist, fisherman — also
becomes blurred. And yet, paradoxically, the very persistence of the narco-­
economy in the US-­Mexico borderlands is dependent on the complicity and often
direct involvement of those very figures from whom this knowledge is meant to be
kept secret: ordinary citizens, the police, government officials, and the military.
And the involvement of these actors, in turn, is also predicated on its secret nature,
but in this case the secret is in relation to the public rather than to the state. It is the
peculiar combination of what Taussig (1999: 149) calls “public secrets” — that is,
secrets that include a public awareness of some of the elements that are supposed
to be hidden from public scrutiny — and what one might call “private secrets” that
has kept the drug trade in business for so long. It is this tension between the hidden
and revealed, known and unknown, familiar and strange that has also fueled the
experience of the narco ­uncanny among the working-­class poor in the borderlands.

The Narco as Double

Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the leader of the Sinaloa cartel and one of the most
iconic narcos of Mexico, embodies many of the uncanny affects I argue have
diffused through the more general population. A closer examination of how El
Chapo has fortified imaginaries of the narco is helpful here.

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 Public Culture During his heyday, El Chapo was regularly sighted making dramatic appear-
ances in high-­end restaurants: he would strut in dramatically in a circle of thugs
and have them politely confiscate the cell phones of diners. He would sit to calmly
enjoy his meal and then leave quietly out the back. When the diners went to leave
themselves they would find that their tabs had been paid. Restaurant owners, not
surprisingly, routinely denied such stories. Thus, El Chapo was, as reporters often
pointed out, “both everywhere and nowhere.” This is the kind of secrecy upon
which El Chapo built his empire.
El Chapo has appeared prominently in the news since January 2016, when
he was recaptured after escaping from a high-­security prison in 2015, for the
second time in his career.5 The official story of El Chapo’s 2015 escape has been
remarkably consistent since it was first reported in the news. Reports concur that
El Chapo escaped through a tunnel that was dug under the shower of his cell.
“Guzmán climbed into the hole and down a ladder, entering a 4,921-­foot-­long tun-
nel. . . . Metal tracks had been bolted to the ground, allowing an ad-­hoc vehicle — a
railcar rigged to the frame of a small motorcycle — to be driven from one end of
the tunnel to the other” (Reel 2015). According to this account it was just a few
guards in the jail who were bought off in order for all this to happen.
Very few of the people I have spoken with in northern Mexico actually believe
this version of the story of El Chapo’s escape. There are dozens of other variations
of the story and, interestingly, many of them focus on the specter of El Chapo’s
double. For example, I met a soldier named Francisco while he was off duty from
his position at military posts near the border. I asked him if he thought El Chapo
would escape again, and he said: “I don’t think he’s in jail.” He went on to explain
that there is no way someone powerful enough to escape a high security prison
twice would end up in jail again. He said, “It maybe looks like El Chapo but it’s
not him. A man that powerful has every technology at his disposal . . . plastic
surgery, cloning.” He pointed out that there must have been a remarkable amount
of government collusion in his last escapes and said El Chapo would not be caught
again.
Indeed, Francisco’s suspicion resonated with the media’s coverage of the cap-
ture. Many of the photos chronicling El Chapo’s arrest portrayed scenes from the
process of supposed identity verification: El Chapo getting his blood sampled by

5. Guzmán was first arrested in Guatemala, in 1993, and spent seven years in a maximum-­
security prison in Mexico. He escaped in 2001. Then, in February 2014, Mexican marines captured
him in Mazatlán. But Guzmán escaped in July 2015 through a mile-­long tunnel under his prison. He
remained free until he was rearrested by Mexican marines in January 2016. See Keefe 2016.

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 figures in white coats, a cotton swab in his mouth for a DNA sample, or posing in The Narco ­Uncanny
front of the camera with a juxtaposed image of the last time he was captured. This
coverage was an implicit response to the kinds of claims Francisco was making
that he was not the real El Chapo.
In many accounts, it is not just El Chapo who has a double, but the tunnel
through which he escaped in 2016, as well. Some people I interviewed in Baja
California in February of 2016 believed the tunnel was just a red herring con-
ceived to distract attention away from the degree of government collusion in the
drug trade. The version of this theory that is particularly relevant here is that the
tunnel through which he supposedly fled was not, in fact, a “full tunnel.” Instead,
there were only a few yards of tunnel at one end, to fool the journalists. When my
friend Ana first relayed this version of the story to me, I said, “But if the tunnel
wasn’t complete, how did El Chapo escape the prison?” Ana laughed and said,
“He walked out the front door.” The implication was that the authorities were so
corrupt that the issue was not how El Chapo physically got out of jail but how the
officials made it look like they had not been involved. Now, of course, this raises
the question of whether it was the real El Chapo who walked out or his double, a
question whose answer people I know could not agree on and that, I later discov-
ered, provoked significant debate on social media.
What interests me about these stories about the double life of El Chapo and
the double lives of his tunnels is not that they question whether the tunnel actu-
ally existed, or even whether it is actually the real El Chapo in jail. These local
theories reveal the extent to which people distrust the government and the official
version of events presented by mainstream media (see also Santamaría 2013). In
fact, a poll cited by the Los Angeles Times in 2015 found as many as 40.7 percent
of Mexicans did not believe the 2014 arrest of a mustachioed man from a beach
condominium in Monterrey was of the real Guzmán.
The reiterative nature of the double, the fact that we do not know where the
real El Chapo begins or ends or at what point he is replaced by his doppelgänger,
underscores a significant role of the double in creating an uncanny affect. Royle
(2003: 123) argues that the double is uncanny because, first, it carries the promise
of immortality through replication and iteration. The life of El Chapo in these
accounts is no longer confined to a single capturable body or narrative. The con-
tinual displacement of El Chapo’s self means the assurance of his real presence,
his real capture, is always deferred. In this way, the state’s symbolic containment
of violence is also continually deferred.
The example of El Chapo is, of course, distinct from the core ethnographic
examples I have analyzed so far. Rather than an instance of recognition of a real-

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 Public Culture ity of general involvement, it is a public spectacle of doubling. But the double also
represents a disordering of identity, as “the individual is no longer individual”
(Royle 2003: 123). For this reason, seeing one’s own double is particularly dis-
turbing, because in witnessing that double one is also obliged to see one’s identity
potentially dissolving. This is why Freud (1955, 17:235) argued that the double
figures as “the uncanny harbinger of death.” And it is for this reason, I argue,
that the talk about the neighbors was insistent. In accusing one’s neighbors of
narco-­involvement locals achieved their own displacement of the narco-­presence.
My neighbors reassured themselves that it was Javier, the neighbor, who was the
narco. Javier’s mother insisted that was not the case, but on the other hand, her
own neighbors’ car was patently funded by narco-­activity. Nonetheless, in mak-
ing these accusations, the underlying discomfort remains. For just as, in Evans-­
Pritchard’s above-­cited observation, the hereditary nature of witchcraft raises the
possibility that everyone’s potentially a witch, accusing one’s neighbor of narco-­
involvement raises analogous uncertainties.
As I mentioned earlier, I experienced some of the disquieting potential for
narco-­self-­recognition when I gave rides to people in my car. But my own recog-
nition of myself in the identity of the narco was easily diffused by the privilege
of my status as a dual Canadian-­US citizen and a white woman, which insulated
me from the full effect of the narco-­discourse that often involved my friends and
neighbors there.
Unlike my experience, or Freud’s on the train, which involves a moment of
uncertainty eventually resolved, the experience of people like Manuela, Javier,
Miguel and the other members of the Peace Caravan involves the uncanny affect
of the reflection of oneself and one’s loved ones in the fates of the dead and is
more enduring. For the uncanny to eventually dissipate, those who experience it
must move toward a reconstruction of the causes or conditions of the disturbance
that create that sense of the uncanny in the first place (Royle 2003: 127). In other
words, they must name the narco or convincingly categorize and recognize the
phenomenon for what it is. Derrida ([1994] 2012: 163) calls this kind of ontologiz-
ing “conjuring away,” and it is exactly the process the uncanny intuition wards
off.
Manuela helped exemplify how this tension plays out. As I described above,
at one point she admitted that from a certain perspective everyone could be seen
as being involved in the drug trade. However, Manuela’s recognition of a reality
of general involvement was only momentary. Not long after that conversation, we
watched a report on local TV news about decapitated bodies found nearby. She
said to me in a reassuring tone that the victims were probably not innocent but

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 narcos, thereby reinscribing a clear-­cut distinction between narcos and normal, The Narco ­Uncanny
innocent people.
While the uncanny may ward off categorization, what I have argued here is
that it only does so in the context of a powerful compulsion to categorize in the
first place, primarily by the state but also by ordinary citizens. In other words, the
uncanny thrives on the tension between the insistence on categorizing the narco
and the difficulty of doing so in the context of the capillary and subcontractual
nature of trafficking operations. When local people and state actors in Mexico
insist that mass deaths, unmarked graves, and random misfortunes are the result of
narcos they impose an explanatory framework on a far more messy set of events,
one that entangles a multiplicity of actors.

Conclusions

In contemporary Mexico, the war on drugs has prompted an unsettling of iden-

tities whereby the boundaries between state and criminal actors have blurred.
Amid a context of generalized violence, officials call individuals narcos to neatly
localize malevolent agents and give a diffuse menace a clear identity. But for
the working-­class poor living in the narco-­corridors of northern Mexico, the cat-
egory of the narcotraficante can take on a slippery flexibility that engulfs ordinary
people and often unsettles their ability to ground themselves in the everyday, the
familiar, and the safe.
Such an unsettling of identities has in many ways engulfed the Mexican nation
as a whole. This became particularly clear with the disappearance of the forty-­
three students from the town of Iguala in September 2014. These were left-­wing,
activist students from a rural teachers’ college in Ayotzinapa, kidnapped and
killed by police officers who were part of the military wing of cartelized sections
of the Mexican state. After the students disappeared, the Mexican government,
police, and military first attempted to deflect the blame onto narcos. But in the
following days and weeks, it became increasingly clear that these assassinations
were ordered by sitting officials and implemented by armed men that were both
narcos and state agents. This overlap of positionalities made clear, perhaps for the
first time to international onlookers, that state agents are fully embedded in the
fabric of narcotrafficking organizations, and that the extreme violence of the war
on drugs, contrary to what official and media narratives say, is often generated by
the state rather than by “narcos.”
The recognition of the state’s culpability is embodied in what has become an
extremely popular rallying cry in Mexico, “No fueron los narcos, fue el estado”

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 Public Culture (It wasn’t the narcos, it was the state). This slogan openly challenges the gov-
ernment’s recurrent explanation that violence is the result of internal conflict
among the cartels. The slogan, in effect, shows how the overuse of the category
of the narco misnames and disguises the hegemonic and state-­r un political forces
responsible for the violence in Mexico today.
The social movement generated by the disappearance of the forty-­three stu-
dents of September 2014 has brought the plight and demands of parents of the
disappeared in Mexico to the national and international fore. These parents drew
from the previous activism of grassroots movements such as the 2012 Caravan
for Peace. Yet the rallying cry “No fueron los narcos, fue el estado” is more radi-
cal than the discourse embraced only a couple of years earlier by some members
of the Peace Caravan, who insisted that their missing or dead relatives were not
narcos and therefore innocent. This position, as noted earlier, is premised on the
idea that narcos are people whose death is somehow well deserved. In contrast,
the more recent activism refuses to discuss the alleged identity or positionality
of the victims and chooses, instead, to name the perpetrators by naming the state
as the narco.
The radical promise of this political stance is that it problematizes the way
government discourses and action take “innocence,” broadly and vaguely defined,
as the crucial category within which drug-­related deaths register as “grievable” in
the public sphere (Butler 2016). As Miriam Ticktin (2016) has argued, “Images of
innocence — and the moral imperative they engender — actually have a long his-
tory of hurting those they intend to help.” This history has been well documented
in the literature on conflict over rights and criminality in Latin America that helps
put these activists’ responses to drug war violence into a wider context.
This literature has explored the various ways that “innocence” has become the
measure of authenticating “victims” of human rights abuses and the condition for
gaining political and social recognition. Such a dynamic exists throughout the
Americas.6 For example, in Colombia, the conflation of criminal networks with
insurgent politics rendered human rights issues less sympathetic to both the pub-
lic and the courts and created friction among activists protesting Plan Colombia
in the early 2000s (Tate 2015). In Peru, ongoing and extensive controversy has
emerged over the importance of innocence in defending victims of abuse among
the human rights community (Theidon 2010; Laplante 2009). There, human rights
cases were refused for individuals who were wrongly imprisoned but also mem-
bers of the communist revolutionary organization Shining Path. Similarly, in

6. See Ticktin 2014 for a review of this trend more generally.

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 urban Brazil, critics of police brutality have been undermined by accusations that The Narco ­Uncanny
they prioritize the rights of criminals (Caldeira and Holston 1999: 716). In Argen-
tina, government discourses during the military dictatorship (1976 – 83) claimed
that all of the thirty thousand people massacred and disappeared during military
raids were associated with terrorists (Taylor 1997: 76 – 85).
The slogan “No fue el narco, fue el estado,” in this regard, is particularly pow-
erful because it points to the uncanny double life of the state as a “narco-­state.”
The latter phrase highlights that in many cases government officials, the police,
and the military, while officially against the narcos, are also part of vaster net-
works that are utterly integrated, working in tandem, sometimes indistinguish-
able from narco organizations (Hernández 2012). The slogan, in fact, captures
the uncanny atmospheres that define the northern Mexico corridor by hailing the
state through the same discourse it has for decades used to dismiss the deaths of
hundreds and thousands of its citizens. But the slogan also pierces through these
uncanny atmospheres by calling out the state as the narco.
These social atmospheres are certainly not reducible to state-­run efforts to
fetishize the “narcos” as ghostly, all-­powerful, and evil actors. As mentioned pre-
viously, many local men in the villages where I lived did identify as narcos at
various points in their lives, even if they only worked occasionally as low-­paid
mules. This public positionality was for them a way to enhance their local pres-
tige, their charisma, and their capacity to seduce women. But some of these men
tried to move away from trafficking after stints in jail, only to find that the aura of
having once been a “narco” still haunted them, often filling them with nostalgia
for the lost prestige. In such a context of unstable positionalities, the naming of
a neighbor or an acquaintance as a “narco” has become an affective disposition
among working-­class people struggling to understand the shifting set of political
relations that makes them particularly vulnerable.
In this article, I have explored the ways involvement in the drug trade is dis-
cursively and affectively navigated across a variety of contexts in northern Mex-
ico. Local talk about accusations of involvement are not simply about the drug
economy but, rather, an attempt to make sense of dramatic structural and politi-
cal changes taking place in the region as well as the violence, misfortunes, and
inequalities engendered by them. But these efforts to make sense of narco-­related
violence are haunted by slippage, deferral, and misidentifications. This is the type
of affective, hard-­to-­capture atmosphere I propose to call the “narco uncanny.”
This uncanny atmosphere pervades the way many people in northern Mexico,
and especially the working-­class poor, experience the liminality and uncertainty
inherent in the war on drugs. In suspecting that neighbors or passersby may be

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 Public Culture narcos and potentially a source of danger, people are not acting out of paranoia but
rather out of awareness of the pervasiveness of people working for organizations
devoted to trafficking illegal drugs. And the naming of potential narcos by the
rural poor in northern Mexico, not unlike the naming of the witch in other cases,
is a defensive and often contradictory, conjunctural gesture that seeks to assert
distance from agents of harm. For people as diverse as rural fishermen, urban taxi
drivers, and mothers coming to terms with the death or disappearance of their
children, the act of naming the narcotraficante does not identify some inherent
characteristic or set of activities. Instead it localizes and displaces all the forces
that have unleashed the violence that pervades the area. In sum, accusations of
involvement help momentarily dissipate those uncanny atmospheres by ensuring
that the narcos remain — at the very least — in the next house over.

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ico; A Feminist Marxist Tale.” Gender, Place, and Culture 21, no. 1: 1 – 16.

Shaylih Muehlmann is associate professor of anthropology and Canada Research Chair

in Language, Culture, and the Environment at the University of British Columbia. She is
the author of Where the River Ends (2013) and When I Wear My Alligator Boots (2014). In
2016 she was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada.

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