Biopolitics and Disposable Bodies

A Critical Reading of Almazns Entre perros

by
Hctor A. Reyes-Zaga
Translated by Mariana Ortega Brea
Until now, little has been said about Mexican literatures relationship with drug trafficking. While the literature influenced by drug trafficking may be seen as opportunistic
and as promoting the dissolution of society and advocating crime, it not only contributes
to the reproduction of the current violent Mexican imaginary but also appears to question
the political and economic decentralization of neoliberalism and its role in making human
beings disposable. Examining an example of this genre, Alejandro Almazns Entre perros
(2009), in terms of the concept of biopolitics developed by Michel Foucault and others
reveals it to be a denunciation of the effects of drug trafficking on Mexican society. The
narconarrative raises the possibility of thinking about a state in which ethics and human
rights are attainable.
Hasta ahora poco se ha dicho de la relacin entre la literatura mexicana y el narcotrfico. Mientras se puede ver la literatura influenciada por el narcotrfico como oportunista
y promotora de la disolucin social y alendador del crimen, no solo contribuye a la reproduccin del imaginario violento mexicano, sino parece cuestionar la decentralizacin
poltica y econmica del neoliberalismo y su rol en hacer desechables a los seres humanos.
Examinando un ejemplo de este genero, Entre Perros de Alejandro Almazn (2009), en
trminos del concepto de biopoltica desarrollada por Michel Foucault y otros lo revela
como una denuncia del efecto del narcotrfico en la sociedad mexicana. La narconarrativa
plantea la posibilidad de pensar en un estado en donde son alcanzables la tica y los
derechos humanos.
Keywords: Drug trafficking, Violence, Narconarrative, Biopolitics, Disposable
humanity

As the philosopher Samuel Ramos (1965) once said, there are many Mexicos,
but the one that stands out the most nowadays is perhaps the one Mexicans
have come to identify through the use of the prefix narco. It stands out
because the violence unleashed by the Mexican drug cartels is displayed daily
in the world press. In 2006 the Felipe Caldern administration began a unilateral war (without the consent of other Mexican political forces) against the drug
cartels, disrupting the balance of power among the various criminal organizations and unleashing a bloody struggle among them. The police, the military,

Hctor Reyes-Zaga is an assistant professor of Spanish at Dickinson College, where he has taught
since 2009. His most recent article, "Cartografa del desencanto en la novela Los mares del sur
appeared in Ogigia: Revista electrnica de estudios hispnicos. Mariana Ortega Brea is a freelance
translator based in Canberra, Australia.
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 195, Vol. 41 No. 2, March 2014 189-201
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X13509799
2013 Latin American Perspectives

189
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the navy, and innocent civilians have all become involved in the process. After
six years, this war has resulted in more than 50,000 deaths,1 the collapse of local
economies, an increase in illicit activities parallel to drug trafficking such as
kidnapping, human trafficking, and extortion, the massive displacement of
Mexicans, and a myriad of human rights violations.
Given this new Mexican reality, the so-called narcoculture has taken over
various channels of cultural production as it did in Colombia. Narco topics
have invaded Mexican television through soap operas and television series
such as El pantera (2008), Sicarios (2010), and El equipo (2011), which, while portraying drug traffickers in a negative way, also romanticize them and, as Diana
Palaversich (2006: 86) points out, present them as the great macho figure still
held in high regard by the majority of Mexicans.
Films have also been influenced by drug trafficking. This is, of course, not
the first time that so-called narco-cinema has entered Mexican theaters; one
needs only to think of the more than 200 films starring the Almada brothers
during the 1970s and 1980s. However, a revival of this type of film has recently
taken place. The award-winning movie El infierno (2010), directed by Luis
Estrada, is an example of the success of the genre. It is the last installment in
an Estrada trilogy that deals satirically with Mexican problems: the nationalist and corrupt policies established after the Mexican Revolution via the
Institutional Revolutionary Party in La ley de Herodes (1999), the eternal promise of attaining First World status through economic liberalism in Un mundo
maravilloso (2006), and the social decadence of a country run by crime and
drug trafficking in El infierno. It is in music, specifically the narcocorrido (a
popular ballad), however, that drug trafficking has become most prominent
in recent years. Los Tigres del Norte, Los Tucanes de Tijuana, and K-Paz de la
Sierra are only a few of the hundreds of Mexican bands that cast drug dealers
as the protagonists of their songs. Sometimes the dealer is killed or defeated
by justice, a fallen hero; sometimes he triumphs over the government.
Generally speaking, however, individuals involved in drug trafficking are
glorified.
Although Mexican literature has also been marked by this social phenomenon and its complexities, little has been said in this regard. Although this type
of literature might appear opportunistic in the current Mexican political and
social situation and as promoting social dissolution and advocating crime, it
not only contributes to the reproduction of the current violent Mexican imaginary but also appears to question the neoliberal political and economic decentralization that makes human beings disposablean assault that appears to be
aimed not only at traditionally unprotected social conglomerates (indigenous
people, drug addicts, prostitutes, street children, etc.) but also at nearly all of
society.
This aesthetics of waste shows us a new reality in which peoples humanity has been erased. Their lives no longer have value; they are refuse, disposable. The beheaded, dismembered corpses in blankets, trunks, or tanks that
flood the pages of national and international newspapers on a daily basis are
clear examples of this residual process in contemporary Mexico: as happened
with the Jews during World War II, the human body has lost any value or
dignity. The dehumanizing metaphors present in the drug trafficking literature seek to awaken a society anesthetized by daily violence.
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But what is it that we are talking about when we refer to drug-trafficking

literature? Is there such a thing as a narconarrative in Mexico? In my opinion,
there is. There is a literary genre that revolves around the phenomenon of drug
trafficking and reflects not only on the stories of dealers and the lawlessness
and violence left in their path but, perhaps more significant, the way in which
this phenomenon affects the Mexican collective imaginary.
There is, of course, no unique formula for writing about drug trafficking.
There are, for example, testimonial texts such as Diario de un narcotraficante, by
A. Nacaveva (1994 [1967]). There are also works in which the plot revolves
around a detective and his relationship with drug traffickers but, in contrast to
what happens in the noir genre, the narrative intention lacks linear development. Balas de plata (2008) and La prueba del cido (2010), by Elmer Mendoza, are
good examples. There are other works, such as Fiesta en la madriguera (2010), by
Juan Pablo Villalobos, in which ironic language describes the routines of organized crime and its responsibility in the cheapening of the human body. Finally,
there are works in which violence is the focus of the narrative. El hombre sin
cabeza (2009), by Sergio Gonzlez Rodrguez, and Entre perros, by Alejandro
Almazn (2009), are examples of this type of narrative, in which beheadings,
hangings, dismemberings, and mutilations function as narrative threads.
Diana Palaversich (2006: 104) speaks of common features or elements rather
than a formula, pointing, for example, to censure of the corruption of the
Mexican state and the symbiotic relationships between the narcos and representatives of the judicial system. To this feature should be added recognition of
the social injustice suffered by the majority of the population, who have been
deprived of their rights, the representation of disposable bodies as an instrument of social protest, and, above all, the portrayal of cartels as parallel or
alternative power centers2 that multiply the sources of violence.
As noted above, the literature of drug trafficking is made up of works of
varying length, structure, and approach, but all are based on a violent reality in
which the human body seems to have lost all value or dignity. It is the production of disposable bodies taking place in Mexico as a result of the drug war that
the narconarrative seeks to denounce. I propose to examine this process with a
theoretical approach based on the concept of biopolitics. In spite of its aesthetic
shortcomings, the narconarrative is an interesting and socially committed artistic project that seeks to reinstate the key issue of ethics and human rights in
drug trafficking through an encounter with violence that creates a communal
conscience.3 The first part of this paper will examine the notion of biopolitics
and trace the theoretical concepts underlying the idea of human disposability.
The second will address Almazns Entre perros (2009) with regard to this idea.
Biopolitics and the Disposable Body
Biopolitics has become one of the essential categories of contemporary political philosophy. Among the many who have contributed to its conception and
problematization are Giorgio Agamben (1998; 1999; 2005), Antonio Negri
(Hardt and Negri, 2001), and Roberto Esposito (2008; 2013).4 Their analyses
address in various ways the renewal of a concept developed by Michel Foucault
(see, e.g., 1980; 1991). Foucaults Discipline and Punish (1977) mentions biopolitics, but it is in the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1978) that the term
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acquires its now familiar connotations. Here the term is used to designate one
of the two basic dimensions of the power that contemporary political technology has developed over life. According to Foucault, one pole of this power
focuses on the body as a machine (its education, increase in skills, empowerment, usefulness, and docility), giving rise to an anatomo-politics5 of the human
body. The other pole focuses on the body as a species (e.g., birth, mortality,
health, proliferation, life span, and all the conditions that can alter these elements) and generates a biopolitics of the population that operates from a definite set of interventions and regulatory controls (1980: 167171).
Foucault points to modernity as the inflection point between anatomopolitics and biopolitics. According to him, sovereign power originally consisted
of a right to acquisitionthe power to appropriate things, time, bodies, and life
and even to suppress them (1980: 164165). The advent of modernity displaced
the suppression of life with its management and maximization. Foucault points
out that the seventeenth century served as the starting point: between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries a series of disciplinary technologies
focused on the individual body arose as life began to take center stage in political strategies. This shift toward the human body was, in his opinion, already
fully evident by the nineteenth century, when the population was naturalized
and became an object of study as part of a system of production. At this new
turning point what was at issue was not only pursuing the individualizing
effects of anatomy, centered on the body as a machine, but governing individuals as biological entities (1980: 169245).
While Foucault points out that the inclusion of life in politics took place in
modern times, Giorgio Agamben (1998) thinks that it has been subject to sovereign power since ancient times. He examines the hidden structure of sovereignty, beginning with a linguistic analysis of the two terms that refer to life
in Greek: zoe, life as a common feature of all beings (animals, men, and gods),
and bios, the life of an individual or group. This is, therefore, not natural life but
qualified life, that of the bios politikos. The distinction is essential for Agamben
because it is the cornerstone of his concept of sovereignty. In his view, sovereign
power can suppress the living body or, more to the point, exclude it from the
legal order, fully exposed in its condition as simple life removed from any
responsibility or legal obligation. Thus he defines the sovereign not as one who
can suppress life first and manage it later but as one who is authorized to leave
bare life 6 in a state of exception or suspension (2005: 4, 6):
The state of exception is not a special kind of law (like the law of war); rather,
insofar as it is a suspension of the juridical order itself, it defines laws threshold concept. . . . It is defined as a kenomatic state, an emptiness and standstill
of the law, in which the bare life is subject to the arbitrariness of the powers,
both legal and illegal. In this sense, the subjects remain outside of legality, they
remain suspended.

For Agamben, there is something particularly modern in this exercise of

power; according to him, the sovereigns dispossession of the subject has
become common practice. The exception becomes the norm in what Agamben
calls the state of exception, giving as an example the concentration camp.
Politically, those who are located in this ambiguous area are not recognized;

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they become disposable in terms of legal discourse because they are not even
valued in their totality as life. Life is canceled, and therefore the killing of such
a category of people (nonhumans) has no legal implications; anyone can
erase these lives with impunity because they are void, and those responsible
are not even condemned by traditional rituals or official law (1998: 29):
The relation of exception is a relation of ban. He who has been banned is not,
in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and
law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable.

The example of Auschwitz that Agamben uses clearly shows this canceled
humanity. Referring to those who have lost everything, Agamben uses the term
Muselmann as it was employed in the concentration camps:7 The Muselmann
is a figure of limits of a special kind, in which not only categories such as dignity
and respect but even the very idea of an ethical limit lose their meaning (1999:
63). For people such as these, there is only bare life as a simple, inert body. There
is nothing to negotiate; they live on the border between inclusion and exclusion,
life and death. In Auschwitz, says Agamben, people did not die; rather, corpses
were produced. Corpses without death, non-humans whose decease is debased
into a matter of serial production. And, according to a possible and widespread
interpretation, precisely this degradation of death constitutes the specific offense
of Auschwitz, the proper name of its horror (1999: 71).
The example of Auschwitz has been refined and updated in a variety of ways
in our time, not only in the strict sense of any states political commitment but
also in transnational or regional power plays and interests that go beyond the
classical mode of conceiving the limit of life within the legal order of the nationstate. Indeed, with the transit from the governmentality8 of classical liberalism
to that of current neoliberalism, the nation-state no longer has total control over
the population and becomes part of a scenario defined by an entrepreneurial
model across the social fabric, the subordination of living bodies (food, health,
work, hygiene, war) to corporate development, the reduction of public benefits
to contractual private services, and the extinction of any concept of collective
responsibility (Hardt and Negri, 2001).
Hardt and Negri (2001) are undoubtedly two of the most important figures
in the revival of Foucaults concept of biopolitics, linking biopower to neoliberal capitalism. They believe that post-Fordist capitalism,9 new information
technologies, and new forms of life have led to two structural changes in the
field of labor: the growing importance of immaterial labor, based on the biopolitical exploitation of corporal, affective, and communicative qualities, and
the importance of transnational social and technological networks in an increasingly deregulated and globalized labor market, which means that the mass of
the exploited includes not just the industrial proletariat but a diversity of social
groups. They use Foucaults theories to address the interweaving of infrastructure and superstructure, as defined by Marx, and to establish a historical
sequence of increased sophistication in the technologies of domination
employed by modern capitalism: first sovereignty, then disciplines, and,
finally, biopolitics. But, at the same time, they think that one must go beyond
Foucault because he lacks a global vision. This leads them to link biopolitics

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and globalization10 as functional aspects of the great historical process of capitalist accumulation and expansion, which, they argue, has followed a path of
increasing economic, political, and cultural dominationto the point that,
today, it controls the most intimate strands of every living body in all corners
of the world.
For Hardt and Negri, the state is no longer the single imperial political
machine capable of reducing the human being to a mere disposable body or
administering it as such; the global advent of neoliberalism has led to the emergence of legal or illegal economic elites so powerful that, like the state, they can
transform the capital body into a superfluous body in an instant. The human
body, they point out, is now exposed to violence from both the state and the
economic powers. These considerations show that, as posited by Agamben, the
figure of homo sacer (the individual experiencing bare life) is increasingly widespread throughout the world.
One of the elites of which Hardt and Negri speakand the one with the
greatest biopolitical potentialis undoubtedly the drug trafficking industry.
This illegal industry has successfully inserted itself into the economic sphere
because of its special, growth-oriented capacity to adapt to demand and internationalization, with a very strict division of labor across different locations
that can adjust to the dynamics of the global economy. This is why the drug
trafficking industry gives special attention to the consumer body, which is ultimately the one supplying its huge profits. There are, of course, in this body
inventory of drug trafficking many more bodies: bodies of confrontation, bodies at risk, locked-up bodies, tortured bodies, and, above all, dead bodies.11 The
use of bodies by the drug industry has been a Latin American reality for several
decades. The cases of Guatemala, Bolivia, Peru, and, above all, Colombia (with
the inclusion of guerrillas in drug trafficking, hired assassins, and the phenomenon of social cleansing) are clear examples of a political erasure of the human
being that leaves the body exposed to use, abuse, and despoliation.12
This residual process has become ferocious in Mexico and, in the words of
Carlos Monsivis (2004: 27), speaks of a reduction of human life in the context of a culture that does not correspond with civil norms or criteria. Thus
death in Mexican drug trafficking seems to become a supreme delight seasoned with the limitless torture and humiliation of the victims (25). More than
an informal state of exception in Agambens terms, Mexico seems to be creating
a culture of exception brought about by narco-capitalist delirium. The more
than 50,000 dead recorded in the past six years and the different ways in which
their bodies have been abused indicate that the humanity of the victims, along
with the value and sacredness of life, is in question, much as happened in the
concentration camps during the second half of the twentieth century. Mexico
is, then, a place where all living bodies are exposed to a double paradigm of
violence: that of the police-state and that of the drug industry. The problem in
this clash of forces is that not even the state can protect its citizens from drug
cartel violence, nor are the latter able to seize total power. This leaves the rest
of society in limbo. It is precisely in the interstices between these alternative
powers and the state of exception and bare life to which Mexicans are subjected
daily that Alejandro Almazns novel Entre perros (2009) is situated, emerging
as a tool for denunciation and a representation of disposable bodies.

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The Disposable Mexican

How have we managed to build a country for amassing dead rather than
for organizing a society for the living? Bishop Ral Vera asked this question
during the presentation of Pas de muertos (Almazn and Osorno, 2011), a collection of newspaper articles regarding violence and impunity in Mexico. The
journalist and writer Alejandro Almazn seems to ask the same question in his
novel Entre perros (2009), in which we witness the world of drug trafficking:
powerful drug lords, corrupt politicians, heartless gunmen, a society that lives
in fear, and, above all, violence and death. Bodies and more bodies are stacked
upon each other in the books nearly 400 pages.
The novel is structured around three friends who share a narrative at the
beginning and the end. One is a Mexican reporter named Diego Zapata (the
narrator), who risks his friendships to report on a story that he barely manages
to survive. This is a figure who moves from physical to social agony and ends
up labeled a traitor. Another is Carlos El Rayo Mondragn, a boxing promoter who becomes immersed in the drug world and ends up dying as one
more piece in the drug trafficking chess game. Finally, there is Ramn Guerrero,
a.k.a. El Bendito, a hit man who works for one of the most powerful cartels
in Mexico and has a story full of contrasts; he is the main character in a war
between powers in which his friends seem to be his greatest enemies. In his
wickedness, he becomes a symbol of the daily violence that prevails in contemporary Mexico. Separated by a mass slaughter that takes place in their hometown of Diosmo, Sinaloa, these three friends meet again in Culiacn after a
macabre discovery: a man is found hanging off a city bridge, and instead of his
head the head of a Saint Bernard has been stitched to his body. Although the
narrative covers only a few days, flashbacks allow us to see and understand the
actions of the characters and the geographical locations where these take place.
Entre perros is a tour through different parts of contemporary urban Mexico:
the Federal District, Culiacn, Tijuana, and Ciudad Jurez. It reveals the city as
the locus par excellence of contemporary life (i.e., violence), juxtaposing it with
a much more peaceful rural past (Almazn, 2009: 3235):
In the past, life was different.
People aged with dignity because affairs could be settled with words.
Grandmothers spread aromas across town when they put meat on the grill. . . .
The earth was muscular, gave good harvests. . . . [Now] the guamchiles wore
a fading green and those that remained standing were scrawny, as if forced to
stand against their will. The pigs encountered death. Rabbits disappeared
quickly. . . . And all of us stopped aging with honor because there were no more
words.

The fact that Almazn locates violence in the city is merely a historical/
referential reality. As a journalist, he knows that cities are marked by the criminal fingerprints of their neoliberal destiny. But this corrupt and violent world
is not particular to a social class or area, and therefore Ramn, Carlos, and
Diego pass through lower-class neighborhoods, bars, and brothels but also
through wealthy areas. In fact, much of the story takes place in the presidential
residence, a symbol of Mexican corruption in the novel. The novels superbly

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sketched presidential couple recalls former president Vicente Fox and his wife,
Marta Sahagn (2009: 240241):
Yes, Santiago; and? We already won, right? Canaglia did not know how to
explain his own situation but did not issue any recriminations either; Mara
controlled the relationship. It was a matriarchy. The cocky cowboy persona
was reduced to a simple and shy groom when his wife took the reins. Some
said Canaglia was an imbecile. Those of us who came to know him have
another theory: his problem was that he fell in love with someone who never
loved anybody except herself. And what ties us to El Plebe?, asked Canaglia.
You just have to let him work, said Len as he beheaded the champagne bottle;
he wanted to pass on the idea of a single cartel but, in the end, thought it unnecessary.

The narrative at the center of the novel leaves little to the imagination. It
reveals, point by point and with inhuman cruelty, the key to every disposable
body in the state of exception that is Almazns Mexico. The novel is structured
around multiple perspectives. On the one hand, we have the drug cartels as
seen through the memories of El Bendito and narrated in retrospect, almost in
chronological order, by the narrator-journalist. On the other, the narrative voice
shows the point of view of the police state via the conversations between
President Santiago, his wife Mara, General Santana, and Lieutenant Matta.
Thus the narrative delivers information from different viewpoints depending
on the narrators view of its relevance, and this contributes to a certain textual
mobility as the many stories run parallel to each other and intertwine. It is
therefore possible to approach the power relations involved from different
angles. The text portrays this as what Foucault (1991) called a microphysics of
powera theory that raises the possibility of understanding power as a relationship with certain specificities, including the idea that it does not merely lie
with the state but rather is part of a different nucleus.13 In the novel, the other
center of power is the drug trafficking industry, which emerges as an economic
elite capable of deciding the fate of any living body (2009: 13): And that, said
El Bendito, is a fucking pleasure, dude; it feels so nice when you waste a motherfucker in a blink, its as if you wielded the grace of Christ. Man, what freaking
power one gets from fucking bullets!
The act of killing as seen by El Bendito is an investiture of power, one formerly controlled by the state but now also articulated by an external power that
vies with the raison dtre of the constitutional order. Rather than separate
them, however, this rivalry seems to join them; in spite of their clear differences,
both powers are a by-product of hegemony: one is based on political values and
the other on financial and economic ones. This approach also implies a destabilization of the social contract through which the state guarantees the security
of its citizens. This even has epistemological implications: if the state no longer
has the monopoly of violence, then it may no longer be solely responsible for
the protection and safeguarding of human beings. In Entre perros we witness
this dynamic of power relations through a narrator-witness, a linking figure
that reveals the intertwining and dissociation of the two machineries that have
led the country to a state of exception (Almazn, 2009: 273):
Encarnacin Castro. That was the name of the man who, after being beheaded,
was hung on El Puente Negro with the head of a Saint Bernard. He was no
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older than 26 and dressed in the Italian fashion, as well as that of Beto
Quintanilla. He had a passion for power that exceeded that of anyone his age:
he commanded the Emes, the gunmen who looked after his father. He was the
son of Alacrn Castro, head of the valleys cartel.
The youth arrived in Culiacn some days ago, very cocky. He went around
saying that hed exterminate the cartels of the Northwest and the Sierra, commanded by El Plebe Zaragoza and Chalo Lizrraga. He wanted too much.
Surely, when he felt the first blow or the first bullet, he realized that in Sinaloa
luck and bluster are not enough.
It is likely that the head of the National Police, General Rafael Toledo, is in
mourning: Encarnacin was his godson. That is why hes ordered a tremendous search. He wants the murderers. Perhaps he has even given his word to
Alacrn that he will capture them so that the drug lord can throw them to pigs.
So far, three of the five gunmen who killed Encarnacin have paid their dues:
Capo, El Carnicero, and El Centenarco are dead.
Toledo could give Alacrn very bad news if he only knew that the other thugs
used to belong to the Emes. Today they are no longer M26 and M27 but
Cartucho and El Bendito.

This passage, presented in the form of a newspaper article, shows the power
dynamics among groups that seem to join and separate depending on their own
interests, crushing, in the process, thousands of Mexicans who are denied their
fundamental rights. Both settings are also in a state of social breakdown that
affects all the various strata of Mexican society, treating them all as disposable.
Here, this is represented by Encarnacins hanging body. Given the absence of
the rule of law in Mexico and the possibility of canceling lives without any liability, the exception becomes the rule and we witness what Agamben (1998) calls
bare life: life stripped of any right. The lack of legal status allows for the exclusion of the human being; placed in the concentration camp, this body can be
killed by anyone without committing murder (Almazn, 2009: 171):
I cant remember what we were talking about, but what followed cant be
erased from my eyes: some guy, riding in a gray jeep, double-parked in front
of us, so Ramn had difficulty maneuvering to exit. Hey, mate, move your shit,
said Ramn. . . . The man took off his sunglasses and looked at him as if issuing
a warning: Shout at me again and Ill kill you. Then I saw how my friend took
a cigarette and, without lighting it, put it behind his ear. Ill be back, Diego.
Like a warrior, he got out of the truck and faced this bastard with Pablo Escobar
delusions. Move it, mate, youd better. Fuck me!, the other answered and
pulled out a .22. I watched in the rear-view mirror as Ramn, always in control
of himself, pulled on the Beretta and shattered the braggarts forehead. Murder
at close range.

Whether the death is that of the young drug dealer Encarnacin, El Benditos
mother, Lieutenant Matta, El Rayo, or the man who refuses to move his truck,
each of their lives seems to have no value in a society that produces only
corpses, corpses without death, non-humans whose decease is debased into a
matter of serial production (Agamben, 1999: 71) From this point of view, the
Mexican no future as presented in Entre perros is the result of a state of exception, a zone of indistinction in which fact and law coincide (Agamben, 2005: 26)
and upon which globalization founds its sovereignty. In these ambiguous areas,
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the distinctions between life and death disappear, giving rise to a contemporary necro-politics that engages in the serial production of corpses.
In fact, given the everyday nature of the war, the life of these disposable
subjects is no different from that of animals and, to some extent, is worse
because it can be ended with impunity. Neither El Bendito, El Marln, General
Santana, Lieutenant Matta, or any other character involved in the countless
murders committed in the novel seems to worry about the constitutional order,
ethics, or morals. In any case, what seems to prevail is the law of the strongest
(Almazn, 2009: 65):
In the purgatory of everyday life, where bullets fly and death stars glisten,
these excesses painting blood apples on the asbestos, killing time, gliding
through the air; sensationalism makes the gut pale, and dogs, instructed by the
streets into social insubordination, tear at each others skin, brace themselves
with pride and sacrifice their fangs to the rhythm of gunshots and friendships
abused by hot air, egotism, and the ethereal struggle to know they are the baddest of the bad.

The dog-eat-dog view in this passage represents not only the struggle for
power and monopoly of violence between the state and the cartels but also the
anguish that must be borne by any individual in Mexico to avoid the worst. The
terrible thing is that, despite peoples effortswhether they hide, stay alert,
demand that the state guarantee their security, or partner with the alternative
powera fierce dog will inevitably reach and devour them because there
seems to be no place to run to.
Let us be a little more specific: Imagine that the man that Agamben refers
to in his texts about the state of exception and the concentration camps is the
reader and the no-man is the body hanging from the bridge, half-human and
half-animal. Through this hellish image readers travel to a placethe concentration campthat is inhabited by dogs who, as noted by Agamben, have lost
everything in the strict sense of the word, not only categories such as dignity
and respect but even the very idea of an ethical limit. Thus readers are made
aware of the inhuman nature of contemporary Mexican society via the experience of those who have been arbitrarily reduced to dogs.
Entre perros intoxicates us so that we can connect our experience with that of
the characters and, through them, with other people who live on the fringes of
society. Thus violent death enables an exchange of fruitful experiences that
removes us from that infamous bubble, allowing us to link our experiences
with lived life and process information via a collective practice that restructures
something that globalization has also arbitrarily fragmented: solidarity. In this
sense, writers like Almazn understand that, to overcome the arbitrary effacement of the humanity of the subjects affected by this evil, they may not remain
local but must seek allies in informed readers.
The relevance of the recurrent topic of drug trafficking in literature has led
to controversy regarding its raison dtre and effects. Several writers who do
not deal with this subject and a good number of critics take a reductionist view,
arguing that this literature falls into a meaningless costumbrismo, recreating
exotic postcards about the narcoculture (see Lemus, 2005). However, those who
censure these books do not take into account high-quality works in this genre
such as Almazns Entre perros.
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Drug trafficking has found a space in Mexican social life because of its ability
to infiltrate and mutate. The narcoculture is only one aspect of this phenomenon. The fact that writers like Almazn present death and violence does not
necessarily mean that they are spreading this disease; rather, theirs appears to
be a reactiona need to expose, criticize, and denounce the effect of drug trafficking on society, especially the vast number of deaths over the past six years
and the state of exception that seems to characterize Mexico today. Violent
death turned into literature also offers the possibility of reconstructing a kind
of solidarity founded on diversity, since it provides an encounter between people who, despite living in different social contexts, could share the same fate,
given the existing legal vacuum. Amid the uncertainties and the ephemeral
nature of the stories of violence we are exposed to on a daily basis, narconarrative raises the possibility of thinking about a state in which ethics and human
rights are attainable.
Notes
1. While official figures from the Felipe Caldern administration acknowledge around 55,000
killings, independent investigations such as that carried out by Zeta magazine indicate that in the
nearly six years of the Caldern government the number of drug trafficking deaths exceeded
60,000. http://www.zetatijuana.com/2011/12/12/quinto-ano-de-gobierno-60-mil-420-ejecuciones/
(accessed March 2012).
2. Here I use the concept of alternative power suggested by Ignacio Corona (2005: 175179).
According to Corona, alternative power is the loss of exclusivity in the exercise of violence historically monopolized by the state as one of the prerogatives derived from the founding national
pact. Violence is now shared by groups operating on the margins of the law. Because many of
thesesuch as the drug cartelshave an economic base that competes with the resources of law
enforcement and their field of action transcends borders, they could be taken as evidence of the
deterioration of the state in the context of transnational globalization.
3. Perhaps the most devoted researcher in this field has been Hernn Vidal, who since the
1980s has sought to introduce human rights as a kind of axiological axis for reassessing canonic
literature. According to him, we should investigate the role that canonical works of literature have
played in the acknowledgment of human dignity. He takes the fascist regimes that ruled much of
South America during the past century and the recent social mobilizations in favor of human
dignity as the socio-historical basis for this view. For Vidal the concept of human rights is a universal space that allows thinking about the particularities of the postcolonial and postmodern
movements and alerts us about the deformities of nation-states, and this justifies the presence of
politics in literary criticism.
4. Roberto Espositos (2008; 2013) main divergence regarding the concept of biopolitics is his
idea that the terms bios and politics are inseparable from the beginning, while Foucault conceives them as initially separate and linked only by a relation of domination of one over the other.
5. According to Foucault (1980: 167171), the anatomo-politics of the human body, supplemented by a biopolitics of the population, was the device through which capitalism could be
consolidated. The body, inasmuch as it materially supports biological processes, became an object
of capture, transformation, regulation, and use in a new form of Western sociocultural organization: the civilized capitalist machine.
6. Bare life refers, in this context, to life devoid of any human particularityin short, what
the human being has in common with an animal or a plant.
7. The term Muselmann was used in the concentration camps to designate the lower castes:
those who had resigned themselves, having lost all will and conscience, and become fatalists,
submitting entirely to divine will. According to Agamben, these people had attained such a state
of deterioration and degradation that they were seen as living dead.
8. Governmentality, which Foucault also calls the art of government and governmental rationality, is nothing more than a system of thought regarding the nature and practice of
government and the behaviors they drive (who governs, how, who is governed) within precise
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200LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

historical coordinates. Governmentality, then, is a technology of power that takes charge of the
lives of subjects.
9. Unlike so-called Fordism, in which workers were part of an assembly-line production
structure, the new mode of capitalist production, often called post-Fordist, is mainly based on
emerging information technologies, the emphasis on types of consumer, the globalization of
financial markets, and, especially, more flexible labor relationships.
10. Here I mainly refer to the economic definition of globalizationfree trade in goods, money,
capital, and services, the internalization of production, and, of course, the increasingly dominant
position of multinational companies.
11. I have borrowed the notion of a body inventory of drug trafficking from Chaves (2004).
12. On the Latin American state and drug trafficking violence in the cultural field, see Rubio
and Rupensinghe (1994), Bagley and Walker (1994), Vela, Sequn-Mnchez, and Solares (2001),
and Rojas (1994).
13. Foucault (1991) does not refer directly to Mexican drug cartels but speaks of the existence
of local and regional forms of power with their own operational, procedural, and technical structures. Many criminal organizations can be described as such.

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