I also draw from Primo Levi’s chilling observations as an Auschwitz survivor in The Drowned and The Saved (2002), in relation to the production of sacrificial bodies which presuppose a fine-tuned and systematic dissolution of the person, a gradual but brutal reduction to an inhuman condition that authorizes the most extreme exercises of submission, torture and control over the body of the other. What I am interested in discussing, then, is what I call the “work of violence,” borrowing from Hannah Arendt’s elaborations on Nazi extermination camps in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1987), in which the author advances an argument that is fundamental to understanding this horror.

Following Löwy, we can say that in terms of the violence linked to narco-trafficking, the machine precedes its servants. This was the key that allowed me to elaborate the idea of the narco-machine as the backbone of this issue of the journal, and, indeed, of the approach that I develop here. The officer himself is nothing more than a servant of the machine” (41). During those days, it became more than evident in Mexico that the violence and the brutal executions had risen to another level (I am referring to the massacres of young people in Ciudad Juárez, Tepic, Tijuana, and Mexico City, and especially to the “narco-fosas,” or mass graves of migrants assassinated by narcos).Īs I thought about the issue, a powerful phrase by Michael Löwy that I had read a couple of years earlier kept returning to my thoughts: “the device does not exist there to execute a man, but rather, the man is there precisely because of the device, to provide a body upon which it can pen its aesthetic masterpiece, its illustrated and bloody book, full of details and adornments. When in the middle of 2010, I received the invitation from the editors of e-misférica to be an invited editor for an issue on narco-trafficking and violence, I thought for several days about what direction to take, what framework to employ, and especially how to frame an approach to a phenomenon that has such power to disarticulate, that is so abysmal, and yet at the same time so quotidian. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others The courage and the imagination to show war in When Leonardo da Vinci gives instructionsįor a battle painting he insists that artists have

Rossana Reguillo The Narco-Machine and the Work of Violence: Notes Toward its Decodification Rossana Reguillo | ITESO (Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Occidente)

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