This talk explores an unconventional form in which knowledge on Mexico's "war on drug trafficking" is produced and circulates, and the kind of symptomatic reading that it performs. By analyzing two such instances—a journalist's testimony on her experience of drug-war violence before a federal government committee and a protest of relatives of the war's victims—I examine how this form of shadow knowledge operates through simultaneous concealment and revelation, illuminating key contradictions at the core of the drug war—the large-scale militarized combat of drug trafficking organizations that began in 2006. While this conflict's structuring logic follows the principles of the US security state—including the designation of an external enemy that threatens the national community and must be fought militarily—its unfolding within the Mexican territory reveals the impossibility of such a designation. Instead, as I will explore in this talk, those discursive articulations outline the symptoms of a new kind of state formation that has emerged in Mexico's drug war: an entity that makes itself felt through the traces of its extralegal violence. Those traces, I will argue, point to two kinds of indistinction: first, that between the state and its criminal enemy—el narco—and second, that between such an enemy and the national community the state was supposed to protect.

Agnes Mondragón-Celis is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Rochester. Her research explores the forms of knowledge production and circulation that emerge in contexts of generalized violence and opacity. She analyzes the psychosocial and performative effects of these forms of mediation, including how they sustain or challenge political authority. Her work has been published in American Anthropologist, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, and Anthropology News.