Doubt as drug war discourse

Created Thursday 02 April 2026


  • Entanglements Of Sovereignties: Searching Mothers, Criminal Organizations And The State Apparatus Amid The Mexican War On Drugs
  • Jorge Isaac Vargas-Gonzalez (2026) PhD

This is an interesting PhD because it looks at the role of doubt in Mexico's drug war. I am interested in this myself, as I often see how doubt and rumors, even from government officials, around the violence serve to obscure the truth. Instead, we are pushed away from structural explanations and often left guessing who did what and what the real motives are.


Vargas-Gonzalez explains how he sees doubt.


In this regard, I turn to doubt (duda) as an analytical tool to explore the porous boundaries between state officials and drug trafficking groups. In anthropology, there is an important discussion about rumors—often regarded as the oldest form of communication in the world. Rumor has always been present in human relations, woven into the very fabric of society’s formation. Rumor is typically defined as a process of information exchange whose truthfulness or veracity is not firmly established. It is a form of knowledge shaped by doubt, nourished by uncertainty. (page 7)


And, as if to prove his theory, the Mexican government recently released a report on disappearances that calls its own official figures into doubt. As reported in the LA Times, President Sheinbaum's administration has reduced the 130,000 reported disappearances to 43,128. In response, the United Nations proposed providing technical assistance to the Mexican government. This was rejected, with a Mexican official declaring: "We don't tolerate, permit, or order forced displacement."


This is an interesting reply, because, as the LA Times article notes, much evidence suggests that the state, in the form of local police or/and military units, often works closely with the cartels. In the academic literature, this is viewed as the privatization of violence, a phenomenon linked to the advancement of neoliberal practice in the region.


As the state retreats, cartels take their place as a parallel state. Their role is to expand capitalism into disparate spaces. The violence that this produces is deadly not just for criminals but also for those who stand in the way of development. In effect, the violence acts as a counter-insurgency that claims the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable in society. But wider society is also impacted, as democratic accountability is marganalised to guarantee economic security. Doubt plays an important role in obscuring this fact.