Narco-History as a Genealogy: From Campos to Pérez Ricart
The revisionist inversion
The new Mexican narco-historiography begins with an inversion. The old “Mexican hypothesis” held that US drug prohibition was imposed on Mexico as an extension of anti-immigrant racism in the United States. Isaac Campos’s Home Grown (2012) reversed the causality: Mexico prohibited marijuana on March 15, 1920 — seventeen years before the Marihuana Tax Act — and the Mexican ideas about cannabis as a cause of “madness and violence,” rooted in elite anxieties about racial degeneration and the conditions of army barracks and prisons, migrated north and helped constitute the US reefer-madness panic. This single move relocates the origin of the prohibitionist paradigm inside Mexico and forces any subsequent account to reckon with Mexican agency.
The foreclosed counterfactual
On March 9, 1940, Mexico opened a state-run morphine dispensary in Mexico City under Dr. Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra’s public-health program. Four months later, under pressure from Harry Anslinger’s FBN and the State Department, the Cárdenas government suspended the program and closed the dispensary. The Salazar experiment matters historiographically because it demonstrates that a different trajectory was available and was deliberately foreclosed — the punitive paradigm was not inevitable.
State-crime co-constitution
From this point the historiography converges on a single load-bearing claim: the modern Mexican state and the drug trade were co-constituted from at least the 1930s. Alan Knight’s “Narco-Violence and the State” essay (2012) provides the theoretical backbone — Mexican state formation always ran on coercion as well as consent, and narco-violence is continuous with that longer history. Benjamin Smith’s The Dope (2021) and his narcopopulism article (2013) supply the Sinaloa case. Carlos Pérez Ricart’s archival reconstruction of FBN and DEA involvement between 1940 and 1980 demonstrates both that US agencies shaped Mexico’s punitive apparatus from within and that Mexican elites pursued the prohibitionist paradigm for their own reasons — to extend state authority into peripheral regions.
The subaltern term
Nathaniel Morris’s 2020 article on serrano communities adds the third indispensable term. Peasant growers in the Sierra Madre and Guerrero highlands are neither lackeys of the cartels nor victims of the state; they are historical agents using drug production in a perennial struggle to protect their communities from all three — state, capital, and traffickers.
The comparative frame
The same structural logic runs through Lina Britto’s Marijuana Boom on Colombia’s Caribbean coast and Paul Gootenberg’s Origins of Cocaine on the Andean coca economies: illicit crop booms arise where state development projects intervened unevenly — building roads and markets while abandoning rural communities to compete at radical disadvantage — not where states were absent. Read together, the Mexican, Colombian, and Andean cases make the same argument, and the new narco-history is best understood as the convergence of three regional historiographies on a single comparative finding.
Open questions
- The post-2018 AMLO/Sheinbaum era: “hugs not bullets,” CJNG expansion, fentanyl transition, and the National Guard all await archival historical treatment.
- Fentanyl has barely entered the historiography, even though its production is primarily Chinese and it is reorganizing cartel economics.
- The gendered dimensions of both drug production and land tenure — especially Torres-Mazuera’s finding that 25% of ejido parcel rights are now held by women — are underdeveloped.