Narco-Femicide

Analytic category that frames the killing of women in contemporary Mexico not as incidental collateral of cartel violence but as the strategic use of gendered violence by criminal organizations — often with state complicity — to enforce social norms and assert territorial control. By 2020, Lantia Intelligence attributed roughly 60% of Mexican femicides to organized crime; more than 110,000 people are officially registered as missing and the number of disappeared women has tripled over the last six years, concentrated in a small number of municipalities all under Gender Violence Alerts.

Historiographically, narco-femicide raises hard questions of causality and periodization. The Ciudad Juárez femicides of the 1990s predate the Calderón drug war by more than a decade and cannot be reduced to cartel violence alone — maquiladora capitalism and structural patriarchy are irreducible components. Melissa Wright’s necropolitics framework treats femicide and drug violence as mutually constitutive rather than parallel, arguing that the state’s biopolitical management of death runs through both.