Narcopopulism

Framework developed by Benjamin T. Smith to describe the mid-century Mexican political settlement — especially in Sinaloa — in which the drug trade operated as a stabilizing mechanism within the PRI’s clientelist order rather than as an aberration from it. Under narcopopulism, peasant growers received cash income without pressing for aggressive land reform; large landowners laundered drug profits and were insulated from expropriation; middle ranchers rose as contrabandistas; and local PRI officials regulated the trade as a set of franchises, using it to mediate between agraristas and latifundistas.

The 1940 Mazatlán pact between state authorities, agraristas, and right-wing paramilitaries is the paradigmatic case: land grants were scaled back, ejidos preserved, and ranchers compensated for their losses through opium trafficking. The collapse of narcopopulism in the 1960s–80s — under centralization of enforcement, the Dirty War, and eventually NAFTA — is for Smith the precondition for the catastrophic violence of the post-2006 period.