State-Crime Co-Constitution

The historiographical thesis — most rigorously developed by Benjamin Smith, Wil Pansters, Alan Knight, and Carlos Pérez Ricart — that the modern Mexican state and the drug trade were co-constituted from at least the 1930s onward. Under this reading, drug enforcement, trafficking, and state formation are not separable spheres: the post-1940 centralization of Mexican state power was accomplished in part through selective regulation of and collusion with the drug economy, using the resources and discretionary powers enabled by prohibition to centralize authority, repress dissent (especially during the 1969–78 Dirty War), and mediate among regional elites.

Alan Knight’s “Other Half of the Centaur” argument — that coercion is as constitutive of Mexican state formation as consent — provides the theoretical backbone. Pérez Ricart’s archival reconstruction of FBN/DEA involvement shows how US drug agencies shaped the Mexican punitive apparatus from within, while also insisting that local elite interest in expanding authority over peripheral regions (not just US imposition) drove the prohibitionist paradigm.