By Juan Larrosa
Today I had planned to speak about measles. However, it is impossible not to turn our attention to what has occurred in the country over the last 48 hours following the arrest of “El Mencho,” leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, one of the most powerful criminal organizations in Mexico and in the world.
The capture took place in Tapalpa, a mountain town located just over 130 kilometers from Guadalajara. Yet its impact was national. The cartel’s reaction included highway blockades, vehicle burnings, attacks on security forces, and looting in more than twenty states across the country. In Guadalajara, many of us remained sheltered at home, in what felt like a de facto state of siege—something we had only experienced under extraordinary circumstances such as the pandemic.
This episode can be analyzed from multiple perspectives. I want to approach it through a central question: what does this tell us about power?
From classical sociology, power is understood as the capacity of an actor—individual or collective—to influence the decisions and lives of others. Max Weber argued that the state holds the legitimate monopoly of violence. In other words, as a society, we agree that only the state may exercise physical force to maintain communal order.
What we witnessed in recent days calls that idea into question. The cartel’s reaction revealed that the Mexican state does not exercise a full monopoly of violence. Rather, it appears to be attempting to reestablish it. The capture of the criminal leader can be read as a demonstration of state force. Yet the cartel’s coordinated and violent response also demonstrated its capacity to destabilize territory and the nation.
Here, a second dimension of power becomes visible: not only the physical, but also the symbolic.
The violence deployed did not serve merely a tactical objective against security forces. It also had a communicative purpose. The blockades, the fires, and the geographic expansion of chaos function as messages. They aim to instill fear in the population, demonstrate operational capacity, and deter both authorities and society from confronting them. In that sense, this is a form of strategic and propagandistic communication.
Cartels have refined this symbolic dimension. It is not only about controlling territory, but about controlling meaning and about displaying power, about making visible their capacity for disorder and disruption. And this has direct consequences for perceptions of insecurity. If two weeks ago we discussed how perceptions do not decline at the same pace as homicides, episodes like this help explain why. Images of blocked highways and paralyzed cities reshape the everyday sense of security.
This moment also leaves us with a deeper concern. Perhaps our traditional theoretical tools are insufficient. The classical idea of the state’s monopoly of violence appears less clear in contexts where conflicts are not between nations, but internal struggles over territory, illegal economies, and symbolic control.
We are facing scenarios in which power is simultaneously physical and communicative. Violent and performative. Territorial and mediated. Understanding what we are experiencing requires refining our categories and rethinking what the “monopoly of force” truly means in democracies with institutional deficits.
This is a commentary by Juan Larrosa for Informativo NTR. If you would like to read this text in its written version, I invite you to visit my website: juan hyphen larrosa dot com. Until next time.