Ideas - Mexican fiction turns drug kingpins into vicious vampires

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

There’s a burgeoning genre of fiction coming from Mexico — stories that merge socio-political history and the impact of drug-related violence with fantastical stories of eerie ghosts, zombies, and monstrous cannibals. IDEAS explores dozens of gothic, horror and crime fiction novels. *This episode is part of our ongoing series, IDEAS from the Trenches, about outstanding PhD scholars across the country. It originally aired on June 5, 2023.We'd love to hear from you. Fill out our listener survey here.

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He threw his head back and came crashing down on her. He serrated teeth tearing the skin like it was Papel Machet. Yes. They were different from the Aztec vampires. His kind had fangs. They had sharp teeth and strong neck muscles to pull and rend the skin. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. The figure of the monster is a figure that always emerges in literature

when things in society are... Bumpy. In fiction, you are able to explore trauma in ways that are more effective sometimes. To shed light on certain overlooked things that are in front of our eyes, I think that is one of the things that literature can do. Especially literature like Mexican novels that turn drug traffickers into vampires and fill eerie cemeteries with the ghosts of empire, literally. A path snaked around the coach house,

and they followed it through the trees and the mists until they reach a pair of iron gates, decorated with the motif of a serpent eating its tail. All houses, all the miners, all these kind of things that you will find in a typical Gothic fiction from the 19th century in Europe, but they are being Britain in Mexico, in continental Mexico. So I thought, well, this is something weird.

Why is this happening? Why is this happening? What is this happening? Eleanor Soyfer is an Argentinian writer based in Toronto. After five intense years of study, he's a newly graduate. PhD scholar. Alejandro believes we're witnessing the birth of a new literary genre. The title of my thesis is a Mexican Gothic, Narco-narratives, necromarkets, and vampires with

machine guns. And it's about horror fiction, crime fiction, and gothic fiction in contemporary Mexico. Narco narratives, necromarkets, and vampires with machine guns. Alejandro's work is the latest to be featured in our series, ideas from the trenches, where producers Tom Howell and Nicola Luchschich showcase innovative PhD research from across the country. This is excellent weather for discussing zombies and all things spooky. Zombies love the rain. They love the rain and the mist and the clouds and the gray.

We first met Alejandro on a rainy gray morning. the fog creeping in from a nearby lake and reaching its cold, moist fingers towards the entrance of his downtown apartment building. Hello. Hello. Hello, Alejandro. It's Nicola here.

Okay, okay. I will open the door for you. Okay. Tradition has it that vampires cannot enter your home unless you invite them in. Alejandro didn't suspect us. So this is where I work. But seconds later, we're sinking our teeth into his bookshelves.

You see all this Pulp Fiction, style and all that. What are we looking at? This is my small collection of classical Gothic and some Stephen King. And then this is the first edition. Alejandro's been drawn to Gothic and horror for as long as he can remember. All these writings that seem or tried to conceive the idea that they are like real stories from true accounts of history. Like, if you read Frankenstein, it's written in a way that's all composed of letters and diaries, and the same for Dracula, and the same for the

Castle of Atranto. The Castle of Atranta by Horace Walpole. Horace Walpole published the Castle of Atranto in 1764. He subtitled it, a gothic story. The helmet! The helmet! Walpole pretended he hadn't written it, and said he claimed he'd found the text,

that it was an old manuscript from the Middle Ages written in a strange Italian dialect kept in a library by Catholic nuns. The Castle of Otranto in the traduction says, Well, I found these papers in a convent and I am bringing to you the public to say whatever you want. And I noticed that most of these Gothic, Mexican gothic narratives, they also try to present themselves as if they are true accounts of things that are happening. So this is like a trend that's happening right now. Horror fiction wasn't a big thing in Latin America for a long time.

And in the last 20 years, it has been like popping up. There are examples in Argentina. There are examples in Ecuador. Olivia, well, of course, Mexico. Why is this happening? When this is happening, I think that's the question that every academic has to ask. Mexico was going to hell. It was hell.

If she'd had any money, she'd have left the country. Some were nice and quiet, without vampires and drug dealers. But she didn't. Anna pressed a hand against her forehead and wondered what gang the vampire belonged to. She could bet this was the work of a necrose. She'd seen bites like that in Sakatecas and had learned to recognize the tale-tale signs of several vampire species.

That's from a novel called Certain Dark Things by Sylvia Morino Garcia. It was published in 2016. She grew up in Mexico and now lives in Canada. In the novel, she tells of narco-vampire turf wars, spilling into Mexico City. She portrays these vampires of being of different races. She has like these original people, vampires from Mexico, that are narcos as well.

but they are like, she says that they were like priests of the Aztecs. The protagonist is one of these vampires. And then there are these colonizers, these European bumpers that are much more violent and they brought all this war. Most countries had taken measures against vampires since the 70s, measures that grew increasingly hostile. Many vampires, a lot of them from Europe, knowing how these things went simply,

underwent mass migration toward the countries that would take them. Countries with corrupt officials who would issue admission papers for vampires who should have been turned back at the airport. Alejandro's question, Why is this happening? The answer seems easy to spot. Gothic horror in Mexican fiction mirrors real-life horror. The federal government is warning Canadians in Western Mexico

to limit their movements and shelter in place, as the region sees a deadly wave of violence erupting between the Sinaloa drug cartel and security forces. Gunfire, burning vehicles and damage to essential infrastructure. Coming after Thursday morning's arrest of a video Guzman, the son of cartel boss El Chapo, and senior player of the cartel in his own right. In cities like Juarez, a homicide rate of over 200 per 100,000. You have something monstrous.

Something monstrous. The monstrous figure allows us to think about. things that are very horrible and try to make them more digestible and focus attention of the reader and say, these are monsters, these things are happening because these monsters people are doing these things. To what extent do these vampire cartels work as a way to understand real-world fears about cartel-related violence as well? There are a way for me to supplement some of my fears.

That's an easy one. I don't know how they can explain the real violence that's happening because, I mean, I'm taking a pretty fantastic approach to it. This is novelist Sylvia Moreno Garcia. The problem that is happening and that has been happening for a really long time in the north of Mexico and several parts of Mexico, because of the drug trade, is not an issue that was created solely by Mexico. It's deeply, deeply connected to forces in the United States and in other parts of the world,

wanting these drugs, providing weapons, providing spaces for this trade to take place. And I think just showing all these, you know, the local vampire, the local Mexican vampires were not nice, but there's also these other forces at play, these foreign forces. And the cops are also not very good and clean and nice in the story kind of shows you perhaps that it's a complicated web. to understand. Mexico, corrupt yet stable, free of wars and political upheavals, was a favorite destination, though Brazil and Argentina also enjoyed a steady influx of vampires. By the time Anna was in high school in the 80s, all 10 vampire species were represented in

Mexico, in varying degrees. Most numerous were the necrows. Sylvia Moreno Garcia often draws on traditional gothic tropes for her fiction set in Mexico. Creepy castles, ghosts, and the uncanny. Well, Gothic novels have traditionally been set in, I shouldn't say have been set in Europe, but the point of view has been a white European Protestant point of view. So in the very early gothics, you see that the figure of the other, the thing that is going to infringe upon the normal, the thing that is strange, are Italians and Spaniards,

which are considered at that in that time period. In the early 1800s, they're very strange and odd. And to us nowadays, that might seem a little bit like, well, who's afraid of Spaniards or Italians? But in this time period, they are the shifty people that are doing really bad and wicked things in these sort of stories. So you either have maybe an evil Italian coming into the picture or you have somebody traveling to Italy

and encountering lots of evil Italians there. That's kind of the dynamic that is happening. with Count Dracula. He's an Eastern European that's going to London and sort of infecting all of these people with vampirism. Later on as the British Empire expands, because this is a genre that takes this route in Great Britain, as it expands, the fears of who is the other begin to change. So you start seeing things like fears of the Caribbean, of voodoo, or maybe India, maybe there's a monkey's paw that if you touch, it can give you very bad wishes or a ruby that's cursed. But the fears remain the same.

It's this white, upper-class, Protestant person who is in danger of being infected, corrupted, or destroyed by these forces of evil who are often persons of color or persons that occupy this space that is not the normal. Sylvia's vampires do more than stand in for violent Mexican drug cartels. The real-world horrors behind the metaphor go back to Mexico's history as a Spanish colony. Sylvia's most famous book is Mexican Gothic, and it's even more explicit about the haunting shadow of colonial rule. She could picture this same graveyard once upon a time

in a tidier state with carefully tended shrubs and flower beds, but now it was a realm of weeds and tall grasses, the vegetation threatening to swallow. the place whole. The tombstones were blanketed with moss, and mushrooms sprouted by the graves. It was a picture of melancholy. It was the sum of it,

not the individual parts, that made the English cemetery so sad. Mexican Gothic takes place in and around, an old manor house high up in the mountains. Fog constantly swirls around the house. Nearby, the dark tunnels of an old abandoned silver mine. The owners of that mine still inhabit the manor house. A British family, the Doyles.

Well, when I wrote Mexican Gothic, what I was trying to reverse was that traditional narrative where you would have perhaps the Mexican being the evil, scary people and the white people being the upstanding good people that are being threatened. And Mexican Gothic completely reverses that relationship because the family here that we have, the Doyles are, it's a colonial mining enterprise that is in Mexico. And the heroine, the point of view that we follow is a young Mexican woman. So it inverses that relationship. You normally would have had something like Dracula, maybe in a traditional Gothic story,

perhaps a Mexican coming to London, I don't know, and kind of spreading Ebola around the populace. So this story reverses that story and makes some of the colonial elements that were sort of more implicit in some of that earlier Gothic fiction, more explicit. In both novels that we were talking about here, you do draw on the colonial history in Mexico to inspire the monsters or the ghosts, vampires in the fiction. What do you hope this achieves among your readers? You can paint a portrait that is very realistic of something, but doing it in a fantastic way allows you to tackle things differently. So if you have a story like Beloved where there's a ghost and there's an exploration of trauma and slavery through this figure of a haunting of a ghost,

That can be very interesting experience and very different experience than if you're reading a nonfiction book that is, for example, narrating what the situation in the United States in the middle of the 19th century might have been for an enslaved person. So it's a way of confronting that historical legacy and almost, I guess you can't use the word personifying it, but maybe creating a monster out of the fear and the terror. that came with that kind of colonial history? Yeah, I mean, sometimes looking back at something that is traumatic is not, it's not easy to achieve in a certain way. So when you are looking back at that kind of trauma, simply looking, for example, at a list of dead people does not sufficiently express the horror of the situation.

And you sort of have to paint it or draw it in a different way, like a painting from, I don't know, Goya, to allow you to even get close to what that might have felt like because otherwise it just becomes sometimes a litany of atrocities, but it just becomes words. And I think in fiction, you are able to explore trauma in ways that are more effective sometimes. And speculative fiction opens the gate to coloring outside of the borders of reality

to draw upon some elements that you can't when you're just trying to do a photographic representation. of the world. Sylvia Moreno Garcia is a Mexican-Canadian author in Vancouver. Her novels include Certain Dark Things and Mexican Gothic. The term Gothic is inherently. The term Gothic is inherently confusing. In a way, it refers back to literal goths and vandals, the so-called barbarians who tore down

ancient Rome and thrust Europe into the Dark Ages. But by the time Gothic novels come along, in the late 1700s, Europe's well into its Age of Enlightenment, and Gothic now means anything unenlightened. Look, there they are. Let us watch from behind this pillar. The Gothic lives in the shadows. Look, my lord. The portrait of Lord Manfred's grandfather moves in its frame on the wall.

What is this? Follow me. Why is this happening? It's sort of medieval, but also sort of silly, not quite convincing. So it's fitting that Horace Wold. Pole himself, founder of the gothic novel, lived in a fake medieval castle. He had the place built for fun and frolics, and then after he moved in, this giant creepy house gave him nightmares.

Alejandro puts bakery at the heart of what he calls the Mexican Gothic style. Take the first novel by Yuri Herrera. Yuri Herrera, is a very important writer. he's been translated into English and he's very well respected. Okay. Hi, my name is Judy Herrera. I'm a Mexican writer living in New Orleans. One of his most famous books, it's called, in English, it's called Kingdom Cons, like a Con, like something fake, like a con. It's about this castle in the middle of Mexico with this narco couple, which is a king, and he has his chest. and he has all this kingdom and all that kind of things.

And there's a witch, of course, and all these ideas that are like reading Castle of O'Tranto in 2022. It was my first novel. It's a novel that I'm really fond of precisely because of this. I wrote it when I was living in the border between El Paso and Ciad Juarez. Tell us, what is the kingdom where the novel takes place? Well, it's a fake kingdom. This is a novel about the relationship between art and power.

He knew blood and could see this man's was different. Could see it in the way he filled the space with no urgency and an all-knowing air as though made of finer threats. This is the opening scene. It's from the point of view of a man called The Artist. The story has a ton of characters, but really it's all about the two from this opening scene. scene, the artist and the king.

It's the story of how someone realizes that this sacred figure is in reality not a sacred figure, but just a regular person that, for some reason, has accumulated a lot of power. It was exactly as he'd always envisioned palaces to be, supported by columns, paintings and statues in every room, animal skin strapped over sofas, gold door knockers, a ceiling too high to touch, and more than that it was people, so many people striding down corridors, this way and that, attending to affairs or looking to shine, people from far and wide, from every corner of the earth, people from beyond the desert, word of God, there were even some who had seen the sea, and women who walked like leopards

and giant warriors. Their faces decorated with scars. This fake kingdom, it's a commercial organization in that sense, you know, a sort of association of criminals that include institutional and non-institutional criminals with which this artist gets acquainted. So the king is a, a... criminal kingpin. Yeah.

And what inspired you to write about the relationship between an artist and a so-called king? I think in every society there is a tension in between the people that are creating art and the people that think that their obligation is to limit the power of artists and in general the freedom of expression of the citizens. And I was thinking that one of my models was the way in which European painters especially, were creating art, in spite of creating it for these lazy, useless aristocrats. And I was fascinated on how these people were able to create our own voice, to create beautiful pieces of art, even though they weren't fully free in that sense, because their sponsors were these powerful people,

and they had to include them in their pieces, and they have to follow their desires. So my sleeping quarters, they were in El Paso, but I spent a lot of time in Juarez, and I was thinking, well, I don't want to write a novel about these lazy European aristocrats. I was in a place in which I had, as a model, an example of those societies. One of the powers that I have there was the power of the organized crime. The artist moves into the King's Palace. His job is to compose Corridos, a traditional form of storytelling song rooted in real-life events.

He soon makes friends with another employee, the journalist. And I'm going to quote directly from your book, this journalist's job is to keep the fools entertained with clean lies. And in order to keep the fools entertained with clean lies, the journalists has to make them seem true. But the real news was the artist's job. the stuff of Corridos. So what is the relationship between the artists Corridos and the truth?

Well, he is someone who has been raised on the streets, and the truth on the street is something that you have to touch, that you have to hear, that you have to smell, and that you have to create your own story regarding it. It's not something that you just... received, predigested in a piece of paper. So the truth of this kind of person is a truth that also has to be said in a way that it can be remembered.

That's why it's a song. And this kind of songs, for this kind of character, is like the ideal way of transmitting information, among other things, because it's always transmitted by a real person in front of view. In the novel, Lovo, or the artist, has this relation with the journalist because the journalist is named like that because of the big boss that gave him the journalist, but he is aware that he knows that he's not a real journalist in the sense that he's working for the power. But he knows what real journalism is, and he knows the power of words, the power of language. That's why he admires the artists, because he realizes that art is...

telling the truth by other means, or telling the truth by other rules. And in this context in which journalism is subjected by the powers that be, it is art that in an elliptical way is going to tell the truth. Is the king supposed to represent some kind of monstrous force to be feared, or what does he represent? Well, yeah, but this monstrous force to be fear is not something that is exclusive to Mexico or exclusive to that narco world, but more than that is the kind of craziness and the kind of inhumanity that shows up with really powerful people, you know,

the way power makes you forget your humanity, the way power makes you think that you have rights over other people's lives. But at the first moment, you don't see that. We have been raised thinking that kings and queens are kings and queens because they deserve it or because they are special people, not because they have amassed all these power through violence, either themselves or their ancestors. If we see the real history of kings and queens and of courts, of aristocracies, it's mainly about historical violence and how they create certain narratives. to clean themselves from the originary violence of their position. Yuri Herrera, thank you so much for your time. No, on the contrary, thanks to you. Much thanks to you.

Thank you, thanks, U.S. Thank you, U.S.S. Uri Herrera is the author of Kingdom Khans, among many other works. He lives and teaches in New Orleans. You're listening to Ideas, where a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca.ca slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Chambers Plan Employee Benefits is not-for-profit, and that's great. for your business. Chambers Plan supports businesses with one to 50 plus employees across Canada

and reinvest surpluses to help keep rates stable. Get flexible coverage for you and your employees with outstanding customer service and unmatched value. Benefit together with Chamberspland. Learn more at hellochambers.ca. This program is brought to you in part by Specsavers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.cavors.ca.ca. Eye exams are

provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Specs www.ca. to learn more. Ph.D. graduate Alejandra Soifer sees a pattern in Mexican literature, starting in the 1990s and growing today. He calls it Mexican Gothic, and he makes the case that a hidden truth lurks in this fantastical trend.

But to see it clearly, we must grapple with a typically gothic obsession, deciding what to believe and who the monster really is. Alejandro's work is the subject of this episode of ideas from the trenches, our series spotlighting PhD students in Canada. It's presented by Tom Howell and Nicola Luxchich. I mean, of course, Sylvia works with vampires, which is the figure of the monster,

and it may be easier for general public to understand it as part of the... horror genre. But Shuri also works with castles, which is a very important topic in the Gothic. We brought Alejandro Seyfer back to talk with us after listening to authors Sylvia Marino Garcia and Yuri Herrera. They used their art to try to represent these horrible things that are happening and at the same time they are using the tropes of the Gothic genre. Now, when you originally wrote to us, you made this claim that the cultural production of Gothic horror, I'm quoting your words, the cultural production of Gothic

horror fiction both reflects the country's current violent state, that's Mexico's current violent state, and shapes how the public interprets and understands it. Explain. Well, I think that what Shuri said, it's a kind of

reaffirms what I told you. Fiction and art molds the way that we interact with reality. All fictions give us a way of thinking. They portray a way of thinking. I don't remember if it was Sylvia

or him that said the fake, they were fake. And I think that that's the most important thing here, the fakery, right? It's obvious that the novel by Celia is a clear fiction because it talks about vampires that everyone

knows that don't exist, but sure is instead he's like with this more embellished prose, these more sophisticated narratives and the way he works with literary realism, maybe he's giving the impression that it's not fiction, but it's kind of a form of reality, right?

And it's clearly not. That's my point. Alejandro worries that a cliche has taken root in our collective imagination. I want to pay me with cocaine. The idea. The idea of there being a handful of mastermind kingpins, living ruthless yet glamorous lives, calling the shots while strategically controlling a multi-billion-dollar international drug trafficking industry. When the government in Mexico City figured out that a bunch of synaloan farmers,

We're getting rich shipping their dope up north, they decided to do something about it. It's a narrative that drives the massively successful Netflix series, Narcos, Mexico. It's a rags to Rich's tale following the life and dramatic times of El Chapo, also known as Joaquin Guzman. The people who make Narcos never hid the fact that as far as truth and fantasy goes, their storylines are a mix, about 50-50. Yes, El Chapo grew up poor. Yes, he dropped out of school by grade three, and he did indeed become a powerful and feared figure in the drug trafficking business.

Okay, nobody is saying that there's no violence and that these people are not making money. That's correct, that's clear. But maybe we are exaggerating, we are making them more than they are, or maybe we are building them as monsters. Joachim El Chapo Guzman, the drug lord, has been arrested.

Alejandro thinks that pop culture makes drug lords like El Chapo, quote, more than they really are. He came to believe this after reading a provocative academic book, a blend of literary critique with media analysis and political theory. Its author is Asualdo Zavala. I came across his work because my supervisor, Susan Antevi, told me about him, his first book, which is called Cartels Do Not Exist. And I found it fascinating.

Cartels do not exist? Exactly. Okay. Well, problem solved then. Yes, that's what I thought. I was like, okay, so if they don't exist, I don't have a PhD to do. No, but it's very provocative. And I thought, well, why?

Why is he making this assertion? Hello, I'm Osvaldo Zabala. I'm professor of Latin American literature and culture at the City University of New York. We reach Oswaldo at his apartment in the busy, noisy heart of Manhattan. Like Yuri and Sylvia, he now lives outside Mexico. I grew up at the U.S.-Mexico border in the city of Juarez, which is right across from El Paso, Texas, right next to the Rio Grande, as they call it in the U.S., or Rio Bravo on the Mexican side. How would you sort of describe life in Juarez for an ordinary law-abiding citizen these days? Well, I mean, it's changed dramatically in the past 15 years or so

because of the anti-drug militarization that began in 2006 with the presidency of Felipe Calderon. Prior to that, which is the Juarez that I'm most familiar with and the one I grew up in, Juarez was a very benevolent, welcoming city for migrants, for people trying to make a better future for themselves from all parts of Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. And unfortunately, beginning with the militarization violence spiked. The homicide rate went astronomical. And I think now people, even though the city is still experiencing disproportionate violence, people are attempting to move on. and to live their lives. And now, of course, it's not just demilitarization.

It's also the undocumented migrant waves from different parts of the continent that are affecting livelihood in Juarez and the way society is trying to deal with the tremendous human tragedy of migration and that is affecting everywhere, but more concentrately at the U.S.-Mexico border. Of course, the book we're going to be speaking, with you about it has a very provocative title cartels do not exist that's what it translates to so what do you mean when when you say cartels don't exist since the 1980s US institutions trying to enforce anti-drug prohibition and legislation have been

using this word cartel to describe the organizations that produce and circulate and ultimately bring across the border drugs, illegal drugs into the United States. And what I argue in my book is that the concept of cartel originated by agencies like the DEA does not only correctly describe the phenomenon, but actually imposes a political, motivated idea about drug organizations. The idea being that drug cartels are pyramidal, powerful structures with extorted capabilities, military and financial, that can not only challenge state structures in Mexico or Colombia or even the U.S. and Europe, but can actually surpass state structures, agencies, police agencies, et cetera. And in doing so, they exert extraordinary levels of violence into

civil society. And so what I argue instead is that the idea of a cartel is a concept that was designed to legitimize a very violent, radical view of anti-drug legislation that involved using the military and that has gradually militarized the entire regions of Mexico and other parts of Latin America with a terrible disastrous result, not only homicidal violence, but just general decay in living standards for Mexican citizens. The D.F. Cartel does not give us any clarity as to what is the phenomenon of drug trafficking, but rather it imposes this idea that they become a tremendous negative force in society that must be fought militarily. And it drives then public consensus to accept the militarization and to legitimize all this

harvils, horrible crimes against society and humanity that are happening in the country. The largest, most violent and most prolific fentanyl trafficking operation in the entire war. As officials now say the four sons only amplified El Chapo's brutal. The homicide rate in Mexico has tripled since 2006, when the Mexican government officially set out to eradicate drug-related activity. Their rate is now 15 times higher than the General Hospital. Their rate is now 15 times higher than the General

homicide rate in Canada. The government estimates about half the murders are directly linked to drug cartel activity. A prominent U.S. think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, reports more than 79,000 Mexicans have disappeared since 2006. This report primarily blames criminal organizations, with government forces also playing a role. So you're not denying that the violence increased exponential. in the last 20 years. You're denying the framing of this violence? Correct. I am not only not, of course, putting into question that there's been a horrible

rise in violence all over Mexico, but what I'm trying to do is to offer a different understanding of how is it that we came to experience this. Up until 2007, in Mexico, we saw a clear sustained descent in the homicide rate all over the country. that actually lasted for that entire decade. So from 1997 until 2007, Mexico was actually experiencing a decisive sustained dissent in homicides, which by around 2007 were close to eight homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, which is a pretty standard rate comparable to many of those of many U.S. cities.

of the militarization, that pattern changed. And instead of declining, it dramatically augmented, right? And so by 2010, we had, in cities like Juarez, a homicide rate of over 200 per 100,000. You have something monstrous. If you wouldn't use the word cartel to describe organized crime that's happening there, how would you describe it? Back in the day, there are different ways to refer to them. Traffickers, I believe in the 1980s, referred to the organization as the federation, some form of conglomerate of different groups that maybe somehow work a little bit in coordination. But what is very interesting about those years,

and this is what some journalists have claimed, and even the traffickers themselves, is that this federation was not organized by the traffickers necessarily, but rather by the political and police system that shelter them and that allow them to conduct business. Now, it is very difficult to get rid of the war cartel because the war has taken a life in its own and its own inertia, right? And so people use it in a very vague, flexible way to describe all kinds of organizations. It can be a large, big organization like supposedly the Sinaloa cartel that, like I said, it's supposed to have a presence in over 100 countries, but also to refer to micro-lit organizations that populate random places of Mexico. Some special research groups on organized crime in the U.S.

and in Mexico have claimed that there exist over 500 groups. Others claim 30 groups. So it's very difficult to define what these organizations are supposed to do or to be or to mean. And so, So my research in part has been aimed at showing how every time we talk about cartel, we really talk about everything and nothing. We talk about the fantasies that DA agents want to peddle in Mexico for different reasons. The first one, of course, to appear to be effectively fighting a very difficult and very dangerous enemy. but also it's been used politically to exert pressure at the diplomatic level between the U.S. and Mexico and to advance geopolitical interest of transnational companies, the military agenda of both U.S., Mexico,

and, of course, the lucrative business of war, right? So for us in order to accept that there's such a thing as the war on drugs, there better be an enemy worth it, right? And so every time we use the word cartel in such irrestrictive, uncontrollable way, we maybe without realizing our participating or collaborating in this political agenda that promotes the militarization of countries like Mexico and Colombia. Oswaldo's books started out, like Alejandro's PhD, as a work of literary criticism. When I started looking at the different types of novels that were out there in short stories, one thing that I quickly understood is that they were all reproducing the same narrative

that then appeared in the mass media, of course, and in official institutions talking about the director. So I was very surprised to see the deep mediation of official discourse in novels such as, for example, Ballas de Plata Silver Bullets by Sinaloan El Mermendosa or Troujos del Reino, which I believe was translated as Kingdom Combs by Judy Herrera and many others that regardless of the objective of the novel or the style of the novel, they were all in many ways presenting to us or imagining for us the drug trade in the same coordinates that official discourse. does. That is, you know, the cartel, the very powerful structure that somehow is in the margins of Mexican society and yet it's penetrating Mexican society and is controlling police and media

and the political class and that has grown up to become so powerful that it's almost a second state in its own or a state within the state. And this fantasy, this imagination of the powerful Trump Cartel, then, I realize, was not really coming from the creative minds of the fiction writers. The point of origin of this story was neither in a novel or in the news report of a journalist, but rather in those institutions that first came up with the idea of the drug war, that invented the idea of the cartel, and that magnified the presence of organized crime in the country so much that we accept the prescription of the state, right? The militarization, more police, more violence, and, of course, but the tremendous bloodshed

and decay that the so-called drug war brought to places like Mexico. Okay, so step one, let's put a cap on this kind of fiction. Would that help? Sure. Really? Well, I mean, in a sense that if by cap you mean a critical check on it, right? Of course, I don't advocate censorship or anything. I don't believe that any sort of enforcement on the way we talk is productive for anyone. But at least as consumers, we should embrace a critical understanding of cultural products, right, if you will. So I believe people should feel free. to watch a Netflix series, but to do it in a critical way, right, to do it, understanding that what they're seeing is not part of a proven empirical reality, but rather discourse,

ideological mediation, right, that there's a history to this ideas, and that these ideas in this form of imagining the drug trade in Mexico brings us back to those people who are most interested in promoting the violence of the drug war. Oswaldo Zabala, much gracias. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Oswaldo Zavala teaches at City University of New York. His books include drug cartels do not exist, narco-trafficking in U.S. and Mexican culture.

There is sort of an ideological discourse around the violence that's going on. This idea that the violence is this grassroots expression that's coming from a reality on the ground, and therefore the texts in the films just reflect that. Whereas we might actually say that those texts are shaping the violence in turn, so it goes the other way. We met up with Alejandro's PhD supervisor, Susan Antabee. Not that the authors are literally agents of some evil power, not quite, but more that they're part of the larger ideological landscape.

Susan's own work combines a study of literature with writing about disability and the human body and the history of eugenics in Mexico. Her interests meet Alejandro's over how a culture processes its deepest fears. Often monstrosity works as kind of a marker of limits and boundaries. There's this interesting connection between this idea of the fear of the other and the way that that structure of fear and also the idea of what is real and what might not be quite real allows us to understand something about the limits of what's considered human and what a nation or a population or people desire for their future.

Susan says monster stories often serve the cause of real-life violence, essentially laying the imaginative groundwork. The classic example because I suppose it's typically thought of his earliest instance of contact is Christopher Columbus writing in his journals, right? And he talks about sort of dog-headed men that might have been living on another island, but we didn't get to visit that island. We heard about them. And he also refers to men who eat or ate other men. So this idea that monstrosity is to be feared and it's there, but it's somehow a little bit always out of reach and elsewhere.

We don't necessarily come face to face with it. This is a common trope that comes up. We also see it in early maps, right? Even prior to Columbus's exploration of the Americas, right? We see it in maps where monsters are depicted as, you know, emerging from the ocean at a particular site. And what would you say is new or significant about the way Alejandro is approaching this horror genre in Mexican literature? What I've really enjoyed about Alejandro's work is the fact that he didn't choose to just say, here are these novels and films that represent drug culture and violence in Mexico.

He took a much more broad and historically specific view, I think, looking at this idea of horror and the Gothic as something that it doesn't depend on a content of drug trafficking. The Gothic has more to do with the play of light and shadow, the way features. and desire come into the text, the way certain places are marked as ghostly or ghastly, and also the notion of what he calls the Gothic counterfeit, that kind of uncertainty about what is real or fake. All of these things, I think, play into a way of reading these texts as not just a reflection of drug culture and violence that's happening now,

but a larger structure shaping a national perception about where the violence is coming from. Thanks for talking to us. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. Susan Antiby is a professor of Latin American literature at the University of Toronto. And Alejandro Soyfer is back with us in studio. Hello, Alejandro. Hi, how are you? Good. So we took quite a journey in this episode from Narco-Trufferns. trafficking vampires to the legacy of colonialism in Mexico,

through to the depiction of real-life narcos and the idea of the monster. What key ideas do you hope people listening to this will hold on to from what they've heard? I think that what my work intends is to try to share a new light to these narratives. I'm mostly interested in the idea of the fakery, this fiction, these times we are living in, when you don't really know what's true, what's not true, what's fake, what's real. The critic's work is to try to understand the text and try to see how they were built and try to bring it to the public and try to say, okay, so you can enjoy this. You do whatever you do you want with this text, but just understand that these are just works of fictions.

So who is the real monster? Human being. No, the idea of the monster within us is one of the classical tropes from gothic fiction like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Stevenson. The monster is part of the human essence, but the particular figure of the monster that I am thinking of is a figure of the monster that stands between progress and the march towards the future from history and tries to stop that progress. You mention colonial times, you mention historical times, and I think that monsters are parts of that past that try to stop the train of progress if you want. Alejandro, thank you so much.

This has been really great to be on this journey with you. Muches gracias. Thank you very much for having me. You are listening to Mexico's Gothic Turn, featuring the work of University of Toronto PhD graduate Alejandro Soifer. It's part of our ongoing series, Ideas from the Trenches, where we feature outstanding PhD research from across the country. If you're working on a PhD and would like to be considered for the series,

email us through our website, cbc.ca.ca slash ideas. The excerpts from Sylvia Moreno Garcia's novels, Certain Dark Things, and Mexican Gothic were read by Syria Gestellum Phelix and Manolo Lugo Mejarez. Raphael Lozano Hemmer read the excerpts from Kingdom Cons by Yuri Herrera.

Thank you to all of our guests. Sylvia Moreno Garcia. Julia Herrera. Osvaldo Zavala. Susan Antiby. My name is Alejandro Soifar. I am from Argentina, Buenos Aires, and I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. For more on our guests and their work, you can head to our website, cbc.ca.ca.com slash ideas. This series is produced by Tom Howell and Nicola Luxchich.

Technical producer for Ideas is Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Greg Kelly is the executive producer. Producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad.