Tales of (Self-)Destruction

Narconarratives often portray drug-trafficking culture through an “us versus them” or “friend versus enemy” Manicheism. This dichotomy erases the role of the government in the history of narcoviolence and reproduces a formulaic and a marketable “good versus evil” distinction commonly found throughout the Mexican literary field. In this article, I analyze two short stories that deconstruct this narrative, “Z” (Julián Herbert) and “Hombres armados” (Daniel Espartaco Sánchez), from the collection Narcocuentos. I approach these stories through the concept of biopolitics, emphasizing the relationship between state and (il)legal violence(s), as well as the authors’ positions in the literary field. These stories reframe the friend-versus-enemy rhetoric, offering unidentifiable perpetrators and victims instead. Moreover, they challenge the hegemonic discourse by using two figures that thrive at the boundaries between life and death: the zombie and the homo sacer. However, the anthology’s failure to attract a wide readership reveals that Herbert’s and Espartaco Sánchez’s attempts to subvert the traditional drug-trafficking “grand narrative” has not been commercially successful in challenging the deeply engrained us-versus-them Manicheism.