{"id":269,"date":"2021-03-07T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-03-07T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/noria-research.com\/?p=23577"},"modified":"2023-12-19T15:08:10","modified_gmt":"2023-12-19T14:08:10","slug":"chapter-8-negotiating-with-narcos-sweet-talking-the-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/noria-research.com\/mxac\/chapter-8-negotiating-with-narcos-sweet-talking-the-state\/","title":{"rendered":"Chapter 8 – Negotiating with narcos, Sweet-Talking the State."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is Chapter 8 of our Opium Project.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
View the Dossier’s outline<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

How Indigenous Communities Survive the War on Drugs in Mexico.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Today, for campesinos in many of the most mountainous, marginalised corners of the country, opium production is the only business that still pays. But what good is money if you\u2019re not alive to spend it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For growing poppies in Mexico is also a dangerous business. My fieldnotes from the Indigenous communities of El Nayar \u2013 the largest and poorest municipality in Nayarit, where between 2000 and 2020 more hectares of opium poppy were destroyed than any other part of the state 1<\/a><\/sup> \u2013 are full of references to violence, murder, kidnappings and disappearances:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

12\/04\/2014: \u201cI arrived just as the cortege set out from the church to the cemetery to bury [X]\u2026 shot dead on Wednesday, in what was officially an accident \u2013 una bala perdida<\/em> [stray bullet] \u2013 but which [Y] tells me was actually a run-in with the guys guarding a poppy field he and some mates were robbing goma<\/em> from \u2013 lleno de plomazos<\/em> [shot full of holes], [Y] described the body of his nephew.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\n

5\/04\/2019: \u201cWhat else is new? Well, various people were killed here over the last year \u2013 think it got really heavy from the summer onwards. Guy called [Z] was killed, by his own cousin I think, in a beef over local sales of meth. As was [V], who I also knew, but whose face I can\u2019t remember. Think he might have been killed at the same time as [M]\u2019s son? Anyway, various others also apparently murdered, and lots of balaceras <\/em>[shoot-outs] at night, but it\u2019s all calmed down now.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In fact, as I was writing this article, I found out that one of my best friends in the region \u2013 a N\u00e1ayari poppy farmer who had been my guide, translator, and companion on many adventures in the Sierra \u2013 had been killed three months before. I still don\u2019t know what happened exactly; all I\u2019ve heard is that “He got with the ma\u00f1a<\/em> (local word for mafia), and they killed him”.2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Official statistics show that the connection between opium production and violence is more than just anecdotal. It is systemic. At the peak of eradication in 2018, 1162.9282 hectares of illicit poppy plantation were destroyed in El Nayar; equivalent to a third of a football pitch for every man, woman and child in the municipality. In the same year, El Nayar was the second riskiest municipality in the state in terms of the likelihood of being murdered, and had the third highest total number of murders,3<\/a><\/sup> whose victims included the chief of the municipal police force.4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Violence is a result of the Mexican state\u2019s \u2018war\u2019 on drug production and trafficking, and the simultaneous attempts of politicians, police officers and soldiers to control the drug trade in alliance with, or in opposition to, rival groups of traffickers.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, for much of the last two decades El Nayar has averaged an astounding yearly murder rate of around 100 per 100,000. And this is no coincidence, either. It is the direct result of the Mexican state\u2019s literal \u2018war\u2019 on drug production and trafficking, and the simultaneous attempts of politicians, police officers and soldiers to control the drug trade in alliance with, or in opposition to, rival groups of traffickers. Small-scale poppy farmers end up bearing the brunt both of the militarised state repression and criminal violence that results from this contradictory situation. I observed this for myself in El Nayar in 2018:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201cThis time last year, following the arrest of Nayarit\u2019s attorney general [for drug trafficking], there was still no plaza<\/em> [in El Nayar], the price of [opium] was at an all-time high, everyone was in good spirits, and eating well (albeit inevitably drinking too much). But it seemed that everyone knew that, sooner or later, one cartel or another would come to claim the plaza<\/em> [criminal territory], and they expected at least some level of violence to accompany that event. And, unfortunately, they weren\u2019t wrong \u2013 last October some armed men arrived, looking for the local [opium] buyers\u2026 The buyers fled, but the sicarios<\/em> [hitmen] threatened their families and shot up some houses and it seems they eventually turned themselves in. They haven\u2019t been seen since. And now whoever it is that controls the local \u2018market\u2019 has got prices down to their lowest in years (around 8-9 pesos per gram), the army are tumbando<\/em> [eradicating poppy plantations] left, right and centre (seemingly more efficiently now with the help of drones and in absence of deals with the state government), and most local people are poor as hell again. Although it\u2019s calm here now, people are wary about further potential outbreaks of violence, and many families have fled.\u201d5<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This phenomenon is not limited to Nayarit. Indigenous communities across Mexico bear the brunt of both state repression of opium production, and rural cartel violence. In the opium-production territories of southern Durango, where I\u2019ve also carried out fieldwork, Indigenous O\u2019dam people are regularly attacked, abducted, and murdered by armed groups seeking ever-tighter control of the local drug trade. At the same time, O\u2019dam scholar and filmmaker Selene Galindo reported in 2019, in a speech to the C\u00e1mara de Diputados, that state prosecutors have themselves acknowledged that \u201cit’s become standard practice to go and grab a bunch of O’dam people, beat them up, arm them to the teeth, and then put out a press release accusing them of being “narcos” and then leave them to rot behind bars, in Jalisco as
well as in Durango”.6<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fact that some of Mexico\u2019s most important centres of opium production \u2013 and of the violence that accompanies it \u2013 are Indigenous regions, is the product of a long and racist history: the history of Mexico itself. The legacies of colonialism, discriminatory economic and cultural development programmes, badly conceived urbanisation drives, and extractive neoliberal reforms have together left the Gran Nayar region of Nayarit, Durango and Jalisco, the sierras of southern Chihuahua, the coastal mountains of Michoac\u00e1n, the Oaxacan Mixteca, and the Monta\u00f1a de Guerrero as some of the most rural and least developed areas of Mexico.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Opium as an economic and cultural survival strategy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It is only by entering the \u2018modern\u2019 world of the drug trade that many of the inhabitants of these regions can earn enough to continue practicing some semblance of \u2018traditional\u2019 Indigenous lifeways, and avoid having to leave the same communities in search of paid work elsewhere. To remain Indigenous campesinos, they have found themselves harvesting and selling the opium gum that oozes from them, precious as drops of molten silver but sticky as half-dried blood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The irony of the situation, then, is that for many Indigenous people opium production is an economic and cultural survival strategy, but one that brings with it its own, terrifying assortment of physical dangers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But indigenous poppy farmers are not just passive victims of Mexico\u2019s \u2018Drug War.\u2019 They also have agency; they can, and do, negotiate with both the state and with criminal groups to defend themselves against the threats that both pose to their livelihood, their lands, their political autonomy and the physical safety of themselves and their families. After all, Indigenous communities have survived five centuries of domination, state attempts to wipe them out culturally, ethnically, and in many cases physically, and the attacks of armed men ranging from renegade conquistadores, to bandits and paramilitaries, to revolutionaries and rebels of all stripes. It is no surprise, then, that the strategies Indigenous Mexicans use to resist the violent pressures of sicarios <\/em>(hitmen) and guachos <\/em>(soldiers) alike are as old as Mexico itself, if not older, and can be roughly divided between three traditional categories: legalistic negotiations, passive resistance, and the use, or threat, of outright violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Legalism<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Indigenous people in Mexico have used \u2018legalistic\u2019 forms of negotiation since the Conquest, often in the form of petitions and \u2018official\u2019 appeals for protection to superior authorities.7<\/a><\/sup> The success of petitions addressed to the state is far from guaranteed, as it depends on the existence of individuals within the state apparatus with whom negotiation is possible. But legal manoeuvres remain the least risky forms of negotiation available to opium producers, and they remain a key part of Indigenous poppy farmers\u2019 negotiation tactics.8<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In one of my very first visits to the mountains of Nayarit, I sat in with the N\u00e1ayari autoridades tradicionales <\/em>(traditional authorities) of one community as they wrote a petition to the state governor denouncing the abuses perpetrated by soldiers during raids in search of hidden stashes of locally-grown opium. In the case I remember best, the soldiers found no drugs at all but still managed to \u2018confiscate\u2019 several items of women\u2019s jewellery, a bundle of women\u2019s clothes, an embroidered belt, some jeans, two large cheeses, and even, rather pathetically, a multi-pack of Maruchan instant noodles \u2013 and beat the family up for good measure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The irony of the situation, then, is that for many Indigenous people opium production is an economic and cultural survival strategy, but one that brings with it its own, terrifying assortment of physical dangers.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Although local people knew very well that the poppies are illegal, they still sought protection for themselves by decrying the abuses that state forces commit against them in the name of the \u2018War on Drugs,\u2019 in the hope that these forces would be transferred elsewhere. In many of these petitions, they also tried to exploit the multi-layered structure of the Mexican state, by complaining to Nayarit\u2019s state government that federal forces harass and steal from them; denouncing to the federal government the beatings carried out by municipal and state police officers; and excoriating all of these forces to the media, and anyone else who will listen, as being in cahoots with the region\u2019s DTOs.9<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Occasionally, such legalistic complaints and petitions \u2013 especially when amplified by the media \u2013 stimulate the intervention of higher authorities, and have won local people a reprieve from particularly abusive officials. In most cases, however, these appeals fall on deaf ears, or are acknowledged but never acted upon, and so have no greater positive effect than providing the communities that issue them with a comforting, but illusory, sense of having recourse to justice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Passive Resistance<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

When legal manoeuvres prove useless as tools in negotiating away external pressures, Indigenous opium producers instead turn to classic \u2018passive resistance\u2019 tactics such as foot-dragging, noncompliance, evasiveness, and obfuscation.10<\/a><\/sup> In Nayarit, Indigenous poppy growers use their indigeneity as to make such defensive tactics more effective; for example, by communicating via walkie-talkie exclusively in the N\u00e1ayari language so as to render their messages incomprehensible to any outsider, whether soldier or sicario<\/em>, who might be listening in. Others claimed ignorance of Spanish in order to avoid interrogation by soldiers or police officers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019dam women in the opium-producing communities of southern Durango have similarly used both their Indigeneity, and their gender, to avoid problems with state forces, exploiting the convergence of older social codes and more modern concerns about violence against women which leave them (somewhat) less vulnerable to arbitrary murder than their male counterparts. Thus:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u2018When members of the Army arrive to destroy [their plantations] they confronted them in their native language\u2026 [the soldiers] looked for interpreters to translate what the women were saying and explain to them their mission, in order to begin a dialogue with the women\u2026 who argued that the plantations were not theirs, despite being in the courtyards of their homes and only a metre\u2019s distance from their houses\u2026 Curiously they could not find any men in the area.\u201911<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

At other times, though, even this has seemed too much of a gamble, and O\u2019dam women and men alike have simply fled their communities.12<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Violent Resistance<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Because violence is the most dangerous of all their negotiation strategies, Indigenous poppy farmers tend to use it defensively, as a last resort, and only against the most violent and\/or \u2018corrupt\u2019 criminal groups or state officials who have proved unresponsive to legalistic appeals or passive resistance. But while it is relatively rare, such violence has long occurred throughout Mexico.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the mountains of Nayarit, for example, a locally-composed ballad called \u2018The Twelve Coras\u2019 commemorates a battle between indigenous poppy farmers and the army in the 1980s, in which a military helicopter was downed:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u2018Across the sierra, just a breath from Durango \/ The helicopter buzzed them \u2013 who could guess what would happen \/ In those bountiful gardens, in the fields of flowering poppies?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u2018Twelve Coras were killed, in the gardens they tended \/ And six soldiers were buried, who fell in the fighting \/ With the shot-down \u201cmosquito,\u201d that first found the poppies.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Since then, Indigenous poppy farmers\u2019 use of violence against both state forces and criminal groups across Mexico has not only become more common, but also more organised, most notably through their joining communal militias known as polic\u00edas comunitarias<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, such examples are not limited to Guerrero alone. In 2015, for example, I observed during fieldwork in one Indigenous community in Nayarit:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201cThe situation has been rather tense in the last couple of years; lots of narco activity, and, worse, police and military abuses of local people, as well as the usual in-fighting between drunken young men… One village\u2019s comisario is still in jail, after he was arrested on accusations of trying to set up a polic\u00eda comunitaria. Some local people say he was trying to increase his own power; others say it was a genuine attempt to curb illegal logging and the abuses of the forces fighting out the drug war \u2013 especially the Nayarit state police. Either way, the government saw it as an attempt to launch an autodefensa movement in the Sierra [del Nayar], obviously a threat to its own and allied narco interests.\u201913<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately, then, this particular attempt to create a communal institution to legitimise the use of violent self-defence against abusive outside forces failed; it was incapable of resisting the paramilitary police forces sent by Nayarit\u2019s attorney general Edgar Veytia, himself a drug trafficker, to dismantle it and arrest its leaders. This has only allowed disorganised <\/em>violence to proliferate in the Sierra, however \u2013 violence that has since claimed the lives of two of Veytia\u2019s paramilitary police commanders,14<\/a><\/sup> as well as the chief of the municipal police force.15<\/a><\/sup> And the longer that such violence continues to brutalise the region\u2019s poppy-growing N\u00e1ayari peasantry, the more likely it is that they will further experiment with armed self-defence against police, soldiers and sicarios<\/em> alike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Few Indigenous opium producers are members of \u2018cartels,\u2019 but nor are they always the eternal victims of either these groups or state forces. They have turned to opium production out of a refusal to let government indifference, widespread rural violence and the brutality of the global economy \u2013 in both its legal and illegal forms \u2013 destroy their rural lifeways and traditions of political and cultural autonomy. And it is as thereforeas Indigenous campesinos, rather than as \u2018narcos,\u2019 that they understand the pressures levelled upon them by state forces and criminal organisations alike; pressures that appear in many ways similar to those they have always faced from bandits, revolutionaries, rebels, and, most significantly of all, governments bent on \u2018modernizing\u2019 them out of existence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is no surprise that, in order to negotiate such challenges in the context of the \u2018War on Drugs,\u2019 Indigenous opium producers use historically tried-and-tested strategies. And often, they have to use all three strategies \u2013 legalistic appeals, passive resistance, and violence \u2013simultaneously, due to the diffuse and fractured nature of the Mexican state and its institutions; the contradictions inherent in government officials\u2019 attempts both to prohibit drugs and to control the drugs trade; and the sheer quantity of different criminal groups and their local \u2018franchises\u2019 active across the country. Nor are these expressions of Indigenous agency necessarily particularly successful; for as Selene Galindo has testified with regards to both the physical and cultural damage the \u2018Drug War\u2019 has done to the O\u2019dam of Durango:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWho will speak [our] languages \u200b\u200bwhen the speakers are being killed? We are being stripped of everything we name with those languages! And it seems that nobody does anything, because those who fight have already been killed before any local newspaper records it. Our languages \u200b\u200bare tied to a territory to which we can no longer access, to a house to which we can no longer return, to everything that is or was there that we can no longer go back to.\u201d16<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notes<\/h2>\n\n\n
  1. Built with MUCD Database, 2021. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  2. \u201cSe meti\u00f3 con la ma\u00f1a y lo mataron.\u201d \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  3. M\u00e9xico Unido Contra la Delincuencia (MUCD), Atlas de Homicidios 2018. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  4. \u2018Autoridades confirman asesinato de director de la Polic\u00eda de El Nayar y revelan detalles del crimen,\u2019 El Sol de Nayarit,<\/em> 11 julio 2018. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  5. Author\u2019s fieldnotes from El Nayar, May 2018. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  6. Selene Galindo, Public Speech in O\u2019dam Language at the Mexican Congress, 3 October 2019. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  7. Romana Falc\u00f3n, \u2018El arte de la petici\u00f3n: Rituales de obediencia y negociaci\u00f3n,\u2019 HAHR<\/em>, vol.86, no.3 (2006), 467. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  8. For more details see Le Cour Grandmaison, Morris, Smith, \u2018No More Opium for the Masses’, Noria Research, 2019. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  9. Patricia D\u00e1vila, \u2018En Nayarit, cientos de desaparecidos ante la indolencia estatal,\u2019 Proceso<\/em>, 27 Jan. 2018. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  10. These have famously been defined by James C. Scott as \u2018weapons of the weak\u2019; cf. Weapons<\/em>, xvi, 29-35. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  11. Sa\u00fal Maldonado, \u2018En Durango mujeres ind\u00edgenas plantan mariguana y amapola en sus patios,\u2019 La Jornada<\/em>, 23 Oct. 2016. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  12. Yuri Alex Escalante Betancourt, \u2018La aldea militar. Una etnograf\u00eda del estado de sitio,\u2019 Narrativas antropol\u00f3gicas <\/em>Num. 2 A\u00f1o 1 (2020) julio-diciembre, p.36. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  13. 24 Nov 2015, Author\u2019s field notes. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  14. ‘Secuestran y asesinan a dos polic\u00edas en Nayarit’, 2019, Excelsior. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  15. \u201cAutoridades confirman asesinato de director de la Polic\u00eda de El Nayar y revelan detalles del crimen”, El Sol de Nayarit, 2018. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  16. Selene Galindo’s Speech, Ibidem. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    This is Chapter 8 of our Opium Project. How Indigenous Communities Survive the War on Drugs in Mexico. Today, for campesinos in many of the most mountainous, marginalised corners of the country, opium production is the only business that still pays. But what good is money if you\u2019re not alive to spend it? For growing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":23616,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_molongui_author":["user-127"],"footnotes":"[{\"content\":\"Built with MUCD Database, 2021.\",\"id\":\"noria-1620\"},{\"content\":\"\u201cSe meti\u00f3 con la ma\u00f1a y lo mataron.\u201d\",\"id\":\"noria-3384\"},{\"content\":\"M\u00e9xico Unido Contra la Delincuencia (MUCD), Atlas de Homicidios 2018.\",\"id\":\"noria-3997\"},{\"content\":\"\u2018Autoridades confirman asesinato de director de la Polic\u00eda de El Nayar y revelan detalles del crimen,\u2019 El Sol de Nayarit,<\/em> 11 julio 2018.\",\"id\":\"noria-4142\"},{\"content\":\"Author\u2019s fieldnotes from El Nayar, May 2018.\",\"id\":\"noria-6812\"},{\"content\":\"Selene Galindo, Public Speech in O\u2019dam Language at the Mexican Congress, 3 October 2019.\",\"id\":\"noria-7763\"},{\"content\":\"Romana Falc\u00f3n, \u2018El arte de la petici\u00f3n: Rituales de obediencia y negociaci\u00f3n,\u2019 HAHR<\/em>, vol.86, no.3 (2006), 467.\",\"id\":\"noria-10865\"},{\"content\":\"For more details see Le Cour Grandmaison, Morris, Smith, \u2018No More Opium for the Masses', Noria Research, 2019.\",\"id\":\"noria-11356\"},{\"content\":\"Patricia D\u00e1vila, \u2018En Nayarit, cientos de desaparecidos ante la indolencia estatal,\u2019 Proceso<\/em>, 27 Jan. 2018.\",\"id\":\"noria-13287\"},{\"content\":\"These have famously been defined by James C. Scott as \u2018weapons of the weak\u2019; cf. Weapons<\/em>, xvi, 29-35.\",\"id\":\"noria-14312\"},{\"content\":\"Sa\u00fal Maldonado, \u2018En Durango mujeres ind\u00edgenas plantan mariguana y amapola en sus patios,\u2019 La Jornada<\/em>, 23 Oct. 2016.\",\"id\":\"noria-15892\"},{\"content\":\"Yuri Alex Escalante Betancourt, \u2018La aldea militar. Una etnograf\u00eda del estado de sitio,\u2019 Narrativas antropol\u00f3gicas <\/em>Num. 2 A\u00f1o 1 (2020) julio-diciembre, p.36.\",\"id\":\"noria-16221\"},{\"content\":\"24 Nov 2015, Author\u2019s field notes.\",\"id\":\"noria-19203\"},{\"content\":\"'Secuestran y asesinan a dos polic\u00edas en Nayarit', 2019, Excelsior.\",\"id\":\"noria-19832\"},{\"content\":\"\u201cAutoridades confirman asesinato de director de la Polic\u00eda de El Nayar y revelan detalles del crimen\\\", El Sol de Nayarit, 2018.\",\"id\":\"noria-19963\"},{\"content\":\"Selene Galindo's Speech, Ibidem.\",\"id\":\"noria-22685\"}]"},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"podcast":[],"project":[34],"region":[15],"class_list":["post-269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-article","project-opium-project","region-americas"],"yoast_head":"\nChapter 8 - Negotiating with narcos, Sweet-Talking the State. - Mexico & Central America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"How Indigenous Communities Survive the War on Drugs in Mexico.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/noria-research.com\/mxac\/chapter-8-negotiating-with-narcos-sweet-talking-the-state\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Negotiating with narcos, Sweet-Talking the State.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"How Indigenous Communities Survive the War on Drugs in Mexico.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/noria-research.com\/mxac\/chapter-8-negotiating-with-narcos-sweet-talking-the-state\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Mexico & Central America\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2021-03-07T05:00:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2023-12-19T14:08:10+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/noria-research.com\/mxac\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/op2-5.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Nathaniel Morris\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"Negotiating with narcos, Sweet-Talking the State.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:description\" content=\"How Indigenous Communities Survive the War on Drugs in Mexico.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Nathaniel Morris\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"9 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/noria-research.com\/mxac\/chapter-8-negotiating-with-narcos-sweet-talking-the-state\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/noria-research.com\/mxac\/chapter-8-negotiating-with-narcos-sweet-talking-the-state\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Nathaniel Morris\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/noria-research.com\/mxac\/#\/schema\/person\/6a9b4dfbc8597d749b2172087c7f318c\"},\"headline\":\"Chapter 8 – Negotiating with narcos, Sweet-Talking the State.\",\"datePublished\":\"2021-03-07T05:00:00+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2023-12-19T14:08:10+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/noria-research.com\/mxac\/chapter-8-negotiating-with-narcos-sweet-talking-the-state\/\"},\"wordCount\":2757,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/noria-research.com\/mxac\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/noria-research.com\/mxac\/chapter-8-negotiating-with-narcos-sweet-talking-the-state\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/noria-research.com\/mxac\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/op2-5.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Article\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/noria-research.com\/mxac\/chapter-8-negotiating-with-narcos-sweet-talking-the-state\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/noria-research.com\/mxac\/chapter-8-negotiating-with-narcos-sweet-talking-the-state\/\",\"name\":\"Chapter 8 - 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