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In this essay, I read the discourse of territorial control, population surveillance, and border security from a fundamentally ecological perspective. I have selected three novels and one short story as the textual basis for the following analysis. All of these works are structured around a single character, either a paid assassin or a drug smuggler, and all four imagine the open spaces of northern Mexico as places of both transit and surveillance. Although organized crime and drug cartels bring to mind large networks of individuals working in consort, the works of narconarrative studied here feature individuals existing in isolation from both their cohorts and the larger society. In their efforts to stalk a victim or evade detection, both the sicario and the smuggler produce much of the genre's dramatic force. The depiction of these characters also contributes to the literary formation of landscapes of surveillance and counter surveillance resulting in an image of both human society and the natural environment under constant observation by the military, police and cartels. In the process, these works also reveal the influence of semiotic practices typically found in contemporary journalism. One element in particular, the cartel map, has become a common visual tool to illustrate the regions of Mexico that have fallen under the control of organized crime. The mapping of cartels in order to construct geographical spaces of power, mobility and surveillance informs a type of narco-panoptic literary discourse that I analyze in the following pages of this essay.
Works of narcoliterature produce numerous scenes that organize Mexican national territory around the exigencies of drug production and smuggling. Police check points, transportation routes, underground passageways, aerial surveillance, lookout points, safe houses, landing strips and secret interrogation sites are the kind of elements that distinguish these narratives from competing arrangements of national space.1 Narcoliterature is not alone in reimagining the geography of Mexico in these ways. Various forms of official, academic and journalistic discourse have responded to drug trafficking by charting supply routes, distribution centers, areas of cultivation, and the regions over which individual cartels exert their authority. It is not uncommon to find within a wide range of media color-coded maps in which large swaths of the country are diagrammed according to the location of smuggling activity and...