The violence specialists

Every society depends on violence workers, but what makes young men take a job that risks their lives and harms others?

by Raúl Zepeda Gil BIO

Tijuana, Mexico, 2023. Mads Nissen/Panos Pictures

is a sociologist and political scientist, and an associate professor in politics and international relations at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Between 2010 and 2011, Los Zetas kidnapped dozens of migrants coming from Central America. Their campaign of terror earned them the reputation of Mexico’s most deadly criminal organisation. In the eastern state of Tamaulipas, in the municipality of San Fernando, authorities found mass graves. According to a 2016 report from the Open Society Justice Initiative, there is compelling evidence that the killings, enforced disappearances and torture committed by members of the Zetas cartel meet the legal definition of crimes against humanity. This gang transformed the landscape of the Mexican drug wars. Beyond drug trafficking, Los Zetas attacked innocent civilians in several towns, operated heavy weapons against the Mexican authorities, and committed massive, forced disappearances.

Most of us are taught to see criminals, like the Zetas, as the polar opposite of the police or the army. Maybe even that the fight between the legal authorities and the illegal cartels is one of simple good versus evil. But some social scientists take a different approach. Los Zetas is interesting for many reasons, including the fact that they were founded by a splinter group from the Mexican Army’s special counterinsurgency unit. In 1997, more than 30 soldiers of the Special Forces Airmobile Group (GAFES in Spanish) defected to work for the leader of the Gulf Cartel, a Mexican drug organisation based in northeastern Mexico. Trained by the government in psychological terror tactics, jungle warfare and the manipulation of heavy weaponry, these soldiers-turned-drug-cartel members named their gang after the Z codes of the Mexican Army radio system.

The movement of these highly trained soldiers into the illegal narcotics trade highlights how the tactics, training and everyday lives of soldiers, police officers, criminals, guerrilla fighters, terrorists and even génocidaires often share a great deal of common ground. They are all specialists in violence, they all have the professional training to kill, and they use these skills to make a living.

Whether they are on the payroll of a government, a guerrilla organisation, a mafia or the police force, all these people, primarily men, are what the sociologist Charles Tilly called ‘violence specialists’. They perform routine and specialised activities in every society on Earth; in fact, they make a living from it. Still, it can be challenging to recognise organised violence as a kind of work, much less one fundamentally shared by both police and criminals.

Every society depends on violence workers, but what is it that makes people go into it as a type of work? Why would they risk their lives and harm others? As I found when I interviewed a group of young, imprisoned men in Mexico who were part of criminal organisations and sentenced for homicide, entering this risky occupation is mostly a voluntary way to gain money and prestige. All of them were imprisoned in a juvenile detention centre in the State of Mexico called La Quinta del Bosque, close to Toluca, the state capital. This centre, which used to be an old farmer’s house, hosts young people, mostly male, who committed crimes when they were between 14 and 17 years old. I visited La Quinta in 2023, after the government lifted COVID-19 restrictions.

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In these 18 interviews with those young men, I heard them speak, time and again, about work. Most of them were using chambear (Spanish-language vernacular for the verb ‘to work’) to talk about gang violence and killings. Killing or protecting the illicit drugs was everyday work.

Many scholars, governments and probably most people explain violence as a result of human nature. In this view, aggression is ingrained in our brains, and some inevitably fall into the temptation of violence; therefore, strict control from the government is essential. Many people also hold to an orthodoxy maintaining that people who resort to criminal violence have experienced some traumatic event, which made them ‘deviant’, disinhibiting the worst instincts.

Of course, at the same time, conventional wisdom holds that people join the police or the army because they have an inherent desire to protect others, and their use of violence is not deviant but an altruistic sacrifice. This unconsidered view survives the fact that it is also well known that police officers and soldiers are capable of violence against innocent people too. There are widely documented occasions of soldiers who tortured, ‘disappeared’ or killed innocent citizens in South America in the 1970s by command of the dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia. Police violence in the........

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