The Economy of Violence

Violence is not evenly distributed: it follows the structure of the market. Between Mexico and Argentina, that difference reveals two distinct forms of organization within the same global chain.

In narcotrafficking, geography does not explain violence; it organizes it.

Green mountains, orange deserts, gray neighborhoods, and multicolored ports form a kind of chromatic map of the drug trade. A varied geography and a heterogeneous architecture can offer a superficial—if unsettling—approximation of narcotrafficking. Diversity is an essential feature of the trade, even as violence cuts across these spaces in uneven ways.

Narcotrafficking is organized as a global chain in which each territory performs a specific function: in some places, raw materials are produced; in others, drugs are manufactured; and in others still, they circulate until they reach consumers. This division is shaped by geography, climate, social and economic conditions, and the capacity of the state to respond.

Around the world—without exception—there are retail drug markets, illegal in their vast majority. Depending on purchasing power and levels of consumption, these markets can be more or less profitable, and more or less violent. Political leaders rarely distinguish among these differences. Whether out of ignorance or complicity, public discourse—and much of the academic literature—often conflates spaces and realities that are fundamentally distinct.

In Argentina, such claims tend to predict a future resembling Mexico’s present, especially when a violent incident captures national headlines. But Argentina’s reality, without that being any particular achievement, is far from mirroring Mexico’s.

The Turning Point

Until the nineteen-seventies, heroin dominated working-class neighborhoods in the United States and much of Europe. Cocaine, by contrast, was an elite drug, circulating among the bourgeoisie. In the nineteen-eighties, that boundary collapsed, and cocaine use began to spread more broadly. To meet the growing demand, Colombian traffickers formed alliances and reorganized the cocaine production system. They secured new sources of supply, built large laboratories, and introduced technologies that lowered costs and drove down wholesale prices.

U.S. military pressure in the Caribbean forced them to partner with Mexican organizations, which until then had primarily produced and trafficked marijuana and heroin into the United States. In Mexico, much of the trade consolidated under the Guadalajara cartel, whose members divided up territorial control, particularly to coordinate the flow of cocaine northward.

The dismantling of the two major Colombian cartels—Medellín and Cali—during the nineteen-nineties, along with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, created an opening for Mexican organizations to take control of the flow of drugs entering the United States, the largest drug market in the world.

By the early twenty-first century, drug consumption had begun to grow steadily, with cocaine, opioids, marijuana, and synthetic drugs sharing the market. In Mexico, traffickers were no longer interested only in moving cocaine across borders; they also sought to produce the opioids and synthetic drugs that were increasingly in demand. To do so, they needed to control two key domains: production and logistics.

Production, Transit, and Scale

In Mexico, opioids and synthetic drugs—two of the most in-demand substances today—are produced. The country also shares a 3,500-kilometer land border with the largest and most lucrative drug market in the world. For criminal organizations, controlling the production of these drugs and their trafficking into the United States is far more profitable than operating within Mexico’s retail market; it is over these higher-value segments that they fight.

In the states of Guerrero, Michoacán, Durango, and Sinaloa, much of the opium used to produce drugs consumed in the North American market is cultivated. And through the border states—such as Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, and Tamaulipas—both drugs manufactured in Mexico and cocaine arriving from Colombia are trafficked into the United States. Control over production and transportation to markets like the United States gives Mexican traffickers the power to determine costs, wholesale prices, and profit margins.

In Argentina, there are no territories where the raw materials needed to produce drugs are cultivated. Nor does the country share a border with a market comparable to that of the United States. On the contrary, neighboring countries such as Bolivia and Paraguay—where drugs are produced—supply Argentina, which functions as a moderately attractive market for traffickers. For criminal organizations operating in Argentina, the only viable strategy is to control small segments of the domestic market.

Urban centers such as Buenos Aires, Santa Fe, Córdoba, and Mendoza, along with their surrounding areas—as in all retail drug markets—are the spaces contested by traffickers. In these zones, rudimentary laboratories are set up to dilute drugs and increase the volume available for retail sale, which now moves across every possible physical and digital channel. Control over these small areas—sometimes no more than a few blocks in impoverished working-class neighborhoods—defines the territory under dispute in Argentina. The difference with Mexico is not only one of territory, money, or firepower, but also of scale in violence and in the number of lives lost.

The Economy of Violence

Violence is a scarce resource. No system functions if violence is used indiscriminately. Nor is it deployed unless it produces sufficient returns. For this reason, among others, it tends to concentrate in specific territories. It is not distributed evenly; it follows the logic of the market.

Amid the ineptitude and corruption of successive Mexican governments—particularly since the administration of Felipe Calderón and his “war on drugs”—extreme violence became persistent and visible in public life. This not only gave rise to national and international movements of denunciation and solidarity with victims and their families; it also made it possible to better understand how criminal organizations operate, both within Mexico and in the international market.

Between 2010 and 2012, a new conflict pitted the Sinaloa cartel against the Zetas. During that period, nearly sixty thousand killings were recorded in states tied to production and logistics—seventy per cent of all murders in the country. Massacres such as the one in Durango—where 340 bodies were found in a mass grave—or in San Fernando—where seventy-two migrants were abducted and killed near the U.S. border—bear little resemblance to what occurs in Argentina. There, while the torture and killing of teenagers or the deaths of bystanders caught in crossfire between traffickers occasionally shock public opinion, they tend to result in statements that rarely translate into effective public policy.

In Argentina, violence is not deployed to control productive territories or major international corridors, but rather emerges from fragmented disputes within a peripheral market, shaped by the country’s economic standing and its position within the global chain. It is not insignificant. But it follows a different logic: violence is used to organize neighborhood-level markets.

A Misunderstood Problem

Public policy on narcotrafficking in Argentina remains unnecessarily fragmented, reflecting a fundamental misunderstanding of a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. Amid an overabundance of imprecise diagnoses, proposed solutions tend to focus on harsher penalties for the weakest links in the chain and on the excessive deployment of security forces—and even the military—in transit zones supplying the domestic market, such as the borders with Bolivia and Paraguay.

The impulse to equate processes and realities as different as those of Mexico and Argentina is not only a sign of misunderstanding; it can also be dangerous. The differences between the two countries are structural. Changes in Mexico’s drug trade emerged in response to transformations in the most lucrative drug markets in the world, foremost among them that of the United States.

In Argentina, by contrast, the transformation and worsening of the phenomenon do not stem from shifts in the global drug market’s functioning, but from its broader global expansion as a social phenomenon and from three decades of disjointed and ineffective public policies. It will be the responsibility of political leaders to place and sustain the issue on the public agenda, develop more accurate diagnoses, and, on that basis, implement policies capable of disrupting the drug trade, mitigating its consequences, and repairing the damaged social fabric.

Not to prevent Argentina from becoming Mexico, but to confront a distinct phenomenon—one that is already eroding social life and demands responses tailored to its own scale and nature.