Borderland Beat
![]()
Source: La Jornada and translated by Jillian Droste for Mexico Voices
The demonstration in favor of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera in Sinaloa shows that the cartel boss constructed a social network to protect himself in his zone of greatest influence. It’s also possible that, with the lack of heroes that demonstrate honor and moral integrity, people are seeking options in figures that are tormentors, according to university investigators.
“There exists in the social conscience the idea that politicians are worse. That they're full of impunity, and of cruelty... Characters like El Chapo, that come from nothing, that are illiterate, make it so that the people have an option, even if it is as degrading, as degenerate as a leader of a criminal gang.”
So thought Raúl Villamil Uriarte, Research Professor from the Metropolitan Autonomous University at Xochimilco.
Nevertheless, the doctor of social anthropology thinks the march was arranged by the cartel that is now using civilian society-based strategies to defend an anti-hero. He said that in these protests there is symbolism related to a kind of "subversion against the national symbols that no longer function."El Chapo, he added, embodies a criminal who has killed many people, but who is described by his defenders in Sinaloa
Nevertheless, the doctor of social anthropology thinks the march was arranged by the cartel that is now using civilian society-based strategies to defend an anti-hero. He said that in these protests there is symbolism related to a kind of "subversion against the national symbols that no longer function."El Chapo, he added, embodies a criminal who has killed many people, but who is described by his defenders in Sinaloa
"—that part of the population that benefits from the drug trafficking—as a good guy who gives them money, helps them and protects their people. There is a series of contradictions in the idealization and the assimilation of the heroes. But with the state of things in Mexico, the situation is truly interesting, because the idols, the heroes, who should be official figures of moral integrity, decency, and honor, don’t exist."
For his part, René Jiménez Ornelas, coordinator for the Unit for Analysis of Social Violence of the Institute for Social Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, considered that the people that went out to protest did it because the boss
“gave them work, even if it were just as a lookout, and because going to protest also is going to have some type of payoff, since, according to them, they're defending El Chapo.”
He recalled that this hasn't been the only such mobilization, since there were also some in support of La Familia Michoacana.
"This illustrates how the cartel bosses favor the population that is near them, where they live, where their territory is, because they require a social network that in a sense can shelter and protect them."
More than being a benefactor for the locals, he affirmed, El Chapo represents
“a type of stability.. he’s giving me work. Just for hiring me as a lookout, he pays me.”
The fact that the people said that he had paid them or given them something in exchange speaks
“of the great economic power of the cartel. El Chapois in prison, but as for the cartel, they are only bugging it; it already has to have five others to substitute for him; the structure is not being hit.”