DInce the 1990s, drug culture in Mexico has been studied as the symbolic repertoire of the “criminal town” that portrays the daily life of drug traffickers. Their expressions are understood as a reliable record of the traffickers' lives, with a transgressive aesthetic that presents excess and ostentation as forms of domination. In this article, forms of spiritual protection among drug traffickers are studied in order to debate the narcoculture. The ethnographic material was collected between 2014 and 2017 in the states of Hidalgo and Michoacán, through participant observations and in-depth interviews. The protection of popular saints such as Santa Muerte, Angelito Negro and San Nazario, allows us to understand how narcoculture is a resource for social emancipation, legitimizing the definitions of justice and sovereignty of organized crime.

TO Below are some fragments of that dialogue between two Me'phaa women, community feminists from the Guerrero mountain, and a feminist anthropologist interested in better understanding this proposal. It is not about “the spokespersons” or an “official” position on what community feminism is, but rather what this proposal means for them in their lives and how it relates to their own identity.

The present article shows the way in which the aesthetics of Afro-American religions, in particular the dance and music of Afro-Cuban Santeria, are inserted as part of a “black” gestural, musical and corporal repertoire that is constructed in transatlantic interconnections from at least the 19th century. I argue that in this sway, the scenarios of the representations of said repertoire become a platform that takes on a “refractive” character (Grau, 2005), that is, they decompose an idea of the “black” into multiple symbolic and interpretive references that they can even be opposite.

In December 2006, the president of Mexico, Felipe Calderón, declared the “war against drugs” and called out the Army to confront criminal groups in the streets. This public security task does not correspond specifically to the functions of the Armed Forces and, among other consequences, has led to a disproportionate increase in homicides and disappearances in the country. Despite this, the Internal Security Law is presented, which institutionalizes this militarization process and justifies, regulates and legalizes the role of the armed forces in the fight against organized crime. There are many questions that arise in this context and we hope that the guests of this Discrepancies section will contribute to animate the debate, perhaps to clarify it.