A Brief History of Violence in Mexico, Pablo Piccato, translated by Quentin Pope, 2025, University of North Carolina Press
Mexico has more reason than most to fear Donald Trump’s fictitious premise of counter-narcotics for attacking Venezuela, given his racist DNA and ominous threats.
“Something’s going to have to be done with Mexico,” Trump said after kidnapping Nicolás Maduro. “[President Claudia Sheinbaum] is very frightened of the cartels. They’re running Mexico.”
This is a an old saw in rightwing US narratives, long fuelling hardline support within Washington for strikes on cartels within its sovereign neighbour which America’s security elite has convinced itself that Mexico’s leaders are unable—or unwilling—to confront.
Like so many US attitudes towards Latin America, and permeating the Monroe Doctrine that Trump boasts he has “superseded”, it is built on a longstanding belief in racial entitlement that has driven policymaking for 180 years.
Since the annexation of Texas, establishment figures in America have legitimised their aggression based on a deep belief that they are racially superior to Mexicans, whom they have portrayed as morally degenerate, inherently corrupt, and self-evidently weak.
Above all else, their objectionable chauvinism has always sought to imply that Mexicans are uniquely prone to violence—a base instinct which, in the contemporary context, they have merely exported to the peace-loving suburbs of white America.
It is fair to say that this blood libel is the foundation of current US threats against Mexico.
Trump did not invent such views: they underpinned the expansionist ideology of Manifest Destiny and have shaped a century and a half of dehumanising rhetoric and social violence towards Latinos in the US that continues to this day.
All Trump has done is scratch at a festering historical sore on the US body politic, thereby reviving racist justifications for military aggression towards Latin America while fostering a climate of impunity for racist law-enforcement, evidence of which can be seen in the murderous brutality of ICE.
It goes without saying that we do not know if the US president will attack Mexico—it would be a very high-stakes gamble to do so—and despite hard evidence that Sheinbaum has been collaborating fully with Washington in the fight against drugs, the Mexican president has also been pulling out the stops to deescalate tensions and reduce risks.
But the underlying racist narrative persists and has been very evident in the Trump administration’s approach to Venezuela and its neighbours—a cocktail of contempt and testosterone-fuelled aggression among the thugs that the Don has surrounded himself with.
Aside from detracting from Trump’s personal political woes—not least growing evidence that he was a willing guest at the carnal feast served up by the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein—the most convenient aspect of this racist framework is that it conceals soaring levels of US violence that, were the shoe on the other foot, would inspire similar portrayals of “Anglos”.
Alongside perennial violence towards Latinos within US society, Washington has been exporting state terrorism across the Americas since the 19th century.
And poor Mexico has often been on the receiving end—the 1846 invasion, the 1906 incursion against the Cananea strike, the 1914 occupation of Veracruz, the 1916 expedition against Pancho Villa, CIA involvement in drug trafficking to fund the Contras, the ATF’s scandalous Fast and Furious gun-running—the list goes on and on.
Given this, the central question of scholarship must be aimed at subverting US racist mythology and thereby undermining the legitimacy claimed by Washington for intervention.
That is the task that Pablo Piccato has set himself in writing A Brief History of Violence in Mexico, originally published in Spanish in 2022 as Historia mínima de la violencia en México (El Colegio de México).
He has a noble purpose, arguing that hard facts comprising the historical record represent an “antidote” to “distorted rhetoric” about violence being an essential trait of the Mexican psyche.
The author writes: “I continue to believe that history is the best way to avoid drowning in the flood of dubious information about violence in Mexico, but the nature of the information that reaches audiences in the United States and other countries is particularly skewed by politicians exploiting anti-immigrant sentiments and promising hardline policies.”
Piccato argues that violence is a social phenomenon carried out within specific material parameters with contextual causality that always has a moral dimension, and that a “Hobbesian permanent state of war” simply does not exist in Mexico or anywhere else.
It is that contextual nature that emerges as a key characteristic, and the author cites Hannah Arendt who argued that as a result the long-term effects of violence are impossible to predict.
This uncertainty is a key premise, and Piccato refrains from proposing a hypothesis about the cumulative effects of violence in favour of describing the various forms it has taken in Mexico, while exploring underlying factors in each case.
Accordingly, he begins with revolutionary violence with all its asymmetries and contradictions, whose overlapping causes included a sense of injustice among campesinos alongside personal feuds, reactions to abuses by federal officers, and middle-class ambition.
Piccato writes: “To equate the Mexican population to a wild and unpredictable ‘tiger’, according to ‘the psychology of our race’ [Porfirio Díaz], overlooks an aspect of this history that became evident for contemporaries after Madero’s victory: the Revolution’s most violent phase began with the ‘pacification’ that followed, and then expanded with the infighting among the different revolutionary factions.”
Mexico’s revolution having concluded, there began a messy (if historically marginalised) period of agrarian violence, in which an armed struggle for land pitted organised political groups against military operations, guardias blancas, villages, families and individuals.
The subsequent Cristero War brought religious violence into the frame yet, as Piccato argues, claiming that anticlericalism was its cause would be insufficient and the origins of this bloody confrontation between incompatible value systems also reflected collective identities, political ideologies, and gender perceptions.
With the creation of effective state institutions and growing urbanisation after 1940, a new type of criminal violence emerged motivated by profit rather than ideology, and violence was no longer seen as a clash of value systems.
If ideology returned to the fore in the political violence of the 1960s and 1970s when leftwing forces confronted an anti-communist state, it did not do so with any real clarity.
As the author points out “it would be a mistake to see a symmetry between the two sides, or even refer to the existence of two sides at all. While the guerrillas never came close to taking power, the state forces always enjoyed a strategic advantage.”
The state of Guerrero incubated two of the most important guerrilla groups of this period which had a long-term influence on other revolutionary movements (despite their defeat), while exemplifying the centrifugal tendencies of the Mexican left. The state also became a laboratory for the military’s most brutal methods of repression.
In the more recent era, organised crime, and in particular drug-trafficking, has nurtured a form of violence that Piccato says has not yet completed its most destructive cycle—ample evidence of which, of course, has been on display in the last two decades.
Nonetheless, the author examines the long history of organised crime as a species of industrial activity with “no precise location, origin, or epicentre”. He shows how the use of violence changed from being a cost of the drug business during its expansion in the 1970s and 1980s to becoming an asset, which helps to explain the explosion of bloodshed in recent decades.
During this transition, Piccato argues, the industry itself changed, no longer limited to the production and export of drugs to the US but now including other lucrative activities such as human trafficking.
A key factor in this change was the role of state agents, who not not only provided protection for drug traffickers but also extorted them with the threat of violence.
The author writes: “Drug traffickers were not initially experts in violence, but they paid money to those who were, and who wore a badge. This allowed them to continue a business that, despite the rhetoric, very few in Mexico considered to be criminal in the same way that it was viewed by the US government.
“Drugs were banned in both countries in the first half of the twentieth century without their prohibition triggering a wave of violence. What changed in the last decades of the century was the amount of money at stake.”
If there has been a common thread to all these forms of violence in post-revolutionary Mexican history, Piccato suggests that it is gender-based—but not in terms of the difference between men’s and women’s bodies, but in terms of the specific way society construes this difference as male superiority.
He writes: “A single ideology runs through all these acts, from the most trivial to the most harmful: the use of violence is an expression of the hierarchical system we call patriarchy.”
A Brief History of Violence in Mexico is a highly important and timely work demonstrating that this country is not in essence violent, and that the forms of violence experienced in its history should be analysed according to their socio-political context just as they should be anywhere.
While the author confines himself to instances of violence within Mexico that are products of the country’s internal dynamics, he points out unflinchingly that this is not to negate the contributing role of US violence historically directed at the country.
He writes: “The relationship between Mexico and the United States has shaped violence south of the border in other ways, both formal and informal, including advice and support for counterinsurgency operations, sponsorship of the ‘war on drugs’, and the unlimited supply of weapons used by criminal organisations. US law enforcement agencies have operated in Mexico with varying degrees of negligence …
“In the minds of some politicians and parts of the US public, Mexico continues to be a laboratory. Justified by stereotypes of Mexican society and politics, it is viewed as a place for the experimentation of violent procedures designed to respond to panicked diagnoses of the public health problem of drug addiction.”
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Categories: Mexico, United States