Hegemonic narratives of violence. Organised crime and drug trafficking between journalism and television fiction

Abstract

The stories that seek to explain phenomena such as drug trafficking in Mexico or Colombia, or the Camorra in Italy, often focus on the central role that so-called “organised crime” plays in the generation of violence. The binary narratives on organised crime are disseminated by government agencies and establish a clear distinction between criminal groups and a state that attempts to suppress them through “national security” policy. This manner of understanding the context becomes a hegemonic narrative that is uncritically diffused by certain journalistic works published in the general media, but also by some celebrated pieces of narrative journalism that privilege their literary resources above their investigative rigour. Based on the Mexican case, this paper proposes a review of the repercussions of these journalistic narratives in the fictional television series Gomorra (2014), Narcos (2015) and El Chapo (2017), which coincide in enunciating themselves as based on journalistically- recorded facts. From a critical perspective, this analysis seeks to explore the ways fictional narratives naturalise a hegemonic discourse of violence, which is generated in government and business circles, and which is uncritically reproduced, in order to evidence how television fiction ends up filling in parts of the story that are absent in the journalism. The combination of document, journalism and fiction confers a narrative sense to the television plot, but at the same time contributes to the construction of a collective imaginary that deforms history and strengthens the securitarian discourse built from power.