The multi-billion-dollar cartel networks of Mexico and Colombia are conventionally framed as criminal pathologies—lawless enterprises to be suppressed through militarized interdiction and crop eradication. This framing is analytically inadequate. A substantial body of scholarship in political science, rural sociology, and critical drug policy studies converges on a different conclusion: these networks are the direct consequence of state abandonment and the systematic denial of local sovereignty to rural, indigenous, and marginalized communities. Organized crime does not simply enter these regions as a criminal enterprise; it enters as a de facto parallel state, filling the governance vacuum left by central governments that have historically been absent except when arriving to inflict violence.

This process has deep historical roots. In Colombia, the Peace Accords signed between the government and the FARC explicitly premise state absence as a main cause of violence, arguing that one of the central causes of the armed conflict has been “the historic state absence or abandonment of the peripheral territories most affected by its violence”. In Mexico, the political science literature has documented how regions such as Sinaloa, Michoacán, and Guerrero functioned for decades as zones of “proto-Estado fallido”—proto-failed state—where criminal organizations accumulated firepower exceeding that of local military forces and financed presidential campaigns. The historical record thus establishes a structural continuity: where the state has been absent, alternative governance structures have emerged, and those structures have been criminal.

The Power Vacuum of State Abandonment

The concept of the “parallel state” has gained analytical traction in the study of Latin American political economy precisely because it captures a phenomenon that neither “failed state” nor “criminal organization” adequately describes. As scholars of narco-state formation have argued, the consolidation of parallel powers in Latin America can be understood through the intersection of weak rule of law, systemic corruption, and the strengthening of organized crime networks that permeate both public and private institutions. Criminal actors in these contexts exercise coercion, taxation, and social control in areas where state authority is weak or complicit, producing negotiated arrangements that take the form of criminal governance.

The empirical manifestations are well documented. In Mexico, 20 of the 32 states experienced cascading violence following the death of a major cartel leader, revealing the extent to which criminal organizations had assumed functions of territorial governance. In Colombia, the concept of the “Estado paralelo” has been applied to describe how the policies of “Paz Total” inadvertently reinforced criminal governance by recognizing armed groups’ territorial control and coercive power. The pattern is consistent: when a central government fails to provide infrastructure, legal protection, security, and economic survival, organized crime does not merely exploit the resulting vacuum—it institutionalizes itself within it.

The Extraction Economy and the Destruction of Legal Sovereignty

The vulnerability of rural communities to criminal governance was significantly accelerated by the forced opening of Latin American markets to global corporate dominance. NAFTA forced the liberalization of Mexican agriculture, expanding import quotas and reducing tariffs, causing maize prices to fall 59 percent between 1990 and 2005. The pre-NAFTA system of agricultural subsidies was dismantled, the CONASUPO price-support system was dissolved, and the price of the cereal collapsed.

The consequences for rural livelihoods were immediate and severe. According to data from Mexico’s Ministry of Agriculture and producer organizations, approximately three million farmers cultivated around eight million hectares of maize, but two million of them relied on their harvest solely for family consumption. When the price collapsed, these farmers faced a brutal structural choice. Academic research has demonstrated that the deterioration of maize-growing municipal economies is “vinculada de forma muy estrecha al cultivo de drogas”—closely linked to drug cultivation. The study “From Maize to Haze: Agricultural Shocks and the Growth of the Mexican Drug Sector” established a causal relationship between falling maize prices and the growth of illicit crop cultivation. The destruction of local economic independence directly fueled the cartel supply chain, as peasants who could no longer sell their maize were recruited by criminal organizations offering seed, credit, and guaranteed buyouts.

The Impossibility of Legal Livelihoods: Missing Infrastructure and Markets

The structural violence of state abandonment is most visible in the physical and commercial infrastructure that does not exist. In Mexico, nearly 40 percent of the Red Alimentadora—the rural road network that connects farming communities to municipal and federal markets—is in poor physical condition, with rural roads remaining largely unpaved, lacking drainage, and often reducing the transport of harvests to a high-risk and high-cost undertaking. Beyond roads, 4.4 million agricultural production units in Mexico lack modern refrigeration and storage centers, and face what the Secretariat of Agriculture itself describes as an “asphyxiating commercialization system” in which small and medium producers “obtain low incomes from the sale of their products and face difficulties accessing commercial circuits that guarantee a fair price”.

This is not a marginal problem. Smallholder farmers produce roughly 30 percent of global food but constitute the most food-insecure group in the world. In Mexico, the traditional milpa system—intercropped maize, beans, and squash—can produce all the nutrients and vitamins required to feed at least two persons per hectare, yet monoculture maize lacks vitamins A, B9, B12, and C, and common bean lacks vitamins A, B12, and C. Households that depend on off-farm income have the lowest nutritional self-sufficiency of all farming households.

For those who work their own land in Mexico, the situation is structurally untenable: low productivity, insufficient government support, inadequate guaranteed prices, lack of inputs, and drought have rendered farming “inviable,” because “the cost of planting is higher than the possible benefits”. More than 60 percent of total rural household income now comes from non-agricultural activities—social programs or temporary employment in commerce and services. In Puebla alone, 15.2 percent of agricultural and forest land lies uncultivated—200,000 abandoned hectares—and the abandoned parcels are disproportionately those growing basic grains like maize and beans, the dietary foundation of most Mexicans.

The situation in Colombia is structurally identical. Research on coca cultivation in the Colombian Amazon documents that “dependence on the coca economy is compounded by deficient infrastructure and services,” with campesinos deploring the lack of investment in licensed slaughterhouses, technical assistance, and especially transport systems. Many subdistricts are connected only by river, and fluvial transport is costly; the roads that exist are mostly dirt or gravel tracks that communities built themselves. A Universidad de los Andes study concludes that in low market integration areas with peasant-scale coca production, policy should prioritize the provision of collective goods—roads, electricity, water, sanitation—to establish “the basic conditions for legal economic activity”. Until those conditions exist, substituting coca for legal crops is administratively burdensome, fiscally inefficient, and “poorly aligned with territorial realities,” often displacing rather than eliminating coca cultivation.

It is absurd—analytically and morally—to expect farmers to be content with this lot. The “lot” of the smallholder in Michoacán, Sinaloa, or Catatumbo is not a pastoral idyll of self-sufficient agrarianism. It is a condition in which the cost of planting exceeds any possible return, in which the harvest cannot reliably feed the farmer’s own family, in which more than half of household income must come from non-farm work or social programs, and in which the nearest paved road may be hours away by river or dirt track. When the state offers nothing but eradication and the cartel offers seed, credit, and a guaranteed buyout, the rational choice is not a moral failing. It is survival.

When Legitimate Livelihoods Are Supported: The Transformation of Illegal Infrastructure

The analytical framework of the parallel state does not, however, lead to fatalism. Where states and international actors have invested in the conditions that make legal livelihoods viable—roads, land titles, technical assistance, guaranteed markets, and sustained institutional presence—the infrastructure that criminal organizations built to service illicit economies has demonstrably transformed into legitimate structures of production and commerce. The transformation is neither hypothetical nor marginal. In Colombia, 31,000 campesino families have enrolled in voluntary coca substitution programs, with 8,584 hectares verified as voluntarily eradicated by the United Nations and another 41,000 hectares in the process of substitution. The crops replacing coca—cacao, coffee, and other legal harvests—are already reaching international markets, including destinations in Asia and North America. A longitudinal study of a pilot project in the Catatumbo region documented the substitution of 52 hectares of coca with legal crops and the establishment of a producers’ association (Asocac25), demonstrating that viable market strategy and secure land possession—even informal—can produce notable success. In the Vichada department, the “Triángulo del Cacao” project has reduced coca cultivation by more than 70 percent, linking 850 families to cacao and avocado production through a direct commercial agreement with the private company Casa Luker, which purchases the harvest at international prices between $30,000 and $34,000 per kilogram—more than what a kilogram of coca paste yields in the region. What was once a zone of conflict controlled by the FARC has become, in the words of the project’s architects, “a territory of opportunities”. The UNODC has certified that alternative development programs have reached 156,285 families that formerly cultivated illicit crops, granted land access to over 30,000 families covering more than 100,000 hectares, and contributed to the establishment of approximately 54 percent of Colombia’s planted cacao crops. In Cauca, a former coca farmer named Mayerly now cultivates roughly 12,000 coffee trees on 2.5 hectares of land, selling through a local cooperative and accessing bank loans made possible by the land title she received through the program. “We can say [the transition] has been a total success,” she says. “It’s a reality that we sustain our families with coffee instead of illicit crops.”

The trajectory is not limited to Colombia. In Sinaloa, Mexico, a legislative proposal is advancing to convert illegal poppy cultivation into state-regulated production of morphine for medical use—transforming what is currently a source of violence and criminal revenue into a source of public health and formal employment for the Sierra Sinaloan families who have cultivated poppy for generations. The initiative, which has been presented to the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), and academic institutions including Harvard and the University of California, San Diego, proposes to leverage Mexico’s traditional poppy-growing regions to supply the country’s public health system with domestically manufactured morphine and codeine, reducing dependence on imports and creating legal economic alternatives for communities that currently have none. The model draws on India’s regulated opium production system, where legal cultivation has provided stable livelihoods for farmers while supplying pharmaceutical-grade raw materials under strict state supervision.

These outcomes are not the result of eradication. They are the result of construction. The infrastructure that criminal organizations built to service illicit economies—roads, collection points, commercial networks, financial flows—can be redirected toward legal production when the state and private sector invest in making legal production viable. The crucial caveat is that these transformations are fragile and reversible. In Mexico’s Sierra de Guerrero, 66 communities returned to poppy cultivation after the federal government withdrew the Sembrando Vida program, which had provided monthly direct support of 5,000 pesos to farmers who committed in writing to abstain from illicit activities. As community authorities stated plainly: “They took away the Sembrando Vida program, from which the majority of us stopped planting poppy to bet on this project that we hoped would change the future of our towns.” Without the program and without productive alternatives in the mountain region, poppy returned as the only survival option. The lesson is not that substitution fails. The lesson is that substitution fails when it is abandoned. Where the state remains present—providing roads, land titles, technical assistance, and market access—the illegal infrastructure transforms into legitimate structures. Where the state withdraws, the cartel reclaims the vacuum.

The Cartel as Parallel State

The analytical framework of the parallel state requires a conceptual shift: cartels must be understood not solely as criminal organizations but as governance structures that emerge in the absence of effective state institutions. In this capacity, they provide employment, resolve disputes, construct infrastructure, and enforce order—functions that the formal state has failed to perform. The scholarship on criminal governance describes these arrangements as negotiated orders in which criminal actors and state officials produce stable, if coercive, systems of territorial control.

This is not a Mexican problem or a Colombian problem. It is a structural consequence of a hemispheric economic order that has extracted wealth from rural communities while denying them the means to build legal, dignified livelihoods. The parallel state is not an aberration within the international system; it is a predictable outcome of the system’s distribution of sovereignty and economic agency.

The Hypocrisy of the Coercion Strategy

The coercive approach to drug policy in Latin America—militarized interdiction, forced crop eradication, and threats of unilateral military action—is not merely ineffective. It is analytically backward. Research by the Transnational Institute demonstrates that aerial fumigations with glyphosate-based herbicides in Colombia set in motion “a vicious circle of human, social and environmental destruction”. Over the past decade, more than 300,000 hectares of coca and opium poppy fields have been sprayed with herbicides. The fumigation cycle causes pollution affecting humans, animals, and vegetation, destroys the livelihoods of peasant and indigenous communities, and forces displacement deeper into the rainforest where new illicit plots are planted—only to be fumigated again.

The empirical record is unequivocal. Despite the enormous areas sprayed, net coca cultivation in Colombia tripled since fumigations began, demonstrating the futility of the exercise. Between 2000 and 2022, three million hectares of coca leaf were forcibly eradicated, yet the percentage of cultivated hectares never declined. The Transnational Institute’s broader analysis of drug policy in Latin America concludes that “current repressive drug policies create more damage than that they produce solutions,” and that the collateral damage generated by both drug trafficking and the “war on drugs” are major impediments for the process of democratization on the continent.

Destroying a rural community’s crop without providing roads, legal markets, and alternative farming infrastructure does not eliminate the structural conditions that produced illicit cultivation. It deepens them. The community is pushed further into poverty, and the cartel—having demonstrated both its capacity to provide and the state’s incapacity to protect—consolidates its role as the only available source of security and economic survival.

The Structural Blind Spot

The coercion strategy reflects a deeper analytical failure: the inability of the dominant American framework to recognize the sovereignty and agency of the people it purports to govern or assist. Whether the manifestation is an influencer on a European train unable to comprehend that locals have a right to quiet, a space corporation that assumes the rest of the world will remain passive passengers, or a White House administration that believes a complex structural crisis of regional sovereignty can be resolved through bombs and tariffs—the blind spot is structurally identical. It is the presumption that the world’s deep-rooted histories, struggles, and rules are entirely secondary to immediate American convenience and enforcement.

The cartels did not build themselves. They were constructed within a vacuum created by state abandonment, sustained by an extraction economy that destroyed legal livelihoods, and reinforced by coercive policies that attack symptoms while exacerbating causes. But the evidence from Catatumbo, Vichada, Cauca, and the Sierra de Sinaloa demonstrates that the vacuum is not permanent. When states and their partners invest in roads, land titles, technical assistance, and guaranteed markets—when they make legal production viable—the infrastructure of the parallel state transforms into legitimate structures of production and commerce. Any serious engagement with the drug crisis in Latin America must begin with this recognition. The question is not how to bomb cartels more effectively. It is how to restore the conditions under which legal governance, economic sovereignty, and dignified survival become viable alternatives to criminal governance.

Citations

1. Colombian Peace Accords, cited in academic literature on state absence as a cause of armed conflict.
2. La Prensa Gráfica, “Estados fallidos, narco y corrupción,” 2026.
3. El Espectador, “El narco como Estado paralelo,” 2026.
4. Hemisferio, “A construção de um narco-estado: insegurança jurídica, corrupção e crime organizado,” 2025.
5. IPS Noticias, “Narcotráfico engulle a productores de maíz en México,” 2014.
6. García Ponce, O., Dube, O., & Thom, K., “From Maize to Haze: Agricultural Shocks and the Growth of the Mexican Drug Sector,” 2014.
7. Excélsior, “Campo mexicano, entre baches y desperdicio,” 2026.
8. Vélez, M. A., & Torres, M.-C., “Beyond the Coca Plot: Rethinking Development Priorities and Territorial Strategies,” Documento CEDE 2026-45, Universidad de los Andes, 2026.
9. Novotny, I. P., Tittonell, P., Fuentes-Ponce, M. H., López-Ridaura, S., & Rossing, W. A. H., “The importance of the traditional milpa in food security and nutritional self-sufficiency in the highlands of Oaxaca, Mexico,” AGRIS/FAO, 2024.
10. “Escaping capitalist market imperatives: commercial coca cultivation in the Colombian Amazon,” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2024.
11. La Jornada de Oriente, “El reto de ser campesino,” 2025.
12. Radio Nacional de Colombia, “31.000 familias campesinas avanzan en la sustitución de cultivos de coca en Colombia,” 2026.
13. Otalora, O. Y. J., Contreras, Y. C. P., & Mora, J. L. U., “De la Coca al Cacao y del Cacao a la Incertidumbre: Un Análisis Longitudinal de la Sustitución de Cultivos y los Desafíos de la Tenencia de la Tierra en el Catatumbo Colombiano (2022-2025),” Revista FACE, 2026.
14. Infobae, “De la coca al cacao: el modelo que está cambiando la vida de familias campesinas en Vichada,” 2025.
15. Canaltro, “15 campesinos del Catatumbo examinan las posibilidades de implementar en su territorio el ‘Triángulo del Cacao’,” 2025.
16. GlobalGiving/Mercy Corps, “Growing peace, one coffee farm at a time,” 2024.
17. UNODC, “The Last Decade of Alternative Development in Colombia,” 2014.
18. News Hidalgo, “Propuesta de Mario Zamora para rescatar la sierra de Sinaloa llega al NIDA de Estados Unidos,” 2026.
19. El Imparcial, “Campesinos de 66 comunidades de la Sierra de Guerrero retoman la siembra de amapola tras retiro de Sembrando Vida,” 2025.
20. Transnational Institute, “Vicious Circle: The Chemical and Biological ‘War on Drugs,’” 2025.
21. Canal 1, “Minjusticia: ‘La erradicación forzosa de cultivos no tuvo éxito en 25 años,’” 2024.
22. Transnational Institute, “Democracias bajo fuego: Drogas y poder en América Latina.”