From Mesoamerican Rituals to Security States

Abstract

This article would like to explore the relationship between violence, power, and symbolism in Central America, looking from pre-Columbian rituals of blood and death to the contemporary dynamics of criminality and state politics. Building on the centrality of sacrifice in Mesoamerican traditions, it examines how Gangs & Cartels ritualize violence through history and aesthetics of death. In the last part, particular attention is given to El Salvador under President Nayib Bukele, whose security policies, transforming the logic of sacrifice into a symbolic mechanism in which chaos is redefined as order and insecurity as security. 

Mesoamerican Symbolisms

Do the societies of Central America have a symbolism of violence, death, and social order? In the pre-Columbian world, the ritualization of killing served a cosmological purpose: blood was life-force, and its offering through sacrifice was a means of sustaining both gods and society. Historically, the respect of death comes from the Mexica pre-columbian culture which influenced the area of current México, El Salvador, Guatemala & Honduras. The death was a symbolic moment that had equal significance in the ritual act of taking life or in the remembrance of those who had passed, whether fallen warriors or dead relatives. The arrival of the European conquests introduced another layer of violence: systematic, colonial, and extractive. This violence was no longer contained by ritual frameworks but deployed as an instrument of domination, reshaping indigenous societies and legitimating a legacy of coercion that remained across centuries. This ritualized conception of death was always a presence, not entirely erased, by colonials. In fact, the colonial order, with its hierarchies of class, slavery, and civil wars, shaped enduring social structures and collective mentalities. Later, national identity and new imperials influence further reinforced patterns of dependency and isolation, perpetuating cycles of inequality and internalized violence. The mix of Spanish culture and Roman Catholicism have created a new type of belief which represents the modern way to face death. Today, el dia de los muertos, is a festival which influences for example the whole of Mexico and Guatemala, becoming a national symbol. But how can a culture that once revered death as a sacred symbol of renewal and remembrance, turning it into a national festival of identity, coexist with a contemporary reality in which the value of life seems so diminished, marked by pervasive violence and a normalized proximity to death?

Gangs as Ritual & Cartels as Spectacle

In the last decades, in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, acts of violence have become a mechanism of social control and criminal governance. Cartels and gangs have transformed death into spectacle: executions, public hangings and mutilations are not only to punish but they build a narrative of violence and fear. There are sociological explanations that underlines: weak institutions, economic inequality, mass migration, and transnational criminal economies are some of the causes of the creation of these criminal groups.

Where and how did this system of violence emerge? An analysis reveals that crime in the area is not simply the outcome of poverty or individual deviance, but a complex geoeconomic order sustained by global demand for drugs, weapons, and cheap labor. Since the late 1970s, the region’s trajectory has been shaped by overlapping historical layers: civil wars, Cold War, U.S. presence, and neoliberal reforms that dismantled rural economies. When these conflicts ended in the 1990s, the demobilization of militias, combined with the absence of social reintegration, left behind networks of armed men, weapons, and a culture of violence. Honduras, was involved as a logistical base for the U.S.-backed Contras operations against Nicaragua. The militarization of Honduran territory created corruption, black markets, and an emerging nexus between the state and organized crime. In this context, mass migration to the United States became both a humanitarian escape and a social transformation. Escaping from the region's wars and economic collapse, establishing (marginalized) communities in the U.S.A. There, young Salvadorans and Hondurans faced an urban territory already divided by African-American and Mexican-American gangs. Seeking protection and identity, they formed their own groups like Barrio 18, initially an arm of a Mexican-American gang, and Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13, born among Salvadoran youth who had survived both war and displacement. These groups later absorbed the culture of U.S. prisons, developing strict hierarchies, initiation rituals, and symbolic tattoos. The 1996 U.S. Immigration Reform (IIRIRA) made large-scale deportations, sending thousands of gang members back to fragile societies that lacked state capacity to reintegrate them. Thus, the Maras across San Salvador, Tegucigalpa, and Guatemala City, transformed themselves into transnational criminal organizations that grew in the absence of institutional order.

Mexico followed a distinct but parallel trajectory. Its organized crime system emerged not from civil war but from the interplay between political protection and illicit trade. During the 1970s and 1980s, the Mexican state, under the lead of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, made an agreement with the Guadalajara Cartel led by Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo. This network coordinated the production and transit of cocaine from Colombia, working as an intermediary between LATAM producers and U.S. After the arrest of Félix Gallardo in 1989, its regional lieutenants founded the modern cartels of Sinaloa (led by El Chapo Guzman and Ismael Zambada, recently arrested), Tijuana, and Juárez, later joined by the Gulf Cartel, its military offshoot, Los Zetas; the latest are El Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación or La Nueva Familia Michoacana. These groups combined business organization with militarized violence, operating like corporate entities into the economy, managing logistics, money laundering, and employment networks that provided works to thousands. Over time, Mexico’s cartels expanded beyond narcotics into extortion, human trafficking, illegal mining, and the “governance” of communities where state authority was absent. One case is among the most emblematic cases of narco-religiosity in Mexico is La Familia Michoacana, and its splinter group Los Caballeros Templarios. Emerging in the early 2000s in the state of Michoacán, the group presented itself as a moral crusade against chaos and social disorder, blending Catholic rites and pseudo knights codes.

Meanwhile, Guatemala and Honduras evolved into a critical corridor between Colombia and North America. In postwar Guatemala, dismantled soldiers and members of elite Kaibil units converted their tactical skills into private militias, working for Mexican Cartels or giving birth to groups such as Los Huistas and Los Lorenzanas. In Honduras, the combination of weak institutions and strategic geography created family-based cartels like Los Cachiros and Los Valle Valle, always connected with Mexican cartels. By the 2000s, both countries had become key transit points for the global drug trade, while El Salvador remained dominated by the maras, whose territorial extortion economy relied on control of neighborhoods and migrant remittances. Across the region, the convergence of militarization, migration, and marketization produced a geoeconomic system in which violence became both a means of accumulation and a form of governance a continuation of political order by other means. But what does it mean for national development when entire sectors of employment, finance, and local governance depend on illicit flows, when the economy of death becomes an indispensable part of the economy of life?

Cross Regional Dynamics: Geoeconomics of Crime

The economic analysis of organized crime in Mesoamerica goes beyond illicit trades; it is a structural component of regional capitalism. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the global market for illicit drugs is between 400 and 650 billion USD annually, with the region functioning as a key logistical corridor and money-laundering hub. In Mexico, the economic impact of violence reached approximately 18 percent of GDP in 2024, about 230 billion USD, while across Latin America and the Caribbean, crime-related costs amount to an average of 3.5 percent of regional GDP each year. These costs include homicides, extortion as well as indirect effects such as productivity decline, capital flight, and the cost of public spending from social welfare to security. Several social reports, such as those by the UNODC, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Institute for Economics and Peace, highlight how narco-related violence inflicts deep social scars, erodes community trust, and imposes heavy economic costs on affected regions. Illicit networks also provide employment, credit, and governance in territories not controlled by the state. From coca routes in Honduras and Guatemala to the port economies of Mexico, criminal organizations integrate thousands of informal workers into corporate operations. Money laundering supports real estate, construction, and commerce, injecting liquidity into local economies. During the 2008/09 financial crisis, UNODC’s director Antonio Maria Costa controversially claimed that drug revenues, estimated around 350 billion USD, had been the only liquid capital available to some banks, illustrating how illicit profits can infiltrate and stabilize formal finance during a systemic crisis. Similarly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, cartels diversified into pharmaceuticals, illegal logistics, and informal credit systems, clashing economic contraction where state failed.

These flows come at a human cost. Since the militarization of Mexico’s drug war in 2006, more than 460,000 homicides and over 124,000 disappearances have been recorded. In Honduras and El Salvador, homicide rating was between 50 and 100 per 100,000 inhabitants during the 2010s, reaching some of the highest levels ever measured worldwide. Entire local economies were depending on criminal governance for stability, revealing an interdependence: violence as both destroyer and provider, coercion as both constraint and survival. And it is precisely in El Salvador that this geoeconomic and social paradox has taken on a new form. In recent years, under the leadership of President Nayib Bukele, coercion itself has been redefined, not as the symptom of disorder, but as the foundation of a new order. 

Bukele´s Security approach

In El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele’s mano dura policies, mass incarcerations, militarized urban control, and the construction of the world’s largest prison, represent a new symbolic order where the spectacle of punishment replaces the spectacle of crime. Bukele reframes chaos as order and insecurity as security, performing sovereignty through public displays of control reminiscent of sacrificial theater. The effect is more than visible, he has dismantled the Maras in El Salvador. Living under a State of emergency has given to institutions more power, and automatically to the police forces, giving them the right to arrest anyone who could be suspected of having relations with the gangs. 80.000 have been incarcerated, summing them to 30.000 already in prison, bringing El Salvador to the top incarceration rate of 1.7 / 100.000 inhabitants. Certainly, Bukele’s strategy is not without its drawbacks. The scale of mass incarceration raises inevitable concerns about due process and potential abuse of justice. While the government presents these policies as a national rebirth, critics argue that such coercive measures risk reproducing the same cycles of exclusion they claim to eliminate. Local voices have been particularly straightforward, most notably journalist Carlos Dada Co-Founder and Director, El Faro, a Salvadorian digital newspaper. It remains undeniable that Bukele’s campaign has had a profound impact on the civilian population, reshaping both the perception and the experience of security across the country.

Conclusion

Across centuries, from the ritual altars of Tenochtitlán to the prisons of El Salvador, the Mesoamerican world has repeatedly transformed violence into a language of power. What once served to maintain cosmic balance through sacrificial blood has evolved into a modern type of coercion, expressed through the governance of fear and the spectacle of punishment. The Cartels and Maras, in this sense, did not simply copy pre-Columbian rituals; they reinvented them within a globalized economy of crime, where death operates as communication and authority. Violence, passed from its sacred way to retaining its performative force, became a political currency traded across borders and ideologies. The convergence of history, economy, and faith has made Central America a theater in which domination and devotion coexist. This fusion of ritual and repression reveals not only the persistence of symbolic frameworks, but also their adaptive power within neoliberal modernity, where poverty and inequality have the same need for order that once justified sacrifice. Is this symbolic logic absorbed by the state itself? El Salvador marks a turning point in the regional cycle of violence: the transformation of criminal coercion into institutionalized control. Through mass incarceration, militarized policing, and surveillance, Bukele has modified punishment into performance, a symbol that evokes the past. His redefined sovereignty as the capacity to decide everything. In doing so, El Salvador mirrors the historical continuity of Mesoamerican governance: the use of controlled violence to produce a moral and political order. This new “security state” raises fundamental questions about the nature of order itself. If the state adopts the mechanisms of the cartels, the secrecy, the discipline, the spectacle, does it still represent a difference from criminal governance, or its perfection? When sovereignty depends on permanent exception, on prisons as temples of purification, can stability be distinguished from submission? In the end, Mesoamerica’s long relationship with death and power invites a reflection on modernity times. Every civilization constructs its order through sacrifice, whether ritual, economic, or political. The region’s current situation exposes this truth with clarity: that control and violence are old friends. Bukele’s El Salvador, like the empires before it, brings the paradox of a world where blood, power, and order remain connected.

Ultimately, moving beyond the dichotomy of violence and punishment requires reimagining security through social inclusion, institutional reform, it seems distant, but the exploration of legalization as a path toward breaking the perpetual cycle of fear could be a solution still?