Last year, I assembled a database of narco-messages. Towards the end of this process, while I was poring over articles from a Guadalajara-based newspaper, I decided to keep track of the narco-fied terms that I came across. These articles were from the early years of the war on narco-trafficking (which started in December 2006), when it seemed like everything was being narco-fied.

Most of these narco-fications didn’t recur with any regularity; they were tested out, but didn’t become regular parlance. I kept track of the terms more for the range of terms than for their repetition. Narcomensaje or narco-message did, however, become a standard term, along with the closely related narcomanta (narco-blanket or narco-banner). There are a lot of forms that a message can take, but a narco-message has a characteristic form: mainly black text with some red letters or words for accent; orthographic errors and/or colloquial expressions; text printed on a portable, removable surface. This form helped settle the name, but the name also helped fix the form.

I kept this list out of sense of the absurdity of this trend of narco-fying the world, but this process also does work in the world. It changes perceptions and shapes understanding. Adding narco- to the front of words like this creates the idea of a totally separate narco-world; an underworld in which everything in the non-criminal world has its glamorous, dangerous, narco double. It inflates the threat of the “narco,” while at the same time setting it elsewhere.

In part, this list is absurd to me because there is no separate world; crime and all things narco are very much a part of this world. Crime is not the product of some different or distant underworld, it is the result of processes and practices taking place here and now, in the society that is our society, in the world that is our world.

• Narco-agent
• Narco-assassination
• Narco-associate
• Narco-band
• Narco-bandit
• Narco-blockade
• Narco-bride
• Narco-broker
• Narco-campaign
• Narco-canvas
• Narco-cell
• Narco-charge (as in toll or fee)
• Narco-commando
• Narco-connection
• Narco-convoy
• Narco-covering
• Narco-crime
• Narco-dialogue
• Narco-dispatch
• Narco-dispute
• Narco-dollar
• Narco-emissary
• Narco-execution
• Narco-government
• Narco-grave
• Narco-gunman
• Narco-house
• Narco-judge
• Narco-junior
• Narco-laboratory
• Narco-message (another way of saying this; one way is not enough)
• Narco-minstrel
• Narco-official
• Narco-pact
• Narco-paramilitary
• Narco-party
• Narco-pilgrimmage
• Narco-police
• Narco-politics
• Narco-postmodernity (because one prefix is never enough)
• Narco-ranch
• Narco-refuge
• Narco-relative (as in familial relations)
• Narco-shootout
• Narco-shrapnel
• Narco-star (like the star shape, yep)
• Narco-summit
• Narco-tailoring
• Narco-text
• Narco-video
• Narco-war
• Narco-warning
• Narco-zone