Social representations of drug-trafficking and narcoculture among university students in Nayarit

Abstract

Since at least 2006, Mexico has been immersed in a tornado of violence as a result of the frontal combat against criminal organizations launched and orchestrated by former President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012). This context of confrontation has led to the emergence of cultural forms and social representations that result from the security crisis that has ravaged the country, especially in states like Nayarit. At the local level, it was against this backdrop that drug-trafficking and narcoculture gained visibility, triggering a series of social problems that have severely disrupted the lives of residents of the capital city of Tepic (tepicenses). The objective of this text is to identify the content of the social representations that a group of young people from Tepic and its metropolitan area, Xalisco, has built around these two objects of representation: drug-trafficking and drug culture in Nayarit. Results show that this local knowledge, re-elaborated as a consequence of the security crisis that affected Nayarit between 2010 and 2012, is clearly evidenced in the discourses of the young people studied, which reveal a marked polarization in relation to these two problems. Our interpretation is that the unprecedented wave of violence in the state marked a breaking point in collective thought regarding drug-trafficking and drug culture, such that the construction of their representations has led to the development of divergent positions that range in valence from positive to negative. Finally, our approach allowed us to identify the relation that exists between these two social objects and to characterize two little-explored problems in Nayarit.