Anthropos 57 (1): 5–14 | issn0587-5161 | e-issn 2630-4082
Introduction
Marina Gržinić
Research Centre of Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Slovenia
marina.grzinic@zrc-sazu.si
(5) sY-sa © 2025 Marina Gržinić
The dossier presented here, compiled by Antonio Fuentes Díaz, is the re-
sult of an invitation I extended during my work on the topic of conflicts
in the years 2023 to 2024. I had originally asked Fuentes Díaz for a con-
tribution, but what I received far exceeded that expectation – a power-
ful, conceptually dense, and deeply analytical wholesale of six contribu-
tions from Latin American academics, theoreticians, etc., exploring the
violent restructuring of key socio-political concepts. These contributions
traverse the complex terrain of state power, capitalism, and necropolitics
while examining struggles for Indigenous peoples’ rights, the systemic
logic of extractivism, and the entangled dynamics of feminicide, crimi-
nal economies, and drug trafficking.
It is also important for us to emphasize the double and divergentmean-
ings of femicide and feminicide used in the contributions. In Europe,
femicide has often been treated primarily as an extreme form of gender-
based violence, typically in the context of intimate partner violence. It is
seen as an individual crime, often based on personal motives such as jeal-
ousy or control. In contrast, the Latin American concept of feminicide
emphasizes that these murders are not just isolated or private acts, but
that they are part of a broader system of structural and systemic gender-
based violence. Feminicide points to the social conditions that allow such
violence to go unpunished, such as misogyny, machismo, poverty, orga-
nized crime, and patriarchal norms that are entrenched in both the pub-
lic and private spheres. Feminicide that has come into the theoretical,
critical, and activist political vocabularies developed in Latin America,
particularly in México in the 1990s, broadens and deepens the meaning
of femicide and introduces critical political and structural dimensions
that have a significant impact on how the issue is understood globally,
including in Europe. For example, indigenous women, migrant women,
and women living in impoverished areas are at higher risk and are of-
ten systematically neglected. It demands accountability from institutions
https://doi.org/10.26493/2630-4082.57.5-14
Marina Gržinić
and makes the death of women a human rights issue and not just a crim-
inal matter. Particularly noteworthy is the dossier’s ability to show how
these phenomena, often dismissed as pathologies of the Global South or
anomalies far fromEurope, actually prove to be structurally embedded in
global formations of sovereignty, governance, and economic extraction.
These processes do not remain peripheral but increasingly inform and
reflect internal developments within Western nations, particularly how
formal state structures and criminal systems interlock and reinforce each
other to ensure the continuity of extractivist profit and systemic control.
I owe special thanks to my colleague Dr. Jovita Pristovšek, who was
instrumental in formatting and preparing the texts according to An-
thropos’ publication requirements. I would also like to thank Dr. Tomaž
Grušovnik and Alen Ježovnik for their unconditional support in publish-
ing the proposed set of texts and for their confidence in the project, which
paved the way for its acceptance. To all those involved in the publication
of Anthropos, from English proofreading to the designer, I must express
my heartfelt thanks.
Finally, this project received the full support ofDr.NinaCvar, the newly
appointed editor of Anthropos, whose vision coincided with the radical
and theoretical core of the dossier.
This collection provides a foundational platform for what I call ‘semi-
nal texts of rigour’ – contributions that span disciplines such as philoso-
phy, social theory, political aesthetics, sociology, and the humanitiesmore
broadly. It creates a critical space for theoretical and political engagement
in Slovenia, where such contributions often struggle to find publication.
The Structure of the Edited Thematic Issue
This edited thematic issue of Anthropos opens with Antonio Fuentes
Díaz and Panagiotis Doulos’ text, ‘Economy of Death: The Grey Zone,
CannibalWarMachine and Capitalist Accumulation in Latin America,’ a
fundamental analysis of México’s socio-political landscape. Rather than
simply describing state violence or coercion, the authors examine the in-
tricate relationships between the global necrocapitalist system and the
hybrid governance of the state. They argue that since the 1980s, Latin
America has served as a testing ground for neoliberal deregulation fa-
cilitated by agreements such as gatt andnafta.
This context allowed for the convergence of state and criminal enter-
prises, leading to what the authors call ‘hybrid governance’ – a shared
sovereignty in which the state relinquishes its monopoly on legitimate
6
Introduction
coercion in favour of complicity with criminal organizations. The au-
thors highlight the role of ‘criminal capital’ in shaping today’s political
economies. This capital thrives on mechanisms of extortion and rent
extraction, in which rent, whether through normalized tax systems or
criminalized extraction, becomes a central axis of value production. In
this framework, capital accumulation depends on the exploitation of re-
sources and populations, creating an economy based on violence and
systemic oppression. The authors suggest that this ‘criminal accumula-
tion’ works by dissolving the boundaries between legal and illegal activi-
ties, creating ambiguous zones where lawlessness and profitability coex-
ist. These grey zones foster ‘shared sovereignties’ in which state authority
is intertwined with criminal organizations, enabling the extraction of re-
sources, income, and even human lives through systematic violence. At
the centre of this framework is the concept of the ‘cannibal war machine,’
a mechanism that uses violence not only as a tool of control, but as a
method to generate profit and maintain power structures. This process
fits seamlessly into the logic of neoliberal capitalism, in which the pur-
suit of value overrides ethical and legal restrictions. In its extreme form,
‘criminal capital’ embodies the nihilistic core of capitalist logic. It reduces
human and material resources to commodities that are exploited in the
relentless pursuit of profit.
By analysing these dynamics in theMexican context, the article demon-
strates that criminal machinations are not an aberration but a structural
feature of global neoliberalism. It emphasizes the need to rethink the
intersections of legality, sovereignty, and violence to understand con-
temporary systems of power and exploitation. This system reflects the
crude logic of value – a stark reminder of how deeply global capital-
ism is interwoven with mechanisms of death and destruction. This text
explores the interplay between extortion, criminal leadership, and con-
temporary capitalism inMéxico, arguing that criminal activity is integral
to contemporary forms of capital accumulation. In the Latin American
context, this manifests itself in the ‘economy of death,’ in which value is
extracted through the commodification of life and the perpetuation of
conflict, embodied by the cannibalistic war machine of drug cartels and
criminal groups.
Lia de Mattos Rocha, Monique Batista Carvalho, and Jonathan da
Motta, in ‘Militias, Factions, and Precariousness: Notes on Living Con-
ditions in the City of Rio de Janeiro Outskirts’ examine the complex
dynamics of territorial control by armed groups in Rio de Janeiro, partic-
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Marina Gržinić
ularly militias and criminal groups, focusing on the outskirts of the city,
of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The text places criminal capital in stark contrast
to the idealized notions of ‘social capital’ propagated in the 1990s, reveal-
ing the brutal reality that capital serves primarily to enrich those who
control production and privatized public goods. The study identifies key
variables such as the type of group that controls a particular territory, the
degree of territorial dominance, the forms of presence of these groups,
and their relations with the local population. Using this framework, the
study shows the complicatedways in which armed groups shape daily life
and influence patterns of sociability, mobility, and access to resources.
The authors argue that these dynamics are not isolated phenomena, but
structural features of urban life in Rio’s periphery. The control exercised
by militias and groups leads to chronic insecurity characterized by vio-
lence, fear, and lack of institutional support. This precarity perpetuates
cycles of inequality and exclusion and further strengthens the power of
armed groups in these areas.
The study examines four key dimensions: the type of armed group op-
erating in each area, the extent and nature of territorial dominance, the
nature of their spatial and institutional presence, and their mode of col-
laboration with the local population. The results show that these armed
groups are not only violent actors, but also act as quasi-governmental en-
tities that shape local sociability, regulate mobility, and mediate access to
essential services in the absence of the state, or with its complicity. This
de facto governance leads to a state of chronic insecurity in which resi-
dents live in a constant ‘state of siege’ characterized by surveillance, fear,
and fluctuating regimes of order and coercion. By foregrounding the lived
experiences of communities under armed control, the study contributes
to critical debates about informal governance, urban violence and the in-
terplay of legality and illegality in shaping life on themargins of the city. It
calls for an urgent rethinking of public policy that aligns with the realities
of those for whom the line between state and non-state power is increas-
ingly blurred. Through this analytical lens, the paper elaborates on how
these armed actors not only occupy space but actively shape the urban
landscape by structuring everyday life, regulating freedom of movement,
shaping the informal economy, and mediating access to basic resources
such as water, electricity, housing, and even justice. Such contradictory
roles blur the boundaries between crime, governance, and survival and
embed the power of armed actors in the social and affective fabric of
community life. The authors, therefore, argue that the urban peripheries
8
Introduction
should not only be seen as places where the state is absent, but as spaces
with multiple sovereignties where legality, illegality, and informality are
constantly negotiated. The consequences of this fragmented sovereignty
are profound: cycles of inequality are deepened, democratic accountabil-
ity is eroded, and the urban poor are trapped in a web of conditional al-
legiances, enforced dependencies, and systemic neglect. Ultimately, this
article sheds crucial light on the fact that armed territorial control is not a
marginal issue, but a defining feature of contemporary urbanity in Rio de
Janeiro. The conditions described – violence, fragmented authority, and
the institutionalization of insecurity – resonate far beyond Brazil, offer-
ing a critical perspective on urban governance and social life in an age of
neoliberal dispossession and securitized development.
Natalia De Marinis takes us ‘back’ to México in her contribution, ‘Cre-
ating a Testimony of the Unspeakable: Testimonial Injustice, Affects and
Political Mobilization of IndigenousWomen in México.’ This article crit-
ically examines how testimonial practices are shaped by intersecting
structures of ethnicity, gender, and class that determine whose voices
are heard, believed, and recognized. Drawing on extensive ethnographic
fieldwork in the Zongolica region of the Gulf ofMéxico, the study focuses
on the experiences of Indigenous women, whose accounts of violence are
often dismissed, their credibility questioned, and their suffering made
invisible. From the perspective of the injustice of testimony, the arti-
cle examines the systematic silencing of these women and the epistemic
violence that marginalizes their experiences from public view. At the
same time, the article highlights the powerful strategies that Indigenous
women and their communities have developed to reclaim their voice and
agency. By developing alternative forms of witnessing rooted in affect,
memory, and collective experience, they are not only resisting erasure
but also creating pathways to truth-telling, solidarity, and justice.
Amid escalating violence in México since the beginning of the war on
drug trafficking in 2007, victim testimonies have emerged as important
tools to confront societal indifference, challenge state narratives, and pro-
mote commemoration and reparation practices. While such testimonies
play a crucial role in resisting impunity and reclaiming agency, the pro-
cess of constructing and legitimizing these narratives is anything but neu-
tral. These counter-narratives challenge the hegemonic framework of vic-
timhood and open up new possibilities for political mobilization in the
face of militarization, criminality, and state neglect.
De Marinis conceptualizes the injustice of testimony not simply as the
9
Marina Gržinić
denial of a speaker’s credibility, but as a structural and affective condi-
tion that delegitimizes the ability of Indigenous women to speak about
violence, dispossession, and trauma in a way that is recognized by hege-
monic systems of knowledge and justice. These forms of silence are of-
ten naturalized by racialized, gendered, and colonial assumptions that
portray Indigenous women as either passive victims or bearers of ‘non-
modern’ knowledge that is unsuitable for political rationality or legal
recognition. However, DeMarinis does not view this conditionmerely as
a site of loss, but explores how Indigenous womenmobilize affects, mem-
ories, and embodied forms of storytelling to articulate political demands
and contest their exclusion. These alternative forms of testimony become
tools of action and resistance that forge communal solidarities and re-
configure the terrain of political struggle. Drawing on ethnographic field-
work and situated feminist epistemologies, De Marinis shows how testi-
monies – exchanged in community gatherings, rituals, or grassroots legal
forums – function as sites of affective reparation and collective healing
while destabilizing normative notions of truth, justice, and legitimacy.
This process is not without tensions, as it must overcome the extractive
gaze of institutions and the risk of re-traumatization. Nonetheless, these
testimonies offer a form of ‘speaking with’ rather than just speaking for,
emphasizing relationality and the creation of shared political horizons.
De Marinis’s essay represents a decolonial feminist critique that empha-
sizes the power of Indigenous women to reclaim the narrative space from
which they were historically excluded. Their testimonies, situated at the
intersection of pain and political action, challenge epistemic hierarchies
and demand the right to be heard on their own terms, not just as objects
of pity, but as active political subjects capable of changing the social and
affective conditions of justice.
Brenda Focas and Alejandra Luneke, in their study, ‘Crime, Women
and Information and Communications Technologies (icts): Everyday
Management of Insecurity in Santiago and Buenos Aires,’ explore fur-
ther the gendered dynamics of urban insecurity in Santiago, Chile, and
Buenos Aires, Argentina, focusing on how young women navigate and
manage everyday experiences of violence and fear through digital and
embodied strategies. We shift the focus fromMéxico to the vast territory
of Latin America. Beyond macro-level analyses of organized crime, the
study foregrounds the micropolitics of insecurity, particularly street ha-
rassment and sexual violence, and its impact on women’s mobility, access
to public space, and social participation. The study also highlights the
10
Introduction
role of information and communications technologies (ict) as risk man-
agement tools and platforms for collective solidarity. From neighbour-
hood WhatsApp groups to social media alerts, these technologies me-
diate women’s responses to urban violence and enable information shar-
ing, emotional support, and grassrootsmonitoring. However, the authors
warn that these digital practices can also reinforce fears and exclusionary
dynamics, particularly in contexts where state protection is perceived as
absent or unreliable. By situating these everyday practices within broader
structures of territorial control, urbanmarginalization, and informal gov-
ernance, the study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the
interactions between violence, gender, and technology in contemporary
urban life. It calls for a rethinking of urban policy that focuses on the lived
experiences of women and addresses the causes of fear and exclusion in
the marginalized areas of Latin American cities.
The constant dissemination of warnings and news about crime and vi-
olence can reinforce a ‘digital atmosphere of fear’ that heightens percep-
tions of danger and induces overprotective behaviour, especially among
women who already bear the burden of dealing with gender-based vi-
olence in public and private spaces. Furthermore, these platforms often
mirror and reproduce social and spatial inequalities. Access to icts, the
power to define what constitutes a ‘threat’ and the power to mobilize re-
sponses are unequally distributed. The authors note that racist and class-
based assumptions often determine how certain bodies or behaviours are
categorized as suspicious, which can lead to dynamics of exclusion, secu-
ritization, and moral panic. The article urges readers to reconsider the
portrayal of icts as neutral or inherently democratizing tools. Instead,
Focas and Luneke argue for a critical feminist approach that considers
the affective, political and social dimensions of digital security practices.
They argue that women’s engagement with these technologies is deeply
embedded in broader structures of insecurity, inequality and institutional
absence – and that these digital strategies represent both a coping mech-
anism and a critique of state failures to protect vulnerable populations.
Carolina Galindo reflects on the influence of television and the mode
of telenovelas in ‘TheNarconovela and Crime in Colombia: 40 Years after
La Mala Hierba.’ This article examines the emergence of the narconovela
genre in Colombia, taking as its starting point the early and controversial
television soap opera La mala hierba (The Evil Weed), which aired in the
early 1980s. Through a detailed analysis of the public reception of the se-
ries and themedia discourse of the time, the study traces the fundamental
11
Marina Gržinić
role of La mala hierba in shaping the narrative and aesthetic framework
that would later define the narconovela genre. By placing the soap opera
in its historical and socio-political context, the article examines how early
depictions of drug trafficking began to blur the boundaries between fic-
tion and reality, spectacle and critique. Galindo examines the evolution of
the genre and questions its politics of representation, aesthetic changes,
and its role in shaping national ideas of crime, power, and identity.
The essay begins by establishing La mala hierba as a foundational text
in the genealogy of Colombian narconarratives, marking a pivotal mo-
ment in which drug trafficking emerged not only as a social and political
reality but also as a powerful cultural trope. Galindo traces how the early
narconovelas captured the ambiguity of the drug trade, its allure and its
violence, its promises of social mobility, and its disruption of traditional
class and power structures. These early stories often reflected the blurred
morals of a society struggling with the normalization of corruption, im-
punity, and extralegal authority.
Galindo examines how such cultural products contributed to the sym-
bolic legitimization of criminality and offered complex representations
that both reflected and shaped public understandings of power, violence,
and aspiration in Colombian society. Furthermore, the article draws con-
nections between La mala hierba and contemporary versions of the nar-
conovela, considering its role in the broader Latin Americanmedia land-
scape and its impact on the normalization and commercialization of nar-
coculture. In doing so, the study contributes to ongoing debates about
the political and ethical implications of crime-based narratives in popular
media and how these narratives shape collective memory, national iden-
tity, and social conceptions of crime.Galindo critically assesses themassi-
fication and commercialization of the narconovela on television, stream-
ing platforms, and in popular fiction. The contemporary versions – highly
stylized, dramatized, and often sensationalized – have transformed the
genre into a transnational media phenomenon. Galindo points out, how-
ever, that these newer narratives often trade complexity for spectacle and
reduce systemic violence to personalized dramas of revenge, desire, and
betrayal.
Galindo engages with key theoretical debates about aestheticization
and complicity, questioning whether the narconovela continues to offer
critical insights or whether it has been complicit in glorifying violence
and reinforcing harmful stereotypes. She notes that while some contem-
porary works attempt to question the complicity of the state, paramili-
12
Introduction
tarism, or us imperialism, many others contribute to a moralizing nar-
rative that individualizes crime and presents criminality as a pathology
rather than a symptom. Importantly, Galindo also emphasizes the gen-
dered dimension of the narconovela. Over time, the figure of the narco-
woman has evolved from a peripheral role to a central figure. However,
even in an empowered position, these representations often reproduce
patriarchal logics, emphasizing beauty, seduction, and tragic downfall,
without questioning the deeper gendered structures of narco-capitalism.
Galindo concludes her analysis by noting that the narconovela remains
an important cultural archive for understanding how Colombians, and
increasingly global audiences, confront, process, and narrate the entan-
glements of criminality, state power, and neoliberal precarity. Forty years
after Lamala hierba, the genre is not only a reflection of evolving national
anxieties but also a contested battleground for the politics of memory,
representation, and resistance.
The final contribution by Melisa Cabrapan Duarte, ‘The Mapuche
People in Vaca Muerta, Argentina: Between Criminalization and Anti-
Extractivist Resistance Aesthetics,’ examines the socio-environmental
conflict surrounding Vaca Muerta, a major hydrocarbon extraction site
in northern Patagonia, Argentina, and its profound impact on Indige-
nous Mapuche communities in the region. As fracking activities expand
under the national and international energy agenda, the Mapuche, par-
ticularly those organized in the Regional Coalition Xawvn Ko of the Ma-
puche Confederation of Neuquén, have become central actors of resis-
tance against the encroachment of extractivists on their ancestral lands.
The study focuses on the criminalization and repression to which the
Mapuche communities are exposed due to their resistance to fracking. It
shows how state and corporate actors mobilize legal and media frame-
works to delegitimize Indigenous resistance. At the same time, the ar-
ticle explores the emerging political aesthetics of the struggle against
fracking and shows how these communities mobilize cultural expres-
sions, collective memory, and territorial practices, particularly through
intercommunal alliances, to reclaim agency and articulate alternative
futures.
By situating Mapuche resistance within broader debates about envi-
ronmental justice, Indigenous sovereignty, and state violence, the article
helps to elucidate how grassroots movements not only challenge extrac-
tivism but also create new spaces of visibility and political action. In do-
ing so, it underscores the urgent need to recognize Indigenous struggles
13
Marina Gržinić
as both epistemic and territorial, and as central to the vision of a sustain-
able and decolonial future in Latin America.
I am impressed by this analytical and profound investigation, which al-
lows us to reflect at length on the hyper-neoliberal system of contempo-
rary Slovenia, currently led by a turbo-neoliberal vision of the Slovenian
liberal party ‘The Freedom Movement,’ which has replaced a strongly
right-wing despotic predecessor, the Slovenian Democratic Party. This
ousted right-wing party currently sits in opposition in parliament and
has an army of supporters representing 25 percent of all eligible voters
in Slovenia waiting for the new parliamentary elections. And finally, the
despotic figure of the former right, now given even more impetus by
Trump and the right-wing ideological ballast of the right-wing, corrupt
eugovernment (just think of the hidden and criminal vaccine deals), will
open up a space in which what we present here as a theoretical discourse
from Latin America will become more and more of a visible reality in
Europe.
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