Del Estado soberano al Leviatán zombi. Una reflexión hobbesiana sobre el narcotráfico en América Latina

Abstract

This article reinterprets Latin American drug trafficking through the lens of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (1651), complemented by Friedrich Schiller's notion of aesthetic education. Building on Hobbes's dictum protego ergo obligo, it argues that when state institutions are infiltrated by criminal networks, the "state of nature" resurfaces inside the polity: the state becomes a zombie Leviathan—institutionally intact yet powerless and illegitimate. The argument is developed through a comparative analysis of three hotspots selected for their high homicide rates and distinct patterns of state capture. In each setting, drug cartels exploit Hobbes's triad of passions—competition, diffidence, and glory—to create parallel orders that deliver "selective security". These dynamics nurture an aesthetic of terror and ostentatious illicit wealth that endows violence with cultural legitimacy. Purely coercive state responses prove short-lived; lasting pacification demands a dual strategy: re-establishing the state's monopoly on coercion while reshaping collective emotions and imagination. Drawing on Schiller, the article outlines "counter-imagination" policies—community arts programs, neighborhood-based creative economies, and pedagogies of alterity—that can redirect fear, desire and hope away from criminal glamour and back toward civic life. The study thus offers a novel analytical framework linking sovereignty, passions, and aesthetics, bridging empirical work on criminal governance with political-philosophical debates on legitimacy, and highlighting the sensory dimension that underpins illicit authority.