Between 2010 and 2011, Los Zetas kidnapped dozens of migrants coming from Central America. Their campaign of terror earned them the reputation of Mexico’s most deadly criminal organisation. In the eastern state of Tamaulipas, in the municipality of San Fernando, authorities found mass graves. According to a 2016 report from the Open Society Justice Initiative, there is compelling evidence that the killings, enforced disappearances and torture committed by members of the Zetas cartel meet the legal definition of crimes against humanity. This gang transformed the landscape of the Mexican drug wars. Beyond drug trafficking, Los Zetas attacked innocent civilians in several towns, operated heavy weapons against the Mexican authorities, and committed massive, forced disappearances.
Most of us are taught to see criminals, like the Zetas, as the polar opposite of the police or the army. Maybe even that the fight between the legal authorities and the illegal cartels is one of simple good versus evil. But some social scientists take a different approach. Los Zetas is interesting for many reasons, including the fact that they were founded by a splinter group from the Mexican Army’s special counterinsurgency unit. In 1997, more than 30 soldiers of the Special Forces Airmobile Group (GAFES in Spanish) defected to work for the leader of the Gulf Cartel, a Mexican drug organisation based in northeastern Mexico. Trained by the government in psychological terror tactics, jungle warfare and the manipulation of heavy weaponry, these soldiers-turned-drug-cartel members named their gang after the Z codes of the Mexican Army radio system.
The movement of these highly trained soldiers into the illegal narcotics trade highlights how the tactics, training and everyday lives of soldiers, police officers, criminals, guerrilla fighters, terrorists and even génocidaires often share a great deal of common ground. They are all specialists in violence, they all have the professional training to kill, and they use these skills to make a living.
Whether they are on the payroll of a government, a guerrilla organisation, a mafia or the police force, all these people, primarily men, are what the sociologist Charles Tilly called ‘violence specialists’. They perform routine and specialised activities in every society on Earth; in fact, they make a living from it. Still, it can be challenging to recognise organised violence as a kind of work, much less one fundamentally shared by both police and criminals.
Every society depends on violence workers, but what is it that makes people go into it as a type of work? Why would they risk their lives and harm others? As I found when I interviewed a group of young, imprisoned men in Mexico who were part of criminal organisations and sentenced for homicide, entering this risky occupation is mostly a voluntary way to gain money and prestige. All of them were imprisoned in a juvenile detention centre in the State of Mexico called La Quinta del Bosque, close to Toluca, the state capital. This centre, which used to be an old farmer’s house, hosts young people, mostly male, who committed crimes when they were between 14 and 17 years old. I visited La Quinta in 2023, after the government lifted COVID-19 restrictions.
In these 18 interviews with those young men, I heard them speak, time and again, about work. Most of them were using _chambear_ (Spanish-language vernacular for the verb ‘to work’) to talk about gang violence and killings. Killing or protecting the illicit drugs was everyday work.
Many scholars, governments and probably most people explain violence as a result of human nature. In this view, aggression is ingrained in our brains, and some inevitably fall into the temptation of violence; therefore, strict control from the government is essential. Many people also hold to an orthodoxy maintaining that people who resort to criminal violence have experienced some traumatic event, which made them ‘deviant’, disinhibiting the worst instincts.
Of course, at the same time, conventional wisdom holds that people join the police or the army because they have an inherent desire to protect others, and their use of violence is not deviant but an altruistic sacrifice. This unconsidered view survives the fact that it is also well known that police officers and soldiers are capable of violence against innocent people too. There are widely documented occasions of soldiers who tortured, ‘disappeared’ or killed innocent citizens in South America in the 1970s by command of the dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia. Police violence in the United States is also widely publicised and known about, even in other countries.
The theories of the origins of violence in illicit and licit cases are both facile and misleading. They derive from efforts by governments to find a ‘cure’ for those attracted to crime, while at the same time justifying violence from their state employees. Fortunately, these ideas have been challenged. In 1989, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) passed a resolution titled ‘The Seville Statement on Violence’, asserting that societies can wipe out violence because it is a cultural and ideological artefact, erasable from the minds and desires of humans. That means the mind and the desire for violence are not born in a vacuum. Instead, most young boys’ minds are influenced by their parents and the society in which they grow up. Therefore, the idea goes, if we change how we think about violence, we can eradicate it from our societies.
Indeed, we can condemn the violence of those who use it illegally. But to understand violence better, we must look into the way societies legitimise it as an occupation for those who wage it legally. It is not so simple as saying that gang members or terrorists are deviants, and that soldiers and police officers are altruists. Consider, for example, how governments and gang leaders use some of the same techniques to recruit people to execute violence. This situation is not even hard to see.
Both clandestine organisations and government agencies tell young boys that their peers and families will respect them, that they will earn a good salary, and that they will contribute to a larger cause. As some schoolboys told me in a Mexican town that had the presence of criminal organisations, they found weapons alluring and military men cool. They saw in these two types of organised armed men the same occupation, just two different employers. While some boys considered drug cartels as enemies of the community, others had their doubts. When they realised that, in cartels, they could earn high salaries as hitmen, some boys began to consider becoming hitmen. Conversely, some of the young men I interviewed who were imprisoned for homicide shared their ambition to join the army or the police after their release.
Members of the Jalisco Cartel in territory under their control near the city of Uruapan, Mexico. Photo by Mads Nissen/Panos Pictures
Regardless of whether they are American, Italian, Brazilian or Mexican, young gang members share a similar desire for a job that appears to be ‘cool’. For many young men, wielding a gun conveys prestige within the community or instils fear in others. Yet, this is an occupation where the risk of dying is high. Sociologists call this type of profession _edgework_ – that is, work that involves significant risk but also a thrilling experience for those involved.
As with any other profession, certain psychological profiles can lead individuals to different kinds of jobs, and some men’s life circumstances may make them choose this type of occupation. We know that workers who specialise in violence gradually develop a psychological profile marked by desensitisation and a drive for adrenaline-fuelled risk. There are evident traces of this profile in the archetypal soldier: a bold warrior ready to confront death with physical prowess. The job demands of violence workers reinforce this profile, encouraging this specific form of masculinity.
Beyond the thrill of killing, some of these boys who will become soldiers, police officers, gangsters or revolutionaries need to feed themselves and their families, and they will work for whoever pays. One of the boys I spoke with, who was 16, told me that he regularly sent part of his salary to pay for his mother’s medical expenses and his baby’s food. Another boy, now around 18 years old, told me he could help his parents build a house that they would otherwise never have access to in their whole lifetimes with the jobs they did.
Not only are violence specialists workers, but they have also won some of the first state support for workers
There are some people in our society who argue for the abolition of the army or the police force, but such positions are very fringe. Perceived threats from _other violent_ members of society keep most people alert to the risks of abolitionism. For example, a secondary school student told me he’d witnessed a gang interrupting a wedding party he attended in a rural town in southern Mexico. With powerful weapons in their hands, the gang members threatened all the wedding guests and stole as much money and jewellery as they could. Another student told me that his father had seen gang members fighting with the army as he was travelling towards a clinic. I found no one in these small Mexican communities who would support the abolition of the armed forces or the police.
Most countries don’t regard legal violence specialists, police officers or military officers as standard workers with the same employment rights as other citizens. For example, it’s currently legal for police officers to go on strike only in Sweden, Belgium, Croatia and Slovenia, and for military personnel only in Sweden, in each case subject to certain preconditions and restrictions. Although soldiers can join associations that offer advocacy and welfare support in countries such as the US, the UK and Australia, only a small number of European countries grant them trade union rights such as collective bargaining. Nonetheless, military pensions and veteran support played a foundational role in the development of modern welfare systems, for example, in the US after the Civil War, and in Europe, the UK and Australia after the First and Second world wars. So not only are violence specialists workers, but they have also won some of the first state support for workers.
Yet, for governments, violence specialists, police, military and customs, etc, are essentially just servants of the public who maintain order or disrupt disorder. Governments rely on their ability to protect values, goods and institutions. Gangs, in turn, use violence specialists to defend goods from police. Historically, guerrilla fighters worldwide have aimed to overthrow governments. Their labour is fundamental to the current state of affairs. Leaving them unchecked is a guarantee of chaos.
So, violence specialists receive wages for their labour and are subordinate to others, working in a corporate hierarchy. Violence specialists are also manual skilled labourers: ie, they have to learn this physical craft. Statistics bureaus will never count clandestine violence specialists on an employment survey or a census. Governments, of course, keep statistics on licit violence workers. For statistical purposes, the International Labour Organization’s International Standard Classification of Occupations has recognised those employed in legally violent occupations as ‘protective service workers’ and ‘armed forces occupations’. These are police officers, soldiers, sailors, bar bouncers and guards. Some of these violence workers can become highly paid, but most do not, which is why it remains a manual form of labour, and why these specialists are a constitutive part of the working class.
Private ‘licit’ violence work, once reserved for bar bouncers or bodyguards, is now a global business
We also know from social scientists that many child soldiers in Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Peru, among other countries, joined voluntarily because they were looking for work. These researchers found the same as I did with Mexican drug cartels’ hitmen: for most, killing was a job choice, not a forced burden.
Some kinds of violence specialists, like gangsters, hitmen or security agents, speak like contractors offering their services, particularly if they work for private military companies or are clandestine hitmen. Child soldiers often describe seeking the prestige associated with guerrilla groups. Soldiers, meanwhile, are typically drawn by benefits such as free schooling, housing and retirement plans. Like other jobs, these roles offer prestige, income and a sense of purpose in exchange for a service. Although anyone can potentially kill, training helps a lot. As with the case of the Zetas, trained military or police have acquired skills in killing that are transferable.
The rise of companies such as the infamous Blackwater, hired by the US to operate in Iraq, or the Wagner Group used by the Russian government in Crimea, as well as many other private military companies, shows that private ‘licit’ violence work, once reserved for bar bouncers or bodyguards, is now a global business. With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US Department of Defense resorted to hiring these companies, comprised mostly of ex-military members, thus avoiding accountability for its own troops.
Usually, prior experience in police or military agencies is common among those in private security businesses. For example, in Iraq in 2008, the US defence department employed in excess of 155,000 contractors, more than the actual troops deployed. And among those deployed, most joined up for the pay; when their contracts with the federal government ended, many were hired by local police forces.
When violence specialists can’t find a new vocation in times of peace, then other governments will call for their skills in war-torn places. That’s the case of the notorious Wagner Group, the private military company employed by Russia to support friendly regimes in conflicts in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, and Mali. This company also served as a crucial component of the Russian operations in their war in Ukraine.
For most of history, the profession of organised violence was the exclusive preserve of ruling elites. The Praetorian Guards in ancient Rome used their power to choose emperors; the Aztec elite known as the Pipiltin governed as warriors or priests; Japan’s samurai unified a nation under a single shogun. Violence and power were the same thing, held by the same people.
That began to change in the early 19th century with Napoleon. Rulers had long worried about the loyalty of hired soldiers – Niccolò Machiavelli had warned that the _condottiere_ who fights only for wages will not die for you and will vanish the moment the fighting gets serious. To build an army that would not desert, the French Empire offered recruits something new: not just wages, but careers, purpose and the idea that they were defending the people of France rather than a king’s ambition. Governments around the world followed. What eventually emerged was the notion that a modern state holds a legitimate monopoly on violence on behalf of its citizens, a foundational idea of today’s modern state.
A hitman would earn the same per kill as a police officer might earn in a month
But that legitimacy has always been fragile. States fall when they can’t pay their fighters. The Russian, French and Chinese revolutions each broke out in part because governments could no longer afford their armies. In Mexico, the dictator Porfirio Díaz – himself a retired general – neglected his military so gravely that his regime was toppled by men like Pancho Villa and other revolutionaries, many of them former bandits who out-recruited him.
Today, across Latin America and the Caribbean, drug cartels are winning the same competition. They offer wages that national armies and police forces cannot match. As one of the imprisoned hitmen told me, he would earn 10,000 pesos (just under US$600) per ‘job’ – killing someone – which was roughly what a police officer in Mexico might earn in a month, and way more than the working-class income in the small rural town where he used to live before he went to prison. Only by migrating to the US and sending money back could he earn as much as a hitman at home.
The young men I interviewed were part of this labour market, which operates on a scale that’s hard to fathom. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, more than 3 million people were murdered in Latin America and the Caribbean between 1990 and 2021, most of them young men. Even if only a fraction were hitmen, the region has lost a generation of people who might have lived differently. Among them were former classmates I’d had when I lived in a small town in rural southern Mexico. While the luck of my parents’ middle-class wealth allowed me to study in Mexico City, I heard news over the years that some of my classmates had disappeared, only to be found dead weeks or months later. Most of these young male victims were employed in manual labour that doesn’t need a university degree and, because of that, they were certainly condemned never to leave the precarious life they had.
Not every working-class man wants this life. The conscripted Russians sent to Ukraine, the American draft dodgers of Vietnam, the young Mexicans recruited by cartels – many resist, at great cost. Violence is a labour market like any other, and like any other, most people would rather be somewhere else. Because our societies lose millions of men in war, crime and other forms of massive violence, is it possible to imagine societies that don’t need these mercenaries in the first place? Is it possible to curb the demand for them, which is fuelled in part by fear? Rethinking the role of violence specialists requires an ethical reckoning for societies: they are part of our communities, either as gangsters or police officers, revolutionaries or soldiers. Thinking of them as workers erodes the fictitious divide and puts us face to face: humans can be peaceful and cooperative, yet become violent by necessity. Currently, this form of work is a feature of our present way of living. Can we learn to live without the _condottiere_?
_Supported by a grant from the Open Society Foundations._