Cartels, revolutions, and the fragile line between terror and government

What distinguishes a revolution from a criminal enterprise? Is it ideology? Popular support? Historical timing? Or simply the ability to win and write the laws afterward? From the storming of the Bastille to the Boston Tea Party, we are conditioned to treat the birth of states as glorious, even inevitable. But when the mechanics of power are stripped of their sacred veils—when violence, corruption, and self-interest are allowed to speak plainly—we are left with a disturbing symmetry between so-called revolutionary heroes and today’s cartel kingpins. Both emerge in conditions of institutional failure. Both appeal to grievances of injustice. Both wield extralegal violence with populist flair. And both, at their most effective, become the de facto rulers of territory, economy, and sometimes ideology.

This essay explores the uncomfortable proximity between insurgent movements that succeed and criminal networks that fail—or, more precisely, that succeed differently. By comparing the American and French revolutions with the modern quasi-state operations of Mexican and Colombian cartels, we can begin to see how notions of legitimacy, morality, and sovereignty blur beneath the surface of political storytelling. All four movements arose from deep dissatisfaction with corrupt or indifferent authority, whether that was colonial British rule, Bourbon monarchy, or foreign-backed neoliberal regimes. All relied, at least initially, on violence, intimidation, and black-market economics. And all proclaimed—implicitly or explicitly—a twin justification of justice and profit: redressing perceived wrongs while seizing control of wealth and resources that the state had hoarded or misused.

Yet only two of these movements have monuments in capital cities. The other two are hunted, bombed, and condemned in every international forum. What makes a revolutionary a Founding Father and not a narco? What transforms bloodshed into liberation, or, alternatively, into terrorism? The answers have less to do with virtue than with velocity—how quickly a movement consolidates power, captures infrastructure, and wins the symbolic war of legitimacy. In the case of the American and French uprisings, emerging elites were able to stabilize, mythologize, and institutionalize their violence into something resembling a nation-state. In contrast, cartels like those in Sinaloa or Medellín remain trapped in a perpetual liminality: militarized, territorial, semi-political—but always outside the fold of recognized statehood.

And yet even this boundary is eroding. Cartels today possess armored divisions, intelligence networks, judicial influence, and even public welfare operations. They fund political candidates and broker ceasefires. Their presence is sometimes more stable than the nominal governments they oppose. One could argue that their failure lies not in lack of capacity but in their unwillingness—or refusal—to make the final leap into overt governance. Perhaps that’s the last taboo. Or perhaps, if we wait long enough, they too will be rebranded—as warlords once were—as Presidents.

In what follows, we’ll trace these twin paths: revolution as legitimized crime, and organized crime as failed revolution. We will not begin with al-Qaeda or ISIS, where ideology overshadows structure, but with the democratic insurgencies of the 18th century and the drug empires of the 20th and 21st. Each case will be read not for its moral posture, but for its practical anatomy: how it marshals resources, inspires loyalty, and carves out zones of control. The goal is not to blur good and evil but to understand how, in the realpolitik of power, justice and profit are often the same flag hoisted by different hands.

Smugglers and Sovereigns: The American Revolution and the Medellín Cartel

To understand the American Revolution without the varnish of patriot myth is to view it, in part, as a highly successful smuggling operation gone ballistic. The thirteen colonies were hotbeds of contraband: tea, molasses, rum, arms, and textiles all flowed in and out of ports like Boston and Charleston through networks that often ignored or evaded imperial taxation. Merchants such as John Hancock built fortunes circumventing British trade laws, while colonial elites decried imperial overreach as unjust—particularly when it began to interfere with profit margins. Beneath the rhetoric of “liberty,” the revolution was animated as much by commercial sovereignty as by philosophical ideals. As historian T.H. Breen notes, *“The revolutionaries protested not only taxation without representation but also the enforcement of customs duties that interfered with their economic autonomy.”*¹

This blending of moral and material grievance mirrors the origin story of Colombia’s Medellín Cartel, which rose to prominence in the 1970s as a response to the asymmetrical economic realities of the global drug market. Colombia’s rural poor, disenfranchised urban migrants, and corruptible officials found in cocaine a commodity as politically potent as tea had been in the 18th century. Pablo Escobar, the cartel’s most infamous leader, cast himself not only as a businessman but as a populist—building housing projects, sponsoring local sports teams, and challenging the legitimacy of a state seen by many as remote, elitist, and subservient to foreign powers (particularly the United States). The Medellín Cartel functioned, for a time, as a parallel government: it taxed, policed, mediated, and protected.²

Like the American revolutionaries, the cartel built its own supply chains, logistics networks, and enforcement arms. It co-opted existing bureaucracies when possible and created its own when necessary. Where the Minutemen gathered in local taverns and mustered under regional militias, Escobar’s sicarios patrolled neighborhoods and executed judicial functions that the national government could not or would not. The violence in both cases was not random but strategic: targeted to assert control, destroy rival power centers, and enforce compliance with a new economic order.

But there is one decisive difference. The American revolutionaries were able to internationalize their cause. With France’s backing and eventual recognition as a sovereign belligerent, they transitioned from rebels to statesmen in the eyes of the world. They drafted constitutions, convened congresses, and projected the appearance of future stability—even while committing atrocities against Loyalists, Indigenous nations, and enslaved people.³ Legitimacy, in the geopolitical system of the 18th century, was a matter of recognition by other states. The Medellín Cartel never crossed that threshold. Though it wielded many of the tools of statehood, its global operations were too closely tied to illicit flows to be redeemable by the existing order. Rather than forming alliances, it made enemies. Rather than seeking sovereignty, it sought impunity.

In this light, the failure of the Medellín Cartel is not a failure of power, but of narrative. Had Escobar declared a breakaway state, drafted a constitution, and made overtures to hostile neighbors—perhaps he would have been a “revolutionary.” But instead he remained a warlord, and in the public imagination, a villain. Meanwhile, Washington and Jefferson, once known as smugglers and slaveholders, became philosophers of liberty.

The lesson is bleak: it is not justice that distinguishes a republic from a rogue network, nor is it brutality or profit motive. It is the ability to consolidate violence into bureaucracy, to camouflage it beneath parchment and procedure—and most importantly, to win the recognition of one’s peers in the international club of states. The Medellín Cartel, though rich and feared, was denied entry. The United States, though born in blood and bonded debt, was welcomed in.

Notes:

¹ Breen, T.H. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. Oxford University Press, 2004.

² Bowden, Mark. Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001.

³ Taylor, Alan. American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804. W. W. Norton & Company, 2016.

Guillotine Logic: From Revolutionary Terror to Narco-Theater

If the American Revolution became a commercial triumph wrapped in the rhetoric of liberty, the French Revolution took the inverse path: a moral crusade that devoured its own architects. It began, as all revolutions do, with a promise of justice—liberté, égalité, fraternité—and a righteous fury aimed at the parasitic elite. Yet within a few short years, the language of enlightenment gave way to mass executions, public show trials, and the normalization of fear as policy. Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety became the central nervous system of a state whose legitimacy no longer flowed from a monarch or constitution, but from the ability to orchestrate violence with moral certainty.¹

The result was what might be called performative statehood: a spectacle of sovereignty in which governance was indistinguishable from terror. The guillotine stood not only as a tool of punishment but as a kind of sacred theater, enacting the moral absolutism of the revolution. Those who opposed the new regime were not simply dissenters; they were “enemies of the people.” In this atmosphere, violence became redemptive—necessary to purify the state and fulfill the revolution’s promises. But the promises were never fulfilled. The revolution’s moral center collapsed into a cycle of revenge, bureaucratic bloodletting, and, finally, military dictatorship under Napoleon.

This pattern is disturbingly echoed in the rise of Mexico’s drug cartels, especially in regions where state authority has withered and criminal syndicates have filled the void. Like the French revolutionaries, Mexican cartels often cloak their brutality in moral language. Cartel propaganda routinely invokes el pueblo—the people—as victims of state corruption, abandonment, and neoliberal pillage. In their territories, cartels are both punishers and patrons: they enforce justice (however arbitrarily), redistribute wealth (however cynically), and provide protection (however selective).²

But what truly mirrors the French Revolution is the theatricalization of violence. Beheadings, mass graves, flayed corpses hung from bridges—these are not simply acts of intimidation, but messages. Like the guillotine in Paris, these are not private executions but public declarations of power. Their visibility is the point. The state is no longer the only actor capable of symbolic punishment. Cartels have appropriated the rituals of justice—not merely to instill fear, but to claim the right to define guilt and innocence.

And just as the Jacobins turned on each other, cartels too are locked in internecine purges, ever-shifting alliances, and betrayals. Leadership is rarely stable. Each new commander must prove legitimacy not through legal process but through displays of command and cruelty. Theirs is a revolution without horizon, sustained by the logic of escalation. This is not because cartels lack ideology. On the contrary, their ideology is post-political: a mix of populism, vengeance, and economic rationality that rejects both state failure and utopian fantasy. They do not promise a republic. They promise order—brutal, uneven, and intimate.

Yet there is an irony. For all their anti-state theatrics, Mexican cartels are deeply embedded in the state itself. Governors, police chiefs, military commanders—many are on cartel payrolls. In some cases, the cartels are indistinguishable from official power structures.³ This is not a revolution in the traditional sense; it is an involution—a spiraling inward collapse where the state and its enemies wear each other’s masks. One thinks again of France: Robespierre’s revolutionary tribunals were technically “legal,” just as many cartel bosses today hold elected office, or fund political campaigns that offer the appearance of civic participation.

Where the French revolutionaries lost their moral compass in the terror, Mexican cartels have none to begin with—but what they do have is efficiency. And as the state weakens, the efficiency of organized violence becomes its own legitimacy. The difference is chilling: in the French case, terror was a temporary phase, leading to Empire. In Mexico, terror may be the permanent condition of rule.

So, we return to the thesis: justice and profit. The French revolutionaries promised the former and descended into a mockery of it. Mexican cartels pursue the latter and occasionally gesture at the former. In both, the boundary between crime and politics dissolves. The result is not chaos, but an alternative order—brutal, strategic, and hauntingly familiar.

Notes:

¹ Schama, Simon. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. Alfred A. Knopf, 1989.
² Grillo, Ioan. El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency. Bloomsbury Press, 2011.
³ Osorio, Javier. “Democratization and Drug Violence in Mexico.” Journal of Conflict Resolution, vol. 59, no. 8, 2015, pp. 1403–1432.

The Sovereign’s Mask: When Crime Becomes Government

If this comparison feels sacrilegious, that is only because we have been taught to venerate revolutions and vilify cartels by default. Yet structurally, tactically, and even rhetorically, they are kin. Both emerge in response to a failing state, both court public loyalty through a mixture of fear and favor, and both claim to restore justice while accumulating profit. The only meaningful difference lies in what comes after the initial success: the capacity to mythologize violence, bureaucratize it, and—crucially—to monopolize it.

Victory, then, is not determined by ethical superiority but by narrative control. The American and French revolutions succeeded not because they were more just or less bloody, but because they secured the apparatus of institutional storytelling: flags, constitutions, international recognition, and the machinery of national memory. The Medellín and Sinaloa cartels, by contrast, remain locked in a paradox—they function like governments but are denied the name. They lose not only in battle but in metaphor. They are “cartels,” never “movements.” They are “criminals,” never “provisioners,” despite feeding millions. They are “terrorists,” not “freedom fighters,” despite openly contesting state power.¹

This reveals a deeper truth: all power begins as shadow power. There is no clean path from revolution to government, only a brutal and improvisational process of stabilization. Washington and Jefferson, like Escobar and Guzmán, first had to break the law before they could write it. What makes the former "Founders" and the latter "criminals" is not their methods, but their ability to normalize those methods through governance, legitimacy, and—over time—forgetfulness.

Consider also how existing states respond. No established government willingly calls a rival a peer. Even the United States hesitated to recognize Haiti after its slave revolution. The label “terrorist” or “criminal” is not a diagnosis; it is a weapon. It serves to deny political legitimacy and to enforce a monopoly on violence. That is why most governments react to rebel movements the same way they react to cartels—with aerial bombings, sanctions, propaganda, and extrajudicial killings. The difference lies not in the target’s morals, but in their threat to the narrative order.

Yet the cartels persist. Their borders are soft but real. Their leaders die, but their systems endure. Their violence is visible, but their logistics are elegant. Some towns in northern Mexico enjoy more consistent services under cartel patronage than under state governance. Some candidates win elections with narco-backing and rule in a state of hybrid legitimacy. If this is not statehood, it is something close: narco-sovereignty in a post-Westphalian age.²

And so, we arrive at an unspeakable possibility: that perhaps the modern state is not the opposite of the cartel, but its descendant. That our republics are just cartels that won the war, cleaned their books, and built courthouses on the corpses. That the guillotine and the sicario, the smuggler and the legislator, the revolutionary and the trafficker—are not antagonists in a moral drama, but actors in the same evolutionary play.

In that sense, every state is born twice. Once in blood. And once in myth.

Notes:

¹ See Scott, James C. The Art of Not Being Governed. Yale University Press, 2009.
² Andreas, Peter. Drug War Politics: The Price of Denial. University of California Press, 1996.

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