The Tartan

By Hailey Cohen

On Thursday, Carnegie Mellon hosted Professor Claudio Lomnitz, who spoke about psychological and theological tactics used by the Mexican cartel to recruit civilians. This lecture was part of the Humanities Lecture Series called Vigilante America, created in reaction to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. History professor Paul Eiss explained that the series was meant to look at what happened on Jan. 6 “not as an aberration, but as a culmination.” 

Eiss introduced Lomnitz as “prolific and profound in scholarship, a very engaged public intellectual … and an accomplished playwright.” For this lecture, Lomnitz read a new piece of work based on the past four years of his research. The piece was written specifically for his appearance at Carnegie Mellon, and the Thursday lecture was the first time anyone heard it. 

For Lomnitz’s current project, he studied the only case of judicial action against cartel commanders and soldiers revealed to the public, due to a leak in Mexican army documents. This case record held witness accounts of people held captive at a cartel training camp run by the Jalisco Cartel New Generation (CJNG). The camp that the witnesses described was near the city of Guadalajara, although Lomntiz explained that this was just one of many camps that operated around Mexico. The document was dated from 2019, describing a military raid on the training camp that took place in 2017.

Three individuals were held captive at the time of the police raid on the cartel camp. Lomnitz described how these individuals “were poor, otherwise they had little in common.” The cartel lured them in using an ad on Facebook for well-paid work at a private security company that did not require a high school diploma. When people responded to the ad, they were told to take a bus to Guadalajara, from which they were driven to a “safe house” to wait, and eventually taken to the cartel camp. 

Lomnitz explained that the systematic devaluing of these captives kept them there and aimed to eventually force them to join the cartel as official members. When the captives were taken to the “safe house,” they were told to turn over all of their official documentation, which they had taken with them as specified in the job description. The captives immediately lost any proof of their citizenship, names, or any official information about themselves. 

In the camps, each of the captives were assigned a nickname. Lomnitz said that nicknames “usually indicated the man’s former profession, or a distinctive and often demeaning physical trait. Indeed, regardless of their objective meaning, these nicknames were always debasing insofar as they flaunted a total lack of regard for the man’s actual name.” In this way, Lomnitz argued, captives were dehumanized and felt as though they were not only physically trapped in the camps, but that even if they successfully escaped, they would have no documentation to resume their life as it was before capture.

Lomnitz argued that a main tenet of these CJNG training camps was a mythological belief in death. There was an idea spread by the cartel members in the camp that “only those who wish to die, die. Living is just a matter of not being afraid,” Lomnitz read from a witness account of a conversation with a cartel member. This justified the violence against captives in the camp. Lomnitz said captives were killed when they expressed that they wanted to leave the camp.

Lomnitz highlighted his work at Columbia where he focused scholarship on investigating missing persons. He has started a “Disappearance Lab” and has had students collaborate with the National Commission for Disappearance in Mexico. Due to the magnitude of missing persons in Mexico, Lomnitz described the problem as “embarrassing,” because of “how little is done in terms of prevention.” He said his students are investigating prevention on social media, where platforms use personal data to create targeted ads.