...Oswaldo Zavala In the last decade, violence attributed to Latin American drug cartels has become a common theme in a proliferation of fiction and non-fiction about the drug trade written both in Mexico and the U.S. This essay shows how the majority of Mexican narconarratives—in particular the works...

...: “very graphic”) of such bar- barous events as ISIS beheadings and body mutilations by Mexican drug cartels. These abominations, however, have a lengthy historical precedence. “Disarticu- lated heads” play a conspicuous role in neo-Assyrian iconography of the ninth to seventh centuries BCE...

...- sible to all but the academically initiated. COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 196 The warnings have now escalated exponentially because of drug traffi cking, in which the U.S. is complicit not only as the primary consumer of the cartels’ prod- ucts but also as the primary provider of the tools...