Narco-populism as an Illegal but Legitimate Elite in Latin America

Populism has been identified as an influential discourse in reshaping the division between the elites and the people in Latin America. However, the rise of populist expressions has also meant the emulation of these practices in drug trafficking organizations (narco-populism) that take advantage of their presence in territories mediated by violence, inequality, and state corruption. The article aims to identify the narrative programs of narco-populism to establish itself as an elitarian reference and compete with populists. The research method is built on the semiotics of political discourse and the construction of four narrative programs based on a corpus of 116 populist and 113 narco-populist speeches. The results show that populists and narco-populists have discursive repertoires to face scenarios of confrontation of their objectives but with an inclination for implicit cooperation agreements in which the interests of the contradictor are not attacked since it involves an expenditure of economic, human, and logistical resources that jeopardize the legitimacy of narrative programs in the population sectors where they have influence. The discussion suggests that populists and narco-populists become emerging elites that struggle to represent social distrust of the economic and political system, hence the need to reformulate categories for analyzing elites in Latin America.