Ignacio Morales Lechuga
Hannah Arendt saw totalitarianism as a project to destroy the common world, a frontal assault that sought to subject all of life to a logic of terror using tools wielded by the state. Its driving force was ideology, and reality was the obstacle to be crushed. In Mexico, we are witnessing a variation: power has not needed to reproduce classic terror. It suffices to administer indifference. It has discovered that, if stripped of political meaning, death is more effective than any secret police.
In the 21st century, we are rapidly approaching a late totalitarianism that turns violence into noise. Death no longer interrupts or moves anyone, nor does it demand mourning. It does not even cause outrage. Murders accumulate, and the figures receive the same attention as the morning traffic reports. The symbolic deactivation of death is present in the architecture of the Mexican regime of late totalitarianism. A society incapable of transforming loss into mourning and of responding to public demands for change is a docile society. Here, tragedy does not explode; it dissolves. Massacres do not shake the state. They remain trapped in a vacuum that nullifies any possibility of political upheaval.
When governmental legitimacy is not sustained by results or institutional respect, stability will depend on the symbolic; it will be nourished by affection, by emotional narrative, by the sense of belonging that the regime offers as a refuge, less physical than metaphysical. Material reality gets in the way because it contradicts and complicates the story. Those in power understand that if they can fabricate the mirage of a parallel world, they will not have to face those who live the harsh reality of the facts. Hyperreality will be the substitute. A system where data matters much less than emotions, failure dissolves into gestures, and narrative is worth more than any evidence. The spectacle does the rest, politics becomes a morning ritual, and slogans become public liturgy. They do not seek to inform; they strive to provide identity, fabricate symbolic enemies, purify the faithful, and entrench themselves against any threat posed by reality. The entire country becomes a stage where truth is irrelevant; what matters is to be part of the right script.
In this ecosystem, the figure of the hyperreal subject emerges: “el chairo” (the die-hard) is not a simple supporter, but a full inhabitant of the official fiction. Their political identity is not based on arguments, but on an emotional bond that acts as a shield against reality. No matter how many graves or how much evidence of impunity accumulates, the narrative will be more convincing than the facts. Loyalty acts as their emotional armor. Without this subject, the regime’s symbolic structure would collapse. They are a key piece of domination, not because they fear power, but because power exploits them. Their indifference to violence is the most efficient resource of late totalitarianism. By not allowing tragedy and death to intrude into their emotional world, they ensure that nothing alters the narrative that sustains the regime. No fear paralyzes them, but rather a collective anesthesia that neutralizes them.
The tragedy of Mexico is not the collapse of the state, but its new stability. A country capable of tolerating thousands of deaths without demanding accountability reveals the absolute triumph of indifference as a form of political control. Power does not destroy reality; it successfully replaces it. Its triumph is the failure of mourning, that individual and social space that allows us to grieve, to build community, to suffer with others, and, ultimately, to demand. By normalizing indifference, nothing hurts us. As pain and death lose meaning, cornered between lies, excuses, and other data, we will continue to inhabit the social fiction of a regime that sustains itself and hangs on the emotional will of those who prefer to believe rather than see and feel for themselves.
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