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.