ABSTRACT
In late August 2017, US media – from print, cable, and internet – began reporting on an apparently new development in the transnational trafficking of drugs across the country's southern border with Mexico. Rather than send people across the border with illicit merchandise, narcos on the Mexican side of the border had piloted a drone that moved the shipment across the border. The frenzied reporting failed to mention the fact that, in practical terms, very little had changed; buried beneath the sensationalist headlines was the fact that authorities had learned of this trafficking method by arresting a person on the US side of the border who had recovered the drone after it had landed in the states. Cartels may no longer need to send human beings across the border with their payloads, but they still depended on human laborers to recover merchandise in the desert; they could not send their merchandise directly to a safe house. These alarmist reports thus heightened a sense of perceived danger that US citizens and policymakers attributed to drone technology in general, even as little had changed on the ground. Interestingly enough, drug traffickers have also ascribed a larger-than-life quality to drone technology due to its presence on the US side of the border. Drone technology began to take root in the United States during President George W. Bush's War on Terror, and it became a favorite “anti-terror” tool for the Obama Administration. This chapter discusses what I call the “drone imaginary,” a term that I use to discuss how the presence of drones has affected how people on both sides of the border conceive of the illicit drug trade. Given my focus on how people imagine remote technology, the central focus of my study is necessarily cultural production – a term that I use to describe both narcocorridos and sensationalist news articles. While I explain how both types of cultural production exaggerate the threat, potential, and/or capabilities of drone technology, my primary goal is to explain the transnational effect of this technology on views of the border and the drug trade.
