The Narco-Letrado: Intellectuals and Drug Trafficking in Darío Jaramillo Agudelo’s Cartas cruzadas

Abstract

Colombian narco-narratives clearly show the divergence of neoliberalism, globalization, and repressive policies in the fight against drugs. On the one hand, the turn-of-the-century narco-narratives represent a capitalist logic, which sees in drug trafficking an economic dynamic of supply and demand that follows the directives of the market. On the other hand, this body of texts criticizes consumer practices that the same capitalist system engenders. In Colombia, the business of drug trafficking produced changes in the social and economic sphere, contributing to the emergence of a new value scale in which easy money and consumption impacted the way individuals think about their future. These factors also enter into dialogue with traditional social values, like hard work and study. This chapter studies Jaramillo Agudelo’s use of the figure of the intellectual in his fiction with the aim of understanding the position the lettered city has taken in the face of the drug trafficking phenomenon. Agudelo’s Cartas cruzadas (Exchanged Letters, 1995) signals the loss of position that the letrados suffer as guides in a neoliberal society and victims of narcotrafficking, and their transformation into what one might call neo-letrados.