The discursive production of the war on narcotraffic during Calderon’s presidency: in search of lost legitimacy

Abstract

This article exposes an analysis of the discursive production related to the war on drug trafficking undertaken during the presidency of Felipe Calderon. For that, three different discourses pronounced during his presidency were analyzed, so that the strategies employed to legitimize and justify such a measure could be identified. At the same time we tried to observe the impact of the socio political context on the discursive evolution. At this point, this research shows how the strategies were used to legitimize the war on drugs according to the sociopolitical context. To this end, it is used the methodological proposal of Silvia Gutiérrez Vidrio, which is based on the theoretic-methodological works of Jean-Blaise Grize, complemented with the studies of some other researchers on the field of argumentation and specially, the operation methods of ideology in accordance to the Works of John B. Thompson.