Mario López Ayala, PhD
Real power no longer always wears a uniform.
Mexico City, May 2026. Mexico is no longer facing merely a security crisis. In several regions, what is unfolding is something deeper: public authority still preserves its legal forms, yet no longer fully preserves its capacity to command. The concept of “dual sovereignty,” developed by Vanda Felbab-Brown, offers a precise framework for understanding that fracture. Organized crime has ceased to function solely as an enemy of the state and has instead evolved, in certain territories, into a parallel authority. This is not the total collapse of the Mexican state, but rather its degraded coexistence with powers that have already learned how to govern without asking permission.
The uncomfortable reality is not that powerful cartels exist. Mexico has lived with that fact for decades. What is truly decisive is that millions of citizens have learned to distinguish between the authority that signs documents and the authority that imposes consequences. When entire communities understand who authorizes routes, collects extortion payments, punishes disobedience, or decides which businesses may operate, sovereignty ceases to be a legal abstraction. It becomes a daily experience of subordination.
This is not simply a matter of stateless zones. The formula is more opaque. Police forces, municipal governments, prosecutors, and elections still exist, yet unwritten rules increasingly condition local life. That is fragmented sovereignty: formal power remains visible while effective power becomes distributed. Mexico is no longer dealing only with institutional absence; it is experiencing a contested administration of territory.
In Chiapas, Guerrero, Michoacán, Tamaulipas, Zacatecas, Guanajuato, and Sinaloa, the conflict can no longer be interpreted exclusively as violence among criminal groups. It also manifests through migrant corridors, extortion rackets, highway control, pressure on agricultural producers, fuel theft, ports, customs infrastructure, and fentanyl trafficking routes. The criminal map no longer follows merely the logic of drug distribution. It follows the logic of control over strategic flows.
Within that environment emerges conditioned authority. The government may enter a region, make declarations, deploy military force, or promise stability, yet its actual margin of action often depends on preexisting informal balances. In many territories, criminal organizations no longer need to fully replace the state; limiting it, intimidating it, or rendering it functionally useful is sufficient. That negotiated governability does not always produce open chaos. Sometimes it produces a kind of order administered through fear.
Hybrid territorial control becomes visible where legality coexists with informal permissions. Cartels regulate circulation, commerce, information, mobility, and silence. A patrol vehicle may still be present while no longer constituting the decisive power. A mayor may still govern while lacking real control over the conditions of governance. The result is not only violence. It is a parallel administration of order.
The criminal economy has also become structurally more sophisticated. Drug trafficking, fentanyl production, extortion, human smuggling, real estate laundering, agricultural control, fuel theft, illegal mining, and protection rackets now operate as interconnected layers within the same adaptive ecosystem. Organized crime understood earlier than many governments that contemporary power no longer depends solely on armed force. It depends on managing flows: flows of money, goods, fear, protection, and obedience.
This is why a geopolitical reading is indispensable. Mexican cartels are no longer local mafias confined to isolated territories. They are nodes within a transnational illicit economy connected to Asian chemical precursors, American consumption markets, cross-border weapons networks, offshore financial systems, cryptocurrencies, and continental migration routes. Mexico simultaneously functions as territory, border, logistical platform, and laboratory for criminal governance.
Militarization has attempted to contain this expansion, yet military deployments alone rarely reconstruct authority. They may temporarily recover territory, dismantle a faction, or reduce immediate violence, but they do not automatically restore institutional legitimacy. Without functional justice systems, trustworthy police forces, financial intelligence, and non-captured local governments, force enters territory merely as armed presence rather than recognized legitimacy. The distinction matters enormously.
Politics itself becomes trapped within this architecture. Criminal organizations do not require ideology. They require access, protection, information, and operational continuity. Their relationship with political power is therefore usually pragmatic rather than doctrinal. Cartels do not necessarily seek to govern as political parties; they seek to ensure that whoever governs does not obstruct their circuits of power. That is where functional territorial capture begins.
The broader consequence is a criminal feudalization of the state. Not because Mexico has ceased to exist as a nation-state, but because authority has become unevenly distributed, partially negotiated, and territorially fragmented. There are regions where the government fully governs, regions where it negotiates, and others where it merely administers the margins left available by armed actors. That geography rarely appears on official maps, yet it exists clearly in the social memory of those who understand the unwritten rules of survival.
At its core, this dynamic points toward an armed privatization of sovereignty. The capacity to decide who circulates, who trades, who speaks, who remains silent, and who survives no longer belongs exclusively to the state. It increasingly migrates toward organizations possessing coercive force, financial power, territorial intelligence, and punitive capacity. The result resembles a kind of informal narco-federalism: nonexistent in constitutional law, yet operational in daily life.
Mexico is not merely losing security. It is gradually losing the capacity to determine who exercises real authority across its territory. That erosion does not always occur through dramatic collapses or visible insurgencies. Sometimes it unfolds more quietly: when merchants pay extortion fees, migrants pay passage tolls, producers pay for protection, mayors calculate silences, and entire communities learn that survival requires obeying two different systems of authority simultaneously.
The essential question, then, is not whether Mexico still has a government. It does. The real question is where, how, and to what extent that government still retains the effective capacity to command. Sovereignty is not ultimately measured through ceremonies, flags, or official speeches. It is measured through the ability to protect citizens, impose rules, punish crime, and sustain legitimate authority where other powers have already learned to govern from the shadows.
Mexico is no longer confronting organized crime alone. It is confronting a dispute over the very principle of authority itself. And as long as public debate continues describing what already functions as parallel power merely as “insecurity,” the diagnosis will continue arriving too late. Dual sovereignty is not an academic metaphor. It is the description of a country where the state still governs, but no longer always rules.
Mario López Ayala, PhD
Researcher and Director of Phoenix24