The Violence Worker and the Broken Vocation: What Zepeda Gil's Sociology Cannot See

The violence specialists and the vocation they replaced

A sixteen-year-old boy convicted of homicide sits in La Quinta del Bosque, a juvenile detention facility outside Toluca, Mexico. He used the word chambear — to work — to describe what he did. The killing was the job. He sent part of every paycheck home to cover his mother's medical bills.

Raúl Zepeda Gil, a Mexican sociologist, argues in his Aeon essay "The Violence Specialists" that the men who staff drug cartels and the men who staff the Mexican Army are participants in the same labor market — both trained in the controlled application of lethal force, both recruited with wages, hierarchy, prestige, and a narrative of belonging. His sharpest evidence is the GAFES, elite Mexican Army special forces, some trained by the United States, who defected in the late 1990s to found Los Zetas, then the most militarily sophisticated cartel in the country. Drawing on Charles Tilly's category of the "violence specialist," Zepeda Gil argues that governments and cartels are rival employers in the same industry. The framework that refuses to see cartel labor as labor — that prefers "deviance" or "evil" over "employment" — has been failing Mexican society for three decades.

But the framework that sees only labor is failing too, in a different direction.

What the labor frame gets right

The labor frame earns its keep by resisting a comfortable fiction: that soldiers are altruists and gang members are deviants. Both perform skilled, dangerous work. Both are embedded in hierarchies with ranks, wages, discipline, and promotion. Both are shaped by professional cultures that reward desensitization to lethal risk.

The Catholic intellectual tradition grounds this sociological realism rather than resisting it. Aquinas understood the division of labor as natural to the human condition — not economic convenience but an expression of the social nature inscribed in persons. Gabriel Zanotti, working in the Thomistic tradition, develops the point: cooperation in specialized tasks becomes indispensable precisely because human beings are neither self-sufficient nor independent of one another after the Fall.[^1] Men work because they are not self-sufficient. Violence specialists fit within this account of divided labor.

But Aquinas also insisted that some forms of work are not merely dangerous or morally ambiguous — they are ordered against life as such. As Nordling, Titus, and Vitz note in their model of vocation and work, "there are other forms of work that are intrinsically life negating, for example, sex-trafficking or selling illicit drugs."[^2] The labor frame brackets this distinction as ideological. The Thomistic frame insists it is ontological — built into the structure of the act, not assigned by whoever holds state power at a given moment.

The state as cartel

Zepeda Gil's most uncomfortable observation is that the institutional line between state violence and cartel violence in Mexico is not reliably a moral line. Municipal police have been documented working as cartel lookouts; governors have been indicted for protecting trafficking networks; the same young men cycle between army enlistment and cartel recruitment depending on which payroll is larger. The GAFES who became Los Zetas did not cross from order to chaos. They crossed from one armed hierarchy to another, carrying their training with them.

This dismantles any framework that grounds a soldier's legitimacy simply in state authorization. Ludwig von Mises observed that "government is, in the last resort, the employment of armed men: policemen, soldiers, prison guards."[^3] That observation is neither condemnation nor celebration — it is a description. The moral weight of that coercive apparatus depends entirely on what it protects and whom it is used against. Aquinas anticipated this: government derives moral legitimacy not from formal authority but from its function — protection of the common good and defense of persons who cannot defend themselves. When an institution systemically inverts that function, it forfeits the moral basis of the compliance it demands. The uniform is not the argument.

The formation vacuum

Rudolf Allers, writing on adolescent character formation, argued that the deepest problem facing young men is not the choice of a particular job but the prior question of what work means — "the development of the right attitude toward work is equivalent to the development of a right understanding of responsibility."[^4] The adolescent drive toward prestige and belonging that Zepeda Gil carefully documents is, for Allers, not a character flaw but a developmental feature: raw material that formation either orders toward the common good or leaves disordered, available for capture by whoever arrives first with a compelling story.

What the cartels and the army share — at least in the regions Zepeda Gil studies — is not merely a labor market. They share a formation vacuum. Both institutions enter that vacuum offering young men the same narrative: you matter, you are feared, you belong to something larger than yourself. The pitch works not primarily because of economics but because the adolescent hunger for meaning and standing is real and powerful, and it will attach to whatever structure arrives first with a convincing answer.

There is also what follows initiation. Zepeda Gil's interviews show that entry into cartel labor is rarely a clean contractual choice — it is a threshold. Once crossed, exit becomes structurally impossible. The Catholic moral tradition has a name for this: complicity under duress. It does not erase moral responsibility, but it distributes it. The sixteen-year-old who commits murder under threat of death to himself and his family bears real but diminished culpability. The institutional architects who built the structure in which a teenager faces that choice bear a culpability that is neither diminished nor deniable. Zanotti's point about cooperation as the indispensable human response to interdependence[^1] has an inverse: structures of cooperation can be ordered toward life or against it, and those who design them carry responsibility for the direction they point.

What the boy deserves

Zepeda Gil's framework can document the machinery. It can show that rational actors respond to the incentives they face. It cannot say that the man who runs the plaza, who recruits the sixteen-year-old, has done something more than operate a labor market. The Catholic tradition can say it, because it grounds the wrongness of the act in the structure of what was actually done to whom — not in which employer issued the paycheck.

His instinct remains right: to call the sixteen-year-old simply a deviant is to evade the question of why the structures that should have formed him toward genuine vocation were absent. Zanotti argues that in cultures where warrior prestige dominates, the harder task is to recover and proclaim the dignity of ordinary cooperative work — the labor that builds rather than destroys, that sustains life rather than extinguishes it.[^1]

The boy who sent wages home had a genuine vocation buried beneath the counterfeit one. That is not a sociological claim. It is a claim about what he was — and about what was taken from him.

References

[^1]: Gabriel Zanotti, Economics for Priests (revised), on cooperation as the indispensable human response to interdependence after the Fall.

[^2]: William Nordling, in Vitz, P. C., Nordling, W. J., & Titus, C. S. (2020). A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person: Integration with Psychology and Mental Health Practice (pp. 210–248). Divine Mercy University Press, on intrinsically life-negating forms of work.

[^3]: Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, on government as the employment of armed men and the coercive nature of state authority; engaged here via Aquinas on the moral legitimacy of government as conditional on its service to the common good.

[^4]: Rudolf Allers, Forming Character in Adolescents, on the development of the right attitude toward work as equivalent to the development of a right understanding of responsibility.