Por una nosología de la violencia del narcotráfico: topos literarios de los años de la peste

This article is an analysis of some of the topos of the violence of drug traffic in Colombia in four
contemporary novels, emphasizing on the eighties and nineties, the historical context recreated by
these texts, which in this paper we will call the “plague years”. The objective is to demonstrate, based
on a semiotic analysis, that drug traffic, as production system, is a symbol and symptom of absence
of State. In order to do this, we describe the “morbid” relation between drug traffic and violence,
recreated in the selected literary corpus, in order to characterize narco-violence as an epidemic that
irrupts historically in Colombian everyday life.