Mexico struggles to keep up with US newspeak around war and trade

“Narcoterrorism,” “friendshoring,” and “antagonisms.” Language shifts in a changing world order.

Mexico’s military officer training school in northern Mexico City is a beautiful building full of Greco-Roman frescoes in its main lecture halls. The visual language of another era. At the Colegio de Defensa Nacional’s yearly “Threats and challenges to Mexico’s national security” seminar this week, Mexico’s famously rigid military hierarchy wrestled with the emergence of a new way of speaking.

At first it felt like semantics. Gerardo Rodríguez Sánchez Lara, a research professor at the school, delved into the minutiae of basic concepts. Above all was the term “antagonisms” which Rodríguez Sánchez Lara assured his audience is “an uncommon term even among academics.” He traced its origins to the recent 2018 publication of Glossary of Unified Terms (Glosario de términos unificados), a dictionary designed as a compromise between Mexico’s many military and intelligence branches.

“Antagonisms” is a newly minted concept meant to contain disparate risks and threats. They range from climate change to emerging challenges from powers previously considered to be aligned, like the United States.

A changing language is no minor phenomenon; it carries the strategic implications of a new world order. And they are not limited merely to the military arena.