Organized crime and drug violence in Mexico is a major national and international security threat. Current research largely focuses on the traditional economic and political aspects of this war in an attempt to formulate a new military strategy to defeat or at least restrict the activities of the drug cartels. The nature of the war, being based on greed, hyper-materialism and the pioneering of the global freemarket, makes it very much a war for the 21st century or postmodern. In exploring this idea, this dissertation will argue that the ‘postmodern war’ concept also assumes various premodern dynamics or traits, leading to the assertion that the conflict between the cartels, the state, and Mexican society, translates into a theoretical conflict between pre and postmoderns.