El Libro Vaquero

This article aims to analyze comic books' use as vehicles for political communication. Employing socio-semiotic methodology, we describe the discursive operations utilized to disseminate governmental propaganda (a particular type of political communication) in mexican popular culture. Our corpus comprises institutionally commissioned comic inserts in one of the most iconic magazines of contemporary mexico: El Libro Vaquero ['The Cowboy Book']. According to our findings, these comics tend to make citizens primarily responsible for implementing public policy, ignore the structural causes of the social problems they represent, reducing them to a sum of individual issues, and, finally, downplay state responsibilities while painting a positive image of the different State institutions. Consequently, we should take these comics as a type of institutional propaganda rather than as social marketing.