Slashdot Mirror
Social Media Becomes the New Front In Mexico's Drug War
An anonymous reader writes "The drug cartels operating in Mexico have often been compared to large corporations, with their own codified leadership hierarchy, recruitment methods, and accounting practices. But part of any big corporation's playbook is a marketing/PR plan. The cartels have long operated a version of those, too, by threatening journalists and killing civilians who speak up. Like any corporation these days, the drug cartels have recognized the power of social media, and they're using it more and more to propagate their messages of intimidation and violence. Quoting: 'Six days after Beltran Leyva's death, gunmen murdered family members of the only Mexican marine killed in the apartment complex siege — including the marine's mother. That same day, a fire was set at a nearby school where a banner was flown, warning that more killings would follow if the federal government made any further attempts to interfere in cartel actions. Photos of the school were then tweeted and shared in status updates — a reply to images of Beltran Leyva's corpse being shared on social media.'"
Sometimes good folks have something to hide. Their identities from bad folks.
One turns a profit, the others not so much.
.gif Hacking heads with chainsaws was enough for me.
I remember reading (I think here, on slashdot) that Youtube is flooded with Mexical Drug cartel videos.
I hope the local police / government doesn't give in to this intimidation. What's next?
One of them has a vested interest in ensuring that drugs remain illegal so there's no risk in losing their major source of profit, and the other isnt affiliated in government in any way.
and use the content as evidence for criminal intimidation and the etc. !!!! ..social media ?? pfft .. the firey banner seems more "cartely" ..
To think of it
These are issues that go back thousands of years to the ancient Greeks.
The concept of the citizen is that he/she has rights and responsibilities, this idea must have the full force of the law behind it. The idea of private armies and police forces must be ruthlessly stamped on by the forces of democracy.
Rule of law should be the King and Queen of public order.
The idea that things should be run by the likes of Al Capone, or corrupt law men like John Edgar Hoover, should be stamped on hard.
It's called an elephant's trunk whereas it is in fact, an elephant's nose, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet
All it would take is a single strike of the pen to remove the cartels' entire purpose for existing, along with the massive societal benefits of no more overcrowding in prisons, no more lives being ruined because of absurd and unjust laws, the possible breakthroughs which can never happen so long as the research is illegal, and the reversal of the militarization of police forces around the country. Prohibition is a proven failure, and factually creates criminals out of innocent people and problems where there were none before.
There is absolutely no benefit to prohibition (and even if there were, they're negligible compared to all the problems it creates) - it should be repealed immediately.
I feel like the place where the bullets are flying through the air, and people are dying, is the real front.......
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
This has been ongoing for at least a decade in Mexico. From the infamous blogdelnarco to twitter. I don't see how this is news today.
I have wondered how far the Cartels will push the government before they just decide to cut the military loose with a death list that includes anyone even remotely involved with the Cartels. At some point the society as a whole is going to get scared/angry and demand a harsh crackdown. When tanks start rolling your million dollar estates, all the AK-47s in the world aren't going to save you.
In any event, it is likely to get worse before it gets better.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Just legalize all drugs already. Take the profit motive away, and soon we won't have to hear any more of these drug gang stories.
You're a fool if you think either of them dont turn a profit.
The humans have been doing this for years, with their beheadings, and the "look what you made me do when you drew a nasty picture".
Also, chimpanzees, even without nasty pictures!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Police already don't bother going after the footsoldiers of these crime orgianisations. A requirement to use your 'real' name would be easily circumvented. Or they'd steal someone's identity to place messages. Or they'd force someone to place messages for them.
Social media are just a method of communication, you have to attack the comiting of crimes.
Legalize drugs - use the tax money from sales for education and profit. Then, one by one, find these cartel barbarians AND the people who enable them. Hunt them down, one by one, no matter how long it takes. Make the hunting clandestine and severe enough to make these scum never stop looking over their shoulders for as long as they live, like the Nazi killlers after WWII. Find them all; jail them all. If they resist, kill them.
Didn't all this happen 5 years ago? Why bring it up now and call it "The dark side of social media"?
Just saw a talk about the Narcotweet project. The interesting part about Narcotweet is that it's documenting the emergence of a new kind of "journalism:" the "tweet curator" who aggregates local social media reporting. These people are routinely followed by bigger news media (CNN en Espanol) yet maintain extremely strong ties to the people witnessing these things first-hand. The power of this entire project is that it's a way of getting information from places where the conventional news sources have decided it's too risky / too expensive to send *actual* reporters.
Make drugs legal, collect taxes and this idiotic war is over. Addicts will use drugs no matter what.
1g of cocaine will cost 1 USD or less where it's made. Sell this shit at 10-50 USD a pop in local pharmacy and cartels will fall fast.
You make it sound easy! They make money off of Heroin/Coke/and apparently they've stepped up there game, creating labs for making purer version of prescription painkillers, along with the synthetic/black/underground drugs, of course that means they are also mixing those painkillers in with other drugs.
The US government has tried to claim these cartels make a balk of their money of off marijuana, and I wish I still had the citation for a report that the feds really didn't try to hide from the public that some 90+% of pot smoked in the US is grown in the US.
You can use Amsterdam as an example of what happens when you put in good laws/regulations that have made Heroin [medical grade] legal, and confined to clinics.. On top of that, there's the logic that legalizing these drugs would see reduced usage, since most people do them because they are illegal. What's dumbfounding, and it could be government agencies cooking the books, is how heroin use has risen. I am not sure if it is due to marijuana being legal and people lost the appeal in smoking it, or because Heroin is surprisingly cheap, compared to marijuana, the prices around here are said to be 10 bux per bag.
And I wonder if the US government isn't getting extra funding by seizing bank accounts. However I also wonder if what their claiming on the cost of this BS war on drugs, is also being bloated on purpose, I have yet to find out exactly what, if anything their getting from this, or possible deals they have with countries to get a large chunk of the drug money.
Yep. The real head of the cartels is this person:
http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/a...
No sig today...
...was give it back to the Mexicans after the Mexican War.
If drugs were legal Miami wouldn't be the city it is today.
how it would be ??? i think much better
I wonder, why the cartels can't think of anything positive to say? They can, for example, emphasize the fact, that their products are primarily targeting the rich, while providing well-paying jobs for the impoverished youth, funding ample charitable donations, and investment in local communities...
By poisoning the "1%" (also known as the "golden billion"), they are spreading the wealth and leveling the playing field — without even ever forcing anyone to participate...
Clearly, the PR-masters working for the thugs have a lot to learn yet.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Which is why drugs will never be legal. There's too many powerful people getting their beak wet. Make drugs legal and Mexico will no longer be a blood-drenched narco state. Without the constant threat of violence, why would their honest, hard-working people flee across the border to pick our tomatoes on the cheap?
And if drugs are legal, where else will we find non-violent "criminals" to fill our private prisons? Who else will they turn into the hardened criminals that are their repeat business? Without the hardened criminals, how will they terrorize the white middle class, and convince them to pay for the police state, and buy the weapons for the militarized police? Hell no we can't make drugs legal. Illegal drugs are too profitable.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Seriously, we need to legalize all drugs, BUT, require that NONE cross state borders. In addition, all production will obviously be limited to the state where it is consumed, and heavily regulated. Finally, we then focus on keeping the drugs our of those under age 21.
By doing this, it remove the money from the drug lords and the gangs. Right now, there is plenty of money for them to share. BUT, if we do the above, they will kill each other, rather than innocent bystanders.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The rationale amongst many who lack historical perspective is hopelessly simplistic. The "prohibition didn't work, so let's solve the problem of drugs the same way we solved the problem of alcohol" argument completely ignores the fact that we DIDN'T solve the problem of alcohol. Alcohol has become a massively abused drug that causes all kinds of harm. It destroys families, is highly addictive, results in self-destructive behaviour and is responsible for a surprisingly large number of hospital trauma cases. Yet we hand-wave away this as part of what it means to have freedom because it has become socially acceptable, and the harms associated natural part of human behaviour. I don't want to live in a world where we get so used to other drugs' deleterious effects that we consider heroin addiction, crack habits and meth death to be a natural part of human behaviour.
Making something legal just because our politicians lack the will to engage in a sincere effort to enforce laws regulating it is a poor, shortsighted and ultimately disastrous attitude to take.
I hate printers.
'Down by the River' and 'Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields' by Charles Bowden are good starting books on the topic. Journalist, Bowden has illuminating things to say about the topic. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... He researched this topic for years, interviewing both the DEA and cartels.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
Teach kids in middle/high schools about drug addiction along with English, and stop making our own kids into addicts, thieving to support their habit.
Alcohol makers don't want the competition of legal drugs, and alcohol is the most destructive drug in the world! Combine all other drug use, and it still doesn't match alcohol's social, physical and societal damage.
Alcohol lobbyist pay lots of $$$ to our politicians to keep alcohol the only legal recreational drug.
The problem with drugs is that addicts will do anything to get their next hit, and they're generally ignorant (or brain-damaged) enough to do things that are pretty horrifying.
Take, for example, meth addicts. Meth isn't that expensive. But given the entrepreneurial nature of Americans, and the effects of the drug itself, a substantial number of addicts start to cook their own to "save money," among other things. This almost inevitably results in a fire, and contamination of the neighborhood. Even if there isn't a fire, the home and often surrounding homes are contaminated, and need to be gutted. Insurance doesn't cover all of the damage, and that's only if it exists in the first place.
The grand fallacy of drug use is that it only affects the user negatively - a notion which is profoundly false.
The real opposition to drug cartels is the police? Oh god, that's a serious candidate for the most uninformed and/or naive comment of the year.
Although, I think it would be easier to bomb drug users rather than the cartels. Drug users are easier to find than cartel members. If we can jail and / or kill enough drug users then the cartels will not have enough people left to sell to and will give up and go away. In fact we can call the mass jailing and killing of drug users "The War on Drugs" and run it for like 40+ years. I mean if you keep it up long enough that approach will work for sure.
..another useless shitsack is detected.
Teach kids in middle/high schools about drug addiction along with English, and stop making our own kids into addicts, thieving to support their habit.
They do this in New Zealand schools. I still ended up addicted to marijuana and an alcoholic*. In fact the reason I sought out and tried drugs was because they told us about all these cool drugs in "Health Education", and being the super-curious type, I couldn't help but want to know what drugs were all about. I'm just glad I didn't get addicted to cocaine or PCP, but that has more to do with availability.
I've been clean from pot for two years now, and relapsing into alcoholism every few months.
* Ok, so being an alcoholic is nearly inevitable in NZ, probably nothing to do with education.