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.'"

Comments

Re:Same as the US TLAs

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Twitter as well

[barlevg]

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.

Re:Wise criminals stay in the shadows...

[meta-monkey]

The zetas scare me shitless. I've heard people say there's no such thing as "evil" in the world, but those people have never read up on the zetas. Cold, cold sweat shit.

The way to win the war on drugs is to make drugs legal so there's no longer that 17,000% profit motive, but that isn't happening any time soon because the American prison, weapons and law enforcement industries make too much money off illegal drugs.