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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.'"
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!
Didn't all this happen 5 years ago? Why bring it up now and call it "The dark side of social media"?
It will become clear when you look at the surrounding news of NSA agreeing they spy on Americans who are "socially connected" to terrorists by a few degrees of separation.
There has to be a good reason lying around for the public mind to latch onto in order to manufacture consent. I'm going to keep posting this link until you watch it and stop asking silly questions about news.
Take their main source of money away and they have to move to other enterprises to keep their organization alive.
Kidnappings-blackmail-ransom, selling organs, child prostitution, weapon trafficking, assassinations, protection rackets, robbery maybe? & etc
Depends on how far one is willing to go really.
They sell drugs because the money is easiest and they have a competitive advantage with a large organization (manufacturing, retails, supply chains, etc). If you take the drugs away the replacement rackets are lower revenue and require smaller orgs. Both factors that reduce the size of the operations.
You'll still have organized crime but not the kind that grows to the scale of a large retail chain.
I stole this Sig