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 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.
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to prohibition (and even if there were, they're negligible compared to all the problems it creates) - it should be repealed immediately.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 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 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.
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.