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

Mandate real names, a great idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes good folks have something to hide. Their identities from bad folks.

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.

Lawmakers need to do the right thing

[Anonymous Coward]

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to prohibition (and even if there were, they're negligible compared to all the problems it creates) - it should be repealed immediately.

Re:Lawmakers need to do the right thing

[phantomfive]

No, it's not about drugs, because Canada has all the same drug trafficking issues, but without the violence (really, look up the estimates of how much marijuana comes to the US from Canada).

Mexico has had violence and gangs of some sort or another for hundreds of years. Just think of the legendary El Guapo and Santa Ana, about whom songs have been written.

When drugs are gone, you still have the kidnappings and the corruption. People in the US get upset when the police taze someone; compare that to Mexican police.

Re:Lawmakers need to do the right thing

[pitchpipe]

When drugs are gone, you still have the kidnappings and the corruption.

I really doubt that you would have it on the same level as we have it today, but I don't think that is the reason to legalize drugs.

We should legalize drugs because it is the right thing to do. The drug laws are a relic of the past when people thought that it was okay to legislate their brand of morality. We now know that drug prohibition causes much more harm than good, and so that makes it dangerous and wrong to continue down the prohibition path. The war on drugs is a failure, and to keep pushing for these laws either means that you're insane, or you want to manipulate the public or are being manipulated.

I do think that as a side benefit of legalization we will see less violence and criminal activity by the cartels, less money to corrupt politicians, less money to buy arms, less money to pay muscle, etc. etc, but of course we won't see these benefits if we don't even try.

Re:Lawmakers need to do the right thing

[geekmux]

Opium was legal in China. How did that work?

The same way it worked for hundreds of years in the United States before they started making things like laudanum(opium) and marijuana illegal. And these products weren't just sitting in your grandpas stash box. They were in the family medicine cabinet, and marketed as such.

Moderation is key with anything in life, and we certainly try and make that statement with all other legal but highly addictive products like tobacco and alcohol. I don't see why legalizing other drugs would or should be treated any differently. Marijuana is already on its way to legalization, and opium is very much welcome in the United States in the form of the trillion-dollar industry that is opiate-based painkillers. They went straight past drug reform and just made it completely legal and controlled. A bottle of opium is only a government-subsidized $5 script away for most, which explains the growing problem with painkiller addiction.

Moderation doesn't work very well for the ignorant.

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...

[TheCarp]

If you think that is easy and cheap....I have this bridge in NYC for sale, and man is it a steal!

You seriously think someone putting up those posters wont be found hanging from a brige with posters nailed to his corpse? These Cartels are not street gangs like we have street gangs now. They are better armed, better funded, and in some cases....are the police.

Shit the Zetas, ever heard of them? They were started by police.

There is no easy way out now that these monsters have been created. Created by naieve people seeking simple solutions. People who thought they could enforce away drug problems.... they failed to change addiction rates (their basic goal) and instead, created violent street gangs...here and around the world.

Now this is the result. The same result as alcohol prohibition gave us, except amplified because instead of a short 15 or so years, its been going on for generations now.

Frankly, every single one of those drug warriers who created this situation deserve to be strung up from their necks in appreciation for the mess they made while trying and failing to control people's desires.

Re:Same as the US TLAs

[meta-monkey]

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.