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 Technology News | February 2007 
Mexican Drug Killers Turn to YouTube
 Hector Tobar - LATimes
For months, video artists and videographers of varying skill have been peppering the Internet with a gruesome cavalcade of images: A woman slain in the cab of a pickup truck, an alleged Mafia hit man being tortured and executed, an assassinated singer's body splayed on a coroner's table.
Many of the videos are posted at one time or another on the website YouTube. They seek to cheer on or denigrate the opposing sides in Mexico's drug wars, the Sinaloa cartel led by Joaquin (El Chapo) Guzman and the Gulf cartel believed led, until recently, by Osiel Cardenas. Mexican authorities extradited Cardenas last month to face charges in a U.S. courtroom.
Last week, assassins armed with assault weapons and cameras appeared to take the cultural battle to a new level. Police said two groups of gunmen videotaped themselves Tuesday assassinating five officers and two secretaries at police stations in Acapulco.
Those images have yet to surface on the Internet. But a vibrant subculture has emerged to celebrate and document the deeds of the drug traffickers. Although many of the people who post videos probably are not directly involved in the drug trade, people made explicit threats on one blog, since shut down, that were followed by real-life killings.
The deeds of Mexico's drug traffickers have long been celebrated in the folk music genre known as "narcocorridos." The Internet video postings are a new venue to spread the mythology, and allow people who identify with one of the cartels to delight in humiliating their rivals.
Mocking might be just empty bluster, but other statements posted on the Internet are not. In September, Marcelo Garza, a high-ranking federal investigator in the border state of Nuevo Leon was assassinated 18 days after a blogger stated, "We swear to you that soon we will knock him down." The blog accused Garza of working for a rival cartel.
In 2005, The Dallas Morning News obtained a copy of a DVD showing unknown kidnappers interrogating four men allegedly working for the Gulf cartel. One of the captives is executed on camera.
The video of that killing is reproduced in several YouTube postings, including one that threatens revenge for the killing of singer Valentin (the Golden Rooster) Elizalde, whose "narcocorrido" ballads were taken up as anthems to Sinaloa cartel leader Guzman.
"This is directed to all those who call themselves Zetas ... and to the Gulf cartel," the YouTube video begins in a hip-hop cadence. "You'll pay with your lives for what you did to our Golden Rooster."
A 30-second video of Elizalde's autopsy in the border city of Reynosa after his assassination in November circulates widely on the Internet, with one version on YouTube having more than 850,000 views as of Wednesday.
Luis Astorga, a drug trafficking analyst at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, says it is likely that the vast majority of the videos posted on YouTube and other sites are produced by people with no links to the cartels themselves.
Officers don't always close off crime scenes and bystanders can shoot footage with the hope of selling it later. Indeed, some video available on YouTube appears to have been filmed by police themselves, including a dramatic eight-minute sequence shot from the inside of a jail in Tabasco during a shootout.
But the presence of camera-wielding assassins in Acapulco last week raises the possibility that the cartels themselves are beginning to take the image war seriously, Astorga said.
The assault itself was staged much like a piece of improvisational theatre. The assassins came in two groups of eight. Police and news reports say the groups included six men dressed in military uniforms complete with red berets and two men in business suits.
The assassins told officers to hand over their weapons. When the weapons had been gathered, the assassins opened fire.
"Hopefully, this isn't the beginning of a spiral of macabre videos," Astorga said. "Perhaps this was done with the goal of impacting public opinion." |
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