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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | February 2008 
Cartels Can Intimidate With a Click of a Mouse
 Greg Gross - San Diego Union-Tribune
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Tijuana – The drug war being waged in Mexican cities has found its way onto the Internet.
The week after a fierce battle Jan. 16 between gunmen of the Arellano Félix drug cartel and Mexican police and soldiers, an anonymous video appeared on the Web site YouTube.
The video used organizational charts from the Baja California state judicial authorities in Tijuana to identify allegedly corrupt agents by name and photograph and blame them for the shootout.
The so-called narco-corridos, Mexican folk ballads describing and in some instances celebrating drug cartels or their hired killers, were among the first drug-related offerings to migrate to the Web. They had been played on radio stations and performed in nightclubs for years, but then “narco-videos” turned up on YouTube, MySpace and other sites.
These days, the Internet also includes what many suspect are videos posted by the cartels themselves, complete with menacing taunts to rivals and authorities.
“The war over narcotics traffic is no longer only on the streets of Tijuana. Now it's in cyberspace,” said Victor Clark Alfaro, director of the Binational Center for Human Rights in Tijuana.
“And the traffickers are winning.”
Rival cartels trade threats and insults in YouTube videos, often with news images of bullet-riddled vehicles or blood-soaked corpses for emphasis.
Those exchanges often continue in the comments attached to the videos. People post comments touting a particular cartel as the bravest and most powerful – or in some cases, even the most honorable – while dismissing the other side as murderers of women and children.
The videos make reference to drug-trafficking bands in Baja California, the Mexican Gulf coast and the Mexican Pacific coast state of Sinaloa, but the videos themselves could have been posted from anywhere in the world.
Many of these exchanges are written in a tone reminiscent of students from rival high schools. Most are too profane to be reprinted.
One such video takes aim at Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the head of Mexico's Sinaloa cartel. Known by his nickname “Chapo,” which is Spanish for “shorty,” Guzmán is a blood enemy of the Arellano Félix cartel in Tijuana.
The video, uploaded by someone using a pseudonym, is straight to the point. It calls out Guzmán by name and says in English and Spanish, “you're next.”
Videos get bloody
In some cases, the Internet exchange has gone beyond threats. Cartels are suspected of producing grisly videos, some of them leaked anonymously to Mexican television stations, that depict the interrogation and slaughter of men who were apparently gunmen for rival gangs.
Typically, the videos are in Spanish, but text included in them often reflects the fondness that English-speaking Web users have for slang and shortened versions of words. For example, some of the videos substitute “ke” for the Spanish “que.”
Not all of the videos champion the cartels. Videos depicting Mexican police and soldiers battling cartel gunmen also can be found. Such videos often have anti-cartel comments attached to them.
One person, commenting on a video that claimed to show links between the Arellano Félix cartel and Tijuana city police, said in Spanish: “Be a patriot! Kill a narco! They are nothing more than traitors to the nation and merit nothing more than death.”
Said another: “Go, army! Don't leave a single narco dog alive!”
Regardless of their nature or whether they tout one of the cartels or the Mexican authorities, these videos tend to generate traffic for the video-sharing sites on which they appear. One video notched more than 150,000 views on YouTube alone.
Finding the facts in all this is a challenge. Are threatening messages aimed at one cartel really from another, or are they from someone using the anonymity of the Net to pull a prank?
Are videos that link police officers to cartels serious attempts to expose corruption, efforts to damage the reputation of honest cops, or attempts by one cartel to cripple another by exposing the rival group's link to law enforcement?
“The difficulty is separating the truth from the lies,” said Clark, who also is a professor at San Diego State University. “Part of the information could be distorted. Some of it seems exaggerated.
“But in the midst of all this, there are some truths being told.”
Arresting El Camarón
At least two videos have caught the attention of authorities in Tijuana.
One posted on YouTube last fall replays audio from a conversation that purportedly took place on May 3, 2006, between members of the Tijuana municipal police and an Arellano Félix lieutenant nicknamed “El Camarón,” the shrimp.
Those engaged in the conversation over police radios apparently were setting up an ambush of Mexican federal narcotics agents.
Federal agent Eduardo Reyes was gunned down that day, and another agent, Humberto Alvarez, was seriously wounded. The man eventually identified as El Camarón, Cuauhtémoc López, was arrested in Tijuana a year later.
YouTube has pulled some of the bloodier cartel-related videos off its site, including one of a purported drug henchman being beheaded, but scores of videos remain and people are constantly adding more.
Attempts to contact YouTube for a comment on its policies regarding such videos were unsuccessful.
On the U.S. side of the border, law enforcement officers acknowledge taking an interest in all this, though they shy away from saying how much or the lengths to which they go to track it.
“To date, DEA has not uncovered any legitimate communication among cartel member via YouTube, MySpace, etc.,” said Eileen Zeidler, a spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Administration in San Diego. “DEA routinely monitors the traffic on public Web outlets such as YouTube, MySpace.”
The DEA has been aware of such postings for about a year, Zeidler said, starting with a video that depicted a brutal beating believed to have been conducted by members of Mexico's Gulf Cartel.
What is clear, Clark said, is that the cartels are including use of the Internet as part of a larger effort to modernize their operations.
And when it comes to making use of cyberspace, they are well ahead of Mexican authorities, he said.
The video makers can be fairly confident of posting their work without being exposed.
“If you post the video from a public terminal, there's pretty much no way to break the anonymity,” said Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert based in Northern California. “If you post it from your own computer, it depends on what the particular site logs and how much effort they're willing to go through to figure out who you are.”
South of the border, that ability is limited, Clark said. Mexican law enforcement, he said, “does not have the capacity to match or to block these types of messages.” |
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