Mexico's Drug War Goes Online Thane Burnett - QMI Agency go to original September 02, 2010
CNN: A blog chronicles drug violence in Mexico, showing images the mainstream media does not. (Graphic content)
Mexico’s bloody drug war is spilling out online. As authorities revel this week over a victory in the ongoing anti-narcotics campaign — the highly publicized capture of alleged kingpin Edgar ‘La Barbie’ Villarreal — many Mexicans are turning to the ‘Narcotube’ for inside information. Twitter has become a quick way to update loved-ones on which neighborhoods to avoid, due to drug violence that has taken 28,000 lives over the past four year. Like pop culture and celebrity gossip, the web has become a publicity machine for dealers and the agencies that hunt them. And on the increasingly popular Blog del Narco, their messages come together in a shared market of propaganda. The Narco blog went up earlier this year. It’s apparently the creation of a 20-something Mexican university student who is able to straddle a deadly line — posting often-graphic content from both sides of the brutal campaign. They do so, even as mainstream journalists have been murdered and newsrooms attacked. In recent days, Narco blog coverage has weighed on the capture of ‘La Barbie’, the Texas born suspected drug lord. But you’re just as likely to read messages by drug enforcers who said of one terror operation: “We burned…families. Women were raped.” The site even links to the Facebook pages of suspected drug barons and their families. QMI Agency reached out to the student who runs Blog de Narco, however so far, he has not responded. But on his site, he points out the blog was born from frustration. “The idea of creating blog Narco arose because the media and government in Mexico is trying to pretend that nothing is happening, because the media is threatened and the government is apparently bought,” he writes in a page translated from Spanish. Boasting about three million hits a week, his blog is not the only sign that the drug campaign —like the war on terror — has a viral wing. Earlier this year, a video posted on YouTube showed 25 year old Mexican municipal policeman, Rodolfo Najera, interrogated by suspected drug dealers. They quizzed him about jail officials allowing prisoners out at night to do the dirty work for a rival drug gang. After he admitted it was true, they shot him dead. The graphic admission was covered by Blog de Narco, and led to the arrest of the prison warden. While criticized for giving a platform to assassins, the man behind Blog de Narco writes they only want to show an unbiased face of what’s happening in Mexico thane.burnett(at)sunmedia.ca
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