However, most coverage of the Mexican narcogangs in the United States press is limited to novelty pieces about private drug cartel zoos and drug-trafficking submarines. There have been rare exceptions such as Boing Boing, and newspapers in cities with large Mexican diaspora populations such as the Los Angeles Times and border publications such as the El Paso Times have consistently provided excellent coverage. This is despite the fact that many of the worst attacks (such as the Nuevo Laredo social media killings) take place within a half hour’s drive of the border. Meanwhile, American print, web, and television media have largely ignored the massive wave of Mexican narcoviolence. Instead, the job of monitoring the lurid violence and regular havoc of the narcogangs has fallen to an active community of Twitterites, YouTube users, bulletin board posters, and “narcoblogs” such as the popular (and well protected) El Blog del Narco and Narco Trafico en Mexico. Most publications that cover narco news, such as the prestigious Proceso, do so in non-bylined articles.
#El blog del narco nuevo laredo tv#
Regular killings and death threats against Mexican reporters and media professionals–more than 80 have been killed since 2008–has all but stopped aggressive narcogang coverage by print and TV outlets. Narcos even sometimes use the same social media to send a deadly message. Apart from Castenada’s decapitation, a widely disseminated viral video showed a man being castrated, decapitated, and hacked into pieces by masked men in military-style clothing . As one New York-based figure with knowledge of the situation in Mexico tells Fast Company, “Utimately people are getting killed regularly for ‘talking,’ and the narcos seem pretty agnostic as to whether that talk is online or off.” (It’s a tactic used by The People’s Republic of China for aggressively scouring Chinese-language microblogs for political content and even by the New York Police Department, who’ve been criticized for monitoring local restaurants and websites to gauge the political involvement of the city’s Muslims). But in Mexico, media monitoring is a precursor to murder.
Gangs such as the Zetas regularly monitor social media, especially the local web forums where so much hyperlocal news is disseminated. Killing of anyone believed by narcogangs to be an opponent is one of the hallmarks of the epidemic of drug-related violence that has cost more than 35,000 people their lives in the past five years–many of them were civilians who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Just this past August, gunmen in Monterrey sealed the doors and set a casino on fire during business hours, killing at least 50.īut the fact that narcogangs are having in-house geeks ferret out anonymous social media commenters signals a deadly new digital evolution. It was one of three prominent killings of Internet users to reach mainstream media reports. They had traced the pen name back to Castenada. Thank you for your attention, respectfully, Laredo Girl … ZZZZ.” The “Z”s were the calling card of the Zetas narco gang, who claimed responsibility the Zetas believed she was reporting news about gang activity not for Primera Hora but on the Nuevo Laredo Live web forum. “For those who don’t want to believe, this happened to me because of my actions, for believing in the army and navy. “… I’m here because of my reports, and yours,” the sign stated.
A sign left next to her body referred to what her killers believed was her online identity, Laredo Girl.
Her decapitated head was on a rock nearby. In late September, police found the body of Nuevo Laredo resident Marisol Macias Castenada, a 39-year-old office manager for the city’s Primera Hora newspaper, dumped on a bridge about a mile from the U.S.