Social Media Becomes the New Front In Mexico's Drug War 120
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.'"
Wise criminals stay in the shadows... (Score:4, Interesting)
In any event, it is likely to get worse before it gets better.
Re:Old News (Score:3, Interesting)
Didn't all this happen 5 years ago? Why bring it up now and call it "The dark side of social media"?
It will become clear when you look at the surrounding news of NSA agreeing they spy on Americans who are "socially connected" to terrorists by a few degrees of separation.
There has to be a good reason lying around for the public mind to latch onto in order to manufacture consent. [youtube.com] I'm going to keep posting this link until you watch it and stop asking silly questions about news.
Re:Lawmakers need to do the right thing (Score:4, Interesting)
Take their main source of money away and they have to move to other enterprises to keep their organization alive.
Kidnappings-blackmail-ransom, selling organs, child prostitution, weapon trafficking, assassinations, protection rackets, robbery maybe? & etc
Depends on how far one is willing to go really.
They sell drugs because the money is easiest and they have a competitive advantage with a large organization (manufacturing, retails, supply chains, etc). If you take the drugs away the replacement rackets are lower revenue and require smaller orgs. Both factors that reduce the size of the operations.
You'll still have organized crime but not the kind that grows to the scale of a large retail chain.
Re:Lawmakers need to do the right thing (Score:0, Interesting)
I believe the consensus is that opium put china on hold for some 100-200 years and possibly moved their entire society backwards, and the strict drug policies put in place by the communist government is considered one of the only reasons china started moving forward again.
But hey, trying to get the typical "legalize drugs!" ass hat to open a history book is more or less a lost cause. They can't understand that, though some which are currently illegal should probably be legalized, there's many out there that most certainly should not be legalized.
They fail to realize the biggest problem with US drug policy isn't what's legal and what isn't, but how addicts are dealt with. They equate pot with everything else and think meth and heroin should be on the same par as pot and completely ignore the fact that these are drugs one can't use casually, and once addicted, are literally nothing but drains on society. People who you will either have to feed and supply drugs to because they're unable to work, or have them commit crimes so they can get their fix. You watch it in the media all the time, big name rock star becomes addicted to heroin, band falls apart because big name rock stars inability to show up to the studio, show up to the concert, if they do show up to the concert, inability to actually play. Access for these sorts of things shouldn't be made easier, but for damn sure, treatment should not include a felony charge keeping them from working and they should probably be put into some sort of treatment center. And they probably shouldn't be released until it's believed their chance of relapse is low. Without the felony conviction, they won't have a hard time getting a job hopefully, and be less likely to relapse by hopefully mixing with a better crowd. Of course that treatment course is based mostly on speculation.