Twitter, Blogs Are New Reporters Of Mexican Drug Wars
September 27th, 2010 | by Jen |Bloggers and tweeters are filling the gaps left by traditional media in Mexico that are limiting their coverage of the country’s drug wars because of pressure from the cartels.
”Shots fired by the river, unknown number of dead,” read a recent tweet on a busy feed from the northern border city of Reynosa. ”Organised crime blockade on San Fernando road lifted,” said another. ”Just saw police officers telling a group of narcos about the positions of navy checkpoints,” ran a third.
Nothing of this kind appeared in the city’s papers which, along with most media outlets in the north-eastern state of Tamaulipas, have become better known for what they do not publish than for what they do.
Tamaulipas is one of the most intense battlegrounds of the drug wars being fought in Mexico between federal forces and at least seven cartels.
Gun fights lasting hours, grenade attacks in shopping streets, military swoops on suspected kingpins - all ignored. In one city six journalists disappeared in two days, and there was hardly a word from their terrified colleagues.
An editor of a regional paper has followed directives from the dominant local traffickers ever since a death threat was issued after a story about a shoot-out.
But every now and then she cannot resist tweeting.
This medium is not just the preserve of citizen journalists and frustrated reporters, all too aware that at least 30 Mexican journalists have been killed or have disappeared since the drug wars began in December 2006. There are also plenty of rumour-mongers, official sources and cartel propagandists.
El Blog del Narco posts the information, photographs and videos it receives unedited and without comment. The result is a catalogue of horror absent even from the national press, which still covers the violence from the relative safety of its headquarters in the capital.
Offerings last week included a video of the interrogation and execution of four alleged hit men, photographs of a car found in a coast resort with two heads on the roof and the headless bodies on the back seat, and the army’s discovery of a torture house about an hour’s drive from Mexico City.
Much of the material comes from the cartels themselves, but the anonymous administrator insisted he had no direct relationship with them.