Mexico's Drug War Takes to the Blogosphere

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Illustration by 731; Gun: Peter Dazeley/Getty Images

By Michael Riley

Anonymous, a global group of hacker-activists, has had a remarkable string of successes lately, from helping Occupy Wall Street to taking out government websites of repressive regimes in Egypt and Tunisia. But when the group this month launched a plan called OpCartel, threatening to release stolen data exposing 100 collaborators of Los Zetas, one of Mexico’s most savage drug cartels, the U.S. security firm Stratfor, among others, warned the hackers they were out of their depth. In September, the Zetas showed their displeasure with a blogger who contributed to an anti-cartel website by dumping her decapitated body near a monument in the border city of Nuevo Laredo. The victim’s detached head was wearing a pair of headphones, and a computer keyboard lay next to her torso.

Releasing information on Zeta collaborators, hacked from police data banks, would likely put the suspects on a “kill list” of rival cartels, security experts warned. Anonymous’s usually boisterous followers were divided on the wisdom of the confrontation, which was announced as a response to the alleged kidnapping of an Anonymous member in the Mexican state of Veracruz sometime before Oct. 6. “Won’t be tweeting on #OpCartel going forward,” messaged a member going by the name AnonyNewsNet. “Excuse me, while I go chainsmoke and/or feel like a coward.”

When the kidnapped activist was freed on Nov. 4 with a note from her captors threatening to kill 10 people for every name released, OpCartel was quickly called off. “We blackmailed them,” says Barrett Brown, an informal spokesman for Anonymous, noting that the Zetas don’t often release victims alive. “And they blackmailed us.”

Forty-five thousand Mexicans have been killed since 2006 and the drug war has cost the economy $120 billion in security expenditures and lost investment, according to Bulltick Capital Markets, a Miami-based investment firm that specializes in Latin America. The wreckage includes a cowed media and an out-gunned, often corrupt police force. Into the void, a new generation of young activists in Mexico is hoping to confront the cartels using social media and high tech tools that have proven effective in other movements. In conflict-torn Mexican cities, Twitter and Facebook are platforms for crowd-sourced intelligence on the drug gangs. Blogs, which don’t have editorial offices the cartels can bomb, have replaced newspapers as go-to sources. Just as important, say activists, is that social media provide a way for beleaguered citizens to fight back. “It’s a way of saying, ‘Here and no further. Even if you kill us, even if you kidnap us, we aren’t going to disappear,’ ” says Javier Valdez, who writes for Río Doce, a website chronicling cartel activity in the Pacific state of Sinaloa.

The movement began with residents in some of the country’s worst conflict zones using Twitter to track street shootouts or murder scenes in real time. Community websites began compiling those feeds as a kind of traffic report of violence. “A convoy of armed men circulating on Colosio Boulevard. Take care,” an anonymous writer warned recently on the site Nuevo Laredo en Vivo, which tracks activity in the border city south of Laredo, Tex. In Tamaulipas state, where local newspapers rarely cover cartel activity, Twitter users developed codes to indicate the level of confidence in the information they post: A2 means it’s rumors, for example; A4 indicates a witnessed event. “Twitter users have taken in their hands a kind of citizen journalism,” Rossana Reguillo, a professor at the Jesuit University of Guadalajara, said at a recent conference in the western state of Jalisco.

Over time, users have grown more daring. The editors at Nuevo Laredo en Vivo recently compiled reports to create a map of drug sale locations and suspected lookouts. The site’s contributors included Maria Elizabeth Macias, the beheaded victim, who posted under the nickname La Nena de Laredo (The Girl from Laredo). Colleagues suspect the Zetas were able to piece together information that led from Macias’ online handle to her real identity. To protect contributors, the editors of the blog Borderland Beat, which has a reputation as one of the most reliable sources of information on Mexico’s drug violence, say even they don’t know the identity of some of the site’s major contributors. Posts are often passed through intermediaries to protect secrecy. “They could be journalists, cops, politicians, maybe even cartel members themselves,” says one of the blog’s editors, who uses the nickname Buggs.