Powerful drug cartels are increasingly using gruesome videos of executions and interrogations to intimidate their rivals, police and an already terrified public in Mexico's vicious drug war.
The drug gangs, battling for control of lucrative smuggling routes into the United States, have long attached handwritten notes to victims they dump in public as a way to scare rival gangs and pesky state officials.
But they are now airing more and more of their dirty work and threats on blogs or Web sites like YouTube, and bullying Mexican media into putting their gory tapes on television for wider play.
The aggressive media strategy raises new questions about whether President Felipe Calderon's war on drugs is making any headway in weakening the gangs and in reining in a drug trade worth up to $40 billion a year in Mexico alone.
About 28,000 people have been killed since Calderon took office in late 2006 and sent thousands of federal police and troops to crack down on the drug cartels.
While the gangs began using the bloody videos to send a message to police and rivals several years ago, they have become more common in recent months as turf wars escalate across the country, experts and police say.
The format of the tapes is often the same: captives, many bloodied from beatings, are tied up, blindfolded and posed in front of a draped sheet in an anonymous setting.
Surrounded by heavily armed captors in ski-masks and guided by questioning from an off-camera voice, the captives are forced to confess allegiances to cartels or corrupt officials. Many are then murdered on-camera.
The most explicit videos, when detected, are usually removed by major web sites like YouTube but stay posted on "narco-blogs" run by anonymous administrators.
In one video, a man with a black eye is tethered to a chair in his underwear and appears to be strangled to death with a tourniquet by his captors. There is a "Z" scrawled across his chest, for Zetas, a spinoff of the Gulf Cartel.
In another video, a man is slowly beheaded with a knife. ...
via NewsDaily: Mexico drug cartels use gory videos to spread fear.
Humans can be really disgusting animals.
1 comment:
This is materialism (greed and stupidity) at its worst. it is also the failure to understand how reality works and apply practical solutions, rather than 'political' ones which don't work but are popular: See greed, stupidity and materialism as at start of this column.
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