Pubdate: Sun, 11 Feb 2007
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Section: A
Copyright: 2007 Los Angeles Times
Contact:  http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Hector Tobar, Times Staff Writer
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Mexico (Mexico)

MEXICAN DRUG WAR'S BRUTALITY CELEBRATED ON YOUTUBE

Videos of Bloodied Victims Emerge As a New Venue for Propagating the 
Mythology of the Nation's Cartels.

MEXICO CITY -- For months, video artists and videographers of varying 
skill have been peppering the Internet with a gruesome cavalcade of 
images: a woman slain in the cab of a pickup truck, an alleged Mafia 
hit man being tortured and executed, an assassinated singer's body 
splayed on a coroner's table.

Many of the videos are posted at one time or another on the website 
YouTube. They seek to cheer on or denigrate the opposing sides in 
Mexico's drug wars, the Sinaloa cartel led by Joaquin "El Chapo" 
Guzman and the Gulf cartel believed led, until recently, by Osiel 
Cardenas. Mexican authorities extradited Cardenas last month to face 
charges in a U.S. courtroom.

Last week, assassins armed with both assault weapons and cameras 
appeared to take the cultural battle to a new level. Police said two 
groups of gunmen videotaped themselves Tuesday as they killed five 
officers and two secretaries at police stations in Acapulco.

Those images have yet to surface on the Internet. But already a 
vibrant subculture has emerged to celebrate and document the deeds of 
the drug traffickers. Though many of those who post videos are 
probably not directly involved in the drug trade, explicit threats 
were made on one blog, since shut down, that were later followed by 
actual killings.

The deeds of Mexico's drug traffickers have long been celebrated in 
the folk music genre known as narcocorridos. Web video is a new venue 
for spreading the mythology, allowing people who identify with one of 
the cartels to delight in humiliating their rivals.

The videos hint at the growing mystique of the cartels, which have 
formed competing bands of hit men who purportedly have received 
paramilitary training. Although YouTube often removes the violent 
videos from its site, they usually reappear quickly. Many of the 
postings have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

"Now you can see that they're not that brave -- ha, ha, ha," one 
YouTube poster wrote in response to a four-minute video titled "Los 
Sicarios" (The Hit Men). The video shows a suspected member of the 
Gulf cartel, popularly known as the Zetas, arrested after a firefight 
in the state of Tabasco.

Handcuffed and lying on the floor, the suspect meekly asks to talk to 
his family and says, "They're going to kill me, I know I'm going to be killed."

"This is great," the YouTube poster writes in response. "Pure Sinaloa 
Productions."

Such mocking may merely be empty bluster, but other postings are not. 
In September, Marcelo Garza, a high-ranking federal investigator in 
the border state of Nuevo Leon, was assassinated 18 days after a 
blogger wrote, "We swear to you that soon we will knock him down." 
The blog accused Garza of working for a rival cartel.

In 2005, the Dallas Morning News obtained a copy of a DVD showing 
unknown kidnappers interrogating four men allegedly working for the 
Gulf cartel. One of the captives is executed on camera. A Mexican 
official told the newspaper that video was part of a rival cartel's 
"counterintelligence strategy."

The video of that killing has shown up in several YouTube postings, 
including one that threatens revenge for the killing of singer 
Valentin "The Golden Rooster" Elizalde, whose narcocorrido ballads 
were taken up as anthems to Sinaloa cartel leader Guzman.

"This is directed to all those who call themselves Zetas ... and to 
the Gulf cartel," the YouTube video begins in a hip-hop cadence. 
"You'll pay with your lives for what you did to our Golden Rooster."

A 30-second video of Elizalde's autopsy in the border city of Reynosa 
after his slaying in November circulates widely on the Internet. As 
of Wednesday, one version on YouTube had been viewed more than 850,000 times.

A YouTube spokesman said in a statement last week that the company 
relied on users to report inappropriate content. Such content is 
removed, he said.

"Real violence on YouTube is not allowed," said the spokesman, who 
declined to be identified. "If a video shows someone getting 'hurt, 
attacked or humiliated,' it will be removed as according to our 
community guidelines."

Luis Astorga, a drug trafficking analyst at the National Autonomous 
University of Mexico, said the vast majority of videos posted on 
YouTube and other sites were probably produced by people with no 
links to the cartels.

Often, reporters arrive at crime scenes before the police do. 
Officers don't always close off the area, and bystanders can shoot 
footage with the hope of selling it later. In fact, some video 
available on YouTube appears to have been filmed by police, including 
an eight-minute sequence shot from inside a jail in Tabasco state 
during a shootout.

"We're in the Palace of Justice and we're under fire," one man in the 
video says as he calls for help on his cellphone. Explosions are 
audible outside the building, and blood covers the floor.

A woman cries out, "Please, call the army!"

But the camera-wielding assassins in Acapulco on Tuesday raise the 
possibility that the cartels are beginning to take the image war 
seriously, Astorga said.

The assault was staged much like a piece of improvisational theater. 
The killers arrived in two groups of eight.

Police and news reports say they included six men dressed in military 
uniforms, complete with red berets, and two men in business suits.

The assassins told officers to hand over their weapons. (Real army 
units disarmed the corruption-tainted police in the city of Tijuana 
last month.) When the weapons had been gathered, the assassins opened fire.

"Hopefully this isn't the beginning of a spiral of macabre videos," 
Astorga said. "Perhaps this was done with the goal of impacting 
public opinion." 
- ---
MAP posted-by: Richard Lake