In Violence-Riddled Mexico, Social Media Is King

Drug trafficking violence in Mexico rose 110 percent between 2007 and 2008, with a death toll reaching 5,600, according to a report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS). The death toll nearly doubled in 2009, soaring to 9,635 that year, alone, according to the Heritage Foundation.

Amid the violence, journalists have become a target of both the cartels and corrupt officials. Since 2000, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has recorded 61 cases of journalists murdered in Mexico, and nine other cases of disappearance since 2003.

An ensuing media blackout and watered-down stories related to drug cartels have caused many Mexican residents to turn to blogs and social media, such as YouTube and Twitter, for their news.

The medium has proven itself as being nearly immune to repercussions, because the authors and contributors can remain anonymous.

The most popular of the “Narco Blogs” is Blog Del Narco, which was started in March 2010. It began with simple YouTube posts, and now receives news updates, videos, and photographs from anonymous sources around the clock.

The author remains anonymous, yet the blog has become one of the central hubs of information regarding the Mexican drug war and brings in 3 million unique visitors each month.

“The idea of Blog Narco arises when the media and government in Mexico is trying to pretend that nothing is happening, because the media is threatened and the government is apparently bought, it was decided to create a media to inform people what happens, and to write the events exactly as they are without alterations or modifications to our convenience,” says a translated description on the blog.

Fear of Reporting

Many journalists in Mexico have become too scared to do their work and have sought ways to alter their reporting in order to avoid repercussions.

A newspaper photographer for El Diario de Juárez became the 11th journalist murdered this year in Mexico on Sept. 17. A unidentified man gunned down Luis Carlos Santiago Orozco in his car, and another journalist, Carlos Sánchez Colunga, was shot and sent to the hospital in critical condition.

The day following the attack, El Diario de Juárez, the largest newspaper in Mexico’s most violent city of Juarez, published an open letter to the cartels asking what the media needed to do in order to avoid further attacks. Orozco was the second reporter from the newspaper who was killed in the last two years.

The move has been viewed as the publication bowing to the cartels in order to avoid further violence. A translation of the article calls the cartels the “de facto authorities in this city.”

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