The Social Narconetwork: How Facebook Became the New Front in Mexico's Drug War Matt Stroud - The Verge
go to original April 3, 2014

A banner left at the scene of a drug war killing. Translated to English, it reads, in part, "This is what happens to thieves, kidnappers and traitors." (Anonymous photographer via Paul Eiss)

On December 16th, 2009, Arturo Beltran Leyva, leader of one of the largest and most violent illegal drug enterprises in Mexico, was killed in a shootout. An ambush, really. Orchestrated by the Mexican federal government and based on intelligence from the US, it took place in a suburb about an hour’s drive south of Mexico City, as part of a coordinated assault on the upscale apartment building where Beltran Leyva was staying. At least 200 Mexican marines were involved, along with navy helicopters and two army tanks.

But while press conference-fueled reports emerged on international newswires — not unlike those that emerged when Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera was arrested in February — Beltran Leyva’s death also received a different sort of treatment on Facebook and Twitter. In a forthcoming article in the journal Latin American Perspectives, Carnegie Mellon University historian and anthropologist Paul Eiss describes a photo of Beltran Leyva’s cadaver that circulated on social media. That photo — and its placement on Facebook and Twitter and elsewhere on the web — represents not only how social media has expanded in Mexico, Eiss says, but how that expansion has transformed the spread of information in a decades-old drug war.

Eiss calls it the narcomedia — the sharing of sometimes gruesome, terrifying messages, frequently on social media. And it’s not just the perceived bad guys sharing these messages.

Read the rest at The Verge

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