From ISIS to Los Zetas: What Will It Take to End the Online Pornography of Violence? Iain Overton - The Guardian
go to original September 7, 2015

A girl looks at blood stains and graffiti left by drug cartel gunmen at a crime scene in Monterrey, Mexico. (Tomas Bravo/Reuters)

As the world focuses on the atrocities Islamic State is carrying out in the Middle East, an equally worrying trend of videoed torture has established itself on the other side of the world, in the drug wars being fought across Mexico.

One video, put up by the Los Zetas gang in 2012 and disseminated on popular blogs and websites that track “narco killings”, begins with a woman decapitating a man while still alive. The man is then dismembered. At one point one of the sicarios, or assassins, carves the gang’s sign – the letter Z – into the stomach of the victim. The message of this, and many other videos, is loud and clear: don’t mess with Los Zetas.

Another, found this year on a confiscated mobile phone and later leaked onto the internet, shows the final minutes of a terrified man and child being blown up by dynamite strapped to their chests. It was a gang-style execution believed to be the work of the Mexican drug gang the New Generation Jalisco cartel.

The cartels have long used violence to assert their control over the drug routes from Colombia to the United States. Rival gang members and others have been burnt alive with diesel instead of petrol because diesel burns slower. People’s heads have been cut off and thrown into the center of discos. And a few years ago in southern Mexico investigators found 11 decapitated bodies stacked together, and 11 burn marks in a circle in a nearby field – the ashen remains of the victims’ heads.

The use of social media, though, to disseminate such violent messages is a relatively new and growing phenomenon. Gangs like Los Zetas now produce videos that end up on popular sites such as Blog del Narco, the drug dealer’s blog. On it you can view titles such as “3 men skinned alive & beheaded” or “Man is chain-sawed to pieces & left in a soup pot with vegetables”.

...This begs the question: why is not more being done to attack this pornography of violence?

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