Mexican Narcogangs' War On Digital Media

Neal Ungerleider interviewed me for a (very good) piece in Fast Company about drug cartels in Mexico, and a new assault on digital media:

“The factors that are remarkable about the narcoblog phenomenon don't exist together in any other current expression of media," Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin, who has reported regularly on narcoviolence, tells Fast Company. "You have the threat of horrific, violent consequences for publishers, if their activity falls afoul of cartel (or perhaps police or army) approval. You have huge, huge traffic and correlating ad revenue. The public is hungry for the information they publish as a matter of their own life and death, and the content is published incredibly fast and wide–but the content is traumatizing."

Meanwhile, American print, web, and television media have largely ignored the massive wave of Mexican narcoviolence. This is despite the fact that many of the worst attacks (such as the Nuevo Laredo social media killings) take place within a half hour's drive of the border. There have been rare exceptions such as Boing Boing, and newspapers in cities with large Mexican diaspora populations such as the Los Angeles Times and border publications such as the El Paso Times have consistently provided excellent coverage. However, most coverage of the Mexican narcogangs in the United States press is limited to novelty pieces about private drug cartel zoos and drug-trafficking submarines.

The big question that observers have been curious about is whether, given the porous nature of the Mexican-United States border and the narcogangs' extensive ties to the U.S. underworld, violence could spread into El Norte on a mass scale. There have already been isolated attacks in Arizona and Texas, and
an American consular worker was the subject of an attempted hit from the Sinaloa cartel. Ironically enough, Mexican narcogangs appear to be a greater threat to American homeland security than the Middle Eastern terrorists who dominate the popular discourse.