Cartel Propaganda Videos - A History
They evolved from splatter movies on VHS to gunmen celebrating Easter on TikTok
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A video shows a ski-masked gangster reading a message from a sheet of a paper with dozens of hit men behind him in helmets clutching rifles and grenade launchers; it finishes with a logo of “CDN Productions,” referring to the Northeast Cartel. Another film has gunmen handing out presents to children on Three Kings Day (Reyes Magos) in cars decorated with balloons and the letters CJNG, short for the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
A far more gruesome video has men in ski masks interrogating a sobbing woman before a thug slowly hacks her head off with a machete. And in even more shocking footage, gangsters believed to be in Mexico State hold down a man, apparently an accused rapist, and gag him with a cloth while a white fighting dog, a Dogo Argentino, devours his genitals.
This is a sick subject that is uncomfortable to write about but it’s real and has a substantial impact on Mexico and various countries beyond. There is now an entire genre of what we could call “cartel propaganda videos.” Tens of thousands of examples of these videos exist on the internet from the last two decades, some on top social media sites like Instagram and TikTok, others on dark corners of the web that don’t squirm from showing gore.
The cartel video genre kicked off in Mexico in 2005 and evolved with technology from VHS tapes and DVD’s to narco blogs and social media. The content also evolved from what was initially almost all violence to messages that show the cartels as quasi-political players.
Violence on video has a curious effect. The victims are not more dead because they are beheaded or because that decapitation is recorded. Some (although probably not many) might even think it worse to be shot dead than have your genitals savaged on film. But the severe cruelty on video is alarming and strikes terror into millions beyond the direct victim. It feeds into a weird type of mediatic warfare parallel to violence on the ground.
Cartels make videos for a range of motives. Mutilation strikes fear into people and stops them snitching or makes them pay extortion. Sequences can humiliate a cartel’s enemies. Yet footage can also aim to show the cartel in a bright light as a charitable benefactor handing out goodies, which helps it buy support in communities. Or the films can get out statements for the cartel to deny a certain incident or make a specific threat against a politician.
There is an interaction between cartel propaganda and Islamic terrorist videos, and they influence each other. They also follow a shared logic of getting more intense. Simon Cottee, a criminologist at the University of Kent who studied Islamic terror propaganda, says to me: “It has a similar dynamic to pornography where it leads to more and more extremity, more and more transgression…it has that sort of demonic logic to it.”
The Original Execution Video
What could be Mexico’s first cartel propaganda video, or at least first one that gained significant attention, appeared in November 2005. It showed four alleged members of the Gulf Cartel tied up, tortured and confessing to various murders and acts of bribery. At the end, one of them is shot in the head. I interviewed a trafficker who was involved in the distribution of this film and he told me that…
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