RIVALRY BETWEEN MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS SPILLS ONTO THE WEB

Blog Led To 16-Month Verbal War As Followers Traded Insults, Threats

MEXICO CITY - A journalistic posting on an Internet blog quickly
digressed into an exchange of insults between followers of the rival
Gulf and Sinaloa drug cartels and included a death threat against a
top Mexican police investigator, who was gunned down 18 days later.

The bizarre 16-month exchange of e-mails among anonymous Internet
users took analysts, police, and the blog author by surprise. Some
wondered what the development might mean for the already raging drug
fight. "It's surprising because drug trafficking is an illegal
enterprise not usually conducted in a public forum, but one aspect of
the Internet is that it's anonymous," said Jorge Chabat, a political
analyst in Mexico who specializes in the drug fight. "It's
globalization." Mr. Chabat said there's no way of knowing how much of
the back-and-forth is posturing by narco-wannabes and how much of it
constitutes real threats. "For sure, some of these people are
involved with narcos," he said. Mr. Chabat said the blog and others
like it were unlikely to have much impact on the level of cartel
violence, which already has killed about 1,500 people this year in Mexico.

The blog began May 18, 2005, with a report on the origins of the
Nuevo Laredo-based Zetas, the enforcement arm of the Gulf cartel, on
www.escolar.net. It ended when the author of the blog, Spanish
journalist Ignacio Escolar, pulled the plug Sept. 16.

Most of the more than 2,000 comments on the blog are curse-laden
macho-swagger against one cartel or the other, or boastful comments
about which of the two is besting the other in a years-old turf war.
The comments often end with "long live Zetas" or "Sinaloa rules." But
a few of the comments appear to have been made by people with inside
knowledge of the cartels, including the death threat against Marcelo
Garza y Garza, head of investigations in the state of Nuevo Leon,
which shares a border with Texas. He was killed by gunmen Sept. 5.

A U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that
the use of blogs by drug gangs or sympathizers is not entirely new
and that the greatest danger is its potential to become a recruitment
tool, a technique used by terrorist groups in the Middle East.

The Escolar blog includes a posting by a writer who identifies
himself as a former Mexican army soldier looking for work with the
narcos, but it apparently went unanswered. The blogger, who left a
cellphone number and an e-mail address, later complained that no one
had contacted him. One section of the blog refers to a video, first
reported on by The Dallas Morning News last December, in which four
members of the Zetas are interrogated by rivals and one of them is
shot in the head. The blog also refers to drug gangs in Brownsville,
Texas, and the "Mafia Mexicana de Texas."

The blog, if printed out, would cover 726 pages, although some
messages are repeated several times.

Jorge Fernandez Menendez, author of a new book on drug gangs, From
the Maras to the Zetas: the Secrets of Drug Trafficking from Colombia
to Chicago, said the blog appears to be more "bluff" than anything
else. "I can't image real narcos using blogs given that they control
lucrative businesses," said Mr. Fernandez, a popular Mexican radio
host. "Maybe people at the third or fourth level down" in the drug
organizations were posting, he said. That's certainly what Mr.
Escolar thought at first, according to his Sept. 16 posting, in which
the original blog became the subject of a new blog started by Mr. Escolar.

"I did not give it much importance until today," he wrote. "I thought
the comments were a matter of adolescents with too many
narco-corridos [songs praising narcos] in their heads. One does not
imagine a real narco boasting about who is going to be his next
victim in blog commentaries. But it seems some of those who wrote
there were serious."

Mr. Escolar referred to Mexican news reports first pointing out the
correlation between the online death threat and the killing of the
police investigator in the newspapers Vanguardia and El Norte . On
Aug. 18, a blogger filed the following post, alleging that Mr. Garza
y Garza had sold out to the Zetas, whose original members belonged to
an elite army unit who defected to the Gulf cartel in the 1990s. The
posting also referred in derogative terms to "The Hummer," "The 50,"
and "The Taliban," nicknames of reputed gunmen for the Gulf cartel.

"What's up [expletive] child-killing Zetas, we already know that
you've cut a deal with marcelo garza y garza ... but we swear that
soon we're going to crush you ... so start counting the hours
[expletive] because it's almost time." It was signed "son of the
short one" a possible reference to the reputed head of the Sinaloa
cartel, Joaquin Guzman, known as "El Chapo," or "Shorty." U.S. and
Mexican law enforcement sources have said Mr. Garza y Garza was
honest. Another post signed by "Z1," a reference to the radio code
used by the Zetas, included specific information about the brutal
beheading of a 17-year-old in Monterrey, the capital of Nuevo Leon.
"Poor kid, how he cried ... the cousin of the Lopez de la Cruz,"
referring to the last name of two brothers reputed to work for the
Sinaloa cartel as gunmen. The U.S. official who spoke on the
condition of anonymity said those two posts, at least, appeared to be
by people with detailed information about the two incidents.

In Mr. Escolar's more recent blog, opinion was mixed as to whether
the postings showed any inside information. Some said it may have
been widely known that the Sinaloa cartel had put a contract out on
Mr. Garza y Garza. Others said the relative precision of the death
threat posting shows prior knowledge. In the follow-up blog, "son of
the short one," the writer who made the death threat against Mr.
Garza y Garza, reappears on Sept. 19 and predicts a wave of
high-level kidnappings in Monterrey by the Zetas. "What idiots, you
all thought it was [false] what I was saying. ... the one talking
here is the real narco thing."

There was also debate about whether the original blog should have
been shut down at all.

With little commentary, Mr. Escobar said he had decided to shut it
down but leave all of the original postings in place.He called it
"the most surrealistic debate of the many that I have seen on my blog."

[Sidebar]

Cartel Chatter

Here is a sampling of entries from a blog, found at www.escolar.net,
that has attracted the followers of two Mexican drug cartels, the
Sinaloa cartel and the rival Gulf cartel and an affiliated armed
group, the Zetas.

"zetas rule"

Posted by z4 on Aug. 30, 2005, 12:07 a.m. "Long Live Sinaloa"

Posted by ALEJANDRO on Aug. 31, 2005, 10:24 p.m. "I want to meet the
zetas so that i can join them."

Posted by pep on Sept. 19, 2005, 4 p.m. "From what i can tell it's
some kind of adolescent narco fan club." Posted by Anonymouse on May
30, 2006, 1:47 p.m.

"i was a gafe [army special forces] and 10 days ago i left the army i
want a job so i offer my services and if you need me i will be here
waiting but the truth is don't take too long because i need the money
i am here in nuevo laredo my cel is ... ."

Posted by alfredo on Sept. 1, 2006, 11:37 p.m. "I want to be a Zeta
because i'm sick of the government how do i do that??" Posted by sapo
on Sept. 14, 2006, 5:20 p.m.