Juárez cartel war waged on Internet

And this goes on as New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson wants the U.S. to send aid to Mexico to fight the Drug wars , which just fuels the fire !
How about a border fence with armed guards ( IT WORKS IN ISRAEL )
elpasotimes.com

The e-mail circulated last week that warned of a violent weekend in Juárez is part of a larger trend in which the Internet has become another front in the war among Mexican drug traffickers.

Videos showing the supposed "confessions" of captured hit men, airing allegations of corruption by government officials and allegedly identifying the mysterious leader of the Juárez drug cartel for the state of Chihuahua can all be found on popular Web sites such as YouTube.com.

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Mexican drug traffickers and others have used videos posted online, often accompanied to the music of

narco-corridos, to taunt rivals, brag and pay homage to cartel leaders for years.

But in recent months, other videos have been popping up in the Internet that name allegedly corrupt police and government officials in Juárez and Chihuahua state.

"Ya basta de tantos ejecutados. Ya basta de tantos muertos inocentes. Ya basta de tanto dolor en Juaritos," stated text saying "enough" to the executions, innocent victims and the pain in Juárez on a video claiming to have been posted by a small group of honest police.

The video, which is mostly text set to music,
lists the names of police supervisors allegedly paid $5,000 a month to look the other way. It ends by stating that Chihuahua residents should protect themselves. "La policia no existe." (The police doesn't exist).

The Web postings come as Juárez has been rocked by nearly 400 homicides, including the deaths of more than a dozen police officers, including two killed over the weekend.

Tuesday evening, two men were found slain in the Loma Blanca area on the outskirts of Juárez. A sign was left behind stating that the executions of people linked to a drug trafficker would continue.

Last week, an e-mail spread around the borderland warning people to avoid going out in Juárez because the weekend would be the "bloodiest and deadliest" in city history with executions and shootings in the streets. The e-mail had some validity as the city recorded about 25 homicides in the past few days and resulted in fewer people crossing the border and caused the closing of shops and nightclubs.

The truth of any information posted online is difficult to gauge. The ones doing the postings often use aliases. And forums linked to the videos are often filled with curse-laden arguments and threats by people claiming the superiority of one drug gang over the other.

"All that stuff is mostly propaganda," said Matthew Taylor spokesman for the El Paso division of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. "The DEA doesn't have an opinion one way or the other on what's on the Internet."

Many of the Juárez-related videos name a man known as "JL" alias "Ledesma" alias "El Dos Letras" (Two Letters), who is reputed to be the top lieutenant of the drug cartel allegedly run by Vicente Carrillo Fuentes.

A high-ranking U.S. anti-narcotics official had previously said that the cartels use the Internet to spread information and misinformation.

However, "JL" was one of the suspected cartel lieutenants the official named. The other suspected lieutenant named was Pedro Sanchez, aka "El Sol" aka El Tigre," who was captured earlier this month by Mexican soldiers after a shootout in Parral, Chihuahua.

FBI spokeswoman Special Agent Andrea Simmons said that the posting of videos related to drug traffickers is part of a trend also seen by criminal groups in the United States and that law enforcement is watching.

"We try to use any kind of tool that is publicly available to our advantage. Nationwide, we have seen groups like gangs post information about themselves" online, Simmons said. She added that the FBI was not investigating the killings in Juárez.

Members of street gangs -- including those in El Paso -- can regularly be found posing with guns, throwing hand signs and boasting on their personal Web pages, such as MySpace.com.

"As the technology increases," Simmons said, "the bad guys use the technology -- use the technology just as the good guys do."