Rascatripas, a blogger and moderator of the site Nuevo Laredo En Vivo, was murdered by the drug gang Las Zetas. His body was hung from the same overpass where two other bloggers were murdered last month. According to the Houston Chronicle, a sign hung with his body said, in Spanish, “This happened to me for not understanding that I shouldn’t report on the social networks.”
One of the two bloggers murdered earlier, Elizabeth Macias, also wrote on the social media site Nuevo Laredo En Vivo.
(Update at end of story.)
In response to the alleged abduction of an Anonymous-allied Mexican hacker, that group declared war this month on Las Zetas under the code name Opcartel.
Other members of Anonymous denied there was any such action, saying it was much too dangerous and pursuing it would be irresponsible. It seems in retrospect that it was aborted.
One other casualty seems to be Barrett Brown, the representative of Anonymous for Opcartel. He has fled his Dallas home, asking for a ticket to Boston or New York. The ticket was provided by members of #OccupyDC, according to Gawker.
Although there is no evidence that the murder of Rascatripas is related to Opcartel or Anonymous directly, it is certainly a function of the same unchecked murderous strategy the cartels have used to take over significant stretches of Mexico for their own. They have frightened, bribed or otherwise suborned traditional media and law enforcement. (The latter have even arrested Twitter users for tweeting a cartel rumor.) What’s left are the bloggers and other users of social media, as Andres Monroy-Hernandez explained here in September.
Despite the vicious tactics of the cartels, Twitter and other social media tools were employed in the aftermath of the murder to communicate the news.
A post on Nuevo Laredo En Vivo after the murder was reported stated defiantly:
“Let’s continue denouncing them, now that we’ve seen it burns them, hurts them… We have to continue. We can’t give in.”
UPDATE: Eva Galperin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation left a comment on my G+ post.
“The Nuevo Laredo en Vivo twitter account has a tweet in which they deny that the murder victim was one of their moderators. If that is the case, it is no less terrifying, but it does remind us to approach initial reports with skepticism.”
“It could also be, that they do not want to be associated with the dead blogger,” I noted. “That would be sad, if understandable.”
Please note, I have no evidence aside from the Chronicle report attaching the victim to the website.
Nuevo Laredo photo by Eduardo Pavon
