Just in case you were wondering, Mexican drug lords are following through on their promise to kill people who say things on the internet about them that they don’t like.
Now, the target is an online chat room, Nuevo Laredo en Vivo, that allows users to comment on the activities of the Zetas and others in the city on the border with Texas.
Already, three apparent site users have been slain, and a fourth victim may have been discovered Wednesday, when a man’s decapitated body was found with what residents said was a banner suggesting he was killed for posting on the site. Chat room users said they could not immediately confirm the victim’s identity, because people all post under aliases.
Despite such precautions, users are highly vulnerable, and the Zetas could be tracking them from clues they leave online, experts said Thursday…Drug cartels appear to have learned that such Internet sites reach far more readers than northeastern Mexico’s small regional newspapers and have adjusted their attacks accordingly.
“We are witnessing a new behavior of criminal forces in the country,” said Erick Fernandez, a communications professor at the IberoAmerican University in Mexico City. “We are in a new phase.”
The story goes on to note that the Mexican cartels, with hundreds of millions of dollars of dirty money at their disposal, are hiring hackers and such to obtain the identities of anonymous web denizens who dare speak till toward them so they can track them down and kill them. And here I thought Anonymous was going to protect us all from this kind of thing?