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Mexico is about to break another record for violent deaths, but that reality doesn’t appear in TikTok videos that go viral showing the culture of drug trafficking.
Tiger cubs and semi-automatic weapons. Stacks of banknotes and armored cars. Fields of poppies that are watered to the sound of songs that exalt the culture of the Mexican drug cartels. This is the world of Cartel TikTok, a video genre showing drug trafficking groups and their activities that collects hundreds of thousands of views on the popular social media platform.
But behind the tinsel narco and gang members’ dances hides a sinister reality: While Mexico is once again about to break homicide records this year, organized crime experts say Cartel TikTok is just the latest campaign. of propaganda. designed to disguise the bloodbath and show the promise of infinite wealth to attract young disposable recruits.
“It’s narcomarketing,” said Alejandra León Olvera, an anthropologist at the University of Murcia in Spain, who studies the presence of organized crime groups on social media. “They use this kind of platform to advertise themselves, but obviously, like this hedonistic advertisement.”
In Mexico, cartel content has been circulating on social networks for years and this month it started flooding TikTok channels in the United States after a segment of a speedboat chase went viral on the video sharing platform. .
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The water chase video appeared for American teens on its For You page, which recommends videos to users they might find interesting. Millions of users have “liked” and shared the segment. Their clicks sent the video up the For You section algorithm, which caused more people to watch it. And once they saw the boat chase, the algorithm started offering them segments that appeared to be from drug trafficking groups in Mexico, first dripping and then in a big wave.
“As soon as I started giving like it to that video of the boat and then there were videos of exotic animals, videos of cars, ”said Ricardo Angeles, an 18-year-old tiktoker from California interested in poster culture.
“It’s fascinating,” he said, “like watching a movie.” Others have also begun to notice the wave of video posters and post reactions to the flood of guns and luxury cars appearing on their news channels. “Did the cartels just roll out their TikTok marketing strategy?” Asked one perplexed user in a video viewed around 490,000 times. “Did the coronavirus hurt you?”
See more: The ten most dangerous cartels facing the government of Mexico
Asked about the video policy, a spokesperson for TikTok said the company “has committed to working with law enforcement to combat organized criminal activity” and that it removes “content and accounts that promote illegal activity. “. The video posters that were sent to TikTok for comment by the company were soon removed from the platform.
Although for most teen tiktokers the poster content may be new, the online depiction of narcoculture is more than a decade old, when Mexico began to double down on its bloody war against these gangs, according to Ioan Grillo, author of The narco: at the heart of the Mexican criminal uprising. At first, the videos were violent and explicit: images of beheadings and torture uploaded to YouTube to scare rival groups and show government forces the cruelty they have faced.
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But content has gotten more sophisticated with the evolution of social platforms and the acquisition of digital skills by posters. In July, a video that circulated widely on social media showed members of the violent Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel in combat clothes, with large caliber weapons and cheering on their leader along with dozens of armored vehicles marked with the initials CJNG.
This show of force appeared online at the same time that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was visiting the states that make up the cartel stronghold. “It’s like a kick, like a blow to the stomach for the government’s security strategy,” Grillo said.
López Obrador, whose campaign promised to tackle crime with “hugs not bullets” has so far failed to have a significant impact on violence in the country, which recorded 34,582 murders last year alone.
But while some videos are still produced to spread terror, others are made to show young people in the Mexican countryside the potential benefits of joining the drug trade: endless money, expensive cars, beautiful women, exotic animals …
“It’s about the dream, it’s about giving him a room,” said Ed Calderon, a security consultant and former member of the Mexican security forces. “This is what they sell.” According to Falko Ernst, a senior analyst for Mexico at the International Crisis Group, a global think tank, some of the TikTok videos could be produced by the cartel members themselves, especially young hitmen eager to show off their war booty.
However, he said, most are likely registered by lower-ranking young practitioners in groups and then spread online by friends or those aspiring to that lifestyle. But whether it’s the posters or just the would-be gangsters producing and sharing them, the ultimate goal is the same: to attract an army of young people willing to give their lives to get closer to glory. Gangs, Ernst said, depend on this “sea of youth”. While videos of gemstone guns and modified cars have been circulating on Instagram and Facebook for years, TikTok has given a new dimension to narcoculture.
See More: The video that TikTok doesn’t want you to see
“The message has to be fast, it has to be attractive and it has to be viral,” said León, the anthropologist. “Violence makes fun of itself, or we even put on music”.
One video, which attracted more than 500,000 likes before being removed, shows a farmer slicing green seed pods in a poppy field, ostensibly to harvest the resin from which heroin is made.
“Here in the sierra, pure hard-working nose,” says a voiceover. “Pure good people.”
In another video, from a now deactivated account called El clown by the CJNG, in reference to the Jalisco cartel, a silhouette dressed in black in a flak vest and AR-15 rifle performs a dance move known as Floss.
Although the videos are aimed at audiences in Mexico, for users in the United States who help promote them they harness a growing popular fascination with the world of cartels, which series like Netflix’s Narcos have propagated.
In part, this was the appeal to Angeles, the Californian teenager, whose parents had emigrated from Mexico before he was born.
While acknowledging the actual violence behind the videos, Cartel TikTok has become a way to connect with Mexican popular culture from a safe distance.
“There’s a difference between watching drug traffickers and seeing you kidnapped,” Angeles said.
The videos are also a cruel reminder of the life she might have had if her parents hadn’t looked for better opportunities across the border.
“I could have been in that lifestyle,” Angeles said. But “I’d rather be penniless and nameless than rich and famous.”
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