El Blog del Narco

Mexican Army Special Forces Squad with Barrett 50 caliber rifles in Michoacan

Daring daughter turned me on to El Blog del Narco, unfortunately it's in Spanish, my Spanish is weak (uno mas Cerveza fria, por favor, is as far as it goes), and Google's translation, while intelligible, is not easily consumed. I did find a story on Aljazeera about it, which provided this quote:

"Individuals journalists are doing the best they can, but in general I don't think the media has done a fair job in covering drug violence," says Lucila Vargas, a professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina who studies Mexico's media landscape. "The media in Mexico are commercial enterprises and their first concern is with the bottom line," she told Al Jazeera.

Of course, it isn't just the media in Mexico, main stream media everywhere follows the same rules.

I'm not sure there is anything in Narco's Blog I want to hear about. It's basically an unending stream of horror stories along with graphic pictures of the aftermath. Supposedly there is also some celebrity fluff and narco bombast. Nothing I really need. It's good that someone is recording it. In ten or twenty years it might be instructive to look back and compare the current and previous situations. Question is will we look back and say those were the good old days? Or will we be asking how things ever got so bad? This war has already been going on for four years (also from the Aljazeera story):

"Violence linked to Mexico's drug war has claimed more than 36,000 lives since President Felipe Calderon declared all-out war on cartels in December 2006."

The picture is from what I suspect is an older version of the blog that was hosted on blogspot. It hasn't been updated since September of last year. I saw a Barrett 50 caliber rifle once. I've never seen a whole squad of guys carrying them.

Update January 2016 replaced missing image, added caption.
Update January 2019 replaced missing image.