Mexico drug cartels use gory videos to spread fear

Powerful drug cartels are increasingly using gruesome videos of executions and interrogations to intimidate their rivals, police and an already terrified public in Mexico's vicious drug war. The drug gangs, battling for control of lucrative smuggling routes into the United States, have long attached handwritten notes to victims they dump in public as a way to scare rival gangs and pesky state officials. But they are now airing more and more of their dirty work and threats on blogs or Web sites like YouTube, and bullying Mexican media into putting their gory tapes on television for wider play. The format of the tapes is often the same: captives, many bloodied from beatings, are tied up, blindfolded and posed in front of a draped sheet in an anonymous setting. Surrounded by heavily armed captors in ski-masks and guided by questioning from an off-camera voice, the captives are forced to confess allegiances to cartels or corrupt officials. Many are then murdered on-camera...more