In one of their rare e-mail interviews, the authors, apparently a computer scientist and journalism student, told French website Bakchich that “only three people knew their full identities, and that was already too much”.
Launched in March, the blog shot to fame in July after it helped lead to a major arrest, when a video posted detailed a prison warden’s system of setting inmates free at night to carry out drug cartel murders.įrance 24 tried to contact the authors of Blog del Narco to request an interview but received no response.
Operating from behind a curtain of anonymity and computer security, Blog del Narco gives a graphic inside view of the kidnappings, killings and torture carried out by Mexico’s powerful drug gangs. Our Observer, herself a blogger anonymously covering drug violence and corruption, tells us why she thinks this kind of reporting is essential to Mexican society. On Wednesday, Blog del Narco also released a book, published in English and Spanish, that details the killings in Mexico in 2010, and how the site's creators risked their lives to report on these crimes.Screenshot from a video posted on Blog del Narco, reportedly showing Mexican drug lord "El Ponchis" torturing and executing a victim.Īn anonymously run blog has become the go-to site for information on the country’s bloody drug war, covering stories that the mainstream media can’t or won’t. Lucy told The Guardian that only close family knows that the she is the person behind the blog, and that she has kept going only because she wants the truth to be known. They were disemboweled and tortured, and a sign that attributed this act to the feared Zetas Cartel, was found next to the bodies: "This is going to happen to all those Internet whistleblowers.
Lucy told The Guardian that a couple of photographers who used to collaborate for the website were found dead in September 2011. Her effort, however, is marked by the constant fear of reprisal. Its Twitter account also has almost 130,000 followers. El Blog del Narco receives nearly three million visitors every week, and is ranked as one of the 100 most read sites in Mexico. The website's numbers seem to support her. "Blog del Narco has been a window for people to know about the violent events that are taking in place in Mexico every day," Lucy wrote in a recent blog post. And at least 42 journalists have been murdered by cartels in the same time period. In Mexico, at least 60,000 people have died since 2006 because of the drug war. Since then, Lucy and a man who is in charge of the site's tech support and security have published graphic pictures and gruesome stories about cartel killings and other drug-related events, despite threats from the Mexican government and the cartels.
Lucy launched El Blog del Narco on Maduring one of the most violent years of the Mexican government military offensive against drug cartels. We are well educated, even if many (foreign) people think otherwise." "I'm in love with my culture, with my country, despite all that's going on. And I love Mexico," the blogger, who asked to be referred to as Lucy in order to protect her identity, told the newspapers in a telephone interview. I'm a woman, I'm single, I have no children. "Who am I? I'm in my mid-20s, I live in northern Mexico, I'm a journalist.