INFO WARFARE, NARCOCORRIDOS, AND YOUTUBE

"Many of these ballads [narcocorridos, or drug trafficker's ballad] are in the classic Medieval style, and they are an anachronistic link between the earliest European poetic traditions and the world of crack cocaine and gangsta rap." Elija Wald.

"Following the model of terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda, the cartels have discovered the Web as a powerful means of transmitting threats, recruiting members and glorifying the narco-trafficker lifestyle of big money, big guns and big thrills." Manuel Roig-Franzia, writing for the Washington Post

The best way to view Mexican narcocorridos, or ballads to drug traffickers, is as a form of information warfare directed simultaneously at:

• internal/general audiences (to enhance the prestige of affiliation and attract adherents),
• the opposition (to demoralize and provoke),
• the state (to demonstrate its impotence through brazen announcements of intent).

Here's an example. The popular Mexican singer, Valentin "The Golden Rooster" Elizalde wrote a paean to the Sinaloan cartel that villified the Zetas/Gulf Cartel. The song's video was posted on YouTube (featuring bodies of killed cartel members from news clips). The Gulf Cartel/Zetas sent a return message by killing Elizalde and his manager outside a concert, punctuated by a YouTube video of Elizalde's autopsy.

Popular Infowar

Historically, information warfare was restricted to elites (government, media, parties, etc.). The onrush of Jihadi videos, political pro-war/anti-war blogs, and narcocorrido videos have categorically demonstrated that this state of affairs has changed. We now live in a world where infowarfare is accomplished by individual practitioners through an open source framework. Over time, the gap between those in the open source framework and the elites will widen in the favor of the former -- we have only scratched the surface of where this empowering technology can go.

While the new media infowar will be chaotic (as much as against each other as for or against the state), the bulk of the momentum will be with those that represent revisionist forces. Namely, those groups that want to change the status quo. Here's an example: Lee Garnett at PostPolitical notes an important transition already occurring in Narcocorridos:

However, more recent slayings have shown a marked tendency to try to transcend the limits of revenge. The videos have begun depicting the killers as vigilantes, bringing justice to the streets by killing off members of their hated rival cartels, which are depicted as the enemies of the people.

Comments

[Cavolonero]

I said we should have made a video about how we wacked Uday and Qsay ~ maybe to Jim Crose

" You don't pull on superman's cape / and you don't spit in the wind ~ You don't pull the mask off the ol' lone ranger / you don't mess around with Jim "

[adam]

Cavolonero,

Johns point is that you need something good to show for the people you're hoping to gain the support of. Assuming that this was intended to show Iraqis that the "bad guys" (dreadful phrase) were dead I have serious doubts that a video of the death of Sadaams sons would make the US look good. The depressing facts are that Uday and Qusay, with the support of Qusays' 14-year old son, held off nearly two hundred US troops from elite units and their air support for around four hours. Finally anti-tank missiles and / or an A-10 tank buster (accounts vary) were needed to blow the defenders to pieces.

In short a realistic video of their death is going be 50 to 1 odds, one of them a kid, against state of the art weapons, and they held to the last. On that basis if Hollywood was making a movie, it'd be about the defenders. Now we can easily hack up some fake footage, but at that point the whole credibility of the US propaganda machine will come into question (pause for catcalls).

To put it into American terms (my first thought was to use the end of the film "Butch and Sundance", but this is more accurate) the most memorable defeat that the Texans took was at the Alamo, and they're still proud of it. For the Sunni Iraqis a video of the deaths of these two would leave the message: "It doesn't how bad you've been in life, at the very least you can die like a man." I don't think that is the kind of propaganda the West needs right now.

Now if its for internal US consumption any old tripe will do, and it might as well not include the real people. Most Americans neither knew nor cared who either Uday or Qusay were other than them being called very naughty people by the US government.

[JDubbs]

Adam

I’m going to give Cavolonero’s comment the benefit of the doubt that it was meant as a joke.

However the idea of creating viral video to counterbalance the numerous jihadi videos in of itself isn’t a bad idea. I'll continue to use the Uday and Qusay video analogy presented(even though I think using Uday and Qusay is a bad analogy because in reality the Sunni insurgents only cared about either one of them in so-far as they could use them to advance the goals of the insurgency. I believe If the US didn’t kill them the insurgency would have eventually. The goal of the insurgency isn’t to reinstall the asshats that got you into this situation.)

One would not have to reinvent the wheel here; the entire framework is already laid out before us in the various releases from the theatre of terror. The idea would be to subvert the medium for our message. The video portion could contain footage of the numerous atrocities that the two have been known to commit and video tape themselves doing superimposed with voice over of various passages in the Koran that speak of the acts of the wicked and concluding with the pictures of their dead bodies and nasheed singing about how God’s vengeance was delivered. They idea is to recreate the grassroots look and feel to go with message that God has come through and is on the side of the righteous and has brought vindication and justice and place the goals of the Interim government in line with plan of God. The video itself would need to be distributed on an anonymous internet site or copied to DVD and placed in the Souks alongside the various other jihadi videos. We are dealing with a people that with good reason are incredibly cynical and dismissive of the State run media. So using such State television exclusively for dissemination our propaganda is at the least ineffective and at the worse counterproductive. Granted the example I’m presenting isn’t ideal, for the goal is to create a piece of viral media that places God’s will squarely on the side of the government without sounding like a piece propaganda released by the occupation nor isolating anyone other then the hardcore jihadists.

Easier said then done. And well it’s a little to late in the game to be effective. Maybe we can put the idea in our back pocket for the next war of liberation.

[Swan]

Re: the Iraq war in general

Ever since the months prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there have been a few reports in the newspapers that the Central Intelligence Agency was casting aspersions on the intelligence the White House was relying on to justify the war. The CIA has never given a position on whether the war is needed or justified or said that Bush is wrong to go to war. But doesn't it seem much more likely that the CIA is an extremely right wing organization than a left wing one? After all, even if the people working for them and at least a lot of the leadership really wanted a war for their own reasons, there are a lot of reasons for them to not want to tie their credibility to what they know is faulty information. They and their personnel, present and former, could use other means of promoting the Iraq war, and still be motivated to make the statements in the media. If the CIA got behind faulty information, they would have to make a choice between whether they would be involved in scamming the American people and the world once the military had invaded Iraq and no weapons were found- so: 1) Imagine the incredible difficulties involved in pulling off a hoax that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. Imagine all the people you would have to be able to show the weapons to- the inspectors from the UN / the international community, the American press, statesmen, etc. Then imagine the difficulties of substantiating that story to people who would examine it- the lack of witnesses to a production plant that made the weapons or to transportation operations or storage of the weapons during Hussein's regime of them. 2) If the story fell apart upon inspection or the CIA tried not to hoax it at all, imagine the loss of credibility they would suffer. The CIA, it is safe to bet, does not want to be known to the American people as a group that lies to them to send them to war. Even within the CIA there could be disagreement among people about how involved they should be in promoting the war or the neo-con agenda more broadly, so the CIA would have to worry about lying to and managing its own people after trying so hard to get them to trust their superiors in the agency, and perhaps there simply might be too many people in the agency who knew enough about what was going on in Iraq to know if someone was deceiving people to promote this war.

So there is a lot of reason to be cautious against being seen as endorsing what they knew was false intelligence even if they were very strong supporters of going to war.

[JDubbs]

Jack McGhee

What does your post have to do with INFO WARFARE, NARCOCORRIDOS, AND/OR YOUTUBE?

[Azr@el]

The strong utilize the dominant media channels, tv,radio,major print, the weak use alternate channels to reach the masses, or nowadays the "particular masses". When the strong begin to use alternative media to shape the landscape; it signals instability, not necessarily loss of power but rather that a shift is underway and that sets off a cascade of uncertainity and butt clenching amongst the sheep: i.e. not good for business as usual, not good for the status quo power, but very good for the upstarts; vandals, visgoths, spawn of al-qaeda & Iran's tug of war over the soul of islam.

P.S. Note for the observant, I didn't say the west, iran and al-qaeda's tug of war, since the west a)doesn't know the rules, b)has decided not to play c)is too tight fisted to ante in the buy( for this sort of game it's paid in blood and souls)

[french swede the rootless vegetable]

Makes me think of blatny pesny ("delinquent songs") from the ex-USSR, with icons like Vladimir Vysotsky.

They played a part in the fall of the soviet empire; music can be rather subversive.