Without the Second Amendment protecting Americans’ right to keep and bear arms, the First Amendment is worthless. That’s not a theory. You need only look south of the border, where cartels collude with the government to prey upon disarmed citizens, to see what happens to freedom of expression when disarmed citizens are left defenseless. In Mexico, anyone who dares report on the cartels’ extra-judicial killings, torture and rape is hunted down, tortured and killed. In the following post, edited for brevity, borderlandbeat.com describes the life of the administrator of the Valor for Tamaulipas Facebook page. His story is instructive . . . [Note: some images were simply too gruesome to republish.] . . .
The administrator doesn’t want to be a hero and much less a martyr. For that, like all the other activists, he has maintained a secret identity. He only wanted to do something, to leave the side of fear and silence.
Closer to the heart is the activists that were killed in La Nena de Laredo. Maria Elizabeth Macias, a blogger of Nuevo Laredo in life, whose decapitated body appeared one morning of 2011, in the locality which she used as an online pseudonym, together with a letter that read “I am La Nena de Laredo and I am here for my reporting and yours”. (Otis: see link to article by BB reporter Ovemex about this killing).
One year later, in the same city, two activists were reported hanging from a bridge after being tortured and massacred. A letter in an envelope on one of the bodies read: “This is going to happen to everyone reporting on us on the Internet. We put this up for all to see.”
On the 1st of January 2012, a common man created the fan page “Valor por Tamaulipas.” At that moment the man became the administrator, an activist among many who denounced criminal groups such as Los Zetas and the Cartel del Golfo. On the page, the administrator then registered disappearances, situations of risk that were presented as a diary of the city, the locals that carried out business with the criminal groups.
The page belongs to a guild of tweeters such as @Agente King, @Bandolera7. amd @MrCruzStar, who had already been denouncing crime in Reynosa since 2010. It was not the first to do it, but it became the most popular site. The site took off. It had more than 200,000 followers after a year of having begun to report, writing everyday the names of those who had been “disappeared”, where the shootings were happening or which places should be avoided due to the strong influence of the criminals.
When the page started, the Cartels seemed even grateful, because they wanted someone who would inform them of the movements of their opponents, according to the administrator. He had received messages from people related to the Cartels, asking for his collaboration. He refused to help them, blocked any individual connected with drug trafficking and did not respond to any of their messages.
“And that was where the problems started”, he recalls that the first threats were soft in nature, but they escalated very rapidly. In a little while, he found accounts ghost writing that they wanted to use “his eyes on a key chain”.
In the middle of 2013 came the strongest threat ever, in the form of a flyer distributed clandestinely in Ciudad Victoria in which they offered 600,000 pesos [about $45k] to anyone who provided accurate information on the identity of the owner of Valor por Tamaulipas…. or their parents, siblings, children or wife.
“This is just free expression” said the Cartel. (Otis: see link to article on this flyer from our very own Matriach, Chivis), but in exchange for that, “money to shut the mouth of asshole pussies like these dumbasses, who believe they are heroes.” They included a telephone number and the guarantee that those who called would be anonymous, and that there was no worry that those who called would receive their money.
According to a communication that he divulged, the administrator had sent his wife and children to the United States for their security, while he continued with the denunciations.
Innocent lives were also sacrificed because of this search. In May of 2013, a partner was kidnapped, well the criminals, apparently Los Zetas – alleged that they were family members of the administrator. They weren’t, said the administrator in another communication, and it made the authorities responsible for the death by heart attack of one of the family that were kidnapped.
The same year, he received another threat:”they sent me a video of a beaten woman, and I heard a voice of a man that said that this would happen to anyone else who cooperated with me. They cut off her head in the video. Other activists like@Agente_Rey and @MrCruzStar report that they receive no more than a dozen or so denunciations by email per week, which is evidence of the popularity and influence of this site.
Of his personality, the only thing one can say is that, to his respect [the administrator] hides a certain paranoia. Carrying out work which can cause cartels to trap the activist if they make only a single mistake, it’s comprehensible.
[His motivation] is powered by the threats and blows he takes from others trying to discover his identity, like the phishing attempt in March, when an email ” that looked like and official Facebook notification” stole the passwords and took temporary control of another two sites, Esperanza por Tamaulipas and Valor por Huasteca. But he ensured that the attackers did not have access to his personal information or that of the people sending in denunciations.
“So the question is” the administrator asks, ” do we shut up or must we continue?”
At various time he has thought on shutting up. At the end of 2014 the administrator announced that he had ceded his page to another person. Another anonymous man, or woman, would take his place, I hope with certain connections to the Government and Sedena, the arrival of the denunciations to the authorities, maybe would obligate them to act. The followers of the page were divided about this was a good or bad thing, but its not important, the said transition never took place.
The administrator is still there, in the line of fire, despite the fact that he knows of few cases in which their actions have saved lives, despite the fact that the risk for him increases, and that he could join the list of bloggers and activists executed throughout the length and breadth of Tamaulipas for expressing themselves.