If a person is traveling in a car with others, one bad phone contact or chat can get the whole group kidnapped, or killed.

Cellphone chats have become death sentences in the continuing, bloody factional war inside Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel.

Cartel gunmen stop youths on the street or in their cars and demand their phones. If they find a contact who’s a member of a rival faction, a chat with a wrong word or a photo with the wrong person, the phone owner is dead.

Then, they’ll go after everyone on that person’s contact list, forming a potential chain of kidnapping, torture and death. That has left residents of Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state, afraid to even leave home at night, much less visit towns a few miles away where many have weekend retreats.

“You can’t go five minutes out of the city, … not even in daylight,” said Ismael Bojórquez, a veteran journalist in Culiacan. “Why? Because the narcos have set up roadblocks and they stop you and search through your cellphone.”

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  • oniEnglish
    6•6 hours ago

    Looking for this info in actual mexican newspapers. Can’t find something that isn’t US newspaper articles.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      4•5 hours ago

      It’s complicated:

      Threats against journalists and their sources have increased exponentially since the latest round of factional fighting broke out after two Sinaloa drug capos — one from each faction — flew to the United States and were arrested there.

      . . .

      Journalists have reported being stopped by gunmen on roadways outside Culiacan and told they couldn’t cover the continuing gunbattles happening on the outskirts of the city on an almost daily basis.

      The fear is well founded; in 2022, one of El Debate’s columnists, Luis Enrique Ramírez, was abducted and killed in Culiacan. His beaten body was found wrapped in plastic on a dirt road outside the city.