Dying For The Truth: Blog Del Narco is a Book
Das spanische Blog Del Narco schreibt seit drei Jahren detailiert über die Verbrechen im mexikanischen Drogenkrieg, die Macher trauen sich als einziges Medium in Mexiko, die eskalierende Gewalt zu dokumentieren und offenzulegen. Ich weiß nicht wirklich, ob ich das lesen kann, aber ich werd’s definitiv versuchen und hab’ mir das Ding grade auf meinen Kindle geladen.
Hidden by veils of Internet privacy due to death threats, this 30-year-old blogger has become a local hero and is documenting Mexico’s decline. She reveals the horrible savagery of the drug cartels with gruesomely graphic pictures, videos and stories of beheadings, death squads, paramilitary cops in ski masks dragging people off and public humiliation. Blog Del Narco’s highly viewed site (Alexa rated 50 in Mexico, 5,000 in the US, 128,000+ twitter following) has become an international mecca of information into a world that few have gone, and even fewer have lived to tell about. […]
Dying for the Truth addresses narco-censorship, government corruption, and an ever-rising death toll all driven by American demand for the products controlled by the cartels and their government collaborators. […] The anonymous author is the only person in Mexico daring to write the truth about the violence and corruption of the horrifying drug war in a country that is quickly becoming one of the most dangerous in the world. Her life has been threatened dozens of times, and her informants have often been killed. It’s a certainty she will be horribly murdered. Both the cartels and the government have searched for her. Her crime: reporting the truth.
Amazon: Dying for the Truth: Undercover Inside the Mexican Drug War by the Fugitive Reporters of Blog del Narco
Feral House: Dying for the Truth: Undercover Inside the Mexican Drug War by the Fugitive Reporters of Blog del Narco (Danke Moritz!)
Instruments made from mexican Drugwar-Guns play John Lennon
Vimeo Direktguns, via Designboom
Pedro Reyes hat aus 6700 Waffen aus dem Drogenkrieg in Mexiko 50 Musikinstrumente hergestellt und während einer Performance mit einer Band „Imagine“ von John Lennon darauf gespielt. Das Cover klingt einigermaßen ätzend, aber darum geht’s ja nun nicht wirklich: „Scrap metal recovered from destroyed weapons were used for making musical instruments. Both the fabrication of the instruments and the recording of this performance was sponsored by Fundación Alumnos 47, Mexico City.“
Imagine is a set of 50 musical instruments fabricated out of destroyed weapons – revolvers, shot-guns, machine-guns, etc. This work is a progression of Palas por Pistolas (2008), where 1527 weapons were melted and made into the same number of shovels to plant 1527 trees. In April this year I got a call from the [mexican] government who had learned about Palas por Pistolas, they told me a public destruction of weapons was to take place in Ciudad Juarez and asked me if I was interested in keeping the metal, which would otherwise have been buried as usual. I accepted the material but I wanted to do something new this time. 6700 weapons, cut into parts and rendered useless, were given to me and I set out to make them into instruments.
A group of 6 musicians worked for 2 weeks shoulder-to-shoulder turning these agents of death into instruments of life. The task was challenging but they succeeded in extracting sounds, from percussion to wind and string. It’s difficult to explain but the transformation was more than physical. It’s important to consider that many lives were taken with these weapons; as if a sort of exorcism was taking place the music expelled the demons they held, as well as being a requiem for lives lost.
Imagine, Designboom: an orchestra of musical instruments made from weapons by pedro reyes
Credits:
Pedro Reyes, Imagine, 2012.
Commissioned and produced by Alumnos47
Proyecto Liquido, curated by Jessica Berlanga Taylor for Alumnos47
Coordination and production, Emiliano García and Marcelo Rangel
Valenzuela
Coordination and Musical Direction, Jazmín Zepeda
Music and Instrument Designers Omar Córdova. Adrián López. Alonso
López. José Mena. Leika Mochan. Daniel Zepeda
Blacksmiths, Antonio García Salinas and Arturo Quiroz
Pablo Escobar-Shirts are a thing in Mexico
El Patrón Pablo Escobars Sohn verkauft Luxus-Shirts mit dem Konterfei seines Vaters in Mexiko. Die Dinger verkaufen sich besonders gut in den Gegenden, in denen der War on Drugs besonders heftig geführt wird.
Nearly two decades after Colombian cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar died in a hail of bullets, his eldest son is conquering new markets in Mexico – with a fashion line in his father’s image.
Sebastian Marroquin’s designer T-shirts, plastered with photos of Escobar, are hot sellers in Mexican states that are on the front lines of the country’s deadly drug war. The shirts are emblazoned with images of the Medellin cartel boss, who flooded the world with cocaine before he was shot dead in 1993. Featuring pictures from Escobar’s student ID card, driver’s license and other images, the shirts cost between $65 and $95 – a small fortune in a country where about half of the population lives in poverty.
Pablo Escobar T-shirts a hit in Mexico drug war states
Vorher auf Nerdcore:
Pablo Escobar Sticker-Album
Cocaine Inc: The Business-Model of Mexicos Sinaloa Cartel
Die NYTimes hat einen grandiosen und ziemlich langen Artikel über das mexikanische Drogenkartel und dessen Boss El Chapo. Real Life Breaking Bad oder auch die Details zu Tony Montanas Geschäftsmodell inklusive „Webcomic“ bzw. Illustrationen von Steve McNiven (Zeichner von Mark Millars „Nemesis“, viel für Marvel, das Cover von Kick-Ass #1 etc.) Im Bild links unten löst ein Subunternehmer des Sinaloa Kartells einen Konkurrenten in Säure auf. Absolutes Must-Read!
The Sinaloa cartel can buy a kilo of cocaine in the highlands of Colombia or Peru for around $2,000, then watch it accrue value as it makes its way to market. In Mexico, that kilo fetches more than $10,000. Jump the border to the United States, and it could sell wholesale for $30,000. Break it down into grams to distribute retail, and that same kilo sells for upward of $100,000 — more than its weight in gold. And that’s just cocaine. Alone among the Mexican cartels, Sinaloa is both diversified and vertically integrated, producing and exporting marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine as well.
Estimating the precise scale of Chapo’s empire is tricky, however. Statistics on underground economies are inherently speculative: cartels don’t make annual disclosures, and no auditor examines their books. Instead, we’re left with back-of-the-envelope extrapolations based on conjectural data, much of it supplied by government agencies that may have bureaucratic incentives to overplay the problem.
So in a spirit of empirical humility, we shouldn’t accept as gospel the estimate, from the Justice Department, that Colombian and Mexican cartels reap $18 billion to $39 billion from drug sales in the United States each year. (That range alone should give you pause.) Still, even if you take the lowest available numbers, Sinaloa emerges as a titanic player in the global black market. In the sober reckoning of the RAND Corporation, for instance, the gross revenue that all Mexican cartels derive from exporting drugs to the United States amounts to only $6.6 billion. By most estimates, though, Sinaloa has achieved a market share of at least 40 percent and perhaps as much as 60 percent, which means that Chapo Guzmán’s organization would appear to enjoy annual revenues of some $3 billion — comparable in terms of earnings to Netflix or, for that matter, to Facebook.
Cocaine Incorporated – How a Mexican Drug Cartel Makes Its Billions (via Reddit)
Sculptures inspired by Mexican Drug Wars
Jasper De Beijer hat eine tolle Ausstellung mit Fotografien seiner Skulpturen am Start, die von den mexikanischen Drogenkriegen und Crime-Ästhetik mit mexikanischen Mythen in knalligen Farben kombiniert. Die Artworks gibt’s auf seiner Seite, Snip von der Asya Geisberg Gallery (via Cool Hunting):
With Marabunta, De Beijer takes the paraphernalia of the Mexican drug war as his inspiration, particularly the mystical and visually obsessive interest in celebrating the flamboyant lives of its leaders and colorful deaths of its victims. De Beijer carves a world in Marabunta that is alarming, chaotic, and reverential – an unnerving amalgam of the omnipresent iconographies of death.
Dominating our news, the cartel wars in Mexico have resulted in increasingly more outrageous acts of murder and mayhem. Bodies are beheaded, covered in warnings and signs, left in broad daylight and in city centers. A pre-existing culture of skeletons and ghosts, festive and even fanciful, coincides with the idolization of these killers and criminals, resulting in gigantic extravagant mausoleums resembling churches, and a general conflation of the gaudy shrines with those of beatific martyrs and saints. De Beijer exploits these glorified graveyards and bloody scenes of murder in his hyper-detailed, entirely fantastical staged scenes. With frenetic color and texture, a frisson of the real and media-influenced, and constant hints at the fabricated nature of De Beijer’s images, the photographer never quite allows a specific point in the continuum between the real and the imagined for the viewer to land. In De Beijer’s afterworld, the characters are eerie facsimiles of living ghosts, one foot made of plastic, and a face of duct-taped tattooed texts.
The resulting strange purgatory is then multiplied: as the outsider, De Beijer forms his own mythology, interweaving distorted and refracted visions gleaned from reality. In his version of the afterlife, the dead refuse to die, and the horror of their living days shines brightly and yet ominously, refusing to be put out.
Inside the Homes of mexican Drug Lords
Die New York Times hat einen superspannenden Artikel über die Einrichtung und Architektur – „Narquitecture“! – der verlassenen und vergammelnden Häuser verhafteter Bosse mexikanischer Drogenkartells. Falls die NYTimes-Paywall zuschlägt, hier das NYTClean-Bookmarklet.
These are the palaces of legend. In Mexican novels, and in movies, the houses of the illicitly rich and infamous are louche, luxurious affairs, with toilets made of gold, mounds of cocaine or cash lying around and furniture of thronelike proportions. In the public imagination, what might be called “narquitecture” or “narco style” is all gaudy excess — part “Real Housewives,” part “Scarface,” part conquistador.
In reality, only some of this is true. As a Mexico correspondent for The New York Times, I often spend my time trying to understand shadowed worlds, from illegal immigration to drugs, and the more I’ve tried to figure out how the country’s criminal networks work, the more I’ve wondered about the people who run them: where do they live, and what is their home life really like? […]
Altogether, the homes I toured were a mixture of stereotype and dissonance. The design and the items left behind pointed to the ridiculous and the banal, with touches that were confounding or tragic. There were obvious signs of young men making and spending too much too quickly, but there were also signs of family life, danger, boredom and a conspicuous desire to appear sophisticated.
In a country as transparent as a blackout curtain, the drug dealers’ homes ultimately provided a reality check — a rare window into the illicit and personal world of Mexico’s criminal culture.
Inside the Homes of Mexico’s Alleged Drug Lords, hier die Fotogalerie: Where Home Tours Don’t Go (via Reddit)
