Tweeting the Disappeared In Mexico

by Melissa Del Bosque

Mexico is in the midst of a kidnapping wave. No one knows how severe it is because Mexicans don’t trust the government or the police, which often collude with drug cartels; so they often don’t report the crimes. But anecdotally, Mexicans say the number of kidnappings and disappearances is rising to unprecedented levels.

In northern Mexico, besieged citizens have turned to the social networking service Twitter to find their loved ones. Working together, they’ve formed an online citizens network that collects information about the missing and “tweets” it, along with a picture of the victim, into cyberspace. One Twitter user, who prefers to remain anonymous for safety reasons, calls himself “Don Alejo” after a folk hero killed near Ciudad Victoria in 2010 by cartel henchmen. He says the group has collected approximately 250 names of kidnap victims so far. “The problems really started to begin in 2009,” he says of his home state of Tamaulipas. “Three busloads of people disappeared, and the government did nothing about it, and the media were too scared to report it.”

Since 2009, the network of citizens using Twitter to look for kidnapped individuals has grown to cover several states, including most of northern Mexico, Don Alejo says. On a typical day, Twitter users across Mexico will send out a string of messages, each with a description and a picture of the missing person. A typical notice reads like this: “Disappeared Dulce Romero Ortiz in #Xalapa #Ver 06/07/2010 Have you seen her?” Each hashtag followed by a city name means the notice will be disseminated to Twitter users in those towns. Sometimes they get lucky. “We have found children with a parent in another town and girls that have run away from home,” Alejo says. Last year they helped locate a teenager from Tapachula, Chiapas, in southern Mexico. “Thank you Twitteros for helping Lulu return to her house safe and sound!” wrote one Twitter user beaneath a picture of a pretty young woman in a turquoise top.

Because of their ability to organize online, social media users are frequently threatened by criminal syndicates through Twitter and on Facebook pages. Their online activity is constantly monitored. Some social media users have even been killed in the border city of Nuevo Laredo for reporting the movements of drug cartel operatives. Don Alejo said the deaths frightened people in the network, but they won’t quit. “I am threatened on a daily basis. But I do this because I love my country. No one pays us a peso for this,” he says. “I get very angry about what’s happening, and I want to help. It’s sad, but nothing will change in Mexico until the government is free of corruption. We live in the shadow of corruption.”