How drug cartels made social-media sites like Facebook into one of their most potent weapons
Drug trafficking has been the primary focus of Mexican cartels, providing most of their obscene profits and motivating much of the bloodshed they've caused.
But as cartels have expanded into other areas of operations, and as law-enforcement efforts have forced them to seek new moneymaking ventures, those cartels have started kidnapping and extorting Mexicans with more frequency.
And social-media sites like Facebook and Twitter have been a boon to these new criminal endeavors.
"Well, the extortion business is a profitable one for organized crime. And in countries like Mexico, it's sadly pretty common that people get these threats," Tom Wainwright, the author of "Narconomics" and the Economist's former reporter in Mexico City, told Business Insider.
"And the new way of doing this, of course, is by social media."
"People get messages though Facebook or through Twitter. And the thing about Facebook is that of course the people who are extorting you know about your family," Wainwright said. "They've seen pictures of them, and they can intimidate you with these details. And so what we're seeing is an increase in that kind of extortion."
Some criminal organizations have proven to be more enthusiastic about extortion and kidnapping than others.
'Freedom to commit crime'
The scale of kidnapping and extortion in Mexico has grown so much that now people of modest means, who would not have been appealing targets for extortion in the past, are getting targeted.
"Now even street vendors, such as taco stands, are extorted in zones where the cartels hold sway," Andrew Chesnut, the Bishop Walter Sullivan Chair in Catholic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University who has done fieldwork in some hotspots for cartel activity in Mexico, told Business Insider.
"Some of my relatives in Michoacan receive so many extortion calls that they must change their phone numbers every few months," Chesnut said, "and these are middle-class professionals, who are far from affluent."