Wired Wednesday II: YouTube Drug Cartel Threat Videos

Six months ago, I reported on the alarming trend of internet affronts spawning real life violence. The morals of that post were, in brief, as follows: 1) do not allow your picture to appear on somebody else's boyfriend's Myspace page, if there is any chance his girlfriend's neighbor is a hitman; and 2) if you get into an argument during a multiplayer online game, do not provide your antagonist with your street address to "settle this in person."

To those morals I would now add the following: if you're a popular Mexican crooner, consider staying out of the narcocorrido, or "drug trafficker's ballad" genre. If you must record one, do not make a video mocking a particular drug cartel and threatening to kill its leaders. And if you do make such a video and it gets pirated on YouTube about a thousand times, and then the cartel you mocked starts posting explicit YouTube threat videos against you, consider cancelling your public appearances for a while. Valentín Elizalde didn't, and he paid the price. In fact, you can leave out most of the details and state the moral more generally thus: if a Mexican drug cartel goes to the trouble of making a YouTube video about how it's planning to kill you, that's often a clue that a Mexican drug cartel is planning to kill you.