This post is part of our special coverage The Death of Osama Bin Laden [1].
As news of United States (US) Special Forces’ targeted killing of Osama Bin Laden was broadcast around the world, netizens in Mexico tweeted and blogged their responses to this signal event in the “war on terror.” Tellingly, in the vast majority of cases their language invoked the “war on drugs” that has been imposed on them by their own government since 2006.
With the tactical deployment of analysis, analogies, irony and hashtags, Mexicans put their own indelible stamp on an event with global ramifications.
On Twitter, users based in Mexico telegraphed the relevance of Bin Laden and the US-led “war on terror” to their own troubled circumstances. Abraham SC (@abraham_360 [2]), for example, drew a crisp analogy with Joaquín Guzmán Loera [3], head of the Sinaloa drug cartel:
#OsamaBinLaden es para USA lo que para #Mexico lo es el #ChapoGuzman
Speculating on the temporal horizons involved, Victor Girón (@victor_giron [4]) posed an open question:
Si #EUA se tardo 10 anos en capturar a #OsamabinLaden, Cuanto tiempo tardara #Mexico en capturar a los mas buscados traficantes de #mx
[5]Photo from the set "Mexico Drug Wars" by Nick Morris, copyright Demotix (05/03/2009).
Pilar Munoz (@mari3_1416 [6]) struck a tone both wistful and ironic:
Es oficial, #osamabinladen esta muerto! Ojala y en #Mexico tuvieramos un objetivo tan claro.
A lawyer from Campeche [7], Victor Valencia (@ViCoValEnCiA [8]), [http://twitter.com/#!/ViCoValEnCiA] wrote skeptically – and with some apprehension – about the timing of the US strike on Abbottabad:
Que coincidencia que matan a #OsamaBinLaden cuando #Obama inicia su campana de reeleccion y en #Mexico a quien matarian!!!????
A tweet by Alex Alan (@alan_weasley [9]), saturated in black humor, made tacit reference to the mass graves recently unearthed in Tamaulipas state:
A #OsamaBinLaden lo encontraron descuartizado en una fosa en San Fernando, eso de la mansion en Pakistan es puro pedo! ;) #mexico #tampico
With more characters at their disposal, bloggers were in a position to expand on the complex sentiments briefly signaled on Twitter. Writing for The Mex Files [10], Richard Grabman (a US-born resident of Mazatlan) posted under the title “‘We are the champions'…and now? On Osama Bin Ladin and Mexico”:
The government here, at the behest of the United States, targeted – and killed – any number of supposedly indispensable men in generic evil-doing business. While there's a tendency to give these groups inappropriate names like “cartels,” or ridiculously inflated bureaucratic terms like “Transnational Criminal Organizations,” the Mexican fight has been against a known – and not all that complicated – an enemy: gangsters.
Every time some “drug king-pin” has been blown away we're told it's an incredible victory for the government and the “war on drugs”… and the result is more violence, more mayhem. […]
The U.S. has supposedly been waging not a war on Al Qaida, but a “war on terror” – the abstract noun that may have on[c]e referred specifically to Bin Laden's organization, and by extension similar armed ideological movements, but has proven elastic enough to cover nearly any organized violent resistance to the status quo.[…]
What frankly scares quite a number of people here is not that the criminals might “win,” but that the state will lose legitimacy. Or, that in its infinite expansion of the “war on terror,” the United States will drop the pretense of “cooperation” and simply intervene directly in this country. Which, of course, would lead to resistance, which would be labeled “terrorism,” which would require more intervention….
A day after news of Bin Laden's death was broadcast, Blog El 5antuario [11] [es] published the post “En Mexico se le presta mas atencion al asesinato de osama bin laden que a cualquier asesinato en mexico” (”In Mexico more attention is paid to the murder of Osama Bin Laden than to any murder in Mexico”). Writing anonymously, the blogger began with an anecdote, and wound up with an argument for the singularity of the Mexican instance:
Hoy paso la peor estupidez en la television mexicana, en Televisa transmitian el programa pequenos gigantes todo iba bien era una transmision normal cuando interrumpen transmisiones (me imagino que todas las televisoras paso lo mismo) para decir “Osama Bin Ladin ha muerto.” OK ustedes diran, “bueno pues es Bin Laden.” pero sinceramente, cuantas personas mueren a diario en Mexico? sinceramente yo quisiera que cada vez que asesinan a un mexicano, ya sea sicario, narco, violador, soldado, policia federal, policia municipal, o simplemente una persona que simplemente iba pasando por la calle y le toco fuego cruzado (ya ven como pasan las cosas aqui en Mexico) quisiera que cada vez que muere un mexicano interrumpieran la programacion de Televisa, TV azteca y dijeran “hoy asesinaron a 10 mexicanos” y dedicaran por lo menos 1 minuto de atencion en los noticieros, pero lamentablemente todos sabemos que eso nunca va a pasar, gracias a iniciativa [Merida] es mas importante la muerte de una persona que la muerte de 10, 20, 30 o hasta 100 Mexicanos, lamentablemente esto pasa solo en Mexico. Por eso es mas recomendable buscar la verdadera informacion en Internet.
This post is part of our special coverage The Death of Osama Bin Laden [1].