A new video that surfaced on social media claims to show members of Coahuila State Police and the Mexican Military executing injured cartel gunmen after a firefight. Government officials claim it is all a smear campaign financed by the Zetas cartel.
The video shows various men dressed in tactical uniforms walking around a pickup truck with some gunmen lying on the floor. While the video doesn’t show the cops faces or them shooting anyone, multiple gunshots are heard in the audio along with men screaming in Spanish “He’s still alive … kill him now, send him to (expletive)”.
As previously reported by El Diario De Coahuila, the government of that state denied the claims raised by the video stating that the video is false and was disseminated by reporters working for the Zetas. The video was from a military operation that the state police had arrived to assist.
“All of the videos that they have shown of the GATES (Coahuila’s SWAT Team) are false, we analyzed them.” Coahuila Secretary of State Victor Zamora Rodriguez is quoted in the Mexican newspaper. “There is a campaign by the Zetas and their followers against the Coahuila tactical teams, I don’t know if they want for organized crime to come back to the stat and we won’t be able to go out into the streets like we used to before.”
The government official further stated that his office was turning to federal investigators a list of local reporters that were under the employment of the Zetas and had been responsible for a smear campaign against authorities in support of the criminal organization.
In Mexico, it is typical for reporters who cover crime to actually work for the cartels themselves. There is usually an individual in newsrooms who is called a “link.” This person controls the media narrative as it relates to crime coverage, cartel activities, and often local politics.
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Editor’s Note: This article is part of Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles. Ildefonso Ortiz and Breitbart Texas Managing Director Brandon Darby traveled to the Mexican border cities of Reynosa and Matamoros to recruit citizen journalists willing to risk their lives and expose the cartels silencing their communities. The writers would face certain death at the hands of the Gulf cartel if pseudonyms were not used. Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles are published in both English and in their original Spanish.