Tamaulipas Drug Cartel Offers $600K Pesos For Twitter and Facebook Administrator

Flyers distributed by drug cartel offering $600K pesos for Valor Tamaulipas Twitter administrator in Mexico.

By H. Nelson Goodson

February 23, 2013

Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, Mexico - On Saturday, the unidentified administrator of the Facebook account "Valor por Tamaulipas" and Twitter account "Valor Tamaulipas" (VT) continued to post information regarding incidents of assaults, homicides, drug cartel road blocks and other current situations of risk affecting citizens of Tamaulipas. The VT administrator's life, including his own family have been threaten.

Recently, followers notified him through inbox that flyers began to circulate around border cities and towns in Tamaulipas from an unknown cartel or criminal organization that offered $600,000 pesos ($47,200 U.S.) for information leading to his whereabouts or members of his family. The flyer included a phone cell number to call, which would be easy to trace by Mexican federal authorities in Mexico.

The VT administrator was forced to move his family to the U.S. to keep them safe and vowed to continue to post information about situations of risk to alert his followers, which most main stream news agencies have chosen to censor due to life threats to their reporters and editors by cartels. VT has more than 25K followers in Twitter and more than 165K in Facebook.

In one of his posts dated February 13 on Facebook that included an image of the flyer offering a reward for information leading to his whereabouts or identification, he stated, that those criminals offering the reward whether from the Zetas of the Gulf Cartel shouldn't look for his family, since they are not at fault for what he decided to do regardless of the consequences and that is to report any criminal activity happening in his state of Tamaulipas. 

VT is being label a wannabe hero by those who circulated the flyer, but he doesn't consider himself a hero at all. It's his duty to report the news that no main stream news agency is willing to do for fear of losing their own lives, according to VT.

In 2011, multiple victims who used the social networks to twit or place information on Facebook and blogs have been abducted, tortured, then killed by hanging them over bridges or their bodies have been found dismembered in local city parks in the state of Tamualipas. Most of these cases, it is believed that friends or coworkers turned them in to criminal organizations for reward money.