By H. Nelson Goodson
April 7, 2013
Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico - On Sunday, the administrator for the official Valor por Tamaulipas (VxT) on Facebook is apparently alive and surprised the 214k followers today after the page went live online around 1:45 p.m. in Mexico. He officially posted that his VxT, Responsabilidad por Tamaulipas (RxT) accounts will go offline permanently in eight days. The VxT administrator also announced that his Esperanza por Tamaulipas (ExT) Facebook account will remain active.
Many VxT followers had believed that the administrator had been killed after he went offline on April 1, without warning leaving many users who depended on his daily postings about risk conditions in the region in the dark. Some posted that information posted in VxT actually saved their lives by diverting them from the crime scenes or road blocks.
The VxT administrator in a lenghty post wrote, that he decided to return and explain his decision to finally go offline. He confirmed that an interim administrator for RxT Facebook, one of his accounts posted a message from VxT explaining why he went offline, but it was done without his authorization. He removed access for that user and the account is now scheduled to go offline.
He also warned that the recently cloned VxT Facebook accounts are just copies. Those accounts should not be trusted and people posting information on them should use generic accounts, so they can't be traced by criminal organizations or drug cartels operating those accounts.
Only with time, the newly online VxT clones or similar accounts can show, if information posted is credible. He also explained, that a woman collaborator in a Twitter account turned out to be affiliated with the Gulf Cartel and also worked for the Mexican military in the area. The woman almost won his confidence, but luckily he discovered the deception, but for a while provided him with some reliable information about the criminal activities of both the Gulf Cartel and the Mexican military.
The official VxT Facebook and Twitter accounts served to expose the daily criminal activities by corrupt Mexican government officials, criminal organizations and feuding drug cartels, including murders, road blocks, bombings, kidnappings, drive-by shootings and disappearances of victims.
In February, the VxT administrator was forced to move his family to the U.S. after a drug cartel offered $47k dollars ($600k pesos) for information leading to his identity, so they could eliminate him.
Currently, numerous clones of VxT have been active on the Internet, but the official VxT warned followers that those clone websites were run by criminal organizations or people trying to provide false information and attempting to imitate him.
VxT is considered one of the main reliable sources of information for people residing in the Reynosa region, since it began to post criminal activity in the area on January 1, 2012.
About 90 percent of the postings could be considered accurate and it agitated members of organized crime in the region. VxT as a watchdog, was able to get residents around the troubled areas to provide information of any illegal activity and the information was immediately posted on VxT, so followers could avoid those trouble spots.
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