MEXICO CITY — Cellphone chats have become death sentences in the continuing, bloody factional war inside Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel. Cartel gunmen stop youths on the street or in their cars and demand their phones. If they find a contact who's a member of a rival faction, a chat with a wrong word or a photo with the wrong person, the phone owner is dead.
Then, they'll go after everyone on that person's contact list, forming a potential chain of kidnapping, torture and death. That has left residents of Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state, afraid to even leave home at night, much less visit towns a few miles away where many have weekend retreats. "You can't go five minutes out of the city, .
.. not even in daylight," said Ismael Bojórquez, a veteran journalist in Culiacan.
"Why? Because the narcos have set up roadblocks and they stop you and search through your cellphone." People are also reading..
. And it's not just your own chats: If a person is traveling in a car with others, one bad contact or chat can get the whole group kidnapped. That's what happened to the son of a local news photographer.
The 20-year-old was stopped with two other youths and something was found on one of their phones; all three disappeared. Calls were made and the photographer's son was finally released, but the other two were never seen again. Residents of Culiacan had long been accustomed to a day or two of violence once in a while.
The presence of the Sinaloa cartel is woven into everyday li.