Why Cartels Love Roblox So Fucking Much?
By reaching platforms like TikTok, YouTube or video games like Roblox, cartels are cementing their power through a powerful international brand.
The man with the black hoodie and the big gun asks for their names: “nombre”, he says looking at the men kneeled before him. After one of them says his name, the man in black picks up his machine-gun, points it out to them and blasts a furious rain of fire. The kneeled men fall one by one leaving blood stains all over.
This wouldn't be an uncommon scene for anyone following cartel videos on social media, but this scene didn’t happen in the streets of Mexico, but in the fictional world of Roblox.
On a different video the squared bold characters of Roblox depict an operation by the Mayo Zambada faction of the Sinaloa Cartel, known as Operativa MZ. In the video an army of heavily armed Roblox characters stand in front of a convoy of white Hummer SUVs. The song speaks about a man known as ‘El Tigre Flechas’, allegedly a commander for ‘El Mayo’ Zambada in northern Mexico.
The following lyrics are heard in the video: "With my armed men we leave no one behind, and for a blank shot know that I am very heavy, with a haughty scar wherever we start with my armed men, and if we have to fight then we fight. I hold the baton by nickname. I am the tiger, to make it clear.”
Roblox is a virtual universe created in 2006 that allows users to easily customize characters and create virtual worlds inside the same universe.
Mexican cartel propaganda has been flooding video games at least for the past decade. As more and more video games allow modifications to its characters and scenarios, games like GTA, Roblox or COD have seen an increase in game characters playing to be Sinaloa Cartel, Jalisco New Generation Cartel, the Los Zetas cartel or even more regional criminal organizations like ‘La Línea’, former armed branch to the Juarez Cartel.
But before jumping into video games or music videos, cartels used a more rudimentary way of stamping their power: narcomantas (narco-banners).
These banners, still in use, are anonymous messages left hanging from a bridge or on the sidewalk next to a public place, to either take credit for a crime, blame a different criminal organization or announce the creation of new groups.
With the arrival of the internet, much of this messaging went online, taking to YouTube, Facebook or Twitter (now X).
But as the online world gets more complex, these criminal groups have also upped their social engineering skills, taking to music videos, catchy TikTok videos and more recently video games.
I reached out to one of the accounts behind the ‘Mayo Zambada’ Roblox universe to learn more about creating video game cartels worlds.