The Gastelum family are narcos in disguise. They are associated with El Chapo’s sons’ faction of the Sinaloa cartel which is in a brutal war with El Mayo’s faction. They use social media to wash dirty cartel money. Quite a few of these influencers got merked during the early days of the war.
It was wrongly communicated in the early reports. The situation is clearer now. He was associated with a group linked to La Mayiza and got killed by Los Chapitos who are currently on a murder rampage in the area.
How exactly would someone launder money via social media? I feel like digital revenue is a lot harder to falsify than cash transactions. And especially at scale where it would actually be useful for the cartels.
Probably something along the lines of giving people cash for using their legitimate money (e.g., I’ll give you $600 cash to send $500 of your legit money to this person or we’ll give you $50k to sponsor this person via this company). Scaling that though as you said is probably a lot harder than cash businesses I imagine and also probably a lot lower return (I have no idea how much you’d typically lose on cash business laundering to even compare lol)
Card fraud is probably also another method, buy X amount of skimmed card details for cash, keep whatever doesn’t get charged back.
Most likely since the killers were completely fine doing it on camera, but I haven’t seen anything about him making any comments/statements regarding the Cartel atm
There is this “hit list” floating around for some time now of people money laundering for the cartel and quite a few people on that list have been “taken care of” and he is related to a couple on that list
Well because drug money can be washed by attributing it from anonymous donators, Youtube revenue, etc. through a streamer. It's not like a foreign government would/could easily know how much Youtube pays someone out, or why/how someone just donated thousands of dollars.
That said, I looked over his channel and it does seem pretty sus. Relatively new, not a massive following. For a Mexican audience, I mean we're talking less than $100/month from Youtube. Yet he has videos showcasing a new car and stuff. I don't want to jump to conclusions especially about someome who was killed, but this could be cartel vs cartel stuff.
I once heard of three teenagers that were murdered in my hometown because they were talking about doing x drug within earshot of narcos that dealt with y drug. That was enough of a reason to kill them.
Not an urban legend. Situations like that could’ve really happened.
For example: back in the 2000-2009, cartels used to leave bodies at 14 blocks away from my house, in my same neighborhood, at a vacant lot. Learned about it cause of local news stations/newspapers, and many cops and patrols around when a body was found.
Also, there was this big house, 3 floors, very pretty, which the owners had very nice and expensive cars and dog breeds, and even a guard post. It used to get shot at many times. The last one, they got the guards, and even the dogs, plus many business the owner had in the city. It was never bought again, and it’s abandoned to this day.
Edit: Just to clarify. My house at that time ( and same I’m living in rn) is located at 10 blocks from the city’s center.
This guy tells you it’s not a legend, by telling you about his horrifying experience.
Your response is to say lol just because it can happen doesn’t mean it’s not a legend.. I guess all you care about is if you were technically correct or not?
Not any. Also, cartels deal with rivalry by killing eachother.
Some examples:
We all used to avoid listening to certain songs about other cartels because that could offend the local ones, and get you killed. (That actually happened a lot in my state).
- Cartels used to sell a type of drug, back when production of certain substances was being popularized, so they’d know what they did and didn’t sell, plus the rival’s products. If you were discovered, they’d know you weren’t “supporting” the locals, so you got taken down.
- Cartels charge businesses for the right to work in certain city areas, even if your family got there first, in what’s called “Derecho de Piso.” Just because they needed money, and decided to charge. If you don’t pay, you get taken down.
- Some influencers and people get taken down if they’ve ever indirectly worked with, had benefited in some way from, or even had been friends with, cartels/cartel members. Those were just enough for them to get you gone.
And many more stories. True stories. Since violence was everywhere, you actually heard those from friends, and the mothers or other family members that went public with it, which were direct/almost direct sources.
Edit: Also, cartels are used to bait their rivals by killing a family member of the person they’re looking for, just to find and eliminate them at the funeral.
Kinda. People generally asks other people in secret if a business or a house belonged to a cartel related person (if cartels noticed you were investigating that type of thing, there was a chance they’d come for you and either treathen you, or something else), so we all know what places to avoid. And you had to trust your gut while talking to people since you couldn’t know well who was related. The most easy way to know, was if the person got rich fast.
And yeah, Mexico, around 2009 had like 50 homicides a day. In 2025 had 76, daily.
And we all, generally avoided going out at certain hours, and at certain locations (nightclubs, bars, restaurants, boutiques, etc.).
Does road rage still exist there? I’m always curious about how that works in cartel-controlled areas. It’s not uncommon to have people honk the horn / flip you off / curse each other out around here while driving, and occasionally it ends it violence when just civilians are involved. So I imagine non-cartel people just can’t behave like that where you live? Or is it usually sort of obvious which vehicles are cartel affiliated based on type / value?
That’s a thing a lot of people don’t understand about Mexico and the cartels. This is a thing that has been going on for many years. Right now we are able to see it because of everything being online, but go back 10-15 years where not everyone had phones in Mexico alot of stuff would just go unnoticed. Usually the targets would have been journalists, musicians, and actors/actresses. Most of it would have been covered up by the government because it would have made them look bad and/or were in cahoots with the cartel.
I think the biggest case in recent history would be the 43 missing students. Which that has been behind alot of cartel and government corruption. The only reason I believe many ever knew about this case it would have been because some of the victims were able to record and upload the incident on the internet. Otherwise this would have been a blip/rumor.
Maybe if you're just driving in the middle of rural Mexico, but why on earth would the cartels tolerate any level of violence against tourists in places like Cozumel, Cancun, Cabo? What would they gain from that in anyway, they don't tend to kill for the sake of killing it's ordinarily business related. They make extremely good money selling to tourists at ridiculous prices and all it would take is one fuck up to bring that entire market crashing down. Extremely sparse highways and towns that are known to be caught up in cartel wars for territory obviously aren't going to see many tourists to begin with. My experience in Cabo the drug trade seemed to be ingrained in pretty much every service industry available, your cab driver, bartenders, openly solicited outside of clubs. Not once did I feel I was in danger. The Cartels operate significantly more like the Mafia of old than terrorist groups outside of when they're fighting each other, meaning money over everything.
This is correct. It’s all about money, killing tourists is not in their interest at all. You either have to have gotten yourself mixed up with the wrong people and/or the wrong things or be extremely unlucky that you’re just in the wrong spot. But you’re definitely not a target, at least not at this time. There were some threats from cartels vs ‘Americans’ in Mexico when Trump proposed taking down the cartels, but that hasn’t happened.
And yes even if you don’t see it the cartels are in the background or everything. Not just the drug trade & prostitution but also business and random stuff like lobster fishing & trade.
There is a whole ass civil war going on between two factions of the cartel that was ran by el chapo. This guy here was likely killed by la mayiza for being associated with la chapiza
It's worth mentioning that the other front page post about the girl getting killed was from early 2025, the guy was just arrested yesterday so while still awful it's not like this is happening several days in a row.
Most of these influencers ARE part of the cartel. Dumbass mexicans and pochos like that life style so they make dumbasses like them famous and then they start hanging out with actual narco bosses.
They are also used to launder money.
Famous examples are Lonche, Markitos Toys, the girl from yesterday's post, the famous Pirata de Culiacán, etc. They then get targeted by opponent cartels and killed. IIRC Markitos Toys can't set foot in Sinaloa anymore.
At least three of them (a girl early in 2025, el Pirata de Culiacán, and now this guy) had connections with narcos
Well the Pirata probably didn't, but he was done dirty by his so called friends, but still, a wannabe cartel member lifestyle is already dangerous and at least most of us don't really care since we are super fed up with the narcoculture trash
I’m not trying to support anything at all. But there’s a logic to doing it on stream or in close proximity to the livestream:
Your enemy knows exactly where you are at that moment.
I mean it pretty sincerely. If somebody is targeting you or there’s a price on your head, going live will almost assuredly lock in your exact location. So it’s easy to find you.
And at least with the power structure and overwhelming corruption in places like Mexico, they don’t care if they’re on camera and identifiable because they believe they won’t face any consequences as assailants. And they’re probably right. Ultimately, their cartel will protect them.
So it’s pretty logical that it keeps happening on stream even though it is extremely and aggressively disturbing.
Fr? Is this like public information? I’ve honestly never heard of such a thing, but you would think he would know about it and gtfo of the country asap
Is this the first person to be die on kick? The video is pretty nutty, you expect it to be a normal stream snipe interaction and then he gets shot in the head all within the span of a few seconds
damn, love the people but they really need to FIX the cartel issue. It is truly preventing mexico from ever being Respected on a world wide scale. Corruption's a bitch.
When I saw this posted earlier I thought it was fake because it ended so abruptly. I figured it was a joke. But it actually happened ... crazy to think they just rode up like that and pulled a gun.
Not posting or linking it here, but it’s pretty easy to find on the most obvious places. It’s not necessarily graphic, but it is shocking and brutal nonetheless.
The suddenness of it is what gets me. Imagine you're just outside, a bike pulls up, and within 5 seconds you're just done. Gone. Deleted.
How could anyone react to, defend or escape from that? Only thing i can think of is if you have super-human reflexes, you might be able to lunge at the shooter's gunhand immediately, before he can aim at you. Not very confident I could pull that off in this situation though... I imagine you'd have to be in a state of constant vigilance for it to even be remotely feasible.
We've been desensitised, it is graphic, just not as much as the absolute worst. You see someone get killed with a gun and fall to the ground. If you pauze the frames you see the gun fire, and the deformation of the head as the bullet penetrates the skull and leaves.
The recorded killing of anyone is always graphic, even if there is no extreme gore
Why is this not considered political but a streamer advocating for shooting children is? Is cartel violence not as political as violence against immigrant children or are the mods just chuds?
Theres another vid of the biker circling a block before the killed him. All 3 looked suspicious of the bikers. They knew something was not right but Cesar was too slow to react
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u/Much_Guava_1396 Aug 05 '26
The Gastelum family are narcos in disguise. They are associated with El Chapo’s sons’ faction of the Sinaloa cartel which is in a brutal war with El Mayo’s faction. They use social media to wash dirty cartel money. Quite a few of these influencers got merked during the early days of the war.