It was Sunday afternoon when my social media feeds began filling up with messages from Mexico. A friend in Guadalajara, the capital of the Mexican state of Jalisco, wrote that she could see smoke from her window. An acquaintance in Puerto Vallarta said he had heard explosions from his home. Suddenly, Instagram stories with the words “code red.” Videos on TikTok of tourists trapped at the airport, unsure of what was happening or when they would be able to leave. Posts on X showing images of burning vehicles.
It took me a few minutes to understand what had happened: the Mexican Army had killed Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, “El Mencho,” leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, during an operation in the mountains of Tapalpa. The most wanted figure in Mexican drug trafficking, with a $15 million bounty, had been killed.
On the ground, the cartel’s response was immediate: highway blockades with buses set ablaze, businesses on fire, and clashes with federal forces in at least eleven states. Guadalajara, which will host matches of the 2026 World Cup in just a few months, woke up on Monday with public transportation suspended, schools closed, and authorities advising people to stay home.
While all this was happening in the streets, something else was happening on our screens.
From around 10 a.m., several high-reach accounts began circulating AI-generated images showing entire cities engulfed in flames, messages claiming key infrastructure had been seized, and scenarios described as a generalized collapse. Nearly five hundred automated accounts amplified content from just three disinformation actors. Within minutes, it was unstoppable.
One of the most concrete effects occurred at Guadalajara’s airport. There was no confirmed attack. But the combination of uncertainty, rumors, and striking images was enough to trigger a stampede. Fear did not need anything to be real. It only needed to feel imminent.
Meanwhile, local Mexican media were doing their job: reporting which highways were blocked, which states were affected, and what authorities were saying. Journalists who know the territory, the sources, and the context. That information existed. It was available. But it was competing on unequal terms with something that has no newsroom, no reporters, no sources: automated disinformation. While local journalism struggles to survive, money continues to flow to the platforms that amplify precisely the opposite of what that journalism produces. It is a paradox that became painfully visible on Sunday.
This is not an accident, nor an inevitable consequence of the digital age. It is a logic that organized crime has long learned to exploit. Violence has two dimensions: the physical and the psychological. The first requires resources, coordination, and risk. The second is far cheaper. A well-distributed video, a rumor filling an information vacuum, a handful of accounts amplifying chaos: that is enough for a place that has experienced no direct incident to wake up with empty streets and closed shops. Once viral, fear does its own work. And it has an additional advantage over bullets: it has no geographic limits.
Organized crime did not build this infrastructure, but it benefits from it. Technology platforms have spent years designing systems that reward virality over accuracy and emotional reaction over context. Their owners accumulate power and political influence while local journalism, which kept the Mexican public informed on Sunday, struggles to make payroll. It is not a conspiracy. It is a business model.
What happened in Mexico on Sunday is not an isolated case. It is a pattern. The same sequence repeats itself: a real event, an information vacuum, rumors filling the gap, algorithmic amplification, a sense of total collapse. And then the tangible effects of that perception: cancellations, closed businesses, institutional decisions made under pressure, citizens paralyzed not by violence itself, but by the perception of violence.
At ICIP, we have long been convinced that building peace today also means contesting this space. That violence is now exercised through images, algorithms, and rumors. Just a few days ago, we inaugurated the exhibition “PolsXtrems” at Palau Robert in Barcelona, which addresses precisely these issues. Its central premise is simple: critical thinking is not an attitude; it is a practice. And the first exercise is the hardest: to pause. Not to share immediately. To ask where this image comes from, what we actually know, and what we are assuming.
On a Sunday when your phone is filled with messages from people you know, with smoke visible from their windows, that pause is difficult. The brain seeks quick certainty, and social media provides it instantly. But when we fail to pause, we become, unintentionally, part of the machinery. Physical violence happens in a specific place. Disinformation happens everywhere at once. And every time we share without verifying, we amplify it a little more. Mexico showed it on Sunday: the chaos was not only in the streets. It was also on our phones.
Chema Sarri, Communications Officer, ICIP