El Armadillo for Borderland Beat
The spawn base in Arma Reforger was the usual, players assembling loadouts, choosing vehicles, customizing their outfits, talking trash. Then somewhere in the noise, two players drifted toward each other off to the side in Spanish.
Where are you from?
Nuevo Laredo.
What part?
The second player hesitated, seemed to ignore the question. The first player asked again, relaxed, unhurried, the tone of someone who had time. Eventually a neighborhood came out.
You looking for work? Looking to make some money?
Silence. Then: no, I’m not really cut out for that kind of thing.
The first player pushed. It’s not hard, he said. Easy work.
The second player went quiet again. Then the first player backed off — alright, fine. Stick to the video game then. This exchange happened within my first few sessions on the server.
Nuevo Laredo is CDN territory. The Cartel del Noreste controls the city and runs one of the most aggressive recruitment operations on the northern border and video games are a natural avenue for their work.
The On-Ramp
Roblox has 380 million monthly active users. The majority are under 17. It is free to play, runs on phones, tablets, and consoles, and its user-generated content engine means that anyone can build anything and publish it to that audience. That openness has produced cartel servers, but it has also produced far darker things. In February 2026, investigators discovered that Jesse Van Rootselaar — the 18-year-old accused of killing eight people at a secondary school in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia — had built a mall shooting simulator in Roblox before carrying out the attack. The platform confirmed the account and removed it.
The cartel servers occupy a different and murkier category than an explicit shooting simulator. They are not preparing anyone for a specific act. They are doing something subtler and in some ways more durable: constructing a world in which cartel life is simply the organizing logic, presented to children as entertainment. The servers I visited mapped onto real geography — a Culiacan server features the Mayiza and the Chapiza, the two factions fighting over the cartel’s splintered remains, alongside the state police and federal military.
I spawned into one server and found a courtyard with a caged tiger behind steel bars, a plastic lawn chair beside a table with walkie-talkies on it, a band in glittering red suits playing under a gazebo. The blocky Roblox aesthetic sits oddly with the narco imagery.
What happens once players spawn in is less organized than the server design might suggest. There is not much communication, no visible coordination. Players pick their faction and unleash chaos on each other. But that is exactly what makes it work as a normalization engine — it does not require structure. It is aesthetic and cultural, taking the horrors of Mexico and transforming them into casual gameplay that virtually anyone can access.
GTA and the Business of Affiliation
Between Roblox’s normalization and Arma’s deep immersion sits Grand Theft Auto Online, and specifically its crews system — persistent player factions built around any name, any logo, any insignia a player wants to display. Hundreds of crews exist organized around real cartel identities, many with memberships in the hundreds. What drives recruitment into these crews is often something simple: players want to put the logo on their car. The crews system lets members display cartel insignias on vehicles, clothing and body armor, and for a significant portion of the player base, that visible affiliation is the entire point. You are not playing a game organized around cartel logic, as in Roblox, you are choosing a flag and wearing it proudly online in one of the biggest games of all time.
It is the step between passive cultural absorption and active identity performance, and it is where the InSight Crime-documented recruitment cases begin to make intuitive sense. In 2021, investigators found Mexican cartels approaching teenagers in multiplayer games including Free Fire, offering real money and arranging face-to-face meetings. A recruiter doesn’t need to explain the appeal to someone who has already chosen a logo.
Arma Reforger: Narco War Simulator
Arma Reforger is built around a single premise: realism is the point. There are no hit markers when you shoot someone. A few bullets is enough to kill. Get shot and survive and you will bleed out unless you can get patched up in time. Get caught near an explosion and the game simulates the concussive effect, your hearing cuts out, the voices of players around you grow distant and distorted, consciousness starts to slip.
The maps are large enough that getting anywhere requires vehicles, and for the cartel faction this means moving in convoy. The monstruos lead — those homemade armored trucks, steel plating welded on, some with machine guns mounted in the back, replicas of the vehicles that circulate endlessly in cartel convoy footage on Telegram and social media. Alongside them run the blindados, armored SUVs or trucks with narrow window slits, trading visibility for protection.
The insignias on these vehicles are not of just one cartel. One truck might carry CDN markings. The one behind it might carry the logo of Grupo Toros, a Gulf Cartel – Metros enforcement arm.
The military side runs properly branded army trucks, painted in the colors of the Mexican armed forces. The soldiers driving them are quiet. There is no energy on that side of the map. Nobody is here to play the government. The cartel faction draws players who want the voice chat full of narco slang, who want to run the convoy routes and coordinate with the language of the organizations they have absorbed through corridos and social media and years of following this conflict. The military, los guachos, exist in these servers because the game requires two sides. That is more or less the extent of their cultural appeal.
The objectives scattered across the maps make everything explicit. Bases are named after real locations from the history of the Mexican drug war. Rancho Izaguirre — the Jalisco extermination camp where the CJNG ran forced recruitment, training, and killing operations, discovered by families searching for the disappeared in March 2025, human remains and hundreds of pairs of shoes left behind on ten thousand square meters of Teuchitlán hillside. Don Alejo’s ranch, named for the Tamaulipas cattle rancher who in 2010 sent his workers to safety, armed himself, and died alone holding his property against a Los Zetas incursion. Players capture and hold these locations as the main objective of the game.
And through all of it, in the vehices, the radio plays real narco corridos.
One of the artists in that rotation is Makebelico. Ricardo Hernandez Medrano, also known as Comando Exclusivo, a CDN associate whose concerts and events have been used to move cartel money. In 2025, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned him. Treasury alleged he was routing half his music earnings — money from streams, shows, and licensing deals — directly to the Cartel del Noreste. Since his sanctioning, Makebelico’s music has been pulled from official streaming platforms, his corridos now live on in fan reuploads scattered across YouTube and SoundCloud.
The game runs on Xbox and PlayStation, it reaches a wide and young audience. The cartel content lives within modded community servers — the same infrastructure that hosts Brazilian favela warfare servers and, more popularly, servers built around the Russo-Ukrainian war. The cartel servers are not the most played. But they are among the most culturally specific, and the detail their builders bring to them is not accidental.
Footage from Arma circulates constantly on social media, regularly mistaken for actual combat footage by accounts spreading misinformation about various conflicts around the world. In May 2025, the Mexican outlet Latinus and journalist Carlos Loret de Mola broadcast a clip they identified as footage of a Chapiza-Mayiza confrontation in Sinaloa. Loret apologized — but his correction misidentified the source as Yemen. It was neither. It was a clip from Arma 3, the predecessor to Reforger.
Beyond the Game
The generation moving through Roblox servers and Arma bases was born into a Mexico already at war with itself. Anyone under twenty has no memory of what came before. They grew up with the narco aesthetic not as something transgressive or exotic but as reality, delivered through television, music, memes, and now the games they play after school.
The recruitment question has never been purely economic, though the economics are worth examining. After El Mencho’s killing, ledgers recovered from CJNG operations in the Tapalpa region of Jalisco showed sicarios earning just over two hundred dollars a week. Tapalpa is rural — that money stretches further than it would in Guadalajara or Mexico City. Even so, it is modest compensation for patrolling territory, being present at operations, risking imprisonment, a brutal death, or disappearance into a site like Rancho Izaguirre. The money is part of it, but a large part of the appeal is cultural, and the gaming servers are just the latest place the culture lives.
