Warring factions in Mexico's bloody drug war are trading insults and warnings in violent videos posted online at YouTube, the Washington Post reported April 9.

Videos posted by warring cartels on the Internet site include "narcocorridos," or drug-trafficker ballads, by performers like singer Valentin Elizalde, whose hits included "To All My Enemies." The video for the song features images of shooting victims; Elizalde himself was gunned down after a concert in November.

Even more graphic are execution videos posted by rival cartels as warnings to rivals and informers; some include death threats, which also are transmitted via online chat rooms. Experts say the cartels have borrowed the tactics from Islamist terror groups like al Qaida.

The videos represent a potential gold mine of information for law enforcement, but Mexican police have been slow to monitor sites like YouTube for anti-drug intelligence. "It's a shame," said Alejandro Paez Varela, an editor at the Mexican magazine Dia Siete. "Everything's here: names, places. They even say who they are going to kill."

"Mexican law enforcement is ill-equipped to deal with this," said Andrew Teekell, an analyst at Stratfor, a private intelligence firm. "In the U.S., posting videos like that would be plain crazy -- U.S.  law enforcement has guys who do nothing but surf the Internet. But in Mexico, they can get away with it. It shows these cartels are untouchable."

YouTube removes videos marked as objectionable by viewers, but some clips reappear repeatedly. The video sharing site also has trouble keeping up with associated chats, often filled with threats written in Spanish.

Meanwhile, partly thanks to YouTube exposure, the late Elizalde has two of the three top-selling Latin albums in the U.S.