Our Man Broly

The name Broly comes from Dragon Ball Z—the Legendary Super Saiyan, all rage and devastation, no interiority. It’s a good name for a cartel enforcer. Less good, in retrospect, as a social media handle when you’re a confirmed member of the Knights Templar, one of Mexico’s more notoriously vicious drug cartels, posing with automatic weapons and fanned-out cash for your Instagram followers.

This is what the internet did to crime. Broly’s selfies—grinning with his crew, pesos in one hand, phone in the other—look like any aspirational lifestyle feed, except the backdrop is an actual narco war rather than a tastefully appointed apartment. The aesthetics are identical. That’s the thing that stays with you. The posturing, the hunger for validation, the carefully constructed image of abundance: indistinguishable from influencer content. Which either says something damning about influencer culture, or something damning about us for finding it surprising.

Nobody knows if Broly is still alive. That question sits under everything. Every selfie is timestamped proof of existence, posted into a future that might not include the person posting it. Most of us do this without thinking about it. For him, the stakes were more literal. The likes kept coming either way.