Sorry folks, Mexican drug cartel not at war with ISIS

The story claiming the notorious Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán had sent a threatening letter to terrorist leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi originates from an entertainment website and was meant as humorous fake news.

RT along with a number of major news outlets fell for the too-good-to-be-true story, which was reported this week by the popular website cartelblog.com, a source of genuine stories about Latin American crime.

Apparently the original source, which quoted alleged threats by the fugitive crime boss to the leader of the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) terrorist group is the entertainment website thuglifevideos.com, which occasionally runs humorous fake news. The El Chapo threat email was published in late November and is among those fakes.

"We write funny 'satire' stories occasionally, which we assume are taken as jokes, and generally they are...” Steve Charnock, who works for the website, told snopes.com, a website specializing in debunking fake news.

“Maybe I didn't make this El Chapo story funny or weird enough, though. Or I just have an uncanny ability to ape how Mexican drug cartel kingpins talk. Only no one seemed to doubt it when it hit the desks of all the major news outlets,” he added, joking that his website didn’t make a penny from the story’s popularity.