Ciudad Juarez

The two victims rest at the same 45-degree angle, embraced by seat belts that at this moment seem an odd precaution, given the manner of death. Gunmen had pulled alongside the forest-green Chevy Tahoe on a gritty downtown street and, in broad daylight, pumped 52 shots into where the bodies now lean. Onlookers, at least 125 of them, press wordlessly against yellow police tape.

The "boy killer" who for many became a symbol of the lawlessness and social deterioration of Mexican society because of the nation's drug war was sentenced Tuesday to three years in prison for killing four people in Morelos state. Edgar Jimenez Lugo, alias "El Ponchis," was 14 when he was arrested by the Mexican army in December. The teenager admitted before news cameras at the time that he began killing at age 11 and that a cartel paid him $200 a week to do it. He claimed to have beheaded four of his victims.

A new word has been written into the lexicon of Mexico's drug war: narco-censorship. It's when reporters and editors, out of fear or caution, are forced to write what the traffickers want them to write, or to simply refrain from publishing the whole truth in a country where members of the press have been intimidated, kidnapped and killed. That big shootout the other day near a Reynosa shopping mall? Convoys of gunmen whizzed through the streets and fired on each other for hours, paralyzing the city.

Drug cartel members may be planning attacks at the U.S. border with Mexico and on U.S. Consulate offices in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, in retaliation for the arrest this week of an accused drug-cartel leader, the consulate warned Friday. In an emergency message , the consulate Friday advised American citizens to "remain vigilant. " It said: "Information has come to light that suggests a cartel may be targeting the U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juarez or U.S. Ports of Entry.  In the past, cartels have been willing to utilize car bombs in attacks.

Four men were convicted Thursday in last year's killing of 15 people at a teen party in the border city of Ciudad Juarez. A three-judge panel delivered guilty verdicts on several counts after a two-week trial in Juarez, which in recent years has been the deadliest zone in Mexico amid spiraling drug violence. President Felipe Calderon set off national outrage when he referred to the victims of the Jan. 30, 2010, massacre as gang members. He backpedaled after it turned out they were promising students and athletes.

The streets of Juarez are swallowing the young and pretty. Monica Alanis, an 18-year-old college freshman, never came home from her exams. That was more than four months ago. Across town, 17-year-old Brenda Ponce didn't return from a job-hunting trip downtown. That was a year ago. Hilda Rivas, 16, was also last spotted downtown. That was 17 months ago. Two dozen teenage girls and young women have gone missing in this violent border city in the last year and half, stirring dark memories of the killings of hundreds of women that made Ciudad Juarez infamous a decade ago. The disappearances, which include two university students and girls as young as 13, have some crime-novel touches: mysterious dropped calls, messages left by third parties and unsubstantiated reports of the women being kept at a house.

Facing intense political pressure and demands that he resign, President Felipe Calderon traveled Thursday to Mexico's deadliest city to defend his troubled fight against drug cartels, which critics charge has only intensified the violence. Angry crowds greeted Calderon as he arrived in a heavily guarded Ciudad Juarez. The president said it was time to launch a much-discussed expansion of the drug war to include efforts aimed at tackling social issues, such as unemployment and addiction.

Drug cartel members may be planning attacks at the U.S. border with Mexico and on U.S. Consulate offices in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, in retaliation for the arrest this week of an accused drug-cartel leader, the consulate warned Friday. In an emergency message , the consulate Friday advised American citizens to "remain vigilant. " It said: "Information has come to light that suggests a cartel may be targeting the U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juarez or U.S. Ports of Entry.  In the past, cartels have been willing to utilize car bombs in attacks.

A fierce battle between rival drug gangs at a prison in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez on Wednesday left at least 20 inmates dead and three critically wounded, authorities said. It took guards, police and military reinforcements nearly three hours to contain the unrest. Black smoke drifted from the cinder-block prison and helicopters patrolled overhead as anxious families waited outside for news. Most of the victims had been beaten or stabbed to death.

A senior Ciudad Juarez police commander's bullet-riddled body was found in the same spot where an apparent hit list naming 26 officers was found days earlier, police said. Roberto Ramirez was the sixth Ciudad Juarez officer killed this week. Ramirez's body was left near a dog racetrack where the corpses of four civilians were found this week, along with the list of officers' names. It was not immediately known if Ramirez's name was on the list.

Four men were convicted Thursday in last year's killing of 15 people at a teen party in the border city of Ciudad Juarez. A three-judge panel delivered guilty verdicts on several counts after a two-week trial in Juarez, which in recent years has been the deadliest zone in Mexico amid spiraling drug violence. President Felipe Calderon set off national outrage when he referred to the victims of the Jan. 30, 2010, massacre as gang members. He backpedaled after it turned out they were promising students and athletes.

Less than a month into his job as the top police official in Mexico's most violent city, Lt. Col. Julian Leyzaola is confronting the kind of abuse allegation that dogged his similar law-enforcement stint in Tijuana. Human rights activists Monday demanded an outside investigation into the "enforced disappearance" of four civilian men March 26 in Ciudad Juarez, the northern border city with the highest drug-war death toll in the nation. Witnesses told human rights investigators that they saw police round up the men, all in their 20s, in front of a market.

A retired Mexican army officer widely credited with restoring law and order as the top police official in Tijuana was named Thursday to a similar post in Ciudad Juarez, the country's most violent city. Julian Leyzaola, who was a lieutenant colonel, was appointed public safety secretary by Ciudad Juarez Mayor Hector Murguia, who was elected last July. He takes over security in a city where fighting between drug cartels has sent killings skyrocketing, with more than 6,400 people slain since late 2006.

First they killed activist Josefina Reyes. Then her brother. Then they burned her mother's house. Two and a half weeks ago, gunmen dressed in black kidnapped Reyes' sister, sister-in-law and another brother. On Friday, their bodies were discovered, shot and dumped on the side of a windswept road in Chihuahua state. The Reyes family has become a case study of the unrelenting violence ravaging northern Mexico. Surviving relatives Friday angrily blamed government authorities for failing to protect a family "so historically aggrieved.

On an especially deadly day in Mexico's most violent city, gunmen barged into a beer joint and killed eight people, six of them waitresses. An additional 10 people were killed in other shootings in Ciudad Juarez during a 24-hour period ending early Friday. The city across the border from El Paso has been plagued by killings and kidnappings as rival drug gangs fight for control. But 18 dead in a single day seemed especially grim. The worst incident was at Las Torres Bar in a low-end commercial strip in a rough Juarez neighborhood.

During a one-day trip south of the border, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday lauded Mexico for battling drug cartels she once compared to an insurgency. Clinton said President Felipe Calderon has been "courageous" in shouldering his share of the two nations' battle against cross-border criminal networks. "This is very hard, and what President Calderon has done is absolutely necessary," Clinton said after meeting with Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa in Guanajuato, a colonial-era mining city.

? Families on Sunday mourned the victims of one of Mexico's worst shootings, weeping over the open coffins of teenagers as young as 14 as Ciudad Juarez residents expressed outrage at the surging violence. Crowding around the bodies in white and gray coffins, parents and friends sobbed as they bid farewell to the 14 people killed at a family birthday party on Friday night in the Mexican city that is the epicenter of the country's drug war. The toll rose from 13 after an 18-year-old victim died of his wounds.

Authorities in Ciudad Juarez said Monday that they have no idea what motivated a weekend shooting attack against a group of young partygoers that killed at least 16 people in the border city. The death toll rose from 14 after two more victims died Monday from wounds suffered during the assault, in which gunmen in seven vehicles sealed off the street and opened fire on a party packed with teenagers. More than a dozen people were wounded during the attack around midnight Saturday.

They go about their lives here, trying to begin anew. They want to forget about the clean-shaven assassins, the sound of gunfire, the graves and the homes they've left behind in Ciudad Juarez. A 41-year-old mother of three sees a Juarez neighbor shopping in the discount stores of downtown El Paso. She looks for a place to hide. A year earlier, she'd been shot through the neck, rushed to a hospital in Juarez and then a second one in El Paso. She had never gone back to her Juarez home.

Mexican authorities said Sunday that they had arrested the main leader of the Aztecas, a Ciudad Juarez street gang blamed for much of the violence in the troubled border city. Federal police officials in Mexico City said Arturo Gallegos Castrellon, 32, was arrested in Juarez on Saturday. They said he confessed to taking part in several high-profile slayings, including the fatal shootings of a U.S. consular staffer and two other people in March and the ambush of a teen party in January that killed 15 people.