Mexico City

When Patricia McCormick realized she didn't have a future in music, she chose a career as filled with drama, passion and death as any of the operas she longed to sing. She became a matadora, breaking long-standing barriers against women and Americans in machismo-saturated Mexican bullrings and performing before enthusiastic crowds in more than 300 fights. In 1963, Sports Illustrated wrote that McCormick "may well be the greatest woman bullfighter who ever lived. " Over more than 10 years, she was gored six times, once so brutally that a priest administered last rites over her mangled body.

MEXICO CITY -- Skull motifs. Dollar bills pasted on a wall. Phrases written in neon lights. Figures cut out of photographs. Or, if you like, a bunch of lines on paper. It's hardly surprising that the offerings at Zona Maco , the Mexico City contemporary art bazaar that opened its 10th edition Wednesday, tend to look and feel like the art for sale at any other big fair. Many of the galleries with showcases at the glitzy five-day event are visiting from established art centers like New York or Milan.

  MEXICO CITY - Mexican drug cartels are striving to become “key players in the European drugs market,”  Europol officials said Friday. Their statement , issued from Europol headquarters in the Hague, said that Mexican criminals have become “global market coordinators” in trafficking cocaine and synthetic drugs to Europe. Police officials also alleged that Mexicans were moving firearms from southeast Europe and trading them with cocaine dealers in the Americas. They also specifically cited the Zetas cartel--perhaps the most ruthless of the Mexican gangs - for reportedly trafficking human beings “for sexual exploitation” from northeast Europe to Mexico.

MEXICO CITY - The new government of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has sought to downplay the deadly violence that has long haunted much of Mexico and that he repeatedly pledged to reduce. But the country's killers aren't cooperating. Newly released statistics indicate the number of homicides related to drug trafficking and other organized crime are only marginally changed from the same period last year, a blow to the government's attempts to recast Mexico's image. On Wednesday, Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said 1,101 people were killed in March.

MEXICO CITY - Debate is intensifying over armed vigilante patrols that have sprung up in crime-plagued sections of rural Mexico, particularly in the state of Guerrero, where some patrols joined forces this week with a radical teachers union that has been wreaking havoc with massive protests, vandalism and violent confrontations with police. The two groups, on the surface, would appear to have little in common. The vigilante patrols, typically made up of masked campesinos , are among dozens that have emerged in the countryside in recent months, purporting to protect their communities from the depredations of the drug cartels.

An estimated 70,000 people have been killed in Mexico's brutal drug-cartel wars over the past six years. Those costs are horrific enough. But there are also collateral damages, including a precipitous drop-off in tourism that has dented Mexico's otherwise robust economy; a chilling effect on the Mexican media, which faces constant threats, kidnappings and worse from the warring cartels; and frequent indifference or ineptitude from the country's legal...

Mexican art and Mexican American art often have treated each other more like strangers or distant cousins than like the fraternal twins they really are. In the United States, apart from in California and the Southwest, many museums and art professionals until relatively recently tended to isolate or ignore Mexico's contributions to global movements such as Modernism or Conceptual and performance art. Similarly, in Mexico, U.S. Chicano art of...

MEXICO CITY - There were fewer riders than normal on driver Octavio Diaz's bus early Wednesday, the first day that a transit fare hike raised costs from about 4 pesos to 5 for a short trip, a difference equivalent to a mere 8 cents. But many commuters, drivers, and officials in Mexico's capital seemed to more or less agree that increases on fares for taxis and buses were to be expected considering inflation and rising gas prices. Ridership "does go down, as people get adjusted," the 39-year-old Diaz said, looking back to half-empty rows of seats on his hurtling microbus.

Designers once had to land an HGTV television gig to emerge beyond the world of coffee-table books and shelter magazines. James Magni, however, may have created another channel for getting his design message to the masses: video. Like many other designers, Magni has come out with a book -- a monograph, as some like to say -- called "Magni Modernism" (Abrams, $60), released Tuesday. With a witty introduction by Mayer Rus, the book chronicles the L.A.-based designer's 25-year career -- 240 pages of Magni-fied homes, some local (Beverly Hills, Balboa Island)

Soraya Jimenez, who won the 58-kilogram weightlifting competition at the 2000 Sydney Games to become Mexico's first female Olympic champion, died of a heart attack Thursday at her home in Mexico City. She was 35. Jimenez, who retired after numerous injuries and surgeries to her left knee. She was described in a statement by the Mexico Olympic Committee as one of her country's "most beloved athletes. " She won her gold medal with a lift of 497 pounds. Following her retirement from competition before the 2004 Athens Games, Jimenez became a broadcaster for Televisa, the largest Spanish-language media company in the world and parent of Univision in the U.S. Jimenez had been accused of doping in 2002 but was exonerated of the charges.