Mexico Drug War

Cuernavaca, in the central Mexican state of Morelos, has long been known as "the city of eternal spring" because of its temperate climate. But now Mexico City's favorite getaway risks being dubbed "the city of eternal rest" for the drug violence that has left a growing number of people in permanent repose. Cuernavaca made it onto the country's narco map in December when Mexican marines killed kingpin Arturo Beltran Leyva in a shootout at a fancy downtown apartment. The subsequent battle for control of his cartel has left about 50 people dead in the area, a tally that includes six corpses with signs of torture found on the highway to Acapulco last week, though not the undetermined number in three bags of body parts tossed on a busy street in the city.

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...

Amid rampant violence and growing doubts over the effectiveness of Mexico's war against drug cartels, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday pledged widened U.S. support for a battle she said must be shouldered by both nations. Clinton, leading an unusually large delegation of senior Obama administration officials, offered firm endorsement of Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who declared war against drug cartels more than three years ago. More than 18,000 people have died since in drug-related violence.

MEXICO CITY - In the six years of outgoing President Felipe Calderon's war against drug gangs, the U.S. became a principal player in Mexico, sending drones and sniffer dogs, police trainers and intelligence agents to a country long suspicious of its powerful neighbor. Calderon, who steps down Saturday, essentially rewrote the rules under which foreign forces could act here in matters of national security. There has been relatively little public protest, reflecting the severity of a conflict that has killed tens of thousands nationwide and spread violence south into Central America - without significantly reducing the flow of drugs.

To strike back at narcotics traffickers suspected of ordering the assassination of Mexico's top drug cop, President Felipe Calderon dispatched 2,000 army troops and federal police to the gang's home base, the western state of Sinaloa. The traffickers struck back themselves with a paramilitary-style ambush of a police station, and taunted the newly arrived troops with mocking signs on the streets.

The White House, in an eagerly awaited report, has concluded that the war against drugs is still hampered by corruption and lack of punishment of drug criminals in Mexico. But the Clinton administration insists in its study that the Mexican government has taken significant steps to improve its performance. And the report, largely drafted by the office of federal anti-drug czar Gen. Barry R.

Nearly 500 people have been killed in Mexico's drug wars this year, according to media reports here, despite a crackdown on the illicit trade by President Felipe Calderon. The dead include dozens of police officers, the daughter of a retired army general, and a suspected cartel hit man in the northern city of Monterrey left with a knife sticking out of his chest and a message to local officials affixed to his body. "Attorney General: Don't be a fool," the note said.

Although the Mexican army has been able to quiet drug violence in some hot spots, political observers say the deployment of thousands of soldiers could undermine civilian institutions and jeopardize Mexico's evolving democracy. Critics say the military lacks the training and sensibilities for such work, and fear it will trample on the rights of ordinary Mexicans.

The White House announced Monday a $1.4-billion military and security package to assist Mexico and several Central American countries in their fight against drug-trafficking groups threatening the region's democracies. President Bush requested an initial $550-million appropriation from Congress, with the rest of the funds to be distributed over one or two years. The aid is to go for helicopters, police training and communications and data-processing equipment.

In a bizarre twist to a string of slayings of Mexican anti-narcotics officers, authorities said a corpse found last Saturday was not that of Jorge Garcia Vargas, the Tijuana commander of the national anti-drug agency, as had been announced. Garcia Vargas is dead, however, officials said Friday.

ECATEPEC, Mexico - As the country is driven deeper into despair, their industry coasts to success. That is the weird reality of the Mexican car-armoring business, and its top executives, like Esteban Hernandez, have spent time pondering the paradox. After all, they can't just dismiss the violence and skip off to the bank. They live here. Their families live here. Hernandez, 47, gets around town in an armored Jeep. The Colombia native is the general manager of a bulletproofing company called Auto Safe, in Mexico City, and his conscience is untroubled.

CULIACAN, Mexico - For generations, the extended Hernandez family tended fields of marijuana high in Sinaloa's western Sierra Madre highlands. They sold their crops to representatives of the Sinaloa cartel for a fraction of what the drug would bring at the U.S. border and eked out a pittance. Barefoot children never went to school; they just helped their dads with the planting and harvest. Women washed clothes in the river. They burned pine sap for light at night because there was no electricity.

What happens when being in the right place at the right time is also the wrong place at the wrong time? When what saves you could ultimately destroy you? That's the terrifying minefield that the terrific "Miss Bala" navigates in a modern-day Mexico where beauty pageants, politics, police, power and a billion-dollar drug business mingle to deadly effect. Directed with great verve by Gerardo Naranjo, and the country's Oscar entry in the foreign language category, the film takes on the bloody running turf wars of the narcotics trade from street level.

Araceli Rodriguez felt a jab of dread when her son, Luis Angel Leon, a federal police officer in Mexico City, announced that he was going on a mission in the western state of Michoacan. "I told him that Michoacan is very dangerous and that I didn't want him to go," Rodriguez recalled. Leon, 24, with two years on the force, said he could use the extra earnings. On Nov. 16, 2009 — a Monday — Leon climbed into a civilian SUV with six other officers and a driver. The group has not been heard from since.

Second of four parts G abriel Dieblas Roman took orders from cartel bosses in Mexico, hard men who ruled by fear, but he wouldn't approve a shipment without talking to a plucky, middle-aged woman from Compton. Guadalupe "Lupita" Villalobos ran a storefront botanica where Virgin of Guadalupe statuettes sat beside grinning Saint Death skeletons. She would threaten to turn neighbors into toads, and her clients believed she could divine the future by studying snail shells scattered on a tabletop.

Last year I visited a friend of mine, journalist Raúl Silva, in a working-class neighborhood of Cuernavaca. A popular destination for tourists and students of Spanish, the city, about 60 miles south of the Mexican capital, was on edge. Only a few weeks before, a drug gang had audaciously displayed its power, issuing a curfew one Friday night, warning that anyone out after 8 p.m. might be "mistaken" as an enemy and killed. A terrified public huddled indoors, and although no serious violence occurred, the incident left a deep scar.

Second of four parts G abriel Dieblas Roman took orders from cartel bosses in Mexico, hard men who ruled by fear, but he wouldn't approve a shipment without talking to a plucky, middle-aged woman from Compton. Guadalupe "Lupita" Villalobos ran a storefront botanica where Virgin of Guadalupe statuettes sat beside grinning Saint Death skeletons. She would threaten to turn neighbors into toads, and her clients believed she could divine the future by studying snail shells scattered on a tabletop.

In the week leading up to the deadline today for the Clinton administration to certify the progress of key nations in the global war on drugs, Mexico's stock market plunged, its frustration soared and its rhetoric seethed with nationalist pique. "The Mexican government does not recognize any legitimacy to the 'process of certification,' " declared Jorge Pinto, Mexico's consul general in New York. And Mexican Health Secretary Dr.

The U.S. ambassador to Mexico resigned Saturday after angering Mexican President Felipe Calderon over leaked diplomatic cables that bluntly described shortcomings in Mexico's 4-year-old war on drug cartels. Carlos Pascual, a veteran diplomat who arrived in Mexico in 2009, helped retool U.S. aid in the drug war to place greater emphasis on improving judicial institutions and civic involvement than on weaponry. But the embassy's analyses in confidential cables of Mexico's military-led drug strategy, which included praise but noted interagency rivalries and called the Mexican army "risk averse," raised hackles.