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Mexican Drug War

Ciudad Juarez
Ciudad Juarez

Mexico Drug War Update

As 2010 ticks down, Ciudad Juarez is on track to hit 3,000 murders this year, and that national toll for the year could hit 10,000.

School Paid a Salary to Alleged Mexican Drug Lord?

A man Mexican prosecutors say is one of the country's most-wanted drug kingpins has collected a salary from the Mexican school system for years, according to official documents, showing the ability of fugitives to draw support from the very government charged with capturing them. Servando "La Tuta" Gómez, a reputed leader and spokesman for the La Familia drug trafficking organization, held a tenured position at an elementary school in the central state of Michoacán and has received paychecks for 15 years.

Mexican Children Learn to Take Cover in Drug Prohibition War

Mexican officials are teaching school children how to dive for cover if they come under fire from gangs fighting over the Pacific beach city of Acapulco as drug prohibition violence reaches deeper into everyday life. At a drill in an Acapulco primary school this week, instructors used toy guns that simulated the sound of real gunfire. "Get down, let's go!" shouted an instructor as children threw themselves on the ground in classrooms and the playground and then crawled toward safety, burying their heads in their hands.

Teenage Mexican Drug Trafficking Organization Hitman Is a U.S. Citizen

The floppy-haired 14-year-old turned, like any other modern teen, to YouTube to make his confession. But unlike a typical 8th-grader, Edgar Jimenez confessed to beheading people for Mexican Drug Traffickers for the price of $2,500 each. Mexican authorities nabbed the "hit boy" known as "El Ponchis" at an airport; he was en route to Tijuana, where he and his teenage sister were planning to sneak into San Diego. Why? He's an American citizen.

Ghost Towns: Ciudad Juarez Residents Flee New Homes to Escape Drug Prohibition War Violence

Across the border from El Paso, Texas, a mass exodus triggered by a murderous prohibitionist war for drug trafficking routes into the United States has left huge swaths of Ciudad Juarez uninhabited, rocking Mexican home builders and gutting the large industrial city of its upwardly mobile working class. Residents are fleeing many towns along the Mexican border, but the migration is perhaps most acutely felt in Juarez, which until recently was among Mexico's fastest-growing cities, its industrial jobs attracting immigrants from across the country and Central America.

WikiLeaks: US Has Lost Faith in Mexico's Ability to Win Prohibitionist Drug War

WikiLeaks cables show the US has lost confidence in the Mexican army's ability to win the country's prohibitionist drug war, branding it slow, clumsy and no match for "sophisticated" narco-traffickers. Classified diplomatic information released by WikiLeaks also reveals a growing sense of alarm within Mexico's government that time is running out in the battle against organized crime and that it could "lose" entire regions. The memos detail blunders in the fight against drug traffickers and a desperate search for a new strategy to save President Felipe Calderón's administration from a bloodsoaked fiasco.