Mexican Drug 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.

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.

Vargas Llosa said, "Drugs have to be legalized and all the huge sums of money that currently are invested in their repression, should be put into treatment, prevention and education, as has been done for example in the case of tobacco, with great success."

A school in Colonia San Antonio was supposedly torched because school staff refused demands for payment made by drug gang extortionists. Classes were canceled indefinitely.

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.

The bodies of 31-year-old Camerino F. Corral and 27-year-old Lorenzo Renteria, both of Deming, New Mexico, were among 20 victims found in a mass grave in drug prohibition war-plagued Mexico.

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.

Hermila Garcia, 38, who became the top law enforcement officer in the town of Meoqui only two months ago, was killed as she drove to work. Her death has left some wondering if it wasn't a warning from the drug traffickers to other women, like Marisol Valles Garcia, 20, a student who became police chief of Praxedis, in the Juarez valley, also in the state of Chihuahua, home to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico's most violent drug war city.

An Associated Press investigation casts doubt on whether the crackdown on the Sinaloa Drug Trafficking Organization caused any significant impact. It still ranks near the top of Mexico's drug gangs, most of those arrested were underlings who were swiftly replaced, and the leader remains free, along with his top commanders. The findings confirm what many critics of the prohibitionist drug war have said for years: The government is quick to boast about large arrests or drug seizures, but many of its most-publicized efforts result in little, if any, slowdown in the drug trade.