Mexican Drug War

A decade ago, they were a small group of elite Mexican soldiers who saw a chance to make a lot more money working as hitmen for powerful drug trafficking organizations. Today, the "Zetas" are the most feared gang in Mexico. Their vicious tactics, geographic reach and expansion into new illegal businesses presents a new kind of threat in a drug prohibition war that has already killed 29,000 people since late 2006.

The search continues for the body of a tourist, David Hartley, believed to have been killed on a Texas lake, which separates the United Stated from Mexico. Friends and family of Hartley held a memorial service for him, without his remains.

A convoy of hitmen ambushed a group of traffic police patrolling a Mexican highway, killing eight officers in the latest strike against security forces. More than 2,000 police officers have been killed due to drug prohibition violence since Calderon took office.

A man accused of being one of Mexico's most notorious hired killers says his confessions were false and extracted through torture. Soto Arias, 29, a junkyard owner, has been convicted of nothing, and his torture complaint is being investigated by Mexico's human rights commission. Many other crime suspects and ordinary citizens have made similar allegations about disappearances, extra-judicial killings and torture at the hands of the Mexican military and police.

The mayor-elect of Martires de Tacubaya, a city near the border with Guerrero in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, was gunned down by hitmen working for drug traffickers. Eleven mayors have been murdered in Mexico this year, and officials say most of the killings are part of the drug prohibition violence that has claimed more than 28,000 lives nationwide since late 2006. The two suspects arrested in the case told investigators they were paid $6,000 to kill the mayor and one of his assistants.

At least 11 mayors have been killed this year across Mexico, as a spooky sense of permanent siege takes hold in the many communities where rival drug trafficking organizations fight for control of local drug sales, marijuana and poppy fields, methamphetamine labs and billion-dollar smuggling routes to the United States.

A search for a missing American tourist presumably shot and killed by Mexican pirates on a border lake has been thwarted by threats of an ambush from drug prohibition gangs.

Residents in Ciudad Juarez, the epicentre of Mexico's bloody drug prohibition war, say authorities are going after small offenders and innocent people such as poor workers even as they allow powerful drug lords to operate with impunity. President Felipe Calderon is under pressure to show results in his offensive against traffickers in Ciudad Juarez where he has deployed more than 7,500 soldiers and police, making the crackdown a central part of his war on drug trafficking organizations. But rights groups say corrupt or ineffective police and soldiers have rounded up hundreds of drug addicts and ordinary people in the manufacturing city across from El Paso, Texas without making major drug busts or arresting top capos.

Amid a bloody war against drug trafficking organizations, Mexican President Felipe Calderon said that he was sending Congress a plan to overhaul the country's police system by doing away with local forces. The idea, called "unified command," has been debated for months, as the death toll from the nearly 4-year-old drug prohibition war surpassed 28,000 and signs of police collusion with crime syndicates continued to pile up.