Mexican Drug War

Border Patrol agents in Texas were fired upon after chasing a suspected drug smuggler back to the banks of the Rio Grande close to Anzalduas Park. Though rarely reported by the mainstream press, armed conflicts along the border with Mexican drug smugglers are becoming a rather common event.

Over the past weekend Mexico saw a proliferation of drug prohibition violence, including the slaying of 25 people in the border city of Ciudad Juarez and a prison break that saw 85 inmates escape.

The meandering network of pipes, wells and tankers belonging to the gigantic state oil company Pemex has long been an easy target of crooks and drug traffickers who siphon off natural gas, gasoline and even crude, robbing the Mexican treasury of hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Now the prohibition-created drug traffickers have taken sabotage to a new level: They've hobbled key operations in parts of the Burgos Basin, home to Mexico's biggest natural-gas fields.

The head of an association of border factory owners said the sector is in crisis mode as unrelenting drug prohibition violence in northern Mexico has spooked investors into curtailing operations at some plants and rethinking expansion at others.

Gunmen have killed the mayor of a town in northern Mexico as he sat at his desk. He is the third politician slain in the past month as drug prohibition-related violence escalates.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said today that the violent, drug prohibition-created Mexican drug trafficking organizations were starting to look like an insurgency. Prohibition violence -- including beheadings, hangings and shootings -- has expanded from the border area to more of the country, including several car bombs for the first time this year. Mexican drug gangs have been blamed for the significant uptick in violence, increasingly against government officials and institutions.

The kidnappings of five petroleum company workers along with 30 others have terrorized the oil community, paralyzing segments of the business. Months later, families have still heard nothing.

Despite the Mexican government’s high-profile capture last week of American-born kingpin Edgar Valdez “La Barbie” Villarreal, the country’s prohibitionist drug war continues to spiral out of control. A telling sign: ordinary Mexicans, who until now have largely been removed from the carnage, are turning to private security firms for help.

In the first of a three-part investigation, The Guardian's Rory Carroll reports from the gateway to America, at the center of drug cartel violence that has claimed 28,000 lives since December 2006.