Mexican Drug War

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.

Largely overlooked is the story of the estimated tens of thousands of children whose lives are blighted by drug prohibition violence. Neither Mexico's government nor the various independent groups studying organized crime keep track of the number of orphans who have lost fathers, and sometimes mothers too, to the drug prohibition war.

Clashes between rival gangs created by drug prohibition in Mexico left 34 people dead over the weekend, and the beating death of a mayor is the fifth killing of a city leader in six weeks, the latest fallout from the country's deadly drug prohibition war.

The alleged shooting of a US boater by Mexican pirates on Falcon Lake, which straddles the Texas-Mexico border, is raising fears about spillover drug prohibition violence from Mexico into the US.

Mexico has been shaken by yet another weekend of drug prohibition violence, with 34 deaths blamed on drug trafficking organizations and a series of grenade attacks that injured a dozen people.

In the midst of the brutal drug prohibition war encroaching on their lives, thousands of Mexicans every morning check social network websites to see if they will encounter any unpleasant surprises on the way to work or school.

Drug prohibition has incentivized Mexican drug trafficking organizations to come to our backyards. Their workers are hidden in crops and hillsides throughout rural Ohio counties.

Raul Benitez, a security expert at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, says that the spate of recent deaths may be no coincidence: It comes as the federal government is increasing intelligence capabilities and taking a harder look at collusion between traffickers and local police and authorities, as it looks to centralize the police force. Therefore, many mayors who once may have turned a blind eye to trafficking exploits in their towns might now be refusing to cooperate. “If the mayor is an obstacle, that is when the problem starts,” says Mr. Benitez.

A mayor who took the job when every other official in his town quit out of fear of drug traffickers was reported slain, the fifth Mexican mayor killed in six weeks. Authorities said Gustavo Sanchez, mayor of the town of Tancitaro in Michoacan state, had apparently been beaten to death with rocks.