Mexican Drug War

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.

More women are working and dying for powerful, unregulated drug traffickers in Mexico's most violent city as high unemployment along the U.S. border sucks desperate families into the lethal, prohibition-driven trade. A record 179 women have been killed by rival hitmen so far this year in Ciudad Juarez, the notorious city across from El Paso, Texas, as teenage girls and even mothers with small children sign up with the drug trafficking organizations.

Times are good for marijuana growers of Mexico's western Sierra Madre mountains -- the army eradication squads that once hacked at the illicit marijuana fields have been diverted by the drug war raging elsewhere in Mexico. To the delight of traffickers, marijuana cultivation soared 35 percent last year and is now higher than at any time in nearly two decades.