Mexican Drug War

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.

Drug traffickers exert influence over 71 percent of Mexico’s 2,439 municipal governments and completely control 195 of them. Criminal groups find it easy to dominate municipalities because local administrations are chronically short of money and suffer from neglect on the part of the state and federal governments.

Increasing drug prohibition violence in Mexico poses a risk to the nation’s credit rating in the “medium term” and may threaten economic growth. The violence is shaving 1.2 percentage points off the economy annually, Finance Minister Ernesto Cordero said today. Moody’s probably won’t downgrade the country before President Felipe Calderon’s term ends in 2012.

The extremely dangerous city of Ciudad Juárez had more homicides this past August than any other month since prohibition-inspired drug trafficking organizations began fighting a turf war in 2008. Other very deadly months include this past June, when 313 people were slain, and August 2009, with 315.

Though they are nearly a thousand miles away from the bloodshed, Mexican expatriates living in the Rogue Valley fear possible reprisal.