MORELIA, MEXICO-The sun has just set on Plaza de Armas when Maria Trujillo, a woman with close cropped hair in her mid-50s, steps on the stage. Shaking, she holds a poster with photos of four men, aged 20 to 35.

"The pain and the impotence make me want to scream," she says, her voice breaking. "I am the mother of four sons who disappeared. Today they were mine, but tomorrow, they could be yours."

Trujillo's brief, powerful speech in Morelia, capital of the state of Michoacan, marked the end of the first day of the Caravan for Peace, Justice and Dignity.

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MEXICO CITY-Three days of raging gun battles this week between rival drug gangs in Michoacan state killed an unknown number of people, forced hundreds to flee their homes and raised fresh fears that another major Mexican state has become all but ungovernable.

Fighting broke out Monday and lasted for three days. But news of the conflict was slow to get out because local media in states like Michoacan have largely stopped covering the carnage on orders from drug gangs.

On Tuesday, a helicopter belonging to the Federal Police was forced to make a hard landing after being shot at by gunmen from a drug cartel, the Federal Investigative Agency, an arm of the Attorney General's Office, said Tuesday. Three federal police were injured.

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MEXICO CITY-Guatemalan soldiers searched Tuesday for the culprits of a massacre in a remote province after the country's president declared a state of siege there, a sign that Guatemala is escalating its own war against drug traffickers as violence spills over from Mexico.

The measures came the day after authorities blamed a Mexican drug cartel called Los Zetas for killing and decapitating 27 people in the remote El Peten province. Under the state of siege, security forces may conduct searches and make arrests without warrants, confiscate weapons and break up groups seen as subversive.

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MEXICO CITY-Guatemalan officials said Monday that Mexico's most brutal drug cartel was responsible for the killing and decapitation of at least 27 people, the country's worst massacre since the end of its civil war.

Carlos Menocal, Guatemala's interior minister, blamed the Zetas, who Mexican authorities say are also responsible for much of that country's most heinous violence, including the August massacre of 72 migrants, and the deaths of at least 183 people kidnapped, killed and buried in mass graves found in the state of Tamaulipas on Mexico's gulf coast in April.

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MEXICO CITY-In March, tragedy struck the household of Mexican poet Javier Sicilia. His 24-year-old son and six friends were found dead near the resort town of Cuernavaca, a massacre that mirrored scores of others in Mexico's brutal drug wars

But the slaying has already resulted in a different outcome than most in Mexico. Mr. Sicilia used his son's death to rally tens of thousands of protesters in Mexico City's central plaza Sunday to hear him speak during his "March for Peace and Justice."

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Tired of innocent bloodshed, 90,000 people have participated in a "silent march" in Mexico City to protest against the country's strategy in its "war on drugs", which is estimated to have claimed more than 35,000 lives.

The march, which began three days ago, was led by the poet and journalist Javier Sicilia, whose 24-year-old son was murdered in March. Behind Sicilia, families of victims marched in silence through Mexico City's avenues, holding photos of their lost ones, while young participants covered in red paint held banners bearing slogans "no more blood" and "we're fed up".

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Tens of Thousands March in the Capital to Decry Drug Violence.

Bearing white balloons and fake bloodstains, tens of thousands of demonstrators crowded Mexico City's historic downtown Sunday to call for an end to the country's unrelenting drug violence.

The primary target of the protest was President Felipe Calderon, who has ruled during a period of extraordinary bloodshed. More than 34,000 people have been killed since Calderon declared an all-out assault on drug cartels after taking office four and a half years ago.

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A dozen suspected Zetas drug cartel members and a Mexican marine died in a battle Sunday on an island surrounded by Falcon Lake, within sight of the U.S.-Mexico border, officials said.

The Mexican naval secretariat confirmed the shootout at a Zeta encampment on an island on the reservoir used by the Zetas to stage marijuana loads to be transported by boat into the United States. The island is located less than two miles northeast of Nueva Ciudad Guerrero, Tamps., across the border from Falcon Dam.

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MEXICO CITY -- Javier Sicilia, the poet who has become an unlikely hero in a movement calling for an end to Mexico's drug war, asked for five minutes of silence at the end of a Sunday rally in this city's giant central plaza.

The silence was to honor the dead -- more than 35,000 since President Felipe Calderon sent the military to fight drug cartels four and a half years ago.

Among the dead is Mr. Sicilia's son, killed seven weeks ago in the colonial city of Cuernavaca.

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Former president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, said that he is in favor of a legalization of drugs to prevent more murders in Mexico.

In a lecture at the University of Houston on Tuesday, Fox said that Mexico is in the middle of the drug problem because the drugs are imported from South America to Mexico and then they are then transported to the United States, which is the number one consumer of drugs in the world.

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NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico - The "police" for the Zetas paramilitary cartel are so numerous here - upward of 3,000, according to one estimate - that they far outnumber the official force, and their appearance further sets them apart.

Most are teens sporting crew cuts, gold chains and earrings, with shorts worn well below the waist and cellphones pressed to their ears. These "spotters" seem to be everywhere, including elementary schools, keeping tabs on everything and everyone for the area's most dominant drug cartel.

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Shallow Graves, Deepening Alarm

Still No End to the Horrors

OFFICIALLY, nearly 35,000 people have been killed since Mexico's president, Felipe Calderon, began an assault on his country's drug-trafficking "cartels" at the end of 2006. But the true body count will never be known. On April 6th police discovered mass graves near San Fernando, a town in Tamaulipas state near the border with the United States, which so far have yielded 183 bodies. Two weeks later hidden tombs were discovered in the north-western city of Durango from which 100 corpses have so far been extracted.

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Calls for the Dismissal of Tamaulipas Officials Grow As the Body Count Reaches 177.

Suitcases started piling up, unclaimed, at the depot where buses crossing northern Tamaulipas state ended their route. That should have been an early clue.

Then the bodies started piling up, pulled by forensic workers from two dozen hidden graves in the scruffy brush-covered ravines around the town of San Fernando, 80 miles south of this city that borders Brownsville, Texas.

At least 177 corpses have been recovered in the last few weeks, most of them, officials now say, passengers snatched from interstate buses, tortured and slaughtered. Women were raped before being killed, and some victims were burned alive, according to accounts from survivors who eventually overcame their fears and came forward.

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MEXICO CITY-The U.S. State Department said Wednesday it has rescinded a warning that U.S. government officials and citizens could be targeted by Mexican drug cartels in three of the country's states.

State Department Spokesman Michael Toner said, "we thought it was credible information, and then it was later deemed that it was not credible enough to warrant it remaining on the website."

The warning, the first indicating Americans were being targeted by drug traffickers, said U.S. officials had "uncorroborated information that Mexican criminal gangs may intend to attack U.S. law-enforcement officers or U.S. citizens in the near future in Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon and San Luis Potosi" states. Among the cities affected by the warning was Monterrey, the country's northern business hub.

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Consulate Says Americans May Be Targets of Drug Gangs; 32 More Bodies Found

MEXICO CITY-For the first time in Mexico's drug war, the U.S. government said its employees and citizens could be the targets of drug gangs in three Mexican states, a disclosure that could signal danger for Americans south of the border.

The little-noticed warning, published last Friday in a warden's message from the U.S. Consulate General in Monterrey, said U.S. officials had "information that Mexican criminal gangs may intend to attack U.S. law-enforcement officers or U.S. citizens in the near future in Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon and San Luis Potosi."

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A Second Massacre In One Small Northern Town Dramatizes The Underbelly Of Nation

Almost eight months ago, residents in the rural Mexican county of San Fernando received startling news: The bodies of 72 immigrants traveling to the U.S. had been discovered on a secluded ranch after the group had been lined up, blindfolded and shot dead.

Now, the sense of horror has returned. Last week, officials said they had discovered mass graves on another secluded ranch there. Some 88 dead have been unearthed so far as forensics teams continue to dig for others.

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Despite Enforcement Efforts, Tremendous Amount of U.S. Use Drives Trafficking Trade

The US port of entry at San Ysidro is the world's busiest land border crossing, processing millions of people a year through 24 car lanes and a pedestrian processing area. Previously

Is U.S.-Mexico border secure enough?

The southwest border has become the nucleus of the U.S. and Mexican war on drugs.

Thousands of law-enforcement agents, from nearly every three-letter acronym agency, are focused on drug traffickers' northward push of narcotics and the southbound flow of American guns and cash intended to fund and arm organized crime.

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MEXICO CITY -- They were young men, traveling by bus to work in the fields and factories of northeastern Mexico, or perhaps hoping to get across the border to a job in the United States. Somewhere along the way, they vanished.

The discovery this week of 72 bodies dumped in mass graves in a no-man's-land about 85 miles south of the United States border may offer a terrible answer to the mystery of what happened to at least some of the missing men. They were forced off the buses at gunpoint, perhaps kidnapped for ransom or press-ganged into drug cartels, officials say.

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The Drug Cartels Have Made Nogales the Tunnel Capital of the Southwestern Border

Leo W. Banks Border Patrol agent Tom Pittman and two National Geographic crewmen prepare to enter a parking-lot tunnel in downtown Nogales.

It's a beautiful morning in downtown Nogales. Border Patrol agent Kevin Hecht is preparing to lead a National Geographic film crew into the blackness of a cross-border drug tunnel, so narrow that he has to remove his gun belt to navigate it.

But first, he wants to make sure no traffic passes on the road above while he is inside.

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MEXICO CITY-The bodies of about 60 people were found in mass graves on a ranch in northern Mexico Wednesday, marking both one of the grizzliest finds by Mexican police this year and the second time scores of dead were found in the same secluded town of San Fernando.

The bodies were found in an area called La Joya in Tamaulipas state, said Ruben Dario, a spokesman for the state prosecutor's office. Eight graves were uncovered, the largest of which contained 43 people.

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