MEXICO CITY -- Mexicans are in a funk over their president, and a majority of them think that he's losing control of the country, an opinion poll released Tuesday found.

Six out of 10 Mexicans think that organized crime gangs are getting the upper hand in the war that President Felipe Calderon launched against drug trafficking when he came to office in late 2006, the poll by Demotecnia found.

The poll may augur a change in the country's approach to its huge drug-trafficking problem when a new administration takes over after elections next year.

[continues 422 words]

Violent players have sprayed bullets and spilled blood in a real-life and ongoing struggle between Mexico's Gulf Cartel, its erstwhile allies, the Zetas, and the Mexican government.

Against this backdrop of violence - which has claimed more than 35,000 lives since December 2006 - the trio has also waged a concerted war for the hearts and minds of the populace. Using public relations tools that include banners, leaflets and releases to the news media, each has sought to cast itself in a more positive light than its enemies.

[continues 1450 words]

To Avoid Falling Victim of a Vicious Drug War, Some Resort to Taking Up Arms

NUEVO CASAS GRANDES, Mexico -- On the ranch lands near the U.S. border, people no longer take security for granted and have turned to weapons to stave off drug thugs.

Teachers, ranchers, town officials, business owners and lawyers in rural towns of northwest Chihuahua near New Mexico have armed themselves.

Legal or not, they are ready to use their guns for protection.

In a country caught in the clutches of a vicious drug war, people have decided it's better to fight than to fall victim to the violence, which has claimed about 35,000 people nationally.

[continues 2361 words]

ATOYAC DE ALVAREZ, Mexico- David Garcia knew he was through with the opium poppy business when he saw the helicopter taking aerial shots of his village near here.

The 2008 incident wasn't the first time the government came to destroy his plants, but this time things were different. Coffee prices were surging, and many opium poppy growers in this southern state of Guerrero, who make the raw material used for heroin, had already begun switching to the legal crop.

Until then, Mr. Garcia said, "I didn't want to go into coffee because I couldn't make enough to live."

[continues 966 words]

Young Woman Hailed For Leading Town's Force Amid Drug Violence Seeks Asylum

A young woman who volunteered to lead her Mexican hometown's police department after a predecessor was beheaded by drug gangs has fled her post to seek asylum in the U.S., authorities said Tuesday.

Marisol Valles was declared in headlines "The Bravest Woman in Mexico" when she took the job in the Mexican town of Praxedis G. Guerrero last year. Now, she is seeking asylum near El Paso, Texas, said Gustavo de la Rosa, the human-rights ombudsman in the Mexican state of Chihuahua where Praxedis is located. Ms. Valles couldn't be reached for comment and it wasn't clear if she was represented by an attorney.

[continues 752 words]

Violence From Drug War To Top Agenda As Calderon Visits Obama In Washington

MEXICO CITY - President Felipe Calderon will meet in Washington on Thursday with President Barack Obama in an attempt to repair relations at a time when spiraling violence in Mexico's drug war has frayed ties between the two allies.

The meeting comes just three weeks after a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent was killed and another wounded by alleged drug gunmen. Jaime Zapata, the slain ICE agent, was the first U.S. law-enforcement official to be killed in the line of duty in Mexico in a quarter century.

[continues 804 words]

MEXICO CITY Mario Vargas Llosa, recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature in 2010, said on Thursday that countries across Latin America will eventually suffer the same type of organized crime-related mayhem currently battering Mexico unless a decision is made to legalize drugs.

"Repressive policies are not going to do away with drug trafficking," the Peruvian novelist said here at a press conference, which he gave to coincide with the Mexico premiere of his theatrical adaptation of "One Thousand and One Nights."

[continues 329 words]

A Chihuahua state legislative report paints a grim picture of Valle de Juarez, a once-thriving agricultural and ranching community that produced world-class cotton and important grains like wheat, alfalfa, sorghum and oats.

The legislators of different political parties blamed record violence in the Juarez region for the economic devastation. Authorities attributed the violence to warring drug cartels.

State legislator Alex LeBaron Gonzalez said he and nine other lawmakers signed off on the Feb. 21 report, which they submitted to the Mexican federal government.

[continues 290 words]

Mexican authorities on Friday found the bodies of three relatives of an anti-violence activist killed last year in the village of Guadalupe in the Juarez valley.

The deaths are the latest in killings eliminating members of the family of slain human-rights activist Josefina Reyes Salazar.

The bodies were of a sister and brother and sister-in-law of Reyes Salazar, who was shot in January 2010 after hunger strikes and protests against the violence and disappearances in Juarez.

Carlos Gonzalez, spokesman for the Chihuahua state prosecutor's office, said the bodies of Maria Magdalena Reyes Salazar, Elias Reyes Salazar and his wife, Luisa Ornelas, were found with messages alluding to organized crime.

[continues 273 words]

MEXICO CITY - The Mexican army detained nine people Wednesday in the killing of a U.S. agent last week, and said the shooting appears to have been a case of mistaken identity by drug hitmen.

Mexican Defense Department spokesman Col. Ricardo Trevilla said Julian Zapata, the leader of a cell of gunmen working for the Zeta drug cartel, was responsible for the attack that killed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jaime Zapata and wounded Victor Avila, another ICE agent.

Six of the alleged gunmen, some of whom appeared to have been roughed up, were paraded before reporters at a press conference at the Defense Ministry. Col. Trevilla said the attack by the Zeta gunmen was a case of mistaken identity.

[continues 464 words]

A Mexican officer assigned to guard President Felipe Calderon was accused of leaking information to drug cartels in exchange for bribes, training hit men through a private security firm, and supplying military weapons to groups like the Zetas, according to a U.S. diplomatic cable.

The document also said another official who worked for Calderon leaked a copy of the president's medical file to one of the cartels.

Concerning the accused military officer, "the cartels were using the information to avoid heightened security around the president, not to target him personally," said the document disclosed by online whistleblower WikiLeaks.

[continues 499 words]

In one of the deadliest three days that officials can remember, more than 50 people were killed in Juarez.

Among the 53 victims between Thursday and Saturday were a Juarez police officer, a municipal patrolman and a state investigator.

According to Chihuahua state officials it was the most violent three-day period seen this year. State police reported that on average eight people are killed in Juarez every day.

More than 150 people have been killed in Juarez this month, according to the state police.

[continues 393 words]

MEXICO CITY-Drug-cartel gunmen were responsible for the shooting of two U.S. government law-enforcement agents, the governor of the Mexican state where the men were attacked said Wednesday.

What is still unclear, however, is why the men were attacked.

Jaime Zapata, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent, was killed Tuesday while driving along a rural Mexican highway with another ICE agent, who was wounded. The second agent, who hasn't been identified, was shot twice in the leg and has been taken back to the U.S. where he is in stable condition, American officials said.

[continues 740 words]

MEXICO CITY -- The gunmen who attacked two American law enforcement officials in Mexico on Tuesday, killing one and wounding the other, knew they were firing on foreign officers but proceeded anyway, current and former American officials said Wednesday.

But an important unresolved question is whether the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were attacked because of their work -- more than one Mexican drug gang has expressed interest in killing American officers -- or for another reason, like an attempt to steal their dark and presumably armored S.U.V., a vehicle favored by drug gangs.

[continues 422 words]

MEXICO CITY -- Gunmen on a highway in northern Mexico killed an agent with United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Tuesday and wounded another, in an attack that signaled the escalating risk for American officials fighting Mexican crime gangs that move drugs and migrants into the United States.

The United States homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, said in a statement that the agents were assigned to the customs agency's attache office at the American Embassy in Mexico City, and that they had been shot in the line of duty while driving between the city and Monterrey.

[continues 363 words]

MEXICO CITY-An agent for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency was shot and killed and another agent wounded by unknown gunmen in central Mexico on Tuesday, according to U.S. officials.

The men were driving from Mexico City to Monterrey in the central state of San Luis Potosi when they were attacked. U.S. officials condemned the attack and said they would work with Mexican counterparts to bring the assailants to justice.

"Let me be clear: any act of violence against our ICE personnel...is an attack against all those who serve our nation and put their lives at risk for our safety," Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said in a statement.

[continues 458 words]

MEXICO CITY - A top police intelligence official was found dead in his burning armored car in Monterrey, dealing a serious setback to Mexico's attempt to regain control of the country's most prosperous city from warring drug cartels.

The body of Homero Salcido, the coordinator of the so-called C-5 center, which houses federal police, naval, army, and state and municipal anticrime intelligence officials, was found Monday in his burning Grand Cherokee car in the center of Monterrey, the capital of embattled Nuevo Leon state, officials said.

[continues 776 words]

Mexican authorities Thursday began an investigation into the killing of a retired Mexican general who was shot dead in Nuevo Laredo barely a month after taking a job as police chief of the violent border town.

Gen. Manuel Farfan, 61 years old, was gunned down late Wednesday night by unknown attackers, according to officials from the Mexican attorney general's office. His killing is a blow to the new state governor of Tamaulipas, who vowed new offensives against violent crime in a state where drug cartels have been encroaching on government authority.

[continues 376 words]

Mexican President Felipe Calderon warned Thursday of the dangers of currency manipulation by emerging economies, saying his government had no plans to join the growing trend.

He also pledged he wouldn't back down from a crackdown on drug traffickers that has sharply raised the country's murder rate.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal at a meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mr. Calderon said Mexico respected market judgments and wouldn't intervene to try to depress the value of its currency.

[continues 491 words]

GUANAJUATO, MEXICO - Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed strong support Monday for Mexico's battle against violent drug cartels, but she emphasized that the country needed to do more to build democratic institutions and defend human rights.

Last year was Mexico's most violent since the Mexican Revolution, with more than 15,000 deaths related to narcotics. More than double that number have died since President Felipe Calderon dispatched the army to battle traffickers four years ago.

Asked during her one-day visit about human rights abuses by the military, which have soared in the past few years, Clinton said, "We think the Mexican government is also making progress here as well," then added that there was "more that needs to be done."

[continues 507 words]