MEXICO CITY-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Mexico on Monday in her second stopover in less than a year, showing growing bilateral cooperation in the fight against organized crime, as drug violence cripples some Mexican cities.

Mrs. Clinton's visit also came as a Spanish newspaper released another set of cables about Mexico obtained by WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group. The leaked documents highlighted some of the concerns that American officials have harbored about Mexico's pursuit of organized-crime groups, including the nation's lack of honest local police forces.

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GUANAJUATO, Mexico - More than a month after the disclosure of cables in which American diplomats questioned progress in Mexico's drug war, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton came here on Monday to deliver a message of solidarity with President Felipe Calderon and to rebut public doubts about persistent violence.

After a private meeting with the Mexican foreign secretary, Patricia Espinosa, in this historic, pastel-splashed colonial city, Mrs. Clinton declined during a news conference to directly address the cables, published by several news organization after they were revealed by WikiLeaks.

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The family of the Penticton man shot in the thigh while vacationing in Mexico are trying to find a way to get him back to the Okanagan.

"There are people offering to pay for flights back, but we really want a direct flight back so they don't have to stop in Vancouver then take another plane. We were hoping to get some kind of private jet or at least have a direct flight here. That is our goal right now, to make him the most comfortable," said the man's daughter Lisa Di Lorenzo-Biggs.

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MEXICO CITY-The drug-related death toll in Mexico climbed to 15,273 in 2010, the highest casualty rate since the government launched an assault on powerful cartels in 2006, Mexican officials said.

The staggering toll-higher than combat-related deaths in places like Iraq and Afghanistan-shows how Mexico is struggling to turn the tide on drug cartels that are fighting each other to control lucrative smuggling routes to the U.S.

"We all know we're going through difficult times in matters of public safety," President Felipe Calderon said in a televised speech minutes after the figures were announced. He urged Mexicans to be patient with his government's assault on cartels.

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More Than 30 Are Found Slain After Two Days Of Brutality-At Least 16 With Their Heads Severed

The discovery of four more bodies in Acapulco Sunday brought to more than 30 the number of people found slain after a weekend of violence in the Mexican resort city, with at least 16 of their bodies found without their heads.

Authorities early Sunday discovered a body hanging from a bridge on the main highway between Acapulco and Mexico City, and the bodies of two other men nearby, one missing its limbs and head. A fourth body was found elsewhere in the city.

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Mexico needs to refocus its war on drugs away from enforcement and concentrate instead on fighting money-laundering and tackling the causes of violence, a leading opposition politician who is widely tipped to win the country's 2012 presidential elections said.

More than 30,000 people have died since President Felipe Calderon launched an army-led offensive on Mexico's drug cartels four years ago, an approach that has led to growing criticism at home.

Writing for the Financial Times' emerging markets website, beyondbrics, Enrique Pena Nieto, governor of the state of Mexico, said the country needed to find ways to prevent violence from occurring in the first place.

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Violence Shrinks Ranks by Half, but Some Doctors Are Fighting Back

MEXICO CITY - Trauma specialist Jose Alberto Betancourt was kidnapped from the parking lot of a Ciudad Juarez hospital after finishing work Dec. 2.

He was found murdered two days later after negotiations with the kidnappers - who had demanded 2 million pesos (about $160,000) - broke down.

The violence that has claimed more than 3,000 lives in Ciudad Juarez last year has hit physicians especially hard. Their upper-middle-class status has made them targets for kidnappers and extortion demands.

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Its Time-Worn Tactics Make Little Dent in Trafficking, and U.S. Officials Are Alarmed.

Four years and 50,000 troops into President Felipe Calderon's drug war, the fighting has exposed severe limitations in the Mexican army's ability to wage unconventional warfare, tarnished its proud reputation and left the U.S. pointedly criticizing the force as "virtually blind" on the ground.

The army's shortcomings have complicated the government's struggle against the narcotics cartels, as the deadliest year of the war by far comes to a close.

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MEXICO CITY - In all of Mexico, there is only one gun store. The shop, known officially as the Directorate of Arms and Munitions Sales, is operated by the Mexican military. The clerks wear pressed green camouflage. They are soldiers.

The only gun store in Mexico is not very busy.

To go shopping for a gun in Mexico, customers must come to Mexico City - - even if they live 1,300 miles away in Ciudad Juarez. To gain entry to the store, which is on a secure military base, customers must present valid identification, pass through a metal detector, yield to the security wand and surrender cellphones and cameras.

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AMATA, Mexico -- Farmers growing marijuana in remote Mexican mountains are adopting techniques pioneered in the United States to produce more potent pot and boost profits from the cash crop that is fueling a deadly drug war.

In the fertile mountain valleys of Sinaloa in northwestern Mexico, soldiers this year found 60 acres of covered greenhouses equipped with sophisticated irrigation and fertilization systems growing seemingly endless rows of marijuana plants.

In another part of Sinaloa, the cradle of Mexican drug trafficking, the army recently busted a marijuana lab that used lamps day and night to speed the growth of the plants, a change from traditional outdoor cultivation of the crop and a sign drug cartels are using more savvy production methods.

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An elaborate security system has enabled Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman to evade capture thus far, according to a U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks.

The cable also reveals that the Mexican army has two officers stationed at the DEA's El Paso Intelligence Center, and that Mexico's army prefers to work closely with U.S. anti-drug agencies because it distrusts its country's civilian law enforcement.

The cable summarizes a discussion last year between U.S. National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair and Mexican Defense Secretary Gen. Guillermo Galvan Galvan.

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The only police officer remaining in a string of border towns in the Juarez Valley has been kidnapped, Chihuahua state officials said Saturday.

Gunmen stormed into the home of Erika Gandara about 6 a.m. Thursday in the town of Guadalupe and abducted her, said Carlos Gonzalez, a spokesman for the Chihuahua attorney general.

Gandara, 28, was the sole officer in the municipality of Guadalupe, which stretches from the outskirts of Juarez to the Big Bend area. Guadalupe is about two miles from Tornillo, Texas.

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Rarely do statistics tell the whole truth, but mark Juarez as an exception.

It accounts for 1 percent of Mexico's population and more than 20 percent of the country's murders.

Juarez is death city, the most dangerous place in North America, and it is getting worse by the year. It has had more than 3,000 murders in 2010, an average of almost nine a day. Sixty-four of its police officers were among those killed.

El Paso, by contrast, saw its number of homicides drop to five this year from 13 in 2009. Both totals were uncommonly low for a city of more than 620,000.

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MEXICO CITY - The leader of the Mexican military told U.S. authorities last year that the head of the Sinaloa drug cartel moves among 10 to 15 known locations but that capturing Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman was "difficult" because the most wanted man in Mexico surrounds himself with hundreds of armed men and a sophisticated web of snitches, according to a leaked diplomatic cable.

Mexico's defense secretary, Gen. Guillermo Galvan, told Adm. Dennis C. Blair, then the Obama administration's director of national intelligence, that the Mexican army was implementing plans to capture Guzman but that "Chapo commands the support of a large network of informers and has security circles of up to 300 men that make launching capture operations difficult," according to a report sent by U.S. Ambassador Carlos Pascual on Oct 26, 2009, and released by WikiLeaks to news organizations.

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TORREON, Mexico-His grandfather was the cross-eyed cousin of Mexico's legendary revolutionary Francisco "Pancho" Villa. Like his famous ancestor, Carlos Villa is a hard-charging general who is charismatic, foulmouthed and not afraid to use his gun.

And some say he is just what Mexico needs as it wrestles with the corruption and violence spawned by the country's powerful gangs of drug traffickers.

Retired Gen. Villa is the 61-year-old police chief in Torreon, an industrial city in Mexico's violent northern badlands-a central drug-running route currently being fought over by two of Mexico's biggest cartels.

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MEXICO CITY-Diego Fernandez de Cevallos, the former presidential candidate kidnapped from his ranch in May, turned up at his Mexico City home on Monday, ending a seven-month ordeal that captivated Mexicans and highlighted the weakness of the country's law-enforcement institutions.

The 69-year-old politician appeared before reporters in front of his house, looking gaunt and sporting a bushy beard. Mr. Fernandez's release comes days before Christmas. "As far as my kidnappers, as a man of faith, I have already forgiven," said Mr. Fernandez, who declined to discuss details of his captivity but said he would soon publish information about his ordeal.

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Their Options Bleak, Adolescents Are Lured into Smuggling, Selling and Killing for Money.

The curly-haired suspect in the sweatshirt faced the flash of news cameras, looking impossibly small.

"When did you start to kill?" he was asked. "How much did you earn?" "How many did you execute?"

He said he began killing at age 11. A drug cartel paid him $200 a week. He'd killed four people.

"How?" came the final question.

"I cut their throats," he replied. Then masked Mexican soldiers hustled him off, the way they do other drug suspects.

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A Woman Protesting the Release of Her Child's Suspected Killer Is Chased and Shot.

Outraged when judges freed the main suspect in her daughter's killing, Marisela Escobedo Ortiz launched a one-woman protest across the street from government offices in northern Mexico.

Now she is dead too.

In a brazen killing caught on video, a gunman chased Escobedo and shot her at close range Thursday night in front of the governor's office building in the capital of Chihuahua state.

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The Mass Breakout in the Border City Is the Latest in a String of Such Incidents.

At least 140 inmates escaped from a prison in the violence-plagued border state of Tamaulipas, authorities said Friday.

The prison's director reportedly disappeared after the escape, which occurred Thursday night in Nuevo Laredo, the latest in a series of escapes across Mexico.

Antonio Garza Garcia, public safety secretary in Tamaulipas, told a radio station that the escapees probably had help from prison personnel. He said most of the inmates were being held on state charges but that 58 had been charged with federal crimes, a category that includes drug trafficking and weapons offenses.

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Unrest Deters Electrolux, Whirlpool, Others Who Have Considered New South-of-the-Border Plants

MEXICO CITY-Growing numbers of companies are deciding to limit their investments in Mexico because of spiraling drug-related violence in one of the world's most important emerging markets.

The latest is Swedish appliance maker Electrolux AB, which said Thursday it had chosen Memphis, Tenn., over locations in Mexico for a $190 million appliance factory that will employ 1,200 people.

The decision involved a host of factors, including proximity to component suppliers, distribution centers and another Electrolux plant in Springfield, Tenn. But Mexico's deteriorating security also played a role, the company said.

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