Fighting among the Zetas gang and other vicious drug cartels led to the deaths of more than 40 people whose bodies were found in three Mexican cities over a 24-hour span, a government official said.

At least 20 people were killed and five injured when gunmen opened fire in a bar late Friday in the northern city of Monterrey, where the gang is fighting its former ally, the Gulf Cartel, said federal security spokesman Alejandro Poire.

Eleven bodies shot with high-powered rifles were found earlier on Friday, piled near a water well on the outskirts of Mexico City, where the gang is fighting the Knights Templar, Poire said.

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You will hear the voice of my memories stronger than the voice of my death -- that is, if death ever had a voice.

- -- Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo

This is how Mexican investigators believe gangsters murdered business student Juan Francisco Sicilia: Two of his friends had been assaulted in Cuernavaca, south of Mexico City, by a pair of policemen moonlighting as muggers for the Pacifico Sur drug cartel. The friends reported the criminal cops, who panicked and asked their mafia bosses for help. On March 27, eight Pacifico Sur thugs, including a crazed psychopath called El Pelon (Baldy), abducted the two accusers, as well as Juan Francisco and four other buddies, from a bar. They were bound with packing tape, tortured in a safe house and suffocated to death. Their bodies were found the next day outside the city.

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10 people decapitated, 20 slain in bar shooting

Mexican authorities sent in an extra 1,800 police Saturday to fight the country's gruesome and deadly drug war, with at least 41 people slain over the weekend including 10 who were decapitated.

The 1,800 federal agents were sent into Michoacan state on Saturday, in a battle there mainly with the Knights Templars, a splinter group of the La Familia drugs cartel. The reinforcements were backed by 170 vehicles, 15 ambulances and MI-4 and Black Hawk helicopters, the Public Safety office announced.

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If one looked at the Western Hemisphere from outer space, one would not see the borders that separate nations. At best we would see two large land masses -- North and South American -- united by a "thin bridge" between the two -- Central America.

On land, our political leaders and governments see it differently. We have three nations of North America; seven tiny republics that make up Central America, and a score of nations in South America. They carefully monitor boundaries as a most important task.

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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is meeting in Guatemala this week for talks with the presidents of Central America, Mexico and Colombia on security assistance to Central America that will focus on the most serious problem facing the region: drug trafficking.

As Mexico has interrupted transit routes across its territory and along its coasts, drug cartels have been moving into Guatemala and countries to the south. A particularly heinous manifestation of this shift in activity was the killing of 27 people in northern Guatemala last month, a crime for which Mexico's "Zetas" openly took credit.

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The Mexican government, finally, is gaining the upper hand in a drug war that has turned much of the border region and parts of interior Mexico into war zones. President Felipe Calderon's campaign against the cartels is now three-and-a-half years old and the death toll is nearing 40,000. After a series of visits to Ciudad Juarez, the war's epicenter, and interviews with federal law enforcement and intelligence officials in Mexico City, I see convincing evidence that the government has dramatically weakened the drug cartels, an essential step if the country is to restore peace.

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MEXICO CITY - As authorities lauded the capture this week of Jose de Jesus Mendez, leader of Mexico's vicious La Familia Michoacana drug cartel, the country was faced with a familiar problem: The top kingpin of a drug cartel had fallen, but the violence he spawned had not.

On Thursday, police found a man who had been dragged, tortured and killed on the outskirts of a rural town where the cartel has a strong presence. A day earlier, another man was found dead not far from where Mr. Mendez was held with a message on his chest to Mr. Mendez, likely from enemy drug traffickers.

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Guy Adams Reports on the Capture of a Kingpin Whose Cartel Espoused A Christian Doctrine but Practised Extreme Violence

His nickname turned out to be richly deserved. When armed police presented Jose de Jesus Mendez at a press conference in Mexico City yesterday, the drug kingpin was revealed to be in possession of both a fat neck and a simian scowl. That's presumably why he was known as "El Chango", or "The Monkey".

Mendez was the leader of La Familia Michoacana, among half a dozen large criminal organisations which have fought for years over one of Mexico's most lucrative industries, the $38bn-a-year (UKP23.6bn) business of shifting cocaine from South America to US consumers.

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MEXICO CITY-Federal police captured the chief of Mexico's La Familia drug cartel Tuesday, dealing another blow to a gang that lost its founding leader just months ago and is now torn by a bloody internal feud in its home state of Michoacan.

Police captured Jose de Jesus Mendez, known by his alias "El Chango," or the Monkey, in the central Mexican state of Aguascalientes without firing any shots, Alejandro Poire, Mexico's national security spokesman, said in a statement.

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MEXICO CITY Spanish journalist Judith Torrea accused Mexican authorities of an enormous lack of "vision and analysis" in dealing with Ciudad Juarez's rampant drug-related violence, which she said is even more horrific than the hundreds of killings of women in that border city dating back to the 1990s.

"The death toll is falling, (now standing at) five per day, which is still a lot, but it's not 20. They say we're doing very well, but I say 'very well in what sense?'" Torrea told Efe Thursday.

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Six Young Women Among Suspected Members of Brutal Zetas Arrested In Police Shootout

Dwarfed by surrounding reporters and with her head bowed to avoid the television cameras, the slender 16-yearold hesitated slightly before she answered the question. "I'm a hit woman," she said.

Maria Celeste Mendoza was among six suspected teenage gang members arrested this week by police after a shootout with authorities in central Mexico, one of the growing ranks of young people working for the country's drug cartels.

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MEXICO CITY-A federal judge dropped weapons charges against a controversial opposition politician and gambling mogul Tuesday and then a state judge refused to hold him on a murder investigation, dealing an embarrassing one-two punch to Mexico's government.

"Jorge Hank is free and at home," the politician's lawyer, Fernando Benitez, said.

Mr. Hank, the former mayor of Tijuana, was detained June 4 by Mexican soldiers who said they found an illegal arsenal of 88 weapons, including automatic rifles at his compound in Tijuana. Mr. Hank is a pillar of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI, and his arrest coming less than a month before elections in the key State of Mexico, where the PRI holds a wide lead, was seen by PRI politicians and some political analysts as being politically motivated.

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They are known as "Las Barbies," "Las Tinkerbells" and "Las Reinas." But the images they evoke in the criminal underworld in Mexico are far from those of innocent dolls, bells and queens.

According to intelligence reports, the terms are used by drug-trafficking organizations for "mujeres sicarias" -- hit women.

Then there are the "Radieras" and the "Halconeras." They act as lookouts, manning radios at strategic points on the roads and who, like hawks, watch the activity of Mexico's federal police, military and marines in order to alert the cartels.

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Renowned poet Javier Sicilia has begun a citizen's protest against Mexico's war against drugs that will visit flashpoints across the country. Our correspondent is in the caravan, talking to residents along the way.

The Caravan for Peace heads into Monterrey " en route to its final destination, Ciudad Juarez" and the streets are deserted.

It is late at night and Monterrey empties out around 7p.m., now that crime has spiked.

You can't fault residents for shuttering their windows and closing doors, since the city, the industrial hub of the country, has become another flashpoint in Mexico's fight against drug cartels.

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American-Sourced Weapons Account For 70% of Seized Firearms iI Mexico

The U.S. was the source of at least 70% of 29,284 firearms recovered by authorities in Mexico in 2009 and 2010, according to new U.S. government figures.

The statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are expected to add to controversy over the U.S. role in fueling drug-cartel violence in Mexico, which has killed more than 40,000 people since 2006.

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A Mexican convoy protesting violence triggered by a military crackdown on drug cartels has arrived in Ciudad Juarez on the final leg of its 3000-kilometre journey.

The peace caravan of about 20 buses, led by famed poet and journalist Javier Sicilia, reached Mexico's most violent city late on Thursday and was greeted by mariachi players and hundreds of well-wishers.

The caravan had earlier travelled through northern Chihuahua state, where demonstrators erected a huge wooden cross outside local government offices to mark the spot where local woman Marisela Escobedo was killed by a gunman in December while protesting against the release of her daughter's killer. Advertisement: Story continues below

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An arsenal found in Mexico included at least five assault rifles that U.S authorities trace to a federal operation gone badly awry, according to government documents.

The discovery appears to confirm for the first time fears cited by Republican lawmakers that a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives operation called Fast and Furious failed to stop guns from ending up with drug gangs in Mexico.

The Fast and Furious program, run by the ATF's Phoenix office, monitored weapons purchases by suspected gun traffickers who were believed to be funneling weapons to Mexican drug cartels. Some lawmakers say ATF didn't have the means to track the guns and shouldn't have used such tactics.

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The International War on Drugs Isn't Stopping Drug Use or Trafficking - -- but It Is Ruining Lives. Drug Policy Expert Sanho Tree Discusses What We Can Do Differently.

Earlier this month tens of thousands of people marched in Mexico City to protest a war that has left more than 35,000 people dead in the last four and a half years. When elected president of Mexico in 2006, Felipe Calderon vowed to crack down on drug trafficking in his country. With the support of U.S. policies like the Merida Initiative [pdf], he executed a military crackdown that has only increased drug-related violence.

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MEXICO CITY -- Rhino trucks, narco tanks, Mad Mex-inismos? No one can agree on what to call the armored monster vehicles that Mexican criminal groups have been welding together in recent months, but this much is clear -- they are building more of them.

Over the weekend, Mexican authorities found two more of these makeshift road warriors in Tamaulipas, the same northern border state where the first armored vehicle appeared in April after a battle between the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas gang. In the latest case, the Mexican Defense Department said, the armored trucks were found in a metalworking shop in Camargo, which also held at least two other partly modified monsters and 23 additional trucks.

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The Evidence Is Mounting That the Militarised Policing Strategy Against Mexico's Organised Crime Gangs Has Failed Horriby

"The fact that there are those who are corrupt, criminal or abuse of their public office does not make a state criminal or corrupt. We should not extrapolate the actions of individuals as those of the state ... Mexico is not Arizona."

So remarked Mexico's sub-secretary of Latin America and the Caribbean, Ambassador Ruben Beltran Guerrero, on 5 April, following the release of report by the government of El Salvador accusing Mexican authorities of human rights violations against 250 El Salvadorian immigrants in 2010.

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