MEXICO CITY - The leaders of the Americas meet with President Brack Obama in Colombia over the weekend where he is expected to hang tough on Washington's anti-narcotics and Cuba policies, positions ever-more unpopular in a region drifting away from U.S. dominance.

Obama flies into the Colombian beach resort city of Cartagena on Friday for the 48-hour Summit of the Americas, a gathering of all but two of the region's 35 national leaders. Cuban President Raul Castro wasn't invited, and Ecuador's Rafael Correo is staying home to protest the snub.

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Top targets, in reality, were FBI informants, but ATF didn't know

Even before hundreds of guns went across the border as part of Operation Fast and Furious, an interagency communication gap had left the investigation doomed, recently released information suggests.

Unknown to the ATF agents leading the probe, the top possible targets of their investigation were working as FBI informants and were essentially "unindictable," according to congressional investigators and documents connected to the case.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives launched the investigation planning to go beyond arresting "straw buyers" and take down a whole cross-border gun-running ring. But it could never have reached its top targets, two brothers named Miramontes from the El Paso area, because they were protected "national security assets," says a Feb. 1 memo by U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

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VALLE DE JUAREZ, MEXICO-Driving slowly down the empty streets of Guadalupe, former resident Marycarmen Madrid points to scorched and crumbling houses, scattered with the personal effects of former residents.

She identifies some of the hundreds killed, terrorized or forced into leaving this town on the U.S. border. Her family's home was burned down last year, along with dozens of others, in the campaign of extreme violence and terror that has gripped the region.

Known locally as the Valle de Juarez, this was once a sleepy agricultural hub an hour east of Ciudad Juarez. Then, in 2008, the valley exploded as it became a battlefield in Mexico's drug wars, which have claimed more than 50,000 lives.

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MEXICO CITY -- In some countries, a man can't get a shoeshine without seeming to make a political statement.

Mexico, it seems, is such a country -- and, on this occasion at least, Ricardo Barroso Agramont is such a man.

Wearing a navy-blue business suit and a scarlet tie, Barroso is lounging at a small, red shoeshine kiosk, while a bootblack attends to the buffing of his footwear.

The mid-morning traffic lurches past along Avenida Insurgentes Norte, among the main thoroughfares in Mexico City, and political activists stream back and forth on foot through the tall metal gates that lead to the huge nine-storey headquarters of the once invincible Institutional Revolutionary Party, the authoritarian political behemoth that dominated this land for seven long decades, until swept from power in watershed elections 12 years ago.

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Businessman, Now in U.S. Custody, Accused of Playing Middleman

A Mexican businessman is in U.S. custody, accused of money laundering and serving as a liaison between drug cartels and powerful politicians, including a former governor who allegedly received millions of dollars in exchange for protecting the criminals, according to a 14-page court filing in Texas.

Four confidential informants told the Drug Enforcement Administration that Antonio Pena-arguelles was paid millions by leaders of the Gulf cartel and the Zetas to help influence politicians, including Tomas Yarrington, the former governor of Tamaulipas state, which borders Texas.

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CIUDAD JUAREZ, nexico - Every police officer in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez has been ordered to leave home and stay in a hotel after the killing of five officers by a local drug cartel.

The cartel threatened a week ago to kill one policeman a day unless Police Chief Julian Leyzaola resigns. Juarez Mayor Hector Murguia said Wednesday that the attacks are a response to toughening police action against cartels. He said there is no way Ley zaola is stepping down.

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Man who often returned to Surrey believed to have owed money after losing shipment of cocaine

CULIACAN, Mexico -- A B.C. man executed in the Mexican state of Sinaloa this week was a high-ranking member of the United Nations gang who had direct contact with Mexican cartels, The Vancouver Sun has learned.

Salih Abdulaziz Sahbaz, 37, spent much of the last three years in Mexico and was the key cartel contact for the notorious B.C. gang, police sources confirmed.

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MEXICO CITY-The Mexican armed forces and prosecutors have suffered at least 28 gunfire attacks on helicopters in the five years since the government launched an offensive against drug cartels, according to official documents made public Monday.

The attacks show the increasing ferocity of Mexico's drug gangs, and also suggest support for what the Mexican government has said in the past: that 2010 may have been the worst year for the upward spiral in violence.

In the first two years of the drug war, reporting government agencies such as the air force, navy and Attorney General's Office reported no chopper attacks. But in 2008, four helicopters were hit by gunfire, wounding at least one officer aboard.

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Under Pressure, Officials Release Partial Figures That Indicate the Toll Is 50,000

Reporting from Mexico City- Six months before a presidential election that his party is widely expected to lose, President Felipe Calderon is on the defensive about the government's blood-soaked drug war, with new revelations that it sought to conceal death toll statistics from the public.

By unofficial count, at least 50,000 people are believed to have been killed since Calderon deployed the military in the first days of his presidency in December 2006.

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We are all at risk of addiction.

Vices are endemic to the human condition and each of us has the potential to become an addict.

Scare statements? Not at the Museo Interactivo Sobre Las Adicciones (aka MIA) in CuliacA!n, Mexico. MIA is a unique interactive games and exhibit-based addiction museum""narcotics feature, but so too do alcohol, tobacco, food, gambling, and internet addictions. MIA broadcasts a strong message: addictions are pandemic and they are global.

"Addiction is a disease not a choice" , Nora Volkow, Director of the US National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), says as she speaks with me on the phone from her office in Rockville, MD. Volkow was influential in the American Society of Addiction Medicine's redefinition of addiction as a primary, chronic neurological disease, and she and her team advised on MIA's content, together with other experts from Mexico and Europe. "Blunted pathways and fewer D2 dopamine receptors mean addicts find it harder and harder to feel good" , she explains. "Even people with no baseline genetic risk can become addicts if their environment is stressful.

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MEXICO CITY -- Mexico's powerful Sinaloa drug cartel appears to be extending its massive production of methamphetamine into neighboring Guatemala, as hundreds of tons of precursor chemicals stream into the Central American nation.

While Mexico is usually estimated to be the main supplier of meth used in the United States, seizure data suggest that Guatemala could in fact be producing as much or more.

That data, along with interviews with U.S. and Guatemalan officials, also indicate that Sinaloa cartel chief Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman is taking advantage of Guatemala's remote, isolated mountains and an alliance with a key Guatemalan trafficker to make the Central American nation a new international meth production base.

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AT THE Church of Senor Del Perdom, sparrows swoop to scavenge on a slice of tomato and a bit of cheese squished into the brick paving. Untidy perhaps, but as the grimness of the church's forecourt is revealed, the birds become a welcome hint of the natural order in a party town that struggles to escape the unnerving and the unnatural.

In the past, a parade of bold-face names sallied to this resort city on Mexico's balmy Pacific coast. Frank Sinatra sang about it. The Kennedys honeymooned and the Nixons holidayed here. Howard Hughes ended his days here, Elvis Presley made a movie and John Wayne and Johnny "Tarzan" Weissmuller opened the fabled Hotel Los Flamingos, one of scores that now stand sentinel by Acapulco Bay's emerald waters.

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MEXICO CITY -- Mexico's powerful Sinaloa drug cartel appears to be extending its massive production of methamphetamine into neighboring Guatemala, as hundreds of tons of precursor chemicals stream into the Central American nation.

While Mexico is usually estimated to be the main supplier of meth used in the United States, seizure data suggest that neighboring Guatemala could in fact be producing as much or more.

That data, along with interviews with U.S. and Guatemalan officials, also indicate that Sinaloa cartel chief Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman is taking advantage of Guatemala's remote, isolated mountains and an alliance with a key Guatemalan trafficker to make the Central American nation a new international meth production base.

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MEXICO CITY - Latin American leaders have joined together to condemn the U.S. government for soaring drug violence in their countries, blaming the United States for the transnational cartels that have grown rich and powerful smuggling dope north and guns south.

Alongside official declarations, Latin American governments have expressed growing disgust for U.S. drug consumers - both the addict and the weekend recreational user heedless to the misery and destruction paid for their pleasures.

"Our region is seriously threatened by organized crime, but there is very little responsibility taken by the drug-consuming countries," Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom said at a meeting this month of Latin leaders in Caracas. Colom said the hemisphere was paying the price for drug consumption in the United States with "our blood, our fear and our human sacrifice."

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Casualties of the Mexican Drug War

While Cartel Violence Has Spread into the U.S., It Hasn't Reached Jackson County, Sheriff Says

Margarita Castillo worries that members of her family who remain in Mexico could get caught in the crossfire of a war raging between two rival cartels who are fighting over the lucrative drug smuggling route to the Western United States.

Castillo, who owns La Placita, an eight-store mini-mall on West Main Street in Medford, said the cartels have put law-abiding, hard-working Mexican citizens at risk because of the violence ripping across the nation.

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Nearly five years ago, Mexico's president, Felipe Calderon, declared war on the country's powerful and vicious drug cartels. His strategy of using the military against them initially enjoyed widespread domestic popularity, as well as Washington's strong support, but it has failed to yield results. Some 42,000 people have perished in the resulting violence, and the cartels seem more powerful than ever.

The Mexican people are increasingly disenchanted with the drug war, and influential political figures are urging a different approach. Some say the government should negotiate a truce with the cartels. Others, most notably Calderon's predecessor, Vicente Fox, are bolder, advocating drug legalization to deprive the criminal enterprises of their vast black-market profits.

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WASHINGTON --- American law enforcement agencies have significantly built up networks of Mexican informants that have allowed them to secretly infiltrate some of that country's most powerful and dangerous criminal organizations, according to security officials on both sides of the border.

As the United States has opened new law enforcement and intelligence outposts across Mexico in recent years, Washington's networks of informants have grown there as well, current and former officials said. They have helped Mexican authorities capture or kill about two dozen high-ranking and midlevel drug traffickers, and sometimes have given American counternarcotics agents access to the top leaders of the cartels they are trying to dismantle.

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Several Police Officers in Northern Mexico Allowed a Violent Drug Gang to Hold Kidnap Victims in the Local Jail While Ransom Payments Were Being Negotiated, a State Official Said Thursday.

Hours later, the navy reported finding 32 bodies in three houses in the Gulf coast seaport of Veracruz, where just two weeks ago 35 tortured bodies were dumped in front of shocked motorists on a main avenue. The first incident appeared tied to fighting between rival drug cartels, but officials did not immediately say if Thursday's find was drug releated.

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52 Killed As Gunmen Set Fire To Casino

MEXICO CITY Felipe Calderon, the Mexican President, declared three days of mourning Friday and demanded a crackdown on drugs in the United States after armed men set fire to a casino in northern Mexico, killing at least 52 people.

I earnestly ask you to end once and for all the criminal sales of assault weapons to the criminals that operate in Mexico," Mr. Calderon, 49, said in a speech broadcast to the nation.

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Mexican President Cites Lax Gun Laws, Demand For Drugs For Fueling Cartels' Violence

MEXICO CITY -His voice cracking with emotion, President Felipe Calderon said Friday that the United States bore some blame for 'an act of terror' by gangsters who doused a casino with gasoline and set a blaze that killed at least 52 people.

The attack Thursday in Monterrey, an industrial city of 4 million barely a two-hour drive from Texas, stunned Mexicans and seemed likely to mark a watershed in the country's intensifying war against criminal syndicates.

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