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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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."

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