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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