Violence

It is unlikely the arrest of the suspected leader of the Aztecas gang over the weekend will end the bloodshed in Juárez, says George W. Grayson, a government professor specializing in Latin America at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.

The Mexican army discovered several clandestine graves holding at least 20 bodies near a ranch in the northern border state of Chihuahua. The bodies had been buried between four and eight months and that it had not yet been determined how they were killed because they were badly decomposed.

A four-year army crackdown in Mexico's methamphetamine-producing heartland has provoked a dizzying increase in violence, fueling fears that the country is losing its battle against drug traffickers. Despite heavily armed patrols, hundreds of drug lab busts and thousands of arrests, locals say gangs in the president's home state wield huge power, ramping up drug output while using terror and bribes to control towns mired in poverty. "Crime has only gotten worse. Before, things were calm. Now you don't know what could happen...We are afraid here," said Miriam Ortiz, a 32-year-old teacher.

Drug prohibition violence has painted Monterrey with the look and feel of the gritty border 100 miles (160 kilometers) to the north. This wasn't supposed to happen in Mexico's modern northern city with gleaming glass towers that rise against the Sierra Madre, where students flock to world-class universities, including the country's equivalent of MIT. The deterioration happened nearly overnight, laying bare issues that plague the entire country and speak to the nature of drug prohibition.

Yosmireli and Griselda, two and four years old, died by bullets to their heads from soldiers' guns -- their mother, aunt and seven-year-old brother Joniel were also killed, on a rural road in northwest Mexico. The killings became the first known case of civilians gunned down by soldiers in the prohibitionist war on drug traffickers declared by the government of conservative Felipe Calderón, which tipped the country into a spiral of violence. One very clear effect is "the invisibility of violence against women...If a girl is found dead on the street and the body shows signs of violence, whether she has a bullet wound, is tied up, or there is a dead man next to her, her death is recorded in the category of 'organized crime'...By recording the cases in the catch-all category of organized crime, the victims' families no longer have access to the case file and cannot pressure the authorities to solve the crime," said David Peña of the National Association of Democratic Lawyers.

Drug prohibition violence is beginning to affect multinationals -- and not only on the border. "It's Al Capone and Tony Soprano doing whatever they want with little or no actual police interference," says Tom Cseh, deputy director of Vance International, a security firm in Mexico City. Among the recent reported incidents: Caterpillar ordered 40 American employees with children home after a shootout at a school in Monterrey earlier this fall; oil-services giant Schlumberger (SLB) said prohibition violence in northern Mexico hurt third-quarter earnings; and Canadian mining company Goldcorp (GG) plans to build a landing strip to fly gold out of a mine instead of hauling it on unsafe highways.

Mexico's regional newspapers are failing to report many of the murders, attacks on police and other violence linked to the nation's drug prohibition war, a new analysis shows. Regional journalists said they routinely do not report the role of the traffickers in the mounting violence. They said that with the central government unable to protect prosecutors and police, they feel forced to chose between personal safety and professional ethics.

Eleven blocks from the Texas border, hundreds of destitute Mexicans are gathered in a shelter, escaping what they fear is certain death.

Mexican police detained a minor accused of working as a gunman for a drug trafficking organization after shocking videos and photos surfaced online of fresh-faced boys mugging for the camera with guns and corpses. One video, briefly posted on YouTube, showed a youth, apparently in his teens, confessing to working for a branch of the Beltran Leyva organization. "When we don't find the rivals, we kill innocent people, maybe a construction worker or a taxi driver," the youth said.