Violence

Gunmen in the drug prohibition violence-ridden border city of Ciudad Juarez killed Rito Grado Serrano, regional president of the community of El Porvenira, and his son, Mexican officials said Sunday.

Texas Homeland Security Director Steve McCraw issued a travel warning advising Texans that nobody should head to Mexico at this point. McCraw stressed the advisory due to the increased drug prohibition violence and threat from drug trafficking organizations.

A Mexican police commander investigating the reported shooting of an American tourist on a border lake was decapitated and his head was found in a suitcase outside a Mexican Army base.

A decade ago, they were a small group of elite Mexican soldiers who saw a chance to make a lot more money working as hitmen for powerful drug trafficking organizations. Today, the "Zetas" are the most feared gang in Mexico. Their vicious tactics, geographic reach and expansion into new illegal businesses presents a new kind of threat in a drug prohibition war that has already killed 29,000 people since late 2006.

The search continues for the body of a tourist, David Hartley, believed to have been killed on a Texas lake, which separates the United Stated from Mexico. Friends and family of Hartley held a memorial service for him, without his remains.

A convoy of hitmen ambushed a group of traffic police patrolling a Mexican highway, killing eight officers in the latest strike against security forces. More than 2,000 police officers have been killed due to drug prohibition violence since Calderon took office.

The mayor-elect of Martires de Tacubaya, a city near the border with Guerrero in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, was gunned down by hitmen working for drug traffickers. Eleven mayors have been murdered in Mexico this year, and officials say most of the killings are part of the drug prohibition violence that has claimed more than 28,000 lives nationwide since late 2006. The two suspects arrested in the case told investigators they were paid $6,000 to kill the mayor and one of his assistants.

At least 11 mayors have been killed this year across Mexico, as a spooky sense of permanent siege takes hold in the many communities where rival drug trafficking organizations fight for control of local drug sales, marijuana and poppy fields, methamphetamine labs and billion-dollar smuggling routes to the United States.

A search for a missing American tourist presumably shot and killed by Mexican pirates on a border lake has been thwarted by threats of an ambush from drug prohibition gangs.