Politics Outside US

An Associated Press investigation casts doubt on whether the crackdown on the Sinaloa Drug Trafficking Organization caused any significant impact. It still ranks near the top of Mexico's drug gangs, most of those arrested were underlings who were swiftly replaced, and the leader remains free, along with his top commanders. The findings confirm what many critics of the prohibitionist drug war have said for years: The government is quick to boast about large arrests or drug seizures, but many of its most-publicized efforts result in little, if any, slowdown in the drug trade.

According to a secret cable sent to Washington in January 2008 by US Ambassador Clifford Sobel, the Federal Police and the Brazilian intelligence agency ABIN monitor suspected terrorists and have arrested some of them on drug charges.

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.

A confidential diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks says Afghan President Hamid Karzai has freed dangerous detainees and pardoned suspected drug dealers because they had connections to powerful figures.

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 continues to complicate the war in Afghanistan. Leaked US documents on paint President Hamid Karzai's controversial younger brother as a corrupt drugs baron, exposing deep US concerns about graft undermining the war against the Afghan Taliban.

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.