Government Corruption

With bloody drug prohibition-related violence unabated despite the latest round of government military offensives, leading members of Mexico's main opposition party are calling for drug legalization as way out.

The "This Week's Corrupt Cops" feature may have been on hiatus while your editor was down South America way, but it's been pretty much business as usual. We're back now, and here's this week's edition with the usual cast of crooked cops and greedy guards.

Three Salvadoran politicians were brutally murdered by Guatemalan anti-drug police outside Guatemala City 10 days ago. Now, the police killers have themselves been killed in a brazen assassination while being held inside a nasty Guatemalan prison. Many questions are being raised, but dead men tell no tales.

DEA agents seize hundreds of millions of dollars a year in drug busts, but a Justice Department audit finds the agency is pretty lax in its handling of all that cash.

Early in his presidential term, Mexican leader Felipe Calderon has already called out the army to fight drug traffickers. Now, his government is pondering the creation of a "drug czar" to coordinate the fight.

While the US using tried-and-failed eradication schemes on the Afghan opium trade, others including the UN and World Bank are calling for smarter alternative development. Others are going even further.

As 2006 comes to a close, we look back at the year's biggest drug reform defeats, disappointments, and downers.

A new report from the World Bank and UN is just the latest to warn of the difficulties facing drug warriors in Afghanistan. The report is comprehensive, exacting, and grim.

The mayor of the Mexican border city of Tijuana has ordered an investigation of all 2,300 city police for links to the drug trade, but there is more to the mayor's move than meets the eye.

The rotten odor of drug war-related police corruption wafts across Tennessee from the banks of the Mississippi to the hazy hills of the Great Smoky Mountains, and that's just half of our corrupt cops this week.