Reuters
Mexican drug traffickers fighting a brutal turf war are attacking priests and preachers who denounce cartel violence, shattering clerics' untouchable aura and breaking honor codes in the world's second-biggest Catholic country.

Gunmen killed a Catholic priest and two seminary students as they left a church in southern Mexico in early June.

Around 1,000 Catholic priests face constant threats from drug gangs across Mexico and as many as 400 have been directly warned to silence their criticisms of narco violence and extortions or be killed, the Mexican Bishop's Conference says.

Although the murdered seminary students are suspected of family ties to drug gangs, most priests say they are targeted for urging parishioners to stand up to traffickers.

"They threatened to burn me and my family alive," said evangelist pastor Bartolome Garcia, who fled a lawless hamlet where he worked near Tijuana on the U.S. border last year.

"They don't like it that we preach and criticize them," said Garcia, who preaches to farmers and the elderly in the bleak, semi-abandoned village of Jacume yards from the U.S. border fence.

Some 12,300 people have died across Mexico in a three-way war between rival cartels and the military since President Felipe Calderon sent thousands of troops to try to crush the cartels on taking office in December 2006.

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Reuters

Police have found the charred remains of 14 bodies in a mass grave in central Mexico, victims of drug hitmen fighting over smuggling routes into the United States, an attorney general's office said on Wednesday.

Soldiers and investigative police found the bodies, mainly bones and badly burned remains, outside a drug safe house after a raid last week in the town of Apaseo el Alto in the once quiet state of Guanajuato.

Security forces came under heavy fire during the raid and killed 12 hitmen that authorities said were working for the armed wing of Mexico's Gulf cartel, the Zetas.

"We have found the remains of 14 bodies buried in the garden of the safe house and who we believe were killed by the Zetas," said a spokeswoman for the Guanajuato attorney general's office.

Rival gangs have taken their fight over Mexico's $40 billion-a-year drug trade inland as they battle for cocaine smuggling routes running up from Central America into the world's top drug consumer, the United States.

Officials in Guanajuato say the Gulf cartel, known for its brutality and for beheading its rivals, is fighting a group of smugglers from the western state of Michoacan called "La Familia" (The Family) for control of the state.

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AP

Reviled as a creaky remnant of Mexico's authoritarian past, the old Institutional Revolutionary Party made a big comeback in midterm congressional elections in defiance of those who had written off what is still the country's biggest and most representative party.

The PRI, as it is known, presents itself as a changed underdog, chastened by its loss of the presidency in 2000. One of its campaign ads challenged old habits of self-doubt, with a sure-footed soccer player preparing to sink a penalty shot even as the home-team crowd whispers, "He's going to miss it." The slogan: "PRI, proven experience, new attitude."

The PRI looked like it was dying when it lost its decades-long hold on power. Staff went unpaid and visitors to the cavernous PRI headquarters scouted party emblems as historical souvenirs.

Now it will once again be the largest force in Congress — and able with allies to achieve an absolute majority.

So PRI leader Beatriz Paredes treated Sunday's electoral victory like a vindication.

"The results demonstrate that Mexico is a country that wants proposals, that Mexico is a country that wants solutions, that Mexico is a country that won't tolerate insults," Paredes said.

With 96 percent of the votes counted by early Monday, the PRI was winning about 36 percent of votes for Congress, to about 28 percent for President Felipe Calderon's conservative National Action Party, the PAN.

The former ruling party also held leads in at least four of six governorship races, including the border state of Nuevo Leon.

The party's strength in Congress could pose problems for Calderon if the PRI wants payback for a bruising PAN ad campaign that depicted the PRI as soft on — or complicit in — the drug trade.

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is so effective.

Now the Mexicans have their own, well funded, organized crime.

A reporter flees the biggest cartel of all--the Mexican Army

Mother Jones

By Charles Bowden

July/August 2009 Issue
THERE IS A MAN DRIVING FAST down a dirt road leading to the border. A rooster tail of dust marks his passage. He is very frightened and his 15-year-old son sits beside him in silence. The boy is that way—very bright, yet very quiet. They are unusually close. The father has raised him as a single parent since he was four.

The father and son are fleeing to the United States. Back in their hometown of Ascensión, Chihuahua, men with assault rifles are searching for them. These men are soldiers in the Mexican Army and intend to kill the father, and perhaps the son, also. As the man drives toward the border crossing at Antelope Wells, New Mexico, he thinks the soldiers are ransacking his house. No one in the town will have the guts to speak up.

The man knows this absolutely.

read the rest at the link

I did inhale.