CNN - The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 26 journalists have been killed since 2005 in Mexico -- most of them while covering the crime or corruption beats. By comparison, 10 journalists were killed in the same time period while covering the war in Afghanistan.

Helen Popper | Tegucigalpa | Nov 17

Reuters - Honduran lawmakers will wait until after a November 29 election to decide whether to reinstate ousted President Manuel Zelaya, delaying a vote central to a U.S.-led deal to end months of political crisis.

Zelaya, who irked the poor nation's elite by forming close ties with leftist Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, was sent into exile in his pajamas by soldiers on June 28 and a de facto government led by Roberto Micheletti took charge.

The U.S.-brokered pact to end the crisis stipulates a congressional vote on reinstating Zelaya, but it never set a date and the October accord collapsed within a week as the rival sides failed to form a unity government.

"We've decided to convene sessions for December 2," Congress head Jose Saavedra told reporters, adding that lawmakers expected the Supreme Court to give an opinion next week on whether Zelaya should be returned to power until a new president is sworn in January after the November 29 election.

Stephen Gibbs | Mexico City | Nov 12

BBC - Mexican authorities have dismissed almost a quarter of all traffic police in the city of Monterrey for failing corruption and competence tests.

It is the latest move by the Mexican government to clean up its police forces, many of which are suspected of having links to organised crime.

At the end of last month all 1,142 traffic police in Monterrey were pulled off duty to undergo extensive tests.

The tests assessed their honesty, mental aptitude and medical condition.

Their living circumstances were also reviewed - to see whether any evidence of possibly unlawful additional income emerged.

The end results have not been good.

More than 270 officers failed the exams outright. They have been dismissed.

Another 500 have been sent for more training. And, in a final insult, over half have been told they are overweight.

Tom Russell nails it on the head. Worth a read to summarize the current Wild West.

I’ll watch it all go down from Ardovino’s Desert Crossing, the great bar and restaurant which sits up near Mt. Cristo Rey, overlooking the lights of El Paso. (Okay, there are a few good bars here.)Trains roll cross the mountain at happy hour and border patrol trucks chase illegals through these desperate, yucca-choked rocks and rills. Over yonder the ugly black border wall snakes across the sandy hills. The wall is our knee-jerk attempt to intimidate Mexican illegals who want to do the dirty work we shun. But this is still the old west, amigo. Those class equations have always been such. The Chinese built the railroads with a shotgun at their head, and their opium was always available in the back of the chop suey joints and whore houses. The “greasers” and “chinks” did the dirty work; and those red devil Apaches raided our horse camps until we sent Geronimo down to Florida to chill out. We’re getting it under control, ain’t we? It’s the coked-up, Manifest Destiny politics of Methland.

Where God and the Devil Wheel Like Vultures: Report from El Paso

First off, Mauricio Fernandez, the mayor of San Pedro Garza Garcia, an exclusive community near Monterrey, announced as he was being sworn in for a new term that a feared drug cartel capo who had been threatening him had been found dead in Mexico City. Only one problem, the body hadn't been found yet. That would take another 3 1/2 hours. And it wouldn't be identified for two more days.

The mayor's explanation once the story erupted as a scandal in normally blase Mexico -- the DEA tipped him off:

When pressed, Fernandez said U.S. authorities tipped him off that somebody intercepted cartel communications and learned Saldana was planning to kill him, and he said unspecified intelligence sources told him Saldana was dead. Paul Knierim, a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman, said Tuesday he couldn't comment on Fernandez's situation, but said American agents routinely coordinate with Mexican investigators trying to crack down on cartels.

Tracy Wilkinson | Mexico City | Nov 1

LA Times - A flamboyant farmworker organizer who called himself a modern-day Emiliano Zapata has been slain in a brazen ambush that also killed 14 members of his family and staff, officials said Saturday.

Prosecutors in the border state of Sonora, where the slayings occurred, said they were investigating a number of possible motives. Sonora, like much of Mexico, has been hit by a wave of killings tied to drug-trafficking gangs.

The union leader, Margarito Montes Parra, was killed in the southern part of Sonora bordering the state of Sinaloa, a major center for the production and transport of marijuana and heroin.

The farmers whom Montes represented often find themselves trapped in the drug war, with traffickers forcing them to work illicit crops. But Montes also had chalked up numerous enemies in tumultuous land disputes over more than two decades.

Montes, his wife and two children were traveling in a small convoy with at least 11 other relatives and staff members to a rural hacienda Friday afternoon when they were ambushed by several assailants armed with large-caliber weapons, investigators said. All 15 were shot to death, they said.

Red Cross workers arrived at the scene to find bullet-riddled bodies on the side of the road. There were reports that three people in the group had survived.

This is the first consequence I've yet seen in over a year of the American taxpayers putting enough money into the banks to buy a majority stake:

Citi's latest reason to be free of U.S. government ownership is that it could be forced to sell off one of its most profitable businesses.

In Mexico the pressure is on, where it's illegal for a foreign government to own a domestic bank. Citi's stake in Mexico's Banamex has fallen afoul of this law.

Citi now has to prove that its U.S. government ownership isn't long-term or overly influential, else it could be forced to discard a Mexican business that generates 15% of the company's worldwide profit.

It won't stop at Citi either:

Uncle Sam has dominant interests in companies like American International Group, Bank of New York Mellon and Bank of America, all of which also have major investments in Mexican banks.

Mexico City | Oct 17

Reuters -

Hurricane Rick strengthened to an extremely dangerous Category 4 storm off Mexico's Pacific coast on Saturday and could hit resorts on the Baja California peninsula next week, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

Rick, the seventh hurricane of the eastern north Pacific season, was located about 255 miles (410 km) southwest of the resort city of Acapulco with maximum sustained winds near 135 mph (215 kph) with higher gusts.

Additional strengthening is forecast during the next 36 hours and Rick could be near a Category 5 hurricane on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale by Saturday night, the center said.

Outer rain bands of the storm have been hitting Mexico's southern coast and that will continue on Saturday, it said.

Not sure how this one will turn out, but Mexican President Calderon has used military and federal police to shut down the power company Luz y Fuerza that serves Mexico City. 44,000 workers were fired.

Business Week makes the case for the shutdown:

It sold 730 megawatt-hours of energy per employee, compared with 2,500MWh per employee at the Federal Electricity Commission. LyFC had one worker for every 291 electricity clients, compared with one worker for every 627 clients of the CFE. And, the union demanded—and got—generous workplace benefits and pension perks that were unsustainable, Gómez Mont said: Retirees currently earn pensions that are 3.3 times the amount taken home by active employees.

Narco News sees it differently:

Calderon's Saturday night invasion of Luz y Fuerza's facilities in the capital and four states is reminiscent of other recent joint police-military operations against drug cartels. Since Calderon deployed 40,000 soldiers and thousands of militarized Federal Police, one of the campaign's hallmark operations has been the sudden takeover of police stations in towns and cities where drug trafficking organizations are believed to have corrupted entire police forces. In these operations, soldiers and federal police surround a police station, relieve the local police officers of their duties, and occupy the building. When 6,000 soldiers and federal police suddenly invaded Luz y Fuerza's buildings and then occupied them to prevent the workers from retaking the facilities, one would have thought that Luz y Fuerza was a drug cartel's base of operations. But it wasn't.

Mexico is becoming increasingly militarized under the pretext provided by the war on drugs. Mexican citizens are becoming correspondingly desensitized to such blatant displays of state military power in the civilian realm. Mexico's Constitution expressly prohibits the military's use in times of peace; however, this was not Mexicans' principle criticism of the operation against Luz y Fuerza. Mexicans consulted by this reporter complained that the operation was a blow to the country's democratic unions, as well as a step towards privatization of the energy sector. When this reporter commented on the barbarity of deploying the military and riot police against a civilian union--one that wasn't even on strike, as if that were to justify such represion--the response was, "Tienes razon. You're right. I hadn't even considered that."

It's not just Mexico where they're getting used to a dramatically expanded definition of the normal role of the military in society. Andrew Bacevich points out what our military adventures are doing to our national psyche:

As the fighting drags on from one year to the next, the engagement of US forces in armed nation-building projects in distant lands will become the new normalcy. Americans of all ages will come to accept war as a perpetual condition, as young Americans already do. That “keeping Americans safe’’ obliges the United States to seek, maintain, and exploit unambiguous military supremacy will become utterly uncontroversial.

Doesn't it seem like we have always been at war with Eastasia?

From Stratfor:

At approximately 2 a.m. on Sept. 25, a small improvised explosive device (IED) consisting of three or four butane canisters was used to attack a Banamex bank branch in the Milpa Alta delegation of Mexico City. The device damaged an ATM and shattered the bank’s front windows. It was not an isolated event. The bombing was the seventh recorded IED attack in the Federal District — and the fifth such attack against a local bank branch — since the beginning of September.

The attack was claimed in a communique posted to a Spanish-language anarchist Web site by a group calling itself the Subversive Alliance for the Liberation of the Earth, Animals and Humans (ASLTAH). The note said, “Once again we have proven who our enemies are,” indicating that the organization’s “cells for the dissolution of civilization” were behind the other, similar attacks. The communique noted that the organization had attacked Banamex because it was a “business that promotes torture, destruction and slavery” and vowed that ASLTAH would not stop attacking “until we see your ashes.” The group closed its communique by sending greetings to the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the “eco-pyromaniacs for the liberation of the earth in this place.” Communiques have also claimed some of the other recent IED attacks in the name of ASLTAH.

...

These IED attacks are the most recent incidents in a wave of anarchist, animal rights, and eco-protest attacks that have swept across Mexico this year. Activists have conducted literally hundreds of incidents of vandalism, arson and, in more recent months, IED attacks in various locations across the country. The most active cells are in Mexico City and Guadalajara.

Compared to the horrific violence of the War for Drugs, this is small potatoes but I expect it to get an enormously disproportional amount of hype from the press.

NarcoNews has a report from El Universal that dissects the feeble, but lavishly funded with U.S. money, efforts to clean up the Mexican police force:

the Merida Initiative provides an unknown amount of funds for the creation of a National Vetting Center, which screens police officers in order to "root out corruption." The screenings entail polygraph tests, audits of officers' personal finances to detect possible "illicit enrichment," investigations of their socio-economic backgrounds, psychological evaluations, and drug tests. Mexican law requires that all police officers be screened every six months. According to the Mexican government, the Merida Initiative funds that pay for these screenings and the National Police Registry come from a $26 million pot of money for "strengthening police professionalization programs and the National Police Registry."
...
The State Department uses these statistics in its "Mexico--Merida Initiative Report" in order to demonstrate that Mexico's police are now more "transparent" and "accountable." With the report, the State Department hopes to release the 15% of Merida Initiative funds that have been held up pending Mexico's compliance with certain conditions. In the report, the State Department implies that the firing of 284 federal police commanders and the arrest of 204 federal, state, and local public servants during the Calderon administration means that the Registry and screenings are effective tools to reduce corruption. The State Department argues that these programs constitute "concrete steps to... address issues of corruption."

The State Department report does not, however, evaluate if these measures actually have led to reduced police corruption. Mexico's daily El Universal consulted several public security experts and published their opinions on how well the Merida Initiative-funded anti-corruption vetting has worked. Their conclusion: it hasn't worked at all.

And the new Mexican Attorney General is the same man who failed to solve the horrific killings of women in Juarez when he was the Chihuahua state prosecutor, per the LA Times:

Mexico's Senate on Thursday confirmed Arturo Chavez Chavez as the nation's attorney general, despite objections by human rights activists who assailed his record as prosecutor in the northern state of Chihuahua during the 1990s.
...
Chavez was Chihuahua's top prosecutor from 1996 to 1998, a period when an alarming number of women in Ciudad Juarez were disappearing or turning up dead, often bearing ghastly injuries. More than 350 women were slain in the city during a 15-year period starting in 1993.

And this from a presentation at the Global Public Policy Forum on the U.S. War on Drugs just makes my stomach churn:

Dr. David Shirk, professor of political science and lead researcher for the Justice in Mexico Project at the University of San Diego, said the desertion of 120,000 Mexican soldiers during the presidency of Vicente Fox (2000-2006), or roughly one-third of the armed forces, provided drug cartels with a huge pool of new recruits trained to engage in types of combat that went beyond the sort of violence long practiced by the traditional gun-for-hire, or pistolero.

“In some ways, we’re seeing the military defect to the other side,” Shirk said.

I've always loved the DC comics character Two-Face, the crusading District Attorney turned psychotic criminal master-mind who flips a two-headed coin to determine whether or not he'll be good or evil in any given situation.

The more I've studied the drug war in Mexico, and even the history of modern police investigations (I'll be posting a review of the Memoirs of Vidocq soon -- the autobiography of the criminal who became the first "scientific" detective and inspired Poe, Hugo, Conan Doyle etc), the more convinced I am that he is the perfect symbol for the "War on Drugs."

Today's news only reinforces my conviction that nothing is as it seems in the narcosphere.

Here's a quick run through of the highlights:

• The Wall Street Journal puts on their libertarian hat and publishes this Mary O'Grady op-ed:
  

  Nevertheless, Mexico's attempt to question the status quo in drug policy deserves praise. Unlike American drug warriors, Mexico at least acknowledges that it is insane to repeat the same thing over and over again and expect a different outcome.

• 124 law enforcement officials, including chief of coordination for state security, were arrested in Hidalgo, linked to the deadly Zetas narco-cartel.
• The border city of Mexicali is declared to be"too peaceful" by U.S. authorities:
  

  There hasn't been a bank robbery in Mexicali in 18 months, or a reported kidnapping in a year. Mexicali is considered so safe that top law enforcement officials from Tijuana raise their families here, and are seen visiting restaurants and movie theaters without the phalanx of bodyguards that usually follows them everywhere else. But is Mexicali an oasis of tranquillity, or just a mirage? Across the border in California's Imperial County, U.S. authorities believe the Baja California state capital has become the major staging ground for drug trafficking into the U.S. The Calexico port of entry now leads the nation in cocaine seizures, with a 64% increase in overall drug seizures for the period from October 2008 through July 2009 compared with the same period a year earlier, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

• Bloomberg reports on an analyst who says that drug war violence is cutting Mexico's GDP by 3%.
• And Jorge Castañeda cuts the crap on Mexico's supposed "decriminalization of drug possession" in the New York Times:
  

Drugs and oil.

First drugs, from the NYT Freakonomics blog:

It has become more difficult to ship drugs from Mexico to the U.S. because of increased border enforcement. This has decreased supply in the U.S. but increased supply in Mexico.

The increased domestic competition in Mexico has pushed prices down, resulting in a large increase in Mexican drug addiction and the violence associated with it. Sadly, I imagine that the new giant border fence will make shipping drugs to the U.S. even more difficult and result in still more addiction — and violence — in Mexico.

And even worse, the oil, from the WSJ:

Mexico's oil output is falling faster than expected, increasing the chance that the country will lose its status as a major oil exporter in coming years and face a worsening budget shortfall.

Output at state-owned oil monopoly Petróleos Mexicanos's offshore field Cantarell, once the world's second-largest oil field, has plunged to 500,000 barrels a day from its peak of 2.1 million in 2005.

"I don't recall seeing anything in the industry as dramatic as Cantarell," says Mark Thurber, assistant director for research at the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford University.

Cantarell's slide has pushed Mexico's overall oil output down. Shrinking oil exports are costing Mexico roughly $14 billion a year -- bad news for a country that relies on oil exports to pay for nearly 40% of its annual government budget. That shortfall, aggravated by the weaker overall economy, has caused the government to cut spending this year and propose a growing budget deficit for next year.

The Latin Americanist has the best summary:

In a developing new story, an Aeromexico flight bound for Cancun was hijacked and diverted to Mexico City.

According to footage shown by Televisa police troops surrounded Flight 576 shortly after landing and freed all the plane's occupants. CNN en Espanol reported cited TV Azteca who claimed that five people have been detained by police.

According to Milenio's website police captured at least six suspected hijackers of Aeromexico flight 576. The nationalities of the accused have yet to be revealed despite earlier reports claiming that they are not Mexican.

One of the passengers briefly spoke on TV and claimed that one of the hijackers was "well-dressed, robust, dark-skinned (and) a good passenger."

Transportation Secretary Juan Molinar Horcasitas told the press that there was no bomb on board the plane. All the occupants were freed said Horcasitas and none of them are injured.

Until the Mexican authorities announce who they have concluded is behind the hijacking we won't know the implications of this incident.

In the meantime, just for fun, here is some breathless speculation on who could be behind the hijacking and what it might mean:

From the L.A. Times:

A months-long drought has affected broad swaths of the country, from the U.S. border to the Yucatan Peninsula, leaving crop fields parched and many reservoirs low. The need for rain is so dire that water officials have been rooting openly for a hurricane or two to provide a good drenching.
...

Though nearly two months remain before the rainy season ends in October, the drought is an unwelcome blow to an economy already laboring under a recession that has crimped exports and cost hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Mexican growers report more than $1 billion in losses from crops planted during spring, in anticipation of seasonal rain. Hard hit have been corn, beans, barley and sorghum, plus livestock. Farmers and officials say the impact, including lost earnings, unpaid debts and shortages of staple foods, could be felt well into next year.

"Although no one wants to recognize it, there is a food crisis," said Cruz Lopez Aguilar, president of a national federation representing rural dwellers. He and others say increasing imports to make up for lost crops could raise food costs.

...

The dry period has also lent new urgency to longtime water worries in metropolitan Mexico City, home to 20 million residents.

Officials have for several months been rationing water from a network of outlying reservoirs, known as the Cutzamala system, which provides at least a fifth of Mexico City's water. Cutbacks have recently been doubled, to 30% of supplies. Rationing means lower flows in many neighborhoods for days at a time, but no citywide cutoffs.

Mexico is the canary in the global warming coal mine for the Western Hemisphere.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon gave his third State of the Union address today to a Congress newly dominated by the opposition. From the Washington Post:

With unprecedented U.S. support, including $1.4 billion in aid, Calderón has tripled spending on security in a struggle for law and order that has left almost 14,000 dead since he took office. The violence has turned border cities such as Ciudad Juarez into danger zones where a dozen people are shot dead a day and U.S. citizens are warned to stay away.

There are now military operations against drug cartels in 16 of Mexico's 32 states and its federal district. Human rights complaints against the Mexican military have soared 600 percent, but the U.S. State Department this month concluded that Mexico is working hard to improve.

As part of Calderón's state of the union report, his attorney general said that 80,000 drug suspects have been arrested, including 10 major cartel leaders -- among them so-called "narco-juniors" who are the money-laundering, designer-clad scions of big cartel families. Authorities have also arrested top government officials who were supposed to be fighting the cartels but were actually in their employ. Security forces have arrested 1,400 kidnappers and detained or dismissed 200 politicians and government agents accused of protecting the crime mafias, who are enriched by an estimated $14 billion in revenue generated by sales in the United States, the biggest drug market in the world.

The LA Times enumerates the litany of economic woes facing Calderon:

The U.S. recession has hit Mexico hard by drying up a market for automobiles and other manufactured goods. Economists project that the Mexican economy will shrink by 7% or so this year, a major drop.

The U.S. downturn has also cut cash transfers sent home by migrants north of the border, one of Mexico's biggest sources of foreign income.

Some Mexican business leaders have proposed closing the revenue gap by extending a value-added tax to food and medicine. But the PRI, which commands a majority of the lower chamber through its alliance with the smaller Green Party, has ruled out such a move.

Per the Latin American Herald Tribune:

Drug cartels currently take in $64.34 billion from their sales to users in the United States, (Genaro Garcia Luna) Mexico’s public safety secretary said.

...

He said that according to figures compiled by international entities, the production of cocaine in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia has remained stable over the past nine years at an average of about 900 tons annually.

He said that in 2007 the wholesale price of cocaine went from $2,198 per kilogram in Colombia to $12,500 when it arrived in Mexico, and from there rose to $97,400 per kilo in the United States and $101,490 in Europe.

Garcia Luna acknowledged that Mexico now has a domestic drug problem and that Mexicans spend an average of $431 million per year on illegal drugs.

According to the U.S. State Department, total exports from Mexico to the US are $223billion/year. If we add the black market drug exports we get a new total of $287billion/year. That means illegal drugs account for 22% of Mexico's imports to the US, its primary market responsible for 82% of its exports.

And we wonder why the narcos have a huge influence on the Mexican government. What industries account for over 20% of the US's exports? Those industries write their own laws (literally) in the US. Why should it be different in Mexico?

But neither move is quite as dramatic as it initially sounds. First the plastic bags:

In the latest effort to improve Mexico City's environment, it became illegal last week for supermarkets and other businesses to hand out nonbiodegradable plastic bags to customers.

CNN reports that "amended ordinances on solid waste now outlaw businesses from giving out thin plastic bags that are not biodegradable."

Sure enough, on my weekly trip to the Soriana supermarket in my neighborhood, I had my groceries packed into plastic bags emblazoned with a logo promising they were biodegradable.

And then the drugs, as I posted a while back, NarcoNews pointed out that things are not what they may seem:

Under Mexico's new law, decriminalization only applies to personal use in the strictest sense. The law provides stiff penalties for those who "supply (even for free)" other people with drugs, even if the "supplied" amount falls within the allowable amounts. Someone who "supplies (even for free)" someone with up to one thousand times the allowable amount of drugs is subject to 4-8 years in prison and a fine. As El Sendero del Peje's Moncada points out, a person who is in possession of a single joint (under 5 grams) of marijuana can't be thrown in jail thanks to the new law. But if that person passes that joint to another person to take a hit, that can be considered supplying the second person with drugs, and the person who passed the marijuana cigarette will be subject to 4-8 years in prison and a fine. That loophole means this aspect of Mexico's new drug sentencing rules are far more severe than any found in the United States: in Mexico the federal minimum for smoking a joint and passing it to another person is four years in prison. If the person on the receiving end of the joint (or any other drug, for that matter) is a juvenile, the sentence is raised to 7-15 years in prison.

But that doesn't stop the New York Times from doing some anxious handwringing:

The decriminalization effort, which many lawmakers endorsed with little enthusiasm, is intended to free up prison space for dangerous criminals and to better wean addicts away from drugs. It is not the only legislation put forward that would probably never have been considered were the country not in the midst of a bloody and seemingly endless drug war.

Mexico City's Michael Jackson fans got together Tuesday morning to practice the recently deceased singer's famous "Thriller" dance in front of the Palacio de Bellas Artes downtown.

Led by Mexican Jackson impersonator "Héctor Jackson" (pictured) and choreographer Adolfo Chávez, the group was preparing for an Aug. 29 event in which an estimated 11,000 people in Mexico City will attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the biggest mass "Thriller" dance. Jackson would have turned 51 on that date.

Whew, that was a close one, from the WaPo:

The Obama administration has concluded that Mexico is working hard to protect human rights while its army and police battle the drug cartels, paving the way for the release of millions of dollars in additional federal aid.

The Merida Initiative, a three-year, $1.4 billion assistance program passed by Congress to help Mexico fight drug trafficking, requires the State Department to state that the country is taking steps to protect human rights and to punish police officers and soldiers who violate civil guarantees. Congress may withhold 15 percent of the annual funds -- about $100 million so far -- until the Obama administration offers its seal of approval for Mexico's reform efforts.

ISN Security Watch has a compelling piece on La Familia Michoacana and their evolution from local vigilantes into "Post Modern Social Bandits":

Local reports claim that La Familia bosses are revered by townspeople and campesinos alike for their charitable donations of food, schools, clothing, money and medical care.

Indiscriminate violence, such as the September 2008 grenade attack in Morelia, Michoacán’s picturesque colonial capital, is also used symbolically when it reinforces the group’s potency.
...

Its agility is its strength. This organization manages a public relations department, and it bathes in the rhetoric and culture of religious mysticism - very effective for displacing individualism with loyalty for the organization. Plucked from drug rehabilitation centers and groups of impoverished, homeless men in Michoacán, its most fervent followers may also act as proselytizing agents.

“José Luis Pineyro, an analyst who is close to the Mexican armed forces, believes that joblessness and poverty is creating ‘an army in reserve’ for the traffickers,” Grayson said.

Grassroots support and selective and symbolic use of extreme violence and charity, blend seamlessly with extortion, protection and ‘street taxes’ to solidify their power base. Executions and beheadings cloaked in cult-like religious pronouncements demonstrate their zeal and reinforce the myth that they are protecting and purifying the land.

More after the jump.

Good feature in the WaPost today on Michoacan that illustrates how deeply inter-woven the narco-cartels are with the society of that state:

Julio César Godoy, the half brother of Michoacan's governor and a recently elected federal legislator, is currently on the run from authorities, accused of ordering the massacre of the federal police. Authorities say that Godoy is a leader of La Familia and that he is called "comandante" within the group. López's own uncle, Genaro Guizar Valencia, a U.S. citizen who was elected mayor of the tierra caliente town of Apatzingan, was recently arrested on charges of aiding La Familia.

The NYT has a piece on the ability of the narcos to continue running their business from inside prison:

Mexico’s prisons, as described by inmates and insiders and viewed during several visits, are places where drug traffickers find a new base of operations for their criminal empires, recruit underlings, and bribe their way out for the right price. The system is so flawed, in fact, that the Mexican government is extraditing record numbers of drug traffickers to the United States, where they find it much harder to intimidate witnesses, run their drug operations or escape.

But never fear, help is on the way, in the form of American tax dollars:

The United States government, as part of its counternarcotics assistance program, is committing $4 million this year to help fix Mexico’s broken prisons, officials said. Experts from state prisons in the United States have begun tutorials for Mexican guards to make sure that there are clear ethical guidelines and professional practices that distinguish them from the men and women they guard.

Oh and in case you were wondering, chances of getting immigration reform during Obama's current term are quickly dwindling:

Congressman Bob Filner (D-San Diego) said he and others have been pushing for legislation but have been disappointed in the administration.

“We don’t sense that Obama thinks it can happen now,” he said. “And if he waits until next year, it won’t happen.”

Two stories on Mexico caught my eye today. Both variations of familiar stories, but the implications were novel and linked. First this story from Reuters about organized theft of petroleum from Pemex, the Mexican national oil company:

At least one U.S. energy industry executive has pleaded guilty in a scheme to steal about $2 million worth of petroleum products from Mexico's state oil monopoly Pemex and sell it to U.S. refiners.
...

Fuel theft is rampant in Mexico and costs state oil monopoly Pemex more than $2 billion a year. Federal police last month raided the Pemex headquarters as part of an investigation into the thefts.

President Felipe Calderon last week accused the country's powerful drug gangs of being involved in the fuel thefts.

Mexican fuel thieves take advantage of Pemex's aging pipeline network to tap into pipes and siphon off fuel. The company located 396 illegal connections to its fuel pipelines in 2008, Pemex said.

This second story has a much more sinister cast, from the LA Times

The profile looks different from that of the more than 350 women killed during a 15-year stretch from 1993. Many of those victims worked in the city's assembly plants and came from other parts of Mexico. Their bodies turned up, often with signs of sexual abuse and torture, in bare lots and gullies.

Despite some arrests and the creation of a special prosecutor's office, the cases remain largely unsolved.

By contrast those missing today are, for the most part, local residents from stable, middle- and working-class homes.
...

The Chihuahua state attorney general's office, whose missing-persons bureau has jurisdiction over the cases, declined to make anyone available to comment, despite several requests. Investigators privately have told local journalists that they suspect the young women were seized by trafficking rings for prostitution.

As ghastly and awful as the killings of young women in Juarez have been over the past 15 years, they were somewhat contained to the fringes of the city's society. These vanishings are striking at the middle-class heart of the city and appear to be motivated by a desire for profit rather than pathology.

But both stories speak to a country whose most fundamental connections are being corroded away by the acid of corruption. The billions of dollars that have been invested in creating the narco-cartels continue to bear poison fruit.

As the bus twists and turns up the Sierra Madre del Sur coming out of Zihuatanejo the first thing you notice are the lush green hillsides. The next thought that logically follows is: wow, there is a lot of water here. But like the coastal ranges of California the water is deceiving as I soon discovered.

After climbing above the first range of crests, outcrops and rippling ridges we descended into a broad valley, much as I imagine the Salinas Valley in John Steinbeck's retelling. It was dry, cactuses proliferated. Grasses burned off in the heat of a Mexican summer. Corn fields baked on the banks of a river.

More after the jump.

Big meet in Guadalajara this Sunday:

Obama will fly to the western city of Guadalajara for his first North American leaders' summit with Calderon and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Sunday.

Obama pledged full support to Calderon in the drugs war during a visit in April but Mexico complains that U.S. anti-drug equipment and training promised by the Bush administration in a $1.4 billion plan is taking too long.

Calderon is likely to ask Obama about the possible delay of $100 million in the anti-narcotics aid after a senior Democratic senator said this week that Mexico has not met human rights requirements needed for the money to be released.

And the news waiting for him is all bad:

Last month was the deadliest month of President Felipe Calderon's nearly three-year army assault on powerful cartels across Mexico with 850 deaths, according to media tallies.

The death rate so far this year stands at around 4,000, about a third higher than in the same period in 2008 despite a brief lull earlier in the year.

Mexico has managed to disrupt cocaine supplies and make some major arrests but top barons are still at large and more than 13,000 people have died in drug violence since Calderon took office in Dec. 2006.

Like most everything else, Obama's policies on Mexico have amounted to doing what Bush did but a little less. Somehow that's not working very well.