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Two of Mexico's deadliest drug cartels have reached a combined force of 100,000 foot soldiers, wreaking havoc across the country and threatening U.S. border states, the U.S. Defense Department told The Washington Times. The cartels rival the Mexican army in size and have both Mexico and the U.S. in crisis mode as they deal with what they fear is a coming insurgency along the border. "It's moving to crisis proportions," an unidentified defense official told The Times. The official also said the cartels have reached a size where they are on par with Mexico's army of 130,000. About 7,000 people...

CULIACAN, Mexico — A shootout between rival gangs killed 10 people in the drug-plagued state of Sinaloa, home of the powerful cartel of the same name, Mexican police said Thursday. The gunbattle occurred in front of a state police station in the town of El Rosario, said Juan de Dios Beltran, an agent with Mexico's federal attorney general's office. Two vehicles, nine assault rifles, several handguns and about 200 shells were found in the area after the shootout late Wednesday, he said. There were no arrests. The state prosecutor's office said in a news release that gunmen later shot up...

Few rituals are more futile than the "housecleaning" of Mexico's police forces. So deep, broad and brazen is cop corruption south of the border that removing it makes eradicating rats from landfills look easy. Mexico stages quasi-annual purges of officers high and low — last year it was 284 federal police commanders — and yet every year it seems to find itself with an even more criminal constabulary. This year's scandals, however, are especially appalling. Over the summer, President Felipe Calderon's anti-drug czar, Noe Ramirez, resigned abruptly. This week, the likely reason became apparent after Ramirez was detained and accused...

MEXICO CITY – Gunmen killed eight youths and a police chief and took dozens of restaurant patrons hostage for hours in two attacks in the drug gang-ridden state of Sinaloa, officials saidSunday. A group of hitmen sprayed four cars with bullets on a busy street in the city of Guamuchil in the early hours of Sunday, killing five young men and three female minors, a police source told Reuters. Advertisement In an earlier attack on Saturday, six other armed men caused pandemonium in the Pacific port city of Mazatlan by taking refuge in a shopping mall to escape security forces...

By Lizbeth Diaz TIJUANA, Mexico (Reuters) - Seventeen Mexican drug gang members were killed near the U.S. border on Saturday, their bodies scattered along a road after one of the deadliest shootouts in Mexico's three-year narco-war. Rival factions of the Arellano Felix drug cartel in Tijuana on the Mexico-California border battled each other with rifles and machine guns in the early hours of the morning, police said. Fourteen bodies were lying in pools of blood on a road near assembly-for-export maquiladora plants on the city's eastern limits. The corpses were surrounded by hundreds of bullet casings and many of their...

SAN DIEGO – Federal authorities Wednesday arrested dozens of individuals across the country suspected of bringing 18 tons of illegal drugs into the United States, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said in an afternoon news conference here. Members of the Victor Emilio Cazares-Gastellum drug trafficking ring were awakened in the early morning hours by federal, state and local law enforcement agencies who served simultaneous arrest warrants as part of a 20-month-long investigation into the ring's operations, Gonzales and other federal officials said. Gonzales said the Mexico-based organization acquired drugs from Colombia and Venezuela to Central America, then smuggled them into...

As the proposed implementation of a pilot cross-border trucking program draws near, another international trade corridor project is drawing heat from local residents in Texas. The March 18 New York Times reported on the reactions of residents of the West Texas towns of Marfa and Alpine to a hearing held by the Texas Department of Transportation on the development of an official trade corridor, La Entrada al Pacifico, or “Gateway to the Pacific.” It would link the port of Topolobampo in Mexico’s Sinaloa state through Chihuahua to the U.S. market, via the border crossing at Presidio, Texas, and the oil...

MEXICO CITY — Gunmen with assault rifles attacked a pickup carrying four women — two of them pregnant — in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, killing all four in another episode of what authorities consider drug-related violence. The women died in a hail of gunfire outside the small town of Leyva, said officials, adding that the crime followed a pattern of the narcotics-smuggling gangs disputing routes and turf in the region. Sinaloa is one of the main staging areas of the cartel headed by the fugitive Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, considered Mexico's most powerful drug lord. Last month, army...