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CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — Gunmen killed 25 people in a series of drug-gang attacks in Ciudad Juarez, marking the deadliest day in more than two years for the Mexican border city, authorities said Friday. Thursday's toll included 15 people killed when attackers stormed four homes in three hours, said Arturo Sandoval, a spokesman for the Attorney General's Office of Chihuahua state, where Ciudad Juarez is located. In the worst of those attacks, gunmen burst into a house and killed two young men — then killed four others for being witnesses. Sandoval said it was the highest single-day murder toll in...

A Mexican drug cartel has issued an ominous death threat against police officers in Nogales, AZ who seize their illicit product as reported by Sean Alfano for the Daily News: Police Chief Jeffrey Kirkham said his officers received threats a couple weeks ago after off-duty police busted a pot smuggling ring. * * * Just which cartel made the threat remains unclear. Violent warnings toward American police are not new, but the Nogales incident marked the first time U.S. officials confirmed a threat. The Sinaloa cartel controls the smuggling routes along the Arizona-Sonora border, and in early 2009 its boss...

CANCUN, Mexico — Police in Cancun found 12 decomposing bodies in four caverns and were searching for more cadavers in violence blamed on drug gangs in the popular resort city, officials said Friday. Earlier this month, police discovered six other bodies, three of them cut open and their hearts removed, in a similar cavern near the Mexican resort. Three of the bodies had the letter "Z" carved on their abdomens — a possible reference to the Zeta drug gang.

SELLS, Ariz. – The reputed head of Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel is threatening a more aggressive stance against U.S. law enforcement, instructing associates to use deadly force, if needed, to protect increasingly contested trafficking operations, authorities said. Such a move by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Mexico’s most-wanted man, would mark a turn from the cartel’s previous position of largely avoiding violent confrontations north of the border – either with American law enforcement officers or fellow traffickers. Local police and federal agents in Arizona said they recently have received at least two law enforcement alerts focused on Guzman’s reported orders that...

MEXICO CITY — As Mexico suffers from an onslaught of massacres, decapitations and execution-style hits, six major drug cartels have carved up the country into fiefdoms. Like the armies of authentic warlords, the cartels attempt to completely dominate their territories, controlling trafficking routes, local drug sales and other criminal enterprises. Clashing over disputed turf, the cartels all have carried out murders on an epic scale. Sinaloa Cartel City base: Culiacan (northwestern Mexico) Kingpins: Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, Juan Jose Esparragoza (El Azul) States in sphere of influence: Sinaloa, Sonora, Durango, Morelos, Chihuahua, Baja California, Mexico City,...

Heeding the advice of Gen. David Petraeus, Barack Obama has committed 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan and will keep 50,000 in Iraq after U.S. combat operations end in August 2010. But are U.S. vital interests more threatened by what happens in Anbar or Helmand than in the war raging along our southern border? Prediction: After all U.S. troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and Korea have come home, there will be a U.S. army on the Mexican border. For this is where the fate of our republic will be decided, as the fate of Europe will be decided by the millions streaming...

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...