In-depth coverage of Mexican drug cartels, including the Sinaloa Cartel, CJNG, and smaller groups. Reports on territorial disputes, leadership changes, drug trafficking routes, and the impact of cartel violence on communities across Mexico.
Cartels
Seven bodies in less than 24 hours. That was just Tuesday in Tecate. Ninety seven executed. One hundred disappeared. Homicides up 100 percent compared to the same period last year.
Mexico
The DEA just called fentanyl "a threat like we have never seen before" and put two Mexican cartels on the top of its hit list. The language is different this time.
Cartels
Mexican cartels are not just shipping drugs anymore. They are shipping the people who know how to make them, and the UN says the recipe is spreading to three continents.
Mexico
Nine thousand soldiers got the same message. Spanish words on their personal phones. The Army said it was a glitch. It was not a glitch. Someone had walked through the digital front door and found every name on the list.
Mexico
The stolen Chevrolet carried two men and a trunk full of something the highway patrol did not want to open. When they did, they found more than drugs. They found a phone with names.
Mexico
The ransom note arrived like clockwork.
security
Mexico's intentional homicide rate has dropped 46 percent in eight months, hitting a 12-year low. But the reasons behind the decline, from cartel consolidation to government strategy, are far more complicated than the numbers suggest.
Drug Trafficking
The federal government just turned Los Cabos into a war zone, and the cartels started it.
Drug Trafficking
Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera wants out of America's toughest prison, and he's got a plan: write a letter to the Mexican president and ask her to bring him home.
Crime
Two young men from California were arrested in Tijuana this week after police found them in a stolen Audi with an assault rifle, and one of them had an active warrant for homicide back home.
Crime
A Cuban woman was shot in an upscale Merida neighborhood by sicarios from Colima's Los Mezcales cartel. Her Jordanian husband ordered the hit to avoid a fair divorce settlement. Both gunmen arrested.
Grupo Proteo
Elite operatives from Grupo Proteo detained two suspected cartel hitmen in Tecate, confiscating a loaded AR-15 rifle and a .40 caliber pistol.