Day of the Dead

For 22 years, I've covered the rise of Mexico's drug gangs, charting their evolution from trafficking mules for Colombian cartels to the dominant players of the narcotics trade in the western hemisphere. They've morphed from mafiosi who once killed only one another — I remember the national trauma when a Roman Catholic cardinal was caught in their cross fire in 1993 — into monsters who routinely slaughter innocents. Last August, Los Zetas, a bloodthirsty gang led by former army commandos, executed 72 migrant workers on a ranch in northern Tamaulipas state just because they couldn't pay the extortion money the gangsters demanded. The violence is so pervasive, so constant, that only the most egregious episodes remain in the memory. Like last year's massacre of 15 teenagers at a Juárez party by narcos who mistook them for rivals. Or the eight people killed in 2008, when thugs tossed grenades into a crowd celebrating Mexico's independence day in western Michoacán, President Felipe Calderón's home state. Or what happened in 2009 after Mexican marines killed drug lord Arturo Beltrán Leyva: his gunmen went to southern Tabasco state, to the funeral of a marine killed in the shoot-out, and gunned down the man's mother and three relatives...more