Mexican police at the Topo Chico prison in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico, where scores of people died in a prison fire and riot in 2016.
Miguel Sierra / EPA
Many young Mexican men that are working in precarious conditions are drawn into the fold of drug cartels.
Men who were detained under the state of emergency are transported in a cargo truck in Soyapango, El Salvador in October 2022 after President Nayib Bukele began a crackdown on gangs that suspended constitutional rights and threw one in every 100 people in jail.
(AP Photo/Moises Castillo)
Widespread violence tied to Ecuadorian drug gangs has left the country looking at a draconian response.
Mexico’s militarized war on drugs – and, often, drug users – has killed at least 150,000 people over the past 15 years.
Jair Cabrera Torres/picture alliance via Getty Images
Mexico would not fully legalize cannabis; its new regulation plan makes recreational use legal. However modest, that would be a symbolic milestone for a country immersed in a long, deadly drug war.
The first group of asylum-seekers allowed to cross from a migrant camp in Mexico into the United States following Biden’s repeal of the ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy arrives to Brownsville, Texas, Feb. 25, 2021.
John Moore/Getty Images
Luck and tenacity paid off for some 15,000 migrants who may now pursue their asylum cases in the US But nearly 42,000 cases filed from Mexico under a Trump-era rule were already rejected.
In this July 2020 photo, a woman is comforted in her home during a wake for her son who was killed along with at least 26 others in an attack by drug cartels on a drug rehabilitation centre where he was being treated in Irapuato, Mexico.
(AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)
The American public should understand that the United States has played a critical role in creating and fuelling violence in Latin America via its unsuccessful war on drugs.
A marijuana trafficker practicing his aim in the Guajira, epicenter of Colombia’s first drug boom, in 1979.
Romano Cagnoni/Getty Images
Step aside, Pablo Escobar. New research shows it was poor farmers who helped turn Colombia into the world’s largest drug producer when they started growing and exporting pot in the 1970s.
Residents of the Dona Marta favela, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, work to clean up community areas.
EPA-EFE/Antonio Lacerda
Government policies and dangerous conditions affect the ability of researchers working on both sides of the US-Mexico border to conduct scientific fieldwork.
National Guard on patrol after gang conflict in Comunidad del Naranjo, Guerrero, Mexico.
EPA
Many governments can’t afford to offer the sort of economic stimulus we’ve seen in the west, and organised crime is only too happy to fill the gap.
More than 35,000 people were killed in Mexico in 2019, the deadliest year on record. Violence has spiked as a result of the government’s ongoing assault on drug cartels.
Leonardo Emiliozzi Ph / Shutterstock
A researcher who fled crime-beset Mexico returns to interview the drug cartels behind so much of the violence, asking 33 ‘narcos’ everything about their lives, from birth to their latest murder.
Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador speaks at the signing of an update to the new North American free-trade agreement in Mexico City.
(AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)
In his first year in office, the Mexican president is dismantling the political and economic structures that have made Mexico one of the most inequitable countries in the world.
Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador with the families of the 43 students who went missing in 2014 in Guerrero state. He has ordered a truth commission to investigate the unsolved disappearance.
Reuters/Edgard Garrido
President López Obrador campaigned on some outside-the-box ideas to ‘pacify’ Mexico after 12 years of extreme violence. But so far his government has emphasized traditional law-and-order policies.
An artist’s sketch of Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán at a 2018 pretrial hearing in a Brooklyn Federal courthouse.
Elizabeth Williams via AP, File
With its tales of bloody violence, corruption, international trade and entrepreneurial innovation, Guzmán’s trial offers a telenovela-style explainer on Mexican cartels and their American clients.
Can Mexico become a ‘loving republic’ built on forgiveness rather than punishment?
Shutterstock/Nalidsa
Mexico’s presidential front-runner wants to end violence in Mexico by pardoning drug traffickers and corrupt officials. Some 235,000 people have died in the country’s 11-year cartel war.
The MS-13 gang operates in Central America, Mexico and the U.S. But so far its efforts to get into the drug business have failed.
Jose Cabezas/Reuters
Trump justice officials portray the Salvadoran gang MS-13 as a powerful drug cartel staffed with criminal undocumented immigrants. That’s a dangerous mistake if you actually want to prevent violence.