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.
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.
Clouds of smoke from burning cars mark the skyline of Culiacan, Mexico, during a 12-hour siege by the Sinaloa Cartel, Oct. 17, 2019.
AP Photo/Hector Parra
A series of brazen, highly visible attacks by Mexican drug cartels have killed at least 50 people in the past month, terrorizing citizens and making the government look weak on crime.
Soldiers burn cocaine and marijuana in southern Mexico.
David Guzman/EPA
The Mexican slow-down in life expectancy improvements coincides with an unprecedented rise in violence.
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.
Investiture of Mexican President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico City on December 1.
EPA Images
Andrés Manuel López Obrador plans to combine army, navy and Federal Police units in a new 150,000 strong national guard.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador acknowledges his supporters as he arrives to Mexico City’s main square, the Zócalo, on July 1, 2018. The leftist López Obrador won the election and is calling for reconciliation.
(AP Photo/Anthony Vazquez)
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.
Did college help don Michael Corleone become a better criminal?
Facebook/TheGodfather
A controversial law to officially engage Mexico’s armed forces in fighting crime has human rights groups dismayed.
Photos of some of the 43 Mexican college students who disappeared in 2014 and are feared to have been massacred by gang members and police. Screen depictions of Mexico’s drug trade mostly ignore their human cost.
Jorge Lopez/Reuters
Los Pollos Hermanos is a chicken shop run by a drug lord in the TV series Better Call Saul. A pop-up version opens in Sydney today - and both ignore the savage reality of Mexico’s drug wars.
Brass Blacker Associate Professor of Demography at LSHTM and Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, University of Oxford