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...security around when he went out with his family one night last fall. Like most residents of Monterrey--a modern, U.S.-friendly metropolis in northern Mexico--Garza believed his city was still one of the safest in the country. But Garza was the top criminal investigator for the border state Nuevo León. That made him a marked man not just to the drug lords who had moved into Monterrey's posh suburbs but also to certain members of the local security services who, police say, have been recruited as hit men for drug cartels, earning as much...
This year Mexico as a whole has logged more than 1,300 drug-related murders, well on pace to eclipse the 2,000 of 2006. The atrocities would seem more familiar south of Baghdad than south of the border: mass executions, contract shootings carried out at funerals and ghastly videotaped beheadings posted on the Internet while victims' heads are tossed into the streets. Mexicans have long held the view that drug traffickers kill only one another, but the latest surge in violence is claiming a broader range of victims, including police, businesspeople, journalists and politicians. "Now people realize these animals...
...security meltdown has sparked concern in Washington. Mexico's $25 billion- a-year drug-trafficking industry moves at least 75% of the Colombian cocaine that enters the U.S. Law-enforcement officials fear drug violence is spilling into the U.S. and sending more Mexicans across the border illegally. "Whenever something impacts the border as dangerously as this does," says a high-ranking U.S. law-enforcement official, "Americans need to consider it a national-security issue." Mexican President Felipe Calderón, who has pledged to "give no quarter" to the cartels, has deployed 25,000 army troops to battle them...
...party bosses. After the PRI's 71-year rule ended in 2000, the government took steps to dismantle the cartels, only to watch them atomize into smaller but more sinister gangs. The most vicious is the Zetas, a 2,000-member army led by ex-commandos hired by the border-based Gulf Cartel because of their military skills. The Zetas recently recruited ex-members of an infamous Guatemalan-army commando unit, the Kaibiles, which is believed to be responsible for the growing use of beheading as a terrorizing tactic. "That militarization of Mexican drug trafficking was a watershed," says Sergio...
...than in Monterrey, a city of 3 million where 1,200 U.S. businesses have major operations. As recently as 2005, the global consulting firm Mercer ranked it Latin America's second safest city (behind San Juan, Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory). But then the Zetas arrived. They terrorized the border by day and retired by night to garish mansions in Monterrey and suburbs like San Pedro, not far from the city's business nobility. "No one wanted to admit that we'd become a dormitory for drug lords," says Monterrey publisher Ramón Alberto Garza, head of the online newsmagazine...