Drug cartel

Most of those killed have been rookie officers in their twenties who were patrolling towns in the north of Colombia.

Colombia’s police come under fire from drug trafficking groups

Police

A recent wave of attacks against police has put Colombia’s security forces on edge. The government has blamed most of the recent police killings on the Gulf Clan, a drug-trafficking group that runs extortion rackets and exports cocaine to the US.

Vicente Zambada Niebla takes the witness box, at the trial of accused Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, right, in this courtroom sketch

El Chapo trial shows why a wall won’t stop drugs from crossing the US-Mexico border

A marijuana farm in western Mexico.

Loosened US pot laws have sent Mexican weed prices plunging

Justice
Men stand next to the wreckage of a tractor-trailer set ablaze by members of a drug cartel in Guadalajara May 1, 2015.

A heavily armed ‘paramilitary’ cartel unleashes violence in Mexico’s second-biggest city

Conflict
A screenshot from Servando "La Tuta" Gomez's 2014 interview with England's Channel 4 News.

Mexico captures its most-wanted drug lord, but Mexicans are still angry

Justice
The World

Remembering Ariel Camacho, the 22-year-old star of Mexico’s narcocorridos

Music

Ariel Camacho, lead singer of the group Los Plebes del Rancho, was killed in a car accident on Wednesday. Just 22 years old, Camacho was already a big name in the world of narcocorridos, Mexico’s musical odes to drug trafficking culture.

Members of a band record a narcocorrido in downtown Culiacan, Mexico.

Mexico’s ‘narco state’ gets a cultural boost from new, more gory pop ballads

Music

Narcocorrido ballads about outlaw drug traffickers have been a staple of Mexican pop music for decades. But now, the songs are getting more violent and seem to reflect the growing influence of drug cartels over the Mexican state.

People carry photographs of missing students during a march in Acapulco on October 17, 2014. On September 26, police allegedly linked to a criminal gang shot dead at least three students and abducted dozens of others during clashes in the southwestern cit

‘If they are going to kill us, let them kill us for a just cause,’ say Mexican citizens

Conflict

Iguala, Mexico is a place that’s hostile to outsiders and heavily controlled by drug cartels. That makes it an extremely difficult — and dangerous — place to look for the 43 missing students who were allegedly abducted by the local police force.

The World

Four kidnapped Mexican journalists remain missing

Arts, Culture & Media

Committe to Protect Journalists’ Carlos Lauria weighs in on the danger Mexican journalists face, while the New York Times’ Elisabeth Malkin joins us from Mexico City with the latest news about the four missing journalists.

Vigilantes at a checkpoint near Apatzingan in Mexico's troubled state of Michoacan.

Mexican citizens take the drug war into their own hands

Conflict & Justice

The Mexican government is floundering over how to handle the security vacuum in the state of Michoacan. Young, armed citizens are fighting and beating a powerful drug cartel, but the government isn’t sure how to handle their new power.