The latest grim manifestation of the unrelenting prison crisis in Latin America comes from the northern Mexican state of Nuevo León, where authorities confirmed that 16 inmates were killed, and 25 wounded, in an uprising at the dangerously overcrowded Penal de Cadereyta facility.
Authorities in San Luis Potosí found the body of local reporter Edgar Daniel Esqueda Castro outside the city's airport, dead of three gunshot wounds. He had been abducted by armed men in police uniforms in a night raid on his home the previous night. Authorities in San Luis Potosí deny that their police were invovled in the abduction.
Yet another Mexican journalist was slain as the cartels continue to exact vengeance on any who would dare to report on their reign of terror and corruption. Cándido "Papuche" Ríos, who covered the nota roja (crime and police beat) for local newspaper Diario de Acayucan, was gunned down in a rural town in Veracruz state.
A man believed to be the godson of Mexican narco lord "Chapo" Guzmán was indicted in a San Diego federal court after turning himself in to US border agents at Calexico. Authorities say Damaso López Serrano AKA "Mini Lic" surrendered under pressure of a bloody power struggle over control of the Sinaloa Cartel.
On his trip to Mexico, US Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly toured Guerrero state to witness opium eradication operations. That very night, a riot broke out at the prison in the state's biggest city, violence-torn Acapulco. The explosion of violence ended with at least 28 inmates dead—many of them mutilated and several beheaded.
An armed clash at a mountain village in Mexico's border state of Chihuahua left at least 25 dead—the latest indication that narco-gangs are stronger than the government across much of the country's drug-producing sierras. The shoot-out erupted in the pueblo of Las Varas, in the foothills of the Sierra Tarahumara—Mexico's prime cannabis and opium cultivation area.
Spyware supplied to Mexico officially to track narco-traffickers and terrorists was instead used against human rights investigators looking into the case of 43 "disappeared" college students. Amid the new scandal, the families of the disappeared continue to wait for justice. There has been one arrest in the case, and the remains of only two of the missing students identified.
A new study finding that Mexico is now the most dangerous country on Earth after war-torn Syria is rejected by the government, but even the military wants out of "drug war."
At a meeting in Chiapas, Mexico's newly formed Indigenous Government Council chose a Nahuatl woman from Jalisco as its candidate to contend in the 2018 presidential race.
The current flare-up in the border town of Reynosa may signal a turning point in the long war between Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel in Mexico's violence-torn Tamaulipas state.
Javier Duarte, the ex-governor of Mexico's Veracruz state, was detained by Interpol in Guatemala—the latest in a string of fugitive Mexican ex-governors to be arrested abroad.
Andres Manuel López Obrador, Mexico's left-populist presidential front-runner, has filed a complaint with the Inter-American Human Rights Commission against Trump's proposed wall.
