From "The Atlantic"
Slideshow video included

Foreign Affairs December 2009

In the almost three years since President Felipe Calderón launched a war on drug cartels, border towns in Mexico have turned into halls of mirrors where no one knows who is on which side or what chance remark could get you murdered. Some 14,000 people have been killed in that time—the worst carnage since the Mexican Revolution—and part of the country is effectively under martial law. Is this evidence of a creeping coup by the military? A war between drug cartels? Between the president and his opposition? Or just collateral damage from the (U.S.-supported) war on drugs? Nobody knows: Mexico is where facts, like people, simply disappear. The stakes for the U.S. are high, especially as the prospect of a failed state on our southern border begins to seem all too real.

by Philip Caputo

The Fall of Mexico

Image credit: JuliÀn Cardona

Poor Mexico. So far from God and so close to the United States.
—Porfirio DÃ*az, dictator of Mexico from 1876 to 1880 and 1884 to 1911

Those famous words came to mind when another man named DÃ*az offered me an equally concise observation about the realities of life in the country today: “In Mexico it is dangerous to speak the truth. It is even dangerous to know the truth.â€