Mexico: Drugs and a Beauty Queen | Newsweek International

El Chapo: The Most Wanted Man in Mexico
Joshua Hammer 6/18/2009 12:00:00 AM
The guards at the city club mall in downtown Culiacán refused to talk about the bullet holes in the parking lot. Or about the cross stuck into the pavement, inscribed with three pairs of initials and a melancholy tribute in Spanish: WE WILL LOVE YOU ALWAYS. But almost anyone in this city of 1 million could tell you what happened here a little before 9 p.m. on May 8, 2008: how three men climbed unawares into their white SUV after shopping at the mall; how three other cars zoomed up then unleashed a fusillade of AK-47 gunfire and a single blast from a bazooka. All three men were killed, two of them bodyguards for the third, a hulking 22-year-old named Edgar Beltrán Guzman—the son of Joaquín Guzman Loera, better known as El Chapo ("Shorty"), the most wanted man in Mexico.
CRIME
The Enemy Within
Eve Conant 3/14/2009 12:00:00 AM
As Manuel exited the Radio Shack in Phoenix with his family one afternoon last month, a group of Hispanic men standing in the parking lot watched him closely. "Do it now, do it now," one said to another in Spanish, according to a witness. One of the men approached Manuel, pointed a revolver at his head and tried to force him into a Ford Expedition parked close by. "Please, I'll get into the car, just don't touch me," Manuel pleaded as he entered the vehicle, his wife told police. Nearby, she said, another man in a Chrysler sedan aimed a rifle or shotgun out the driver's side window. At some point, shots were fired, said witnesses, although apparently no one was hit. Then the vehicles tore off with a screech of tires.
INTERNATIONAL
Bloodshed On the Border
11/29/2008 12:00:00 AM
Late one night in January, an ambulance escorted by five unmarked squad cars pulled up to Thomason Hospital in El Paso, Texas. Out leaped more than a dozen armed federal agents to protect the patient—Fernando Lozano Sandoval, a commander with the Chihuahua State Investigations Agency. He'd been pumped full of bullets just across the Mexican border in Ciudad Juárez by gunmen believed to have been hired by a drug cartel. Lozano Sandoval's sole hope of survival was the medical team at Thomason, the only level-one trauma center for nearly 300 miles. U.S. authorities took no chances; in Mexico, assassins regularly raid hospitals to finish off their prey. Throughout Lozano Sandoval's three-week treatment at Thomason (which proved successful), the Americans funneled visitors through metal detectors, posted guards outside the commander's room and deployed SWAT teams armed with assault rifles around the hospital's perimeter. Officers "were ready for war if it should go that route," says El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen.
WORLD AFFAIRS
The Age of Innocents
Michael Miller 10/25/2008 12:00:00 AM
Mexico is no stranger to violence. But when men dressed in black tossed grenades into crowds celebrating Mexican Independence Day in Morelia in September, it marked a new stage in a national nightmare. A country long accustomed to bloody feuds between powerful drug cartels, Mexico now faces the prospect of an all-out drug war in which innocents are no longer off-limits. The grenade attack in Morelia killed eight and injured 100, raising the death toll from drug violence this year to more than 3,700—a figure more reminiscent of Iraq or Afghanistan than the United States' neighbor.
A Priest And A Crime Caper
MEXICO FAX
Drug Lessons
Marc Peyser