A shootout in a border city that leaves five alleged drug traffickers sprawled dead on the street and seven police wounded. A police chief and his bodyguards gunned down outside his house in another border city. Four bridges into the United States shut down by protesters who want the military out of their towns and who officials say are backed by narcotraffickers.
"The grisly portrait of the violence is unprecedented and horrific," said Robert Pastor, a Latin America national security adviser for President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s.
Pastor calls the problem in Mexico "even worse than Chicago during the Prohibition era" and said a solution similar to what ended that violence is needed now.
"What worked in the U.S. was not Eliot Ness," he said, referring to the federal agent famous for fighting gangsters in 1920s and '30s. "It was the repeal of Prohibition."
CNN.com - Also see Mexico’s civil war on Macleans.ca
Mexico’s Drugs Wars - Photo Essay - Photographer Anthony Suau documents the surging influence of the drug cartels in Northern Mexico and the efforts by police to maintain law and order - Time
I am very ashamed to admit it and tell you that I was involved in the very first IRFing (internal reaction force) incident at Camp X-Ray. On the first day we had been taking detainees from the in-processing centre to their cages for quite a while when myself and the guy that was my escorting partner grabbed the next detainee to be taken. He was probably in his mid to late fifties – short and kind of husky build. I remember grabbing him and then starting to walk first through the rocks and then through the sally port [a long walkway with gates on both sides] heading towards Alpha Block. Then I noticed he was really tense, shaking really bad, and not wanting to walk or move without being forced to do so. We made our way to Alpha Block, to the cage he would be placed in. He was instructed to go to his knees, which he did. 
My partner then went down and took off his leg shackles. I still had control of his upper body, and I could still feel him tensing up. Once the shackles were off my partner started to take off the handcuffs. The detainee got really tense and started to pull away. We yelled at him: “Stop moving!” Over and over. Then he stopped moving, and when my partner went to put the key in that first handcuff, the detainee jerked hard to the left towards me. Before I knew it, I threw the detainee to the ground and was on top of him holding his face to the cement floor. 
terrorism is being exploited by the Government to erode civil liberties and risks creating a police state. 
“It would be better that the Government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism: that we live in fear and under a police state,” she said. 
