Federal bureaucrats call it the "border fence." The residents along the Texas-Mexico border say it's a wall echoing the Cold War. And south of the Rio Grande, Governor Humberto Moreira of the Mexican state of Coahuila has dubbed it a "wall of hate." But no matter what the controversial barrier being constructed between Mexico and the U.S. is called, the $1.6 billion, 670-mile-long first phase is close to completion as President Barack Obama enters office. And ...

The drug-related violence in Mexico is harrowing and depressing. It poses a growing danger to Mexican civil society, the Mexican economy and the U.S. We are Mexico's largest trading partner, and only part of that business is drugs. The simple equation has always been one of supply and demand: America's insatiable demand drives the drug business in Mexico. But the huge increase in violence and lawlessness in Mexico over the past five years vastly outstrips the rise in drug use ...

Residents across New Mexico might be wondering what they did to anger Mother Nature. Ever since 2011 arrived on the scene, the weather has been nothing but ugly, beginning with a terrifying winter and now terrifying fires with the nebulous possibility of nuclear contamination. It began with a mass of arctic air in early February that sent temperatures plummeting to depths never seen in the state before. Pipes froze and many schools and government offices were closed ...

This is how Mexican investigators believe gangsters murdered business student Juan Francisco Sicilia: Two of his friends had been assaulted in Cuernavaca, south of Mexico City, by a pair of policemen moonlighting as muggers for the Pacfico Sur drug cartel. The friends reported the criminal cops, who panicked and asked their mafia bosses for help. On March 27, eight Pacfico Sur thugs, including a crazed psychopath called El Peln , abducted the two accusers, as well as ...

Mexico's newest drug cartel, and certainly the most bizarre, is La Familia Michoacana, a violent but Christian fundamentalist narco-gang based in the torrid Tierra Caliente region of western Michoacan state. The group is infamous for methamphetamine smuggling, lopping off enemies' heads and limbs, and massacring police and soldiers. Yet La Familia's leader, Nazario Moreno — aka El Mas Loco, or The Craziest One — has written his own bible, and his 1,500 minions hold prayer meetings before doing their ...

As twilight falls over Mexico City's Buenavista neighborhood, the traditional night shift begins. A woman in suspenders and a pink dress takes up right outside the doors of an American-owned bank. Across the street, two girls in miniskirts entice clients at the entrance of a subway station. A block down, a group of transvestites and transsexuals bare their wares outside a convenience store. Quickly, the streets fill with hundreds of sex workers, while their clients lurk discreetly ...

THE ADMINISTRATION The Strauss Affair Along a dim corridor outside the U.S. Senate chamber one evening strode a big, round-shouldered man with a conspicuous smile curling on lips that more often turn soberly downward. New Mexico's Democratic Senator Clinton P. Anderson was obviously happy with his thoughts. Spotting Anderson alone in the corridor, a newsman hurried up, asked a question heard constantly throughout Washington: "Will he make it?" Anderson paused, drew from his inside coat pocket a well-worn tally ...

The talk of New Orleans has centered on whether the most severe Mississippi River flood in more than a quarter-century will cause catastrophic damage to a city still recovering from Hurricane Katrina. And for good reason: the flood has carved a destructive path from from Cairo, Illinois, to Vicksburg, Mississippi, and prompted Louisiana's Republican governor, Bobby Jindal, to ask the federal government for emergency assistance. But there just might be a silver lining: the flood could ...

Mexican soldiers found a seventh mass grave in Durango, Mexico, this week, and its location was as unexpected as the six before it. TIME was one of the first media at the scene on Thursday, May 19, as forensic officials descended on a white stucco house in the upscale Jardines de Durango neighborhood to unearth presumed drug-cartel victims buried in the garden. Like the other grisly fosas, or narco-graves, uncovered in this northern desert city since last ...

On Saturday afternoon, Sandra Kelly, a 53-year-old cook, stood along the Atchafalaya River, which connects the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, and sighed. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, manager of much of the nation's water system, had just opened a spillway north of here, mainly to keep the bloated Mississippi's waters from toppling levees into cities, particularly the state's capital, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans. "I don't know how they decide who to ...