Mexico

Mexicans have been left wondering what happened to about a dozen men who disappeared after they were seen lined up against a wall by drug cartel gunmen.

In a video apparently filmed by a resident of the town San José de Gracia in the western state of Michoacán and posted on social media, bursts of gunfire broke out and smoke covered the scene.

The camera cuts away, and most observers assumed all the men – perhaps as many as 17 – died.

Not to make light of the Ukraine but more are killed daily in Sunny Mexico.

Three years ago reporter Lourdes Maldonado López stood up before Mexico’s president at a press conference and told him: “I fear for my life.”

On Sunday she was gunned down in the city of Tijuana – the third Mexican journalist to be killed this year in what is a deepening murder crisis facing the country’s press corps and its populist leader, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Maldonado, a former journalist for Mexico’s biggest network, Televisa, was reportedly shot in her car outside her home at about 6.20pm.

Tulum, jewel of the Mayan Riviera, risks emulating Acapulco, another once glamorous resort now overwhelmed by violence

Bright yellow police tape fluttered in the breeze outside a restaurant just off the main strip in the Mexican resort town of Tulum, as the lights of a nearby police truck flashed blue and red.

Troops in camouflage fatigues stood guard outside the deserted late-night eatery La Malquerida, “The Unloved” – the site of a gangland shooting that killed two female tourists and wounded another three holidaymakers.

Mexico is a Narco-State. They are a trading partner. What is to be done?

Narco gangs have upped the propaganda stakes

In nobler times, there wasn’t just honour among thieves; besuited gangsters, freedom-fighting terrorists and even invading fascist armies would give the citizens of a town or city fair warning before they started maiming, bombing and wiping out the local population. Old-school villains and ageing counter-terrorism experts I know often speak of “putting the frighteners” on extortion victims or receiving “coded” telephone calls from the IRA: failure to comply meant “we’d have to break something” or worse.

A small squad of soldiers with about a half-dozen trucks and sandbag emplacements stands guard on a rural highway in western Mexico. In one direction, almost within earshot, one drug cartel operates a roadblock extorting farmers. In the other direction, a rival cartel carries out armed patrols in trucks bearing its initials.

The Mexican army has largely stopped fighting drug cartels here, instead soldiers guard the dividing lines between gang territories so they won’t invade each other’s turf – and turn a blind eye to the cartels’ illegal activities just a few hundred yards away.

At the first roadblock, set up by the Viagras gang that has long dominated the state of Michoacán, a truck stands parked across the highway and stacked sandbags protect cartel gunmen.

Fifty years ago, Cancún was little more than a hurricane-battered fishing outpost, but it mushroomed into a tourist mecca thanks to massive government investment – and by the 1980s it was firmly established as the crown jewel of Mexico’s tourist industry.

Millions of tourists from around the world descend annually on the destination and the Riviera Maya, which unfolds to the south.

But success has brought other, less welcome visitors, too. Criminal groups run extortion rackets and peddle drugs. And its location on the eastern side of the Yucatán peninsula makes an ideal way station for drug runners moving cocaine out of Central and South America.

I have never held a desire to visit the narco-state.