This comes in the wake of a corruption scandal in which prison guards in Gómez Palacios, Durango allegedly released and armed convicts to carry out mass murder in Torreón, Chihuahua. The two sister cities are one metropolitan area separated by a river which marks the state line.

Federal police investigators dropped this bombshell in a weekend press conference after looking into the July 18th massacre of 17 people at a birthday in a hotel. Eighteen people were wounded in the same attack. This was the third such massacre this year thought to have been committed by inmates released from the state penitentiary in Gómez Palacios. Crime scene shell casings were traced to assault rifles used by guards at the prison.

The four missing journalists aren’t the only victims in the scandal’s immediate fall out. A prison guard has been killed and 8 human heads have been found around the city of Durango, capital of the state of the same name.

Federal authorities allege that not only were dangerous criminals released from their cells, but that prison guards lent them high-caliber firearms and official vehicles. Investigators traced the weapons back to the prison from crime scene shell casings. The same weapons were allegedly used in at least 2 other massacres this year.

This isn’t the first time prison officials in the state of Durango have been accused of colluding with inmates tied to the region’s powerful drug trafficking interests. Four prison officials are currently under investigation.

Many of Mexico’s overcrowded prisons are microcosms of the drug violence that has claimed more than 24 thousand lives here since President Felipe Calderón launched his military approach to the Drug War in December of 2006.

Eight people died in drug-related violence in the border state of Tamaulipas and an explosive device was thrown at the US consulate in the city of Nuevo Laredo. The consulate remains closed to the public today as part of the ongoing investigation.

Mexican states immediately south of Texas have been experiencing a surge in drug-related violence as the Gulf Cartel battles with its former enforcement wing, The Zetas, for control of strategic territory. Thousands marched Sunday in the cities of Tampico and Monterrey calling to an end to the violence.

Meanwhile, the vicious turf war in Ciudad Juarez may be tapering off, according to an FBI assessment leaked to the Associated Press. Mexican newspapers are widely citing statements by the FBI spokesperson in El Paso that the majority of drugs passing through Ciudad Juarez now belong to the Sinaloa Cartel.

The battle for the Juarez drug route has killed more than 5,000 since 2008.

Official corruption is suspected behind a major jailbreak near the northeastern border city of Matamoros. The 41 inmates simply walked through the front doors of the high-security prison to waiting vehicles. Most were in prison for federal crimes. Two guards disappeared along with the inmates. The prison’s director has been fired and all 200 staffers are under investigation.

Most of the escaped inmates allegedly have ties to organized crime. Their jailbreak comes at a time when the Gulf Cartel is said to be battling its former enforcement wing, The Zetas, for control of valuable drug trafficking territory in northeastern Mexico. The warfare has included heavy intimidation of the press in the region, resulting in very little on-the-ground coverage outside of posts on social networking sites.

North of the border, the Department of Justice says that Mexican cartel activity has expanded to every region of the US and the tonnage of drugs trafficked has increased despite a 1.4 billion dollar military aid package aimed at reducing supply.

That may sound like good news to a public that has grown weary of the military strategy that has claimed 18,000 Mexican lives in the past 3 years, but the announcement was short on specifics on just how this new social strategy will be carried out. Also without concrete details was the US promise to try to curb demand at home – the world’s most lucrative drug market.

Other new bi-national initiatives will include the sharing of information on convicted criminals deported to Mexico, tougher penalties for people traveling with forged documents, and a joint security program for the violent border metropolis of Ciudad Juárez. Both countries also agreed to tackle the flow of arms and laundered money from the US into Mexico.

Financing for the plan comes from the 1.4 billion dollar Mérida Initiative – a military spending program similar to Plan Colombia.

While there’s no official explanation for the surge in violence in Guerrero, widely circulated rumors tell of a new alliance among 3 powerful cartels to eliminate another.

Weekends with double digit death tolls are usually only seen in Ciudad Juarez. The northern border city located across from El Paso, Texas was also the site of violence this weekend. Among the dead are 3 people connected to the US consulate in Juarez.

They were shot in front of their children in two separate attacks after leaving a child’s birthday party. Two of the children were injured. The State Department has since authorized consular employees in 6 border cities to move their families to the US.

President Calderon has carefully cultivated his tough-on-crime image since deploying the military to fight the Drug War just days after taking office. While the military strategy sparked some of the worst bloodshed Mexico has seen in decades, the administration insists the violence means cartel infrastructure is crumbling.

So, it came as a surprise to some when Calderon himself proposed a measure to decriminalize the possession of small quantities of illegal drugs. At the height of the Swine Flu scare in late April, Mexico’s Congress passed a bill that would allow users to carry up to 5 grams of marijuana, half a gram of cocaine, 2 grams of opium, and smaller doses of heroin or methamphetamines.

Symbolic Importance

“When you’re decriminalizing possession like this, it has essentially no international consequences,” says Ethan Nadelmann, Executive Director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a US-based organization that promotes alternatives to the Drug War. “This is not about the production, sale, distribution – it’s none of that sort of stuff. So, there’s no reason to think that this is going to make marijuana much more available in Mexico or lower its price coming across the border. It’s really about changing a small element of the legal relationship between the cop and somebody who’s picked up with marijuana or maybe some other drug in a small amount.”

The bill creates three different legal categories for drug offenders; users, addicts, and small time dealers. What separates a user from an addict will be up to a police investigator, but what sets a dealer apart from the rest is quantity; anything over the tolerated limit. Dealing offenses also carry mandatory minimum sentences harsher than those under current law.

Tolerated Limits and Market Reality

Jorge Hernandez Tinajero is the head of CUPIHD, a Mexican NGO that advocates for drug policy reform. He insists the quantities listed for simple possession have no relation to the reality of the market. “For example, in the case of marijuana, no one who is going to buy it is going to purchase only 5 grams,” says Hernandez Tinajero. “In the case of cocaine, the bill allows for the possession of a maximum of half a gram, whereas in the market, cocaine is sold by the gram. So, the act of buying or possessing a gram of cocaine – the unit by which it’s sold – automatically makes someone a “small scale dealer” and carries a 4 year sentence. The notion that this is a law to decriminalize is false.”

Little Impact on Ground Zero of the Drug War

Others say the proposed law will have a greater impact on a political level than on everyday life. Isaac Gonzalez works with at-risk youth in Ciudad Juarez. He cites poverty, inadequate educational infrastructure, and the overall lack of opportunities as the forces that drive young people towards using and dealing drugs. To drive the point home, Gonzalez points out that organized crime “according to some youth we’ve been able to rescue, pays fifteen hundred pesos a week to guard a pusher’s corner or to be involved in some way”. That’s 2-3 times what a maquiladora worker makes in the troubled border city.

“Why do we think about adding more police when perhaps what we need is rehabilitation or harm reduction…or prevention?” he asks. “But not prevention by burning drugs because that’s not directly related with consumption. We need to change this dynamic. The only things the people here see are shootings and death and all it creates is a society of fear…and not a society that thinks and can be critical of its everyday reality.”

Enter the Private Prison Industry

The end result of the so-called decriminalization law, with its mandatory minimum sentences, could be a prison population that the current system can’t house.

The Calderon administration seems to have already taken this into account. Mexico’s Public Security Ministry announced last month that it will increase bed space by more than 40 thousand by working, for the first time, with private investment to construct 12 new prisons.