Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


According to government figures, there were 47,515 drug-related killings in Mexico between late 2006 and late 2011, though many experts put the death toll much higher. Almost every aspect of Mexican life is affected by organized crime and its endless battle to control the distribution of illicit drugs, most of which are destined for the United States and Canada. In just one month, photographer Louie Palu documented more than 110 murders in Mexico. There is no way of knowing how many of those deaths involved people who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. As long as its justice system allows criminals to operate with impunity, Mexico will continue to be brutalized by the drug trade. This is one photographer’s view of the deadly US-Mexico frontier.

Marisol Espinoza, a 20-year-old woman from Chiapas, rests in a shelter for deportees and migrants in Nogales, Mexico, the night after she was deported from the United States. She crossed into the US and walked through the Arizona desert for six days until she was arrested by the Border Patrol.

A heavily armed man who was killed by the Mexican military in Culiacán, Mexico, during an operation trying to hunt down the head assassin of the Sinaloa Cartel known as ”El Fantasma” in Quila, which is believed to be territory controlled by El Mayo—a Mexican drug lord associated with the Sinaloa Cartel.

A US drug enforcement agent aims a flashlight down a 55-foot-deep drug smuggling tunnel that runs almost 720 feet under the US-Mexico Border cut through a floor of a small industrial unit south of Yuma, Arizona, in the town of San Luis. It is estimated that the tunnel built by a Mexican drug cartel cost up to $1 million dollars and took one year to build.

A heroin addict shoots up along the Tijuana River in Tijuana, Mexico.

The Mexican side of the US-Mexico border fence located west of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, Texas, near the state of New Mexico.

Girls dressed as angels pray at a Ciudad Juárez crime scene where a young man was assassinated while rival drug cartel assassins ”heated up the plaza.”

Multiple track marks from injecting heroin seen in the legs of a Mexican man in Ciudad Juárez who was deported to Mexico from the US. He was first exposed to illegal drugs in the US, became an addict and was eventually deported. Drug addiction in Mexico along the US border is rising due to the amount of illegal drugs passing through border towns.

Some of the many mayors of the town of Práxedis in the Juárez Valley located east of Ciudad Juárez. This town has been under one political party rule for decades and has been under the control of drug cartels who have killed many mayors in the region and throughout the country in order to maintain control of this lucrative smuggling region.

The bodies of men executed and dumped on the side of the highway in Navolato, Sinaloa, which was the birthplace of one of the former leaders of the Juárez Cartel. Navolato is located next to the home turf of the Sinaloa Cartel, which was locked in a battle for control of Ciudad Juárez for several years.

A man holding a US passport coming from Mexico with his bike lines up at the Laredo, Texas, port of entry under the watchful eye of a Border Patrol agent and a dog used to sniff out illegal narcotics.

A woman who was found beating herself in downtown Ciudad Juárez is seen in a privately run shelter for the mentally ill west of the city. Due to a lack of state social infrastructure, many people with extreme mental illnesses are brought here.

A migrant’s feet after walking for days through the Arizona desert, seen in a Nogales, Mexico, migrant shelter after being deported by US authorities. One of the top injuries to migrants is severe blistering on their feet from walking in the desert heat.

Mexican families at a beach on the Rio Grande River, which serves as the US-Mexico border where the states of Chihuahua, New Mexico, and Texas intersect.

The PAN party candidate Margarita Cervantes Arellanes celebrates with supporters after her winning campaign made her the first female mayor of Monterrey, Mexico, the capital of the state of Nuevo León.

This project was supported with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate