Good luck, friends. 

It just keeps getting worse.

First came the recent news that Mexican authorities had caught a guy known as El Pozolero. A technicrat in a Tijuana drug cartel, he earned the nickname by dissolving the bodies of over 300 cartel enemies in acid.

And the situation in Juarez and Chihuahua gets more depressing by the hour. Gunmen attacked a convoy carrying the governor recently, and the police chief also resigned, bowing to cartel threats to kill one policeman per day if he didn’t.

The mayor of Juarez, quite possibly the most dangerous city in North America, is now living in El Paso, which, oddly enough, is one of the safest.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the violence is spilling into my new backyard in Albuquerque. The Albuquerque Journal reported the following on February 14:

     One of the cartels with ties to Ciudad Juarez was “sending a message” with the death of Danny Baca, who was found shot 22 times with an assault rifle, burned and left in the middle of a far West Mesa roadway in January 2008. 
     Baca, 54, was supposed to bring a load of drugs across the border for a smuggling cartel, meet a connection in El Paso and go from there, according to authorities. 
     Bernalillo County Sheriff Darren White said Baca “signed his own death warrant” when he and another man decided to bypass El Paso and bring the drugs to Albuquerque. 
     “They wanted to make sure everybody knew you don’t mess with the cartel,” White said Friday. “This was a very clear message they were sending.”

Here I thought I had left all this behind in Michoacan.

The good news is that White and his colleagues in New Mexico and federal law enforcement could beat the cartels in a fight. The bad news is that they might one day have to.