The drug wars in Mexico have sunk to a new low.

Yesterday, a gang of hooded gunmen shot eight patients to death and wounded six others at a rehab center in Ciudad Juárez in what looks like part of a drug-gang feud in the cartel-ridden city. The gunmen reportedly stormed the center (during a Wednesday night prayer service, no less), then picked out their victims and took them to the back patio to be shot. The gunmen then opened fire inside the rehab center, leaving behind 60 shell casings.

FILE: ALFREDO ESTRELLA/AFP/Getty Images

These shootings bring the city's total of drug-related killings to a whopping 40 -- for just this week. A major drug transit point, the border city has always run rampant with cartels and crime. But the recent outbreak of murders and kidnappings is something new. So far this year, Ciudad Juárez's murder toll sits just below 800, most of them drug-related.

Things don't look too good for Felipe Calderon, who vowed to crack down on Mexico's drug traffickers at the beginning of his term. This year's wave of violence might just be a reaction to his stepped-up efforts to combat crime, but the Mexican president has some house-cleaning to do. Just today, six members of the government's top organized crime unit were arrested for supposedly leaking information to drug traffickers.

With Mexico still awaiting some $400 million in U.S. drug-war aid, Calderon better step up his efforts to kick out the bad guys soon.

Today's map is a source of a bit of controversy in the UK. Recent news reports have described plans to provide folks with interactive maps that display incidents of crime in any neighborhood. The maps would detail, on a street-by-street basis, where different crimes took place. It would also allow users to select different types of crime -- "serious violence," "other violence," and "youth nuisance" among others -- and highlight only those infractions in each neighborhood.

The map below shows "anti-social behaviour" in Leeds, West Yorkshire:

In case you're wondering what constitutes "anti-social behaviour," here's a quick sampling:

Street drinking, presence of drug dealers or users, soliciting, abandoned cars, illegal parking, off-road motorcycling, skateboarding, noisy neighbours, persistent alarms, shouting & swearing, fireworks, climbing on buildings, false emergency calls, uncontrolled animals, groups or individuals causing nuisance, graffiti, damage to bus-stops or buildings, dropping litter and fly-tipping."

Not everyone is happy about the map. Aside from privacy concerns, there are fears that publishing that sort of information in a rough housing market could devalue properties overnight.

It would sure make life easier for a British Bruce Wayne, though.

SHAH MARAI/AFP/Getty Images

As if we needed more bad news from Afghanistan. Afghanistan's drug lords are now recruiting foreign chemists to help refine raw opium into heroin, the U.N. warns:

Most of the chemists come from Iran, Turkey and Pakistan, the UN says, and are going to some of Afghanistan’s most troubled areas to oversee the mixing of poppy resin with smuggled industrial chemicals to produce heroin of the highest quality.

Christina Orguz, Afghanistan country director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said Afghanistan’s drug lords were behaving like businessmen and recruiting the best talent available. Afghanistan now supplies more than 90 per cent of the world’s heroin.

The refining process requires large amounts of otherwise-legal chemicals, smuggled across the border into Afghanistan. Earlier this year, a shipment was seized in -- you guessed it -- Pakistan.

iStockphoto.com

A few weeks back, I blogged a Times of India story about how China's construction boom was driving up iron prices, resulting in widespread theft of manhole covers in Mumbai.

Now, the New York Times is reporting that the epidemic of manhole theft is spreading throughout the United States as well. In Philadelphia alone, 2,500 covers have been stolen in the last year, costing the city at least $300,000. Widespread manhole-cover theft has also been reported in Long Beach, Cleveland, Memphis, Miami, and Milwaukee. Some cities are now switching to plastic covers or welding down the metal ones.

Police are trying to crack down on junkyards, but as one North Philadelphia scrap metal collector reports, the demand curve is not in their favor:

These guys here," Mr. Sergeant said, pointing at one scrap yard, "They’d buy a police cruiser and melt it down if we brought it in. The prices for metal are just that good these days."

ABDELHAK SENNA/AFP/Getty Images

The BBC has a pair of interesting stories today about an awful practice in Nigeria and other African countries where conmen pose as sports agents and dupe young, would-be soccer players out of thousands of dollars. These fraudsters tell youths -- many of whom live in the slums of Lagos, Accra and other cities and see soccer as a way to escape poverty -- that they can guarantee them a trial with a club in the English Premiership, the most competitve soccer league in the world.

Trafficking in African youths has become a growing concern for soccer's governing body, Fifa, as middlemen can bypass work permit restrictions and bring teenage Africans into European countries, where they are then sold to clubs for large sums of money, or simply discarded on the streets of major European cities.

In an accompanying video, an undercover reporter from the BBC -- posing as the parent of a talented teenaged soccer player -- can be seen negotiating with one of the swindlers in a Lagos hotel. After promising the undercover reporter that his son will be given a trial with Manchester United, the man is confronted with a television crew before being carted off by Nigerian police.

Nigeria is not the only country affected. Just over a year ago, 34 young boys from Ivory Coast were promised trials in Europe, borrowed the money to pay their bogus agents, and were then robbed and held against their will in neighboring Mali.

Sepp Blatter, the President of Fifa, has accused Europe's wealthy soccer clubs, who often turn a blind eye to this despicable practice, as commiting "social and economic rape" of Africa.

He's right. European clubs are often the subjects of the wildest dreams of young African soccer players. They have a responsibility to see that these dreams are not abused by criminals.

STUART PRICE/AFP/Getty Images

To get high, some South African drug addicts have reached a new low.

Durban's provincial health department recently reported an alarming level of thefts of Stocrin, an antiretroviral drug treatment used to treat AIDS. Drug users reportedly crush the Stocrin with marijuana to get an extra-potent yet extra-dangerous high. The mixture breaks down the body's immune system "and eventually leads to death," according to Anwar Jeera, the head of a South African rehabilitation centre. But the ones most hurt by the thefts are of course South Africa's AIDS patients, many of whom have been ambushed by drug thieves on their way home from the hospital. In a country where five and a half million people suffer from AIDS, a crime-induced shortage of the life-saving antiretroviral treatments -- which 478,000 South Africans are registered to use -- is very bad news indeed.

BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP/Getty Images

Today, apparently, is International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, and the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) is launching a new three-year campaign called "Do drugs control your life?"

But instead of releasing statements from Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon or posting video clips in Serbian on YouTube, maybe the office should spend more time lobbying the Security Council and the IAEA.

The ongoing standoff with Tehran over its nuclear aims is threatening a rare cooperative venture between Iran and the West: Tehran's campaign to stem opium and other drug trafficking from Afghanistan through Iran to Europe. In a little-noticed provision in the incentives package offered to Tehran on June 14, Western countries threatened to cut off further aid to the anti-drug efforts unless Iran agrees to halt its uranium enrichment.

Such measures would harm anti-drug efforts in the Middle East and Europe, U.N. officials say. Iran caught approximately 900 tons of Afghan drugs in 2007, and UNDOC Director Antonio Maria Costa warned that a "heroin tsunami" could hit Europe if aid were cut. And it could be devastating for Iran as well. Despite devoting 30,000 troops (like the fellow in the photo above) to drug patrols in border areas, the Islamic Republic already contains the highest proportion of heroin and opium addicts in the world, experts believe.

It's a tough world for journalists these days. Reporters attempting to shed light on tragedy, corruption, and death often encounter all three. The recent political violence in Zimbabwe may be the perfect example, and Sri Lanka is not far behind. Reporters in war zones face the obvious perils of combat-related injury or death, not to mention kidnappings at the hands of guerrilla groups. Iraq continues to rank as the most dangerous country in the world for journalists.

The following interactive map from MSN and the International News Safety Institute allows us to see where journalists have been killed in 2008:

Not surprisingly, death statistics tend to follow the political and social conditions in a given country. A reporter investigating gangs in Panama was stabbed to death. The same is true of India, where Mohammad Muslimuddin was killed in April after he exposed a drug-trafficking ring.

Here's a question for all you expert readers out there. What happens when you burn 260 tons of hashish?

Afghan counternarcotics officials said Wednesday that they uncovered 260 tons of hashish hidden in 6-foot-deep trenches in southern Afghanistan in what one DEA official said appears to be the world's biggest drug bust.

The hashish, found in the southern province of Kandahar on Monday, was worth more than $400 million and would have netted the Taliban about $14 million in profits, NATO's International Security Assistance Force said.

The hashish weighed as much as 30 double-decker London buses, ISAF said. The drugs were burned on site. Hashish is a concentrated form of marijuana.

SAEED KHAN/AFP/Getty Images

FP contributor Doug Farah, who wrote the book on Viktor Bout, the world's most notorious arms dealer, has sources telling him that the Russians are offering the Thais (who are holding Bout pending extradition to the United States) just about anything to prevent Bout from being shipped off to trial in America:

After several diplomatic efforts to get Bout out of prison and back to Russia, the Russian government, or at least its military establishment, has decided to let some money and hardware do the talking.

My sources tell me the Russian ambassador in Thailand has met several times with the Thai prime minister, and has offered sweet heart deals on weapons systems, including fighter jets, in exchange for Bout.

In addition, the Russians are offering sweet heart gas and oil deals to sweeten the pot...The question is, why would Bout be so valuable to the Russians, and what is it that they fear he could or would say in a court?

The most obvious answer is that he is deeply in bed and protected by the Russian military establishment and its intelligence services.

What's curious about this situation is the fact that it seemed likely at the time of Bout's arrest in March that there was no way the Thais (and by extension, the Americans) could have gotten their hands on such a prized prisoner unless the Russians had given the go-ahead. Bout allegedly lived openly in Moscow, and if his connections to the Russian intelligence agencies are as strong as many believe, there's reason to believe that someone might have sacrificed him for other (higher) purposes. That said, this could be a case of luck and old-fashioned investigative work coming together and resulting in a major nab, in which case the Russians want him back, not least because of the fear he'll talk. As with all things Bout, this situation is as murky as they come.

The Balkans, once Europe's "powder keg," has just been crowned "one of the safest [regions] in Europe" by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in its report Crime and Its Impact on the Balkans.

According to the report (full pdf), the region has relatively little problem with conventional crime. In fact:

Croatia has a lower murder rate than the United Kingdom. The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia had less homicide per capita than Portugal or Sweden. Romania was safer than Finland or Switzerland."

But that doesn't mean Croatia is all kittens and roses. Rather than taking the form of street crime, the report explains, the region's ugly transition from communism and years of war has lingered on in the form of organized crime networks and illicit trade. The region's two biggest problems today are trafficking of drugs and humans (predominantly sex trafficking).

About 100 tons of heroin enters the region each year, of which 85 tons are sold on to the West for a gross annual flow worth $25 to 30 billion -- more than the annual GDPs of Albania, Macedonia, and Moldova put together.

On the human trafficking front, the UNODC calls the Balkans an "epicenter" of trafficking in Europe. While the report repeats an outside estimate that 120,000 women and children are moved through the region each year, it quickly points out the utter lack of information on the real magnitude of the problem. (For insight into the world of sex trafficking and those trying to fight it, check out this story and this recent essay in FP).

Take-away message: The Balkans may be Europe's new Mayberry, but only if you're not vulnerable, young, and female.

The number of sex workers in New Zealand does not appear to have increased since legislation decriminalising prostitution became law, according to a new report.

Story here, via Tyler Cowen.

ROBERT ATANASOVSKI/AFP/Getty Images

For months, Greece has been threatening to veto Macedonia’s admittance into the EU, all because the two can't agree on the name issue.  But with violent outbreaks pock-marking Macedonia in the weeks before its June 1 elections, it appears the tiny Balkan state might just knock itself out of contention before Greece even gets the chance.

Last month, Macedonia’s parliament moved to disband and hold snap elections after months of deadlock (and the occasional headlock) over reform issues and rights for its 25 percent Albanian minority.

Since the beginning of the campaign last Sunday, a member of the Democratic Party of Albanians (DPA) has been stabbed to death and members of the rival Democratic Union for Integration (DUI), have been beaten, shot at, and had their offices attacked. In the latter cases, the DUI has blamed the violence on DPA supporters.

EU leaders have expressed concern over Macedonia’s pre-election troubles, saying that "violence has no place in an election campaign."  

This seems like an awfully understated response on the part of the EU, for whom Macedonia is quite close to the front of its new membership queue.  A candidate country since 2005, Macedonia is on track for EU membership in the coming years. But if the country can’t better control its pre-election tensions, is it really ready?  After all, as Bulgaria has shown, EU membership is not just going to make crime and corruption disappear.  But on the flip side, the promise of an EU future may be the only thing keeping countries like Macedonia on track toward an eventually stable government.

So back to Greece and its veto-happy approach to its northern neighbor. Is prolonged regional instability really worth it for one little modifier?

OMAR TORRES/AFP/Getty Images

The chaotic drug violence in Mexico continues unabated. With more than 6,000 killed in the past few years, today we can add yet another victim: the country's national police chief, killed by gunmen outside his home in Mexico City yesterday.

Edgar Eusebio Millán Gómez, the public face of Mexico's offensive against drug cartels, became the highest-ranking law enforcement official to be killed since the launch of the effort 17 months ago. The assassination could give new confidence to drug cartels blamed for 6,000 killings in the past 2 1/2 years, and embolden other anti-government groups in this violence-plagued nation.

"This could have a snowball effect, even leading to the risk of ungovernability," Luís Astorga, a Mexico City-based sociologist and drug expert, said in an interview. "It indicates terrible things, a level of weakness in our institutions -- they can't even protect themselves."

Just a few ordinary days in modern Mexico...

This weekend:

Gunmen killed 17 people over the weekend in the southern coastal state of Guerrero in a wild hunt for the head of the state cattlemen’s association, who has gone into hiding, the authorities said Monday.

On Saturday morning, several men dressed as commandos and carrying assault rifles opened fire on a cattlemen’s meeting at a hotel in Iguala, killing seven ranchers but missing the leader of the group, Rogaciano Alba Álvarez.

The next day, eight trucks full of armed men pulled up outside a house on Mr. Alba Álvarez’s ranch in Petatlán. The men asked for the owner of the ranch. His family and ranch hands denied knowing his whereabouts.

The gunmen then lined people up against a wall and opened fire, killing 10 people, including two young sons of Mr. Alba Álvarez, Alejandro and Rusbel, a witness told The Associated Press. Then they kidnapped a teen-age girl believed to be Mr. Alba Álvarez’s niece or daughter and fled, authorities said.

Last week:

TIJUANA – A confrontation between rival criminal gangs left 13 dead and nine injured early yesterday in gunbattles that started along a major thoroughfare and continued near a private clinic where police exchanged gunfire with injured suspects.

Saturday:

Police have recovered the remains of seven men who were killed and dumped along a road in northern Mexico.

Thanks to the likes of Napster, modern-day piracy is often associated more with ripped files than riptides. But according to this week's Tuesday Map, modern-day pirates still roam the high seas –- at least off the coast of Somalia.

This integrated satellite map, created by UNOSAT (the Operational Satellite Applications Program of the UN Institute for Training and Research) shows reported incidents of pirate attacks and hijackings off the coast of Somalia between January and November of 2007 (highlighted in red orbs) as well as incidents in 2005 and 2006 (not highlighted).

Somalia, ranked third in the 2007 Failed States Index, has been in a rough patch ever since the 1991 fall of President Said Barre. For more than two decades, it remained loosely governed and divided by warlords. Then, back in June 2006, a group of Muslim clerics, leaders, and businessmen called the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) took control of Mogadishu and installed an Islamic extremist leader, challenging the legitimacy of Somalia's U.N.-backed Transitional Federal Government (TFG). Seven months later, the TFG, with the help of neighboring Ethiopia, retook the capital city and much of the South. The TFG's resurgence was also supported by American commandos, sent in to take out suspected al Qaeda terrorists.

Given this rocky track record, Somalia's coastal chaos would seem to reflect its internal instability. But according to UNOSAT's figures (see the chart included in the pdf map), piracy actually subsided during the UIC period, a time otherwise reported as bearing a striking resemblance to the Taliban regime.

Perhaps there's a fatwa against eye patches?

Fire up your popcorn poppers and invite over all your friends: On Wednesday night, PBS stations nationwide will air the new National Geographic documentary Illicit: The Dark Trade, based on the bestselling book by FP Editor in Chief Moisés Naím. You can check your local listings for times. (If you live in Washington, D.C., it's on WETA TV 26 at 8:00 p.m.)

The film explores the dark underbelly of globalization, from the counterfeiting of luxury goods to money laundering to human trafficking. Highlights include live footage of a raid on a counterfeit warehouse and a moving sequence illustrating how the contaminated cough syrup that killed dozens in Panama last year originated at an unlicensed Chinese chemical factory. It also features extensive interviews with Naím and our Carnegie Endowment colleague Minxin Pei.

Here's a preview:

FP subscribers can also check out Naím's 2003 cover story, "The Five Wars of Globalization," to see where it all began.

Guang Niu/Getty Images

Since July 2006, the Chinese People's Liberation Army has discovered "4,112 fake military vehicles and 6,373 stolen or bogus military number plates," Xinhua reports.

Why the counterfeiting? Because vehicles with military plates don't have to pay for tolls or parking, and they're far less likely to get pulled over for speeding.

I wonder, what kind of vehicles are we talking about here? Tanks? APCs? Some clever Chinese fraudsters have already fabricated a Ferrari, so why not?

bumad.un.kiev.ua

Bulgaria, the EU’s newest member state, is fast becoming one of Brussels' main headaches.

Back in January, corruption accusations grew so rampant around the country’s road construction projects that the EU froze all related funding until further investigation.  

Then, less than a week after EU officials visited Sofia to warn against corruption and organized crime, a prominent businessman was shot twice in the head in the stairwell of his apartment building. Less than 24 hours later, a former mafioso turned novelist was also shot and killed while leaving a downtown café. Their deaths only add to the 150 or so mafia-style killings in Bulgaria since the fall of communism –- none of which have seen convictions.

Now, Bulgaria’s parliament has reported that its country’s problems extend far beyond the new EU border.  Bulgaria’s National Security Agency has found that Bulgarian drug traffickers, who do a sizable business sitting on the fault line between Europe and Southwest Asia, have close links to Arab drug traders who, in turn, fund Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad.

I’m all for the EU accession of Western Balkan states –- if nothing else because there is presently no other viable alternative for an economically and politically stable future in the region. But it's because of the lack of an alternative that accession standards have slipped as far as they have.  And if the EU can’t hold Bulgaria on its commitment to anti-corruption standards, how will it ever manage the likes of Bosnia and Serbia?

FILE: Mark Penn; Win McNamee/Getty Images

I must admit, I'm puzzled as to why it's supposed to be such a big deal that Hillary Clinton's chief strategist Mark Penn (right) met with Bogotá's ambassador to Washington about the controversial U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

The key point to remember about this and other FTAs in Latin America is that they're much more about politics than they are about economics. Ninety percent of U.S. imports from Colombia have already been entering the United States without any tariff, thanks to prior agreements. Peterson Institute analyst Jeffrey J. Schott estimated in 2006 that any welfare gains (GDP boost) from a U.S.-Colombia FTA would be positive, but "relatively small" -- roughly half a percentage point for the Colombians, and a negligible amount for the United States. If anything, the agreement is about lowering Colombia's tariff barriers to U.S. goods, solidifying trade relations, and lowering the risk that President Álvaro Uribe's successor will have a different economic philosophy. So, claims by U.S. labor activists that the FTA would be bad for U.S. manufacturers are little more than dishonest fearmongering.

That said, I'm not on board with U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab's hyperbole, either. Can it really be that the dangling FTA, not the drug war, is the root of Latin America's problems today?

Leaders in the hemisphere and Latin America have said that the single most destabilizing factor in Latin America today may be the U.S. Congress's failure to ratify the Colombia Free Trade Agreement. That is more destabilizing today than anything that Colombia's neighbor Venezuela is doing or threatening to do— and that is saying a lot.