Mexico is more dangerous than Iraq

USA Today's web site misfiles this story under News > World > Troop Deaths in Iraq, but it's about the epidemic of drug violence in Mexico (about which Nice Deb has more).

Key points:

The death toll from drug-related violence in Mexico last year surpassed 6,000, more than double the previous year, raising questions about whether Calderon's government can prevail against a brutal and often better-armed enemy without additional help from the U.S. government.

"People are scared, and they have reason to be," says Michael Shifter, a Latin America specialist at Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank. "The economic crisis is just going to aggravate the situation. It's very hard to imagine how things will get better in the short term."

That's bad news in broad swaths of the USA, where Mexican drug gangs have extended their operations to at least 230 cities from Texas to Alaska, according to a recent Justice Department report.