Gunmen assassinated the front-running candidate for governor of a Mexican border state Monday in what President Felipe Calderon called an attempt by drug gangs to sway local and state elections this weekend. The assailants ambushed Rodolfo...

The former governor of the Mexican state of Quintana Roo has pleaded not guilty in New York to drug trafficking and money laundering charges. On Sunday, Mario Ernesto Villanueva Madrid became the most senior Mexican politician to be extradited to the...

Mexico’s drug cartels have changed tactics and are turning more attacks on authorities, rather than focusing their fire on rivals gangs, the country’s top security official said Sunday. Interior Secretary Fernandez Gomez-Mont said at a news...

The bodies of 12 murder victims, eight of them partially burned, were found in a Pacific coast state, authorities said Wednesday. The Nayarit state Attorney General’s Office said the corpses were discovered in fields outside the town of Xalisco...

Scores of police officers – including the entire department of one town – have been detained in Mexican probes of killings and kidnappings. Mayor Alfredo Osorio of the Gulf coast town Tierra Blanca said Monday that about 90 city policemen were...

A law allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry comes into effect on Thursday in Mexico City. The law, which was passed by the city’s local assembly in December, gives gay people full marital rights, including the right to adopt.

A long-missing journalist in the Gulf coast state of Tabasco was killed by a drug cartel’s hit men who dissolved his body in acid, Mexican authorities said. Rodolfo Rincon, 54, who worked for the newspaper Tabasco Hoy, was last seen Jan. 20,...

Mexican authorities say a man’s head and a threatening message referring to a drug cartel have been found on a town square. Prosecutors in central Michoacan state say the head was left on a tree-lined plaza in the town of Quiroga on Wednesday....

One of Mexico’s most-wanted drug lords has been killed in a shoot-out with state security forces, officials say. Arturo Beltran Leyva and four alleged members of his cartel died in a raid on a flat in Cuernavaca, just south of Mexico City. The...

About 17 million Brazilians, 13% of the electorate, confessed to have traded their vote for money, job or gifts, according to a public opinion poll released Sunday by the Brazilian daily with the most circulation, Folha de S Paulo. Under the heading...