Jason Beaubien

The new top cop in Mexico's deadliest city, Juarez, gained notoriety for using an iron fist to reduce the violence in Tijuana's streets. And Julian Leyzaola now plans to use that fist to beat down the drug cartels in Juarez.

On his first day, thugs left Leyzaola a greeting on a tortured, duct-taped body. It said, "Welcome to Juarez, Julian Leyzaola. This is your first little gift and it's going to keep happening." It was signed, the Sinaloan cartel.

Last of a three-part series. Read Part 1 and Part 2.

The drug war in Mexico is having ramifications throughout the hemisphere, as Mexican cartels seek new markets and smuggling routes for their products.

Second in a three-part series. Read Part 1.

As Mexico's drug cartels come under sustained attack by President Felipe Calderon's forces at home, several of them have started outsourcing. Los Zetas and the powerful Sinaloan cartel have been expanding their operations in Central America, where security forces often lack the resources to confront them.

First of a three-part series

Mexico's drug cartels are carving out new territory in Central America, in some of the poorest and most fragile countries in the hemisphere.

Mexican gangs are cutting clandestine airstrips in the Guatemalan jungle, laundering money in El Salvador and unloading boatloads of cocaine on the coast of Honduras.

The World Bank recently warned that narcotics trafficking poses one of the greatest threats to development in the region.

In Mexico City, the world's richest man has just opened a new museum to showcase his extensive European and Mexican art collection. Telecommunications mogul Carlos Slim calls the museum a gift to his country.

The glimmering, modern building is already being hailed as a new landmark in Mexico's capital, but it is also being criticized as the pet project of a man who knows more about business than art.

In Mexico's drug war, children are getting increasingly sucked into the violent narcotics trade. Middle-school-age kids are working for the cartels as couriers, lookouts and even assassins. Others are being killed, injured or orphaned in the crossfire.

In the past, drug violence was usually contained between gangs and security forces, but that's changed. Recently, even toddlers have been targeted in attacks involving military-style assault weapons.

In the Mexican capital this week residents are staging an elaborate re-creation of Jesus Christ's final days on Earth — an Easter tradition in one of the world's most Catholic countries.

For more than a century and a half, the Passion of Christ has been performed each year in the streets of the impoverished Mexico City neighborhood of Ixtapalapa.

Monday night, Jesus gave his Sermon on the Mount, Lazarus rose from the dead, and a few loaves of bread multiplied to feed the hungry masses. Now preparations are being made for the Last Supper.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon's administration is vowing to bring the full weight of the government to bear on killers who have been operating in the northern state of Tamaulipas.

The declaration comes after at least 116 bodies were discovered in mass graves over the last week in the town of San Fernando. It's the same town where 72 migrants were found assassinated last August.

Investigators say the latest victims are mainly Mexicans who may have been kidnapped recently in the area.

A Painful Search

In Japan, efforts to gain control of the crippled nuclear reactor continue at the same time that hundreds of thousands of people are living in shelters and millions of people are attempting to restart their normal lives.

Officials in Japan now put the confirmed death toll at more than 10,000. Most of the deaths were due to the massive tsunami that pounded the Japanese coast.

Some of the dead are parents and students swept out of a schoolyard in the coastal city of Ishinomaki.