The total number of tourists in Mexico hit a record in the first half of the year, with more than 14 million foreigners touching down, almost 20 percent more compared to last year, the Tourism Department said.  The spike in visitors, especially Americans, comes after several years of stagnation in the travel sector here amid a slow global economic recovery and fears of gory cartel violence.

Let's agree that the arrest of Mexican drug lord Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman is not going to have an impact on the flow of drugs through Mexico into the rest of North America. That flow is driven by demand, and the demand for drugs in the U.S. and Canada will continue whether Guzman is in prison or out, alive or dead.

Townspeople gathered at dusk in the central square of this city of ranches and lemon groves, planning to pick a committee to support and oversee the activities of a recently arrived self-defense group here. The vigilantes gained acceptance when they recently ran off a cartel accused of everything from extracting extortion payments to making people it didn’t like in the community disappear.

The Internet, and particularly left-leaning U.S. blogs, are abuzz with a story in the Mexican newspaper El Universal alleging that the United States cut secret deals with one of Mexico's largest drug cartels. The nature of those deals change based on which English-language rewrite you're reading, but in the most extreme and widely circulated tellings, the U.S. allowed the Sinaloa cartel to "smuggle billions of dollars of drugs" and granted the organization "immunity and undisturbed drug trafficking" in exchange for information on rival cartels.

Hell seems ever more liable to bust loose in western Mexico’s Michoacan state, with heavily armed civilians squaring off against feared meth-producing gangsters who’ve had the run of rural hamlets and towns for years. The self-defense militias, at least some of them accused of connivance with criminal rivals of the local Knights Templar gang, have been working to encircle the Templar-dominated city of Apatzingan since last summer.

Members of Mexico's drug cartels are really starting to harness the power of the internet, using it to run positive PR campaigns, post selfies with their pistols, and hunt down targets by tracking their movements on social media. Antoine Nouvet from the SecDev Foundation, a Canadian research organization, has been working with drug policy think-tank the Igarapé Institute on a project called the Open Empowerment Initiative.