Silver or Lead
William Finnegan writes about La Familia, a drug cartel with a powerful, deadly presence in the Mexican state of Michoacán.
Calderón sent fifty thousand soldiers and twenty thousand federal police into the streets. More than twenty-three thousand people have died in Mexico's drug war—but La Inseguridad, as Mexicans call it, has become engulfing. "They're a second law," a schoolteacher said of La Familia. "Maybe the first law."