All eyes on Mexico

As President Obama prepares for his first trip to Latin America tomorrow, GlobalPost's crack marketing team took a step back and looked at our coverage. They came up with this list of 10 shocking facts about Mexico's drug war that we thought we should share:

1
A recent U.S. government report suggests that “Two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico.”

2
Mexico has one of the highest kidnapping rates in the world: An average of 70 people are abducted each month.

3
More than 1,100 guns found discarded at Mexico shooting scenes or confiscated from cartel gangsters were traced to Texas gun merchants in 2007.

4
One of Mexico’s most notorious drug kingpins, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, escaped a maximum security prison in 2001 by driving out in a laundry truck.

5
This year Forbes magazine included Joaquin Guzman, a Mexican drug lord, on its annual billionaires’ list.

6
A drug cartel hood named “The Cook” reportedly dissolved the bodies of 300 victims in acid as part of the grisly work he committed for crime bosses.

7
The FBI has reported 75 open cases of Americans kidnapped in Mexico.

8
In a poll by the daily newspaper La Reforma, Mexico City residents ranked public insecurity as a worse crisis than the economy by a 5-to-1 margin. In the past year, 20 percent were crime victims. 

9
In the past year, Mexico's civil drug war has claimed some 6,300 lives.

10
Grammy-nominated singer Sergio Gomez was kidnapped and his genitals were burned with a blowtorch in December 2007, presumably for singing narco corridos, or “drug ballads.”

Here is a compilation of GlobalPost's coverage on Mexico's drug war.

http://www.globalpost.com/notebook/mexico/090415/all-eyes-mexico