MEXCO CITY -- The bodies of 23 people were found hanging from a bridge or dismembered in ice boxes and garbage bags in northeastern Mexico on Friday, in an escalation of brutal violence involving rival drug gangs on the U.S. border.

In a first incident, the bodies of five men and four women were found hanging from a bridge in Nuevo Laredo, in Tamaulipas state just across the border from the Texas city of Laredo, police said.

Police could not confirm who was responsible for the murders but a message seen with the bodies indicated it may have been an attack by the Zetas cartel against the rival Gulf cartel.

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Hours later, police found the dismembered corpses of 14 people in garbage bags and ice boxes dumped near the police station of Nuevo Laredo, police investigators said.

They said the second massacre could have been an act of revenge for the earlier killings, police said.

More than 50,000 people have died in drug-related violence in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon launched a crackdown on traffickers after taking office in late 2006 and deployed tens of thousands of federal police and soldiers across Mexico.

The Zeta cartel was founded by deserters from the Mexican special forces who became Gulf cartel enforcers and later split from their employers.

The two gangs are now fighting for control of local drug trafficking routes.

Last month the dismembered remains of 14 men were found stuffed inside a minivan left near Nuevo Laredo's town hall.

Days later a car exploded outside police headquarters and police said the explosion was caused by a grenade.

Discontent over the bloody attacks is helping fuel support for the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, ahead of Mexico's July 1 presidential election.

Opinion polls make the PRI the favorite to regain the presidency they held for most of the past century.

Turf wars
The Zetas have also been engaged in hostilities with the powerful Sinaloa cartel, named after the state in northwestern Mexico where violence has surged over the past week.

Sinaloa is the home turf of Mexico's most wanted drug trafficker, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, who heads the Sinaloa cartel, and analysts say his killing or capture would boost Calderon's embattled conservatives ahead of the presidential vote.

Calderon cannot seek a second term in office.

At least 20 suspected drug gang members, one police officer and a soldier have been killed in six confrontations in Sinaloa since April 28, a spokesman for local state prosecutors said.

He was unable to specify which gangs were thought to be behind the latest violence in Sinaloa.

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68,000 guns recovered by Mexican authorities in the past five years have been traced back to the United States, authorities said Friday.

The flood of tens of thousands of weapons underscores complaints from Mexico that the U.S. is responsible for arming the drug cartels plaguing its southern neighbor. Six years of violence between warring cartels have killed more than 47,000 people in Mexico. 

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The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives released its latest data covering 2007 through 2011. According to ATF, many of the guns seized in Mexico and submitted to ATF for tracing were recovered at the scenes of cartel shootings while others were seized in raids on illegal arms caches. All the recovered weapons were suspected of being used in crimes in Mexico. 

At an April 2 North American summit in Washington, Mexican President Felipe Calderon said the U.S. government has not done enough to stop the flow of assault weapons and other guns from the U.S. to Mexico. 

Cross-border methamphetamine trade booms amid Mexico's 'war on drugs'

Calderon credited President Barack Obama with making an effort to reduce the gun traffic, but said Obama faces "internal problems ... from a political point of view." 

There is Republican opposition in Congress and broad opposition from Republicans and gun-rights advocates elsewhere to a new assault weapons ban or other curbs on gun sales. The Obama administration says it is working to tighten inspections of border checkpoints in the absence of an assault rifle ban that expired before Obama took office. 

For more than a year, ATF has been reeling from accusations that some of its agents in Arizona were ordered by superiors to step aside rather than intercept illicit loads of weapons headed for Mexico. 

The Justice Department's inspector general and Congress have been looking into the Arizona gun probe, Operation Fast and Furious. 

The issue of gun control legislation hasn't been part of the Republican-led probe of Fast and Furious by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. 

The number of all types of ATF-traced firearms manufactured in the U.S. or imported into the U.S. and later recovered in Mexico rose from 11,842 in 2007 to 14,504 in 2011, according to ATF. The figures for U.S.-sourced firearms were 21,035 in 2008; 14,376 for 2009; and 6,404 in 2010. Included in those totals, the number of rifles recovered in Mexico, submitted to ATF for tracing and found to have come from the U.S. rose from 4,885 in 2007 to 8,804 last year. 

One killed every half hour in Mexico drug-related violence

Mexican law enforcement officials report that certain types of rifles such as AK variants with detachable magazines are being used more frequently by drug trafficking organizations, ATF said in a news release. 

Mexico has provided ATF information on 99,691 guns. ATF determined that the source for 68,161 of the weapons was the U.S, 68 percent of the total. For the remainder, ATF was unable to determine a U.S. source or was unable to trace the request to a country of origin. The 68 percent figure is down from estimates of 90 percent in years past when Mexico was sharing less information with the U.S. 

During the Obama administration, ATF has undergone a management shake-up and Attorney General Eric Holder has called Fast and Furious a flawed operation that must never be repeated. 

Sen. Chuck Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that thorough gun statistics are hard to come by and tricky to interpret. 

"The only guns Mexico is going to submit for tracing are guns they know are from the United States, which clearly paints an incomplete picture of the firearms found in the country," Grassley said. 

 In the Obama administration's efforts to slow the illicit trafficking, gun store owners in Southwestern border states are suing to overturn a requirement that they report to ATF when customers buy multiple high-powered rifles within a consecutive five-day period. To date, the program has been upheld in one federal court. ATF says the reporting requirement, imposed six months ago, has led to 100 criminal investigations and the referral of 30 cases for prosecution involving 100 alleged gun trafficker defendants.

 

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CACERES, Brazil - For the first 500 years of Brazil's history, pretty much anything that wanted to cross its borders could do so in relative peace, whether cattle, Indians or intrepid explorers.

That era is now drawing to a close. Brazil's economic rise is forcing it to deal with a problem it long regarded as the sole concern of rich countries such as the United States: the need to secure its borders and slow down a flood of drugs, illegal immigrants and other contraband.

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President Dilma Rousseff, under political pressure from a crack epidemic in Brazilian cities, is spending more than $8 billion and overhauling Brazil's defense strategy to tackle an issue that has implications for trade, agriculture and the overall economy.

Brazil's prosperity has created a new consumer class of tens of millions of people who happen to live right next to the world's three biggest producers of cocaine: Colombia, Bolivia and Peru. Brazil is now the world's No. 2 cocaine consumer, behind only the United States, according to U.S. government data. It is also a booming consumer of marijuana, ecstasy, and other narcotics.

Rousseff's attempt to choke the flow of narcotics could mean big money for companies from Brazilian aircraft maker Embraer, which plans to make a new line of unmanned drones to patrol the border. Foreign firms such as Boeing, Siemens and others stand to gain.

Securing an area that is five times longer than the U.S.-Mexico border, winding through more than 10,000 miles of Amazon jungle and 10 different countries, is proving to be a huge challenge. It is also sparking debate about whether it's really worth the money and effort.

For Rafael Godoy de Campos Marconi, a police lieutenant at a lonely border checkpoint in the snake-infested Pantanal wetlands in western Brazil, the task can seem hopeless.

Marconi's unit is responsible for patrolling a 125-mile stretch of border with Bolivia, the source of about 80 percent of the cocaine consumed in Brazil. On any given day, Marconi believes there are dozens of smugglers sloshing their way through his turf, with drugs stuffed into their shoes, pants and underwear.

The problem? Marconi usually only has 10 to 12 men to cover all that territory. Two weeks had passed since their last bust.

"Oh, they're out there," he sighed, scanning the horizon, sweating in the 100-degree heat and humidity. "But there are so few of us that they know exactly where we are." Even with double his current resources, he said, it would be "very difficult" to control a region so deep in Brazil's interior. With a wry smile, he mentioned a solution that was on the lips of a number of Brazilians here.

"Maybe if we built a wall, like the United States has (with Mexico)," he said. "Maybe then we can slow these people down."

Brazil won't be building any walls. But it is trying to absorb other lessons from the United States, and leaning on Washington for resources and technical advice. The head of Brazil's armed forces traveled last year to El Paso, Texas, along the Mexican border, to meet with U.S. military and Department of Homeland Security officials.

Brazil's new emphasis on its borders, and the obvious subtext - that it regards its neighbors with a growing wariness - is starting to prompt the kind of resentment around South America that used to be reserved for a certain large, English-speaking country to the north.

"It pains me to say it, but I've heard people say we're the new gringos," said Pedro Taques, a senator from Mato Grosso state, which borders Bolivia. "Controlling the border is a problem that Brazil never thought it would have to face ... and it's forcing us to do some uncomfortable things."

Nonetheless, Taques said that improved border protection was "critical" to the health of Brazil's economy and society, and he expressed frustration that results have not come faster more than a year into Rousseff's presidency.

"Until now, we've seen lots of speeches," he said. "But people who live on the border aren't seeing enough results."

Brazil is ramping up its efforts just as the countries around the region who have fought drug gangs the hardest in recent years, at enormous financial and human cost, seem to be starting to explore other alternatives.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said last year that he would "welcome" legalization if it took the profits out of smuggling. His Mexican counterpart, Felipe Calderon, hinted in a September 2011 speech that he might be open to a similar move.

Colonel João Henrique Marinho, who commands the Brazilian army's Second Border Battalion in Caceres, observed that, at present, Brazilian smugglers in the border region lack anything resembling the sophistication or firepower of cartels in Mexico or Colombia. Instead, they run what Marinho described as an "artisanal" operation based on smugglers and light aircraft.

Asked why local smugglers haven't organized themselves into Mexican-style cartels, Marinho raised his eyebrows and replied: "Could it be because we're not resisting them yet?"

The full version of this news feature by Reuters reporter Brian Winter can be seen here.

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Colombia's FARC rebels freed 10 members of the armed forces held hostage in jungle prison camps for more than a decade on Monday, the last of a group the drug-funded group had used as bargaining chips to pressure the government.

The four soldiers and six policemen were released to a humanitarian mission led by the International Committee of the Red Cross in what the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia called a gesture of peace.

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Wearing olive fatigues and seeming well fed and relatively healthy, the 10 men stepped off a helicopter provided by Brazil after the Marxist rebels freed them in a remote area of southern Colombia.

Following their successful recovery from the jungle, the hostages were taken to the city of Villavicencio, received by medics of the security forces and some immediately reunited with family members in the VIP lounge of the small airport, according to a report on local English language news website Colombia Reports.

It said the release marked a “milestone” in the Colombia conflict.

Smiling and joking with a medic, one soldier left the aircraft draped in the Colombian flag and skipping with joy. Each carried a plastic bag of belongings and one was accompanied by what appeared to be a small pig that had been his pet in the jungle. Another had what looked like a monkey on his shoulder.

"To these victims of the intolerance and cruelty of the guerrillas, soldiers and policemen of Colombia, welcome to freedom," President Juan Manuel Santos said from the presidential palace. "Freedom has been long delayed, but now it's yours."

The release could signal that the FARC is taking tentative steps toward a bid for talks that may end Latin America's oldest insurgency after five decades of killing and destroying economic infrastructure.

But many Colombians remain skeptical that the guerrilla group, which is still believed to be holding as many as 700 civilian hostages for ransom, will lay down its weapons after having used previous peace talks to strengthen their forces.

The logistics of feeding and moving hostages has become more difficult for the FARC as an increasingly effective U.S.-backed military offensive has killed its leaders and driven the guerrillas back into ever more remote regions.

As a result, the police say, cases of kidnapping for ransom have fallen 90 percent since 2000 to 208 incidents last year, while the number of extortion cases surged 33 percent in 2011 from the previous year.

Reuters and msnbc.com staff contributed to this report.

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