(The handwritten sign reads: "Esto les va a pasar a todos los que trabajen con el Ingeniero. Los vamos a hacer pozole." Or: "This is what will happen to all who work with The Engineer [a rival gang leader]. We will turn you into pozole.")

This story, part of the "Mexico Under Siege" series in the LA Times, exercises a magnetic horror from its first sentence ("he is said to love the ladies, fast horses and dissolving enemies in lye") to its last (I don't want to spoil it for you).

His heavily armed hit men, authorities say, have been leaving the gruesome displays of charred and decapitated bodies across the city, signed with the moniker "Tres Letras," for the three letters in "Teo." And authorities believe he runs a network of hide-outs where kidnap victims are held in cages.

Many police officers, prosecutors and ordinary citizens go silent when Teo's name is mentioned. What is known about him comes from the secret testimony of captured gunmen, narco-messages left with victims and anonymously written narcocorrido ballads sold at swap meets. "Pay attention, President [Felipe Calderon]. . . . In Tijuana, I rule," one song boasts. "We'll show you what a real war is like."

Garcia's alleged criminal empire is built largely on kidnappings and extortion, a model for a post-drug-war crime boss who, starved of narcotics profits, resorts to bloodier, homegrown pursuits.

The War on Drugs, obviously, isn't working—in another story today, a Coast Guard admiral says "we're lucky we get 5 percent [of the drug trade in the Caribbean]... everything has to come together perfectly"—but the assumption is always that if you legalize and regulate the drug trade, the gangs will dry up.

But perhaps the narco-gangs in Columbia and Mexico have grown too large to dry up. In some places, they're more powerful than the government:

Officers stationed in Garcia's stronghold in eastern Tijuana put tape over the numbers on their cars and patrol in groups of two or three cruisers. If they see a convoy of Ford F-250s and Cadillac Escalades — the drug gangs' vehicles of choice, often stolen from California — they go the other way.

Maybe, like all entrepreneurs, the narcos will invent new ways to sustain the standard of living to which they've become accustomed.

Anyway, read the whole thing—shootouts over a freeway, raids and reprisals, killing for comic effect—here.

Spend your snowbound afternoon reading all the other stories—about the narcocorrido folk songs dedicated to the gang lords, how legal US gun sales are arming the narcos, and how the cops are in on it—here.

And consider sledding down to your local bookstore to buy Roberto Bolaño's 2666—a polyphonic sprawl of a novel, a kind of Mexican Moby Dick, with serial murder in Northern Mexico as its motif. I review it here; Sarah Kerr wrote the best review here.

And, just for the fuck of it, here's a passage in which an African-American reporter in Sonora is talking to his African-American editor in Harlem:

"Oscar," said his editor, "you're there to cover a goddamn boxing match."

"This is more important," said Fate, "the fight is just a little story. What I'm proposing is so much more."

"What are you proposing?"

"A sketch of the industrial landscape in the third world," said Fate, "a piece of reportage about the current situation in Mexico, a panorama of the border, a serious crime story for fuck's sake."

"Reportage?" asked his editor. "Is that French, nigger? Since when do you speak French?"

"I don't speak French," said Fate, "but I know what fucking reportage is."

"I know what fucking reportage is too," said the editor, "and I also know merci and au revoir and faire l'amour, which is the same as coucher avec moi. And I think that you, nigger, want to coucher avec moi, but you've forgot the voulez-vous, which in this case ought to have been your first move. You hear me? You say voulez-vous or you can get the fuck out."

And some more:

The University of Santa Teresa was like a cemetery that suddenly begins to think, in vain. It was also like an empty dance club.

"I get the idea perfectly," said Archimboldi, thinking all the while that this man [a veteran telling war stories] was not only irritating but ridiculous, with the particular ridiculousness of self-dramatizers and poor fools convinced they've been present at a decisive moment in history, when it's common knowledge, thought Archimboldi, that history, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.

Which is as good a description of 2666 as any.