Agencia el Universal / GDA via AP

President Felipe Calderon named Tomas Angeles Dauahare deputy defense minister upon taking office in December 2006.

Two Mexican generals, including the former deputy minister of defense who helped lead the escalation of the country's war against drug gangs, are being investigated for ties to the drug trade, according to local reports on Wednesday.

Mexican soldiers on Tuesday detained Tomas Angeles Dauahare, who served as the army's second in command until he retired in 2008, and Roberto Dawe Gonzalez, who led an elite unit in the state of Colima, and turned them over for questioning to the country's organized crime unit, officials told Reuters.

"The generals are making a statement because they are allegedly tied to organized crime activities," the official at the attorney general's office told the news service on condition of anonymity.

President Felipe Calderon named Dauahare as deputy defense minister upon taking office in December 2006, and the general retired in March 2008, according to a military spokesman, who said no arrest warrant had been issued for the two generals and said they were only being questioned at this point. 

Mexico's drug war: No sign of 'light at the end of the tunnel'

Dauahare, who once was considered a potential minister of defense, left the military in "through the back door" in 2008 under a veil of secrecy, according to Spanish-language news agency EFE (Link in Spanish). Francisco Armando Meza replaced Dauahare, according to Mexican newspaper Cronica (Link in Spanish).

EFE reported that in January, 2008, Dauahare said in a speech that groups of criminals had been recruiting members of the army and air force, in particular deserters. 

Desertion, he said at the time, "has always happened. It has increased as of this decade, with workload, absence from home, wages, contributing to the phenomenon," EFE reported. 

Calderon has staked his reputation on bringing Mexico's drug gangs to heel, sending in the army out to fight them at the beginning of his term. 

Violence has spiraled since then and around 55,000 people have fallen victim to the conflict, eroding support for Calderon's conservative National Action Party (PAN), which looks likely to lose power in presidential elections on July 1. 

On Tuesday, a former Mexican law enforcement official who worked closely with U.S. authorities in the drug war pleaded guilty in federal court in San Diego to aiding members of a violent Tijuana-based cartel, including helping traffickers get away with a double homicide in 2010.

18 beheaded bodies found near popular Mexico tourist site

Jesus Quinonez was convicted of participating in a federal racketeering conspiracy and could face a maximum sentence of life in prison.

In his plea, Quinonez admitted sharing confidential information with the Fernando Sanchez Arellano drug gang while he worked as an international liaison for the Baja California state attorney general's office.

He is the highest-ranking of four former or current Baja California law enforcement officials arrested in the case and was a primary contact in Baja for U.S. law enforcement agencies. 

A total of 43 defendants were named in the federal racketeering complaint alleging murder, kidnapping and other crimes. Four are still fugitives, and one is awaiting trial. About half of those arrested are U.S. citizens, U.S. Assistant Attorney James Melendres said. 

Msnbc.com’s F. Brinley Bruton, Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Alfredo Estrella / AFP - Getty Images

Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes takes part in a tribute to Mexican writer and anthropologist Fernando Benitez (1912-2000) at the Fine Arts Palace in Mexico City, on Dec. 18, 2011.

Novelist Carlos Fuentes, one of Latin America's most eloquent and widely read authors and a fierce critic of governments, has died after a literary career spanning more than five decades. He was 83.

Fuentes' best-known works include "The Death of Artemio Cruz,'' "The Crystal Frontier'' and "The Old Gringo," which was made into the 1989 movie by the same name starring Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda.

Local media said Fuentes died in a Mexico City hospital on Tuesday following heart problems.

Dividing his time chiefly between Mexico City and London, Fuentes dovetailed literature — writing more than 30 books that have been translated into two dozen languages — and social observation throughout his career.

Fuentes, an "elegant public intellectual and grand man of letters," as the New York Times obituary describes him — helped spark the explosion of Latin American in the 1960s and 70s known as "el boom" along with Colombia's Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru and Argentine Julio Cortazar.

In the 1980s he was a frequent critic of U.S. intervention in Central America and lambasted the effects of U.S. immigration policy on Mexican migrant workers in his mid-1990s novel, "La Frontera de Cristal'' (The Crystal Frontier).

"They know they need migrant Mexican labor, without which their harvests, services and many aspects of life would go to ruin,'' Fuentes once said, calling U.S. policy a farce.

Fuentes also became one of the most open critics of Mexico's entrenched political system under the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled Mexico for 71 years before it was ousted in 2000 elections.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon and other political and cultural leaders quickly paid tribute to Fuentes on Tuesday.

"I profoundly regret the death of our beloved and admired Carlos Fuentes, writer and universal Mexican,'' Calderon wrote on his Twitter account.

Fuentes' critical eye was at work from the start of his career. His first novel in 1958, "La region mas transparente'' (Where the Air is Clear), was not only a look at life in Mexico City, now ironically one of the most polluted in the world. It also examined how the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1917 had created a new and wealthy elite but did nothing for the impoverished and indigenous masses.

Born in Panama in 1928, Fuentes divided his early years among the United States, Chile and Argentina, following his father's diplomatic postings before going on to study law.

In an interview with the Academy of Achievement, Fuentes explained how his life growing up as the child of a diplomat pushed him in the direction of writing.

"As a little boy, I read a lot," he said. "That was solitary in a way, because I knew my friends wouldn't last more than two or three years, then another change, new friends. So I had to build my own inner world through reading, movies, radio at the time."

Reuters contributed to this report

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Mexico is struggling to contain a drugs war that has claimed more than 50,000 lives in less than six years. Msnbc.com's F. Brinley Bruton spoke to NBC News contributor Jorge Castañeda, who is a former Mexican foreign minister and a New York University professor, about the problems he sees with the ongoing efforts to stamp out the illicit trade and possible ways out of the violence.

Q: An estimated 50,000 people have been killed in Mexico since 2006, the country is one of the most dangerous in which to be a journalist, and kidnapping and extortion are rife. Is Mexico teetering over into chaos?

Daniel Becerril / Reuters

Residents look at shoes of missing people that have been arranged to form the number 49 in memory of dozens of people whose bodies were found dumped near Mexico's northern city of Monterrey on Sunday. The mutilated corpses of 43 men and six women, whose hands and feet had been cut off, were found in a pile on a highway.

A: It is not true, but it's less inaccurate that it was three or four years ago. It’s not teetering on the verge of chaos because violence remains concentrated in a few places. But those places have been changing over the past five years. The violence and killings move from one state or one region to another depending on where the army is, where the national police is, what the economic circumstances are in in a given region.

Yuri Cortez / AFP

Jorge Castañeda, foreign minister of Mexico from 2000-03, is a Latin America policy analyst for NBC News and Telemundo.

Another factor is that violence now seems to be stabilizing at very high levels.  It has pretty much leveled off at about 1,000 drug-linked executions a month –- about 12,000 per year. All very high levels, but it is no longer growing.

The problem is that this has been going on for almost six years. It is much more difficult to claim now that this is a temporary problem that will soon be resolved once the cartels are destroyed or weakened or thrown out or whatever.

At six years on, it is beginning to look more difficult to see any kind of light at the end of the tunnel.

Nearly 50 bodies found dumped on Mexico highway

Q: What is the alternative to the war on drugs?

A: I’m against the war. I thought it was a mistake from the very beginning. That said, I can see how many well-intentioned people would for one year, for two years, for three years believe that with a little more time the violence would begin to decline, supply routes of drugs from Mexico to the United States would begin to shut down, the kingpins would be caught and all of this would sort of go away.

None of these things have happened. 

A few kingpins have been caught, but many others, the biggest ones, have not. There is no indication that there has been any decrease in overall drug consumption in the U.S. The Americans point to some decline in powder cocaine but an increase in marijuana, methamphetamines, etc. Those come from Mexico also.

If you put it all together, you see very meager results given the exorbitant costs for Mexico.

18 beheaded bodies found near popular Mexico tourist site

Q: What are the costs to Mexico of fighting this war?

A: I mean 50,000 dead, about 50 billion in expenditures ...  kidnappings, extortions, etc. Plus the terrible deterioration of Mexico’s image in the world, and for a country that thrives on tourism, that’s a big problem. And the human-rights violations that have increased exponentially over the past six years.

Q: So what are the realistic solutions? Deal with the cartels? Legalization? More military involvement? Just live with it?

A: I think it’s a combination of all of those. More military involvement -- we don’t have, we just don’t have the troops, we don’t have the money, we don’t have the equipment.  We don’t have any of the things that are necessary to significantly increase the military involvement.

Q: A lot of American troops are coming back from Afghanistan …

Tomas Bravo / Reuters

Marines escort Jesus Hernandez Rodriguez, a hit man of the Zetas drug cartel, as he is presented to the media in Mexico City on Friday.

A: Yes, well, they could be sent to Mexico, or they could be sent to the U.S. and the United States could do this job from its side of the border. The point being that  ... there is a reasonable case to be made for dramatically increasing the size of the national police force, from 25,000 to 30,000 now to 100,000 or 150,000.  That would be the minimum that would be necessary given that ... there is a great consensus in Mexico that municipal and state police are useless.

Mexico leader's message to US: 'No more weapons!'

Q: Indeed, Mexican states have had to fire their entire police forces.

A: Exactly, just redo the whole thing. So there’s a good case to be made for increasing the number of national police troops to 100,000 or 150,000. The National Action Party (known by its Spanish acronym PAN) candidate for president has said 150,000 troops. That makes sense, but that takes time, and that costs a lot of money. Now you still are not ever going to ever have enough police to really patrol the whole country.  So then the question is, since you’re going to have scarce resources, where do you want to concentrate those scarce resources and on what do you want to concentrate them?

And that is where the real disagreement exists between the government and people like myself. The government has basically concentrated all its resources these past five-and-a-half years on fighting drug trafficking. I think those resources should be concentrated on fighting the effects of violence and crime that hurt people –- kidnapping, extortion, holdups, automobile thefts, etc. –- and basically not concentrated on drug trafficking

Alejandro Acosta / Reuters file

A soldier stands guard at a clandestine drug processing laboratory discovered in Zapotlanejo, on the outskirts of Guadalajara, in September 2011. The burgeoning meth industry is a major concern to officials on both sides of the border.

You don’t have to make a deal with the cartels, you don’t sit down and talk with them, you don’t shake hands with them. You just concentrate your resources on what matters to you; you don’t concentrate them on what matters to the U.S.

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

Q: But in terms of lobbying, isn’t legalization a bit of a radioactive subject in the United States? Politicians hardly mention it in public.

A: Yes and no.  Just this past weekend a state legislature in Connecticut approved medical marijuana, which for all practical purposes is legalization. This is the 17^th state, together with the District of Columbia, and it is moving forward on the ballot in two states for full legalization in November.

So politicians don’t touch it, but there’s a real movement in American society, which is being reflected in medical marijuana, which is being reflected in a decline in incarceration rates, which is being reflected in more money being spent on prevention and less on punitive policies now in Obama’s budgets.  You have a lot of changes that are going on, (but) people don’t want to talk about them. But there’s nothing wrong with hypocrisy. Honesty is overrated in these matters.

Q: “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States” has been a popular saying in Mexico.  Do you think most people feel that way?

A: Perhaps it summed up what many Mexicans believed until the 1980s and ‘90s. But I think that from 1982 onwards it became clear that were it not for recurrent American bailouts and were it not for closer economic ties with the U.S., whether it was tourism or immigration then NAFTA, then investment ... that all of this is an opportunity, it is not a misfortune. 

Now most Mexicans believe that by being close to the United States geographically and close economically, socially, etc., is not a misfortune but rather an opportunity.

One killed every half hour in Mexico drug-related violence

Q: On the subject of the war on drugs, what can Mexico legitimately ask of the U.S.?

A: It can ask what President Felipe Calderon has been asking and what every president has been asking for the past 40 years, which is, stop consuming so many drugs and repeal the Second Amendment -- stop allowing people to buy guns in the United States and then export them to Mexico.

The usefulness and effectiveness of asking those two things is very much open to question in my mind. I don’t see what we gain by whining about this when we know it’s not going to happen. It is very similar to how the Americans whine, “Why don’t the Mexicans get their house in order, stop sending all these people to the U.S.?”

Map of Mexico's drug cartels

It’s not going to happen.  All the whining in the world is not going to stop Mexicans from going to the U.S. They’ve been doing it for over a century.  And all the Mexican whining in the world is not going to stop Americans from smoking pot.

Q: Do you feel optimistic about the future of Mexico?

A: I’m very optimistic. I think if Mexico gets three or four things straight over the next year or two, it can finally take off and become a middle class, poor-rich country within 10-15 years.

And I think it will. We have to put this war behind us. It just can’t go on. We have to change some fundamental policies, mainly on the ant-trust fron. We have to find a way to distribute the fruits of growth better, but in a rational, modern, effective way. And we have to improve the educational system rather dramatically and soon.

But these are not impossible to do.

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Alejandro Acosta / Reuters

Forensic technicians handle bags containing human remains found in two abandoned vehicles near Guadalajara, Mexico, on Thursday.

MEXICO CITY -- Police found the decapitated and dismembered bodies of 18 people near Mexico's second-largest city, Guadalajara, on Wednesday, in what appeared to be the latest atrocity by the country's most brutal drug cartel. 

Thought to have been carried out by the Zetas gang, it was one of the biggest mass beheadings in the recent history of Mexico, where decapitations have become alarmingly common.

The bodies and heads were stuffed into two vehicles abandoned on the side of a highway in the small town of Ixtlahuacan de los Membrillos, said Tomas Coronado, chief prosecutor for the state of Jalisco. 

Ixtlahuacan de los Membrillos is located 18 miles south of the center of Guadalajara on the road to Lake Chapala, a site popular with foreign tourists and U.S. retirees.

Money, drugs, guns and gangs: Child actors shame Mexico

Some of the bodies had been refrigerated before they were dumped, Coronado said.

A policeman at the scene in Ixtlahuacan said some victims had been so badly mutilated that officers could not determine whether they were male or female.

The officer said a note by the bodies was signed by the Zetas cartel, a criminal militia led by former Mexican soldiers and blamed for some of the worst atrocities in Mexico's drug war.

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

"They are clearly messages between rival groups that are in conflict," Coronado told The Associated Press.

The AP reported that the vehicles, described as minivans, were towed to government offices to unload the bodies.

Guadalajara, known for its high-tech industry, mariachi bands and tequila, has been a strategic base for drug traffickers since the 1980s. 

Violence has flared in the once-tranquil city as the Zetas moved in to challenge the smuggling turf of other gangs in western Mexico.

One killed every half hour in Mexico drug-related violence

Soldiers arrested a high-ranking member of the powerful Sinaloa cartel in the city in March, causing his supporters to block streets with 25 burning cars and trucks.

Slideshow: Narco culture permeates Mexico, leaks across border

Mexico's drug war is also part of a drug culture with roots in music, movies and even religion.

Launch slideshow

Attacks between the Zetas and their rivals have flared up across Mexico since the beginning of the year. 

On Friday, nine corpses were hanged from a bridge in the border city of Nuevo Laredo just hours before 14 bodies were dismembered and shoved into garbage bags and ice boxes. 

Five days of intense battles in western Sinaloa state last week also left 34 dead, adding to the body count in Mexico's drug war, which has killed more than 50,000 people in the past five years.

Msnbc.com staff and Reuters contributed to this report.

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Instituto Federal Electoral/Handout/via Reuters TV

Former Playboy model and presidential debate assistant Julia Orayen hands out cards to the four candidates during a televised debate Sunday night at the Federal Electoral Institute in this still image taken from video.

A former Playboy model clad in a revealing white dress stole the show at a somber presidential debate in Mexico focused on the economy and drug-related violence.

Wearing a tight-fitting white dress with a cut below the neckline to show much of her cleavage, Julia Orayen was working as an assistant on the televised debate.

At the start of Sunday night's debate, Orayen walked in front of the camera to hand out cards to the four candidates, creating an immediate stir on online social media.

The appearance lasting a few seconds quickly began trending on Twitter, generating thousands of mentions. Mexican newspaper Excelsior declared her the online winner of the debate.

"The best was the girl in white with the cleavage at the beginning," tweeted former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda, who is also a New York University professor.

At least one candidate was seen gawking at Orayen's posterior from the dais. Gabriel Quadri, who is drawing single-digit support as the candidate of the New Alliance party, said her appearance made him nervous.

"It is impossible not to concentrate your attention on a woman so spectacular," Quadri told MVS Radio.

While many Mexicans celebrated Orayen, others condemned the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) for the incident, saying it had undermined the seriousness of the debate.

The IFE later issued a statement apologizing to the citizens of Mexico and the candidates for the "production error associated with the dress of an assistant."

A Twitter account in Orayen's name has picked up more than 7,000 followers since the two-hour debate.

Orayen posed nude for the Mexican edition of Playboy in 2008, a spokesman for the magazine said.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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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.

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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Susan Hoffman / NewportBeach.Patch.com via Reute

A member of the yacht Aegean waves at the camera at the start of the Newport to Ensenada Yacht Race off the waters of Newport Beach, California on April 27.

ENSENADA, Mexico - Eric Lamb was doing safety patrol on a 124-mile yacht race when he spotted a boat that appeared too close to Mexico's Coronado Islands. He never got there.

As his twin-engine boat neared the uninhabited islands just south of San Diego, he stumbled on sailboat shards that were mostly no more than six inches long strewn over about two square miles. He saw a small refrigerator, a white seat cushion and empty containers of yogurt and soy milk.

Over several hours, a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter directed him in his search and led him to two dead bodies floating with their backs up, badly scraped and bruised. The Coast Guard recovered a third body and the fourth member of the crew was missing early Monday in California's second deadly accident this month involving an ocean race.

Lamb, 62, said the 37-foot yacht looked like it "had gone through a blender."

"It was real obvious it had been hit just because the debris was so small," he said Sunday.

Three sailors were killed in the accident and a fourth was missing, officials said. The Coast Guard, Mexican navy and civilian vessels scoured the waters off the shore of both countries for the fourth sailor before suspending their search Sunday evening.

Hundreds of race participants held a moment of silence at the Newport Ocean Sailing Association's award ceremony, many of them stunned and puzzled. Skies were clear and winds were light when the boat went missing on the course from Newport Beach, Calif., to Ensenada.

3 dead, 1 missing in accident during Newport-Ensenada sailing race

A GPS race tracking system indicated the Aegean disappeared about 1:30 a.m. PT (4:30 a.m. ET) Saturday, said Rich Roberts, a spokesman for the race organizer. Race organizers weren't closely monitoring the race at that hour but a disappearing signal is no cause for alarm because receivers occasionally suffer glitches, he said.

"Somebody may have thought the thing was broken," Roberts said.

Lamb, who has been patrolling the race for eight years as captain for a private company, saw the debris nine hours later, called the Coast Guard, and searched for identifying information. He and a partner found a life raft with a registration number and a panel with the ship's name.

'Horrified'
The Coast Guard said conditions were fine for sailing, with good visibility and moderate ocean swells of 6-to-8 feet. Officials have not determined the cause of the accident, and would not speculate on what ship, if any, might have collided with the sailboat.

Race officials said they had few explanations for what may have happened to the Aegean other than it must have collided with a ship like a freighter or tanker that did not see the smaller vessel.

The episode immediately sparked a debate over safety of ocean races.

"Quite honestly, I'm amazed it hasn't happened before," said Lamb. "You get 200 boats out there, they lose their way, and they're just bobbing around."

Gary Jobson, president of the U.S. Sailing Association, said his group will appoint an independent panel to investigate.

"I'm horrified. I've done a lot of sailboat racing and I've hit logs in the water, and I've seen a man go overboard, but this takes the whole thing to a new level," Jobson said. "We need to take a step back and take a deep breath with what we're doing. Something is going wrong here."

Chuck Iverson, commodore of the sailing association, said the collision was a "fluke," noting how common night races are along Mexico's Baja California coast.

Shipping lanes crossed
The race goes through shipping lanes and it's possible for a large ship to hit a sailboat and not even know it, especially at night, said Roberts, the race spokesman. Two race participants who were in the area at the time the Aegean vanished told The Associated Press they saw or heard a freighter.

The deaths are the first fatalities in the race's 65 years. The race attracted 675 boats at its peak in 1983 before falling on hard times several years ago amid fears of Mexico's drug-fueled violence.

Participation has picked up recently, reaching 213 boats this year. The winner, Robert Lane of Long Beach Yacht Club, finished Saturday in 23 hours, 26 minutes, 40 seconds.

The race attracts sailors of all skills, including some who are new to long distances. The Aegean competed in one of the lower categories, which allows participants to use their motors when winds drop to a certain level.

Watch US News videos on msnbc.com

Two of the dead were William Reed Johnson Jr., 57, of Torrance, Calif., and Joseph Lester Stewart, 64, of Bradenton, Fla. The San Diego County Medical Examiner's office was withholding the name of the third sailor pending notification of relatives.

The Aegean is registered to Theo Mavromatis, 49, of Redondo Beach, Calif. The race sponsor didn't know if he was aboard but Gary Gilpin at Marina Sailing, which rents out the Aegean when Mavromatis isn't using it, said the 49-year-old skipper took the yacht out earlier in the week for the competition.

Gilpin said Mavromatis, an engineer, was an experienced sailor who had won the Newport to Ensenada race in the past.

The deaths come two weeks after five sailors died in the waters off Northern California when their 38-foot yacht was hit by powerful waves, smashed into rocks and capsized during a race. Three sailors survived the wreck and the body of another was quickly recovered. Four remained missing until one body was recovered Thursday.

The accident near the Farallon Islands, about 27 miles west of San Francisco, prompted the Coast Guard to temporarily stop races in ocean waters outside San Francisco Bay. The Coast Guard said the suspension will allow it and the offshore racing community to study the accident and race procedures to determine whether changes are needed to improve safety. U.S. Sailing, the governing body of yacht racing, is leading the safety review, which is expected to be completed within the next month.

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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. 

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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