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TENS of thousands of women and men, including soldiers, police officers, politicians and journalists, have been brutally murdered in Mexico in just four years.
But this war isn't driven by weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, territory or liberation - it is fuelled by the drug trade.
The blood-stained streets are a world away from Britain's shores, but we can't wash our hands of it.
Reports suggest a third of all cocaine consumed in Britain has passed through the hands of Mexican drug cartels.
Once a tourist paradise, the Central American country is now the epicentre of a savage drug war.
Since December 2006, more than 28,000 people - many of them completely innocent - have been murdered as part of drugs-related violence.
Bodies have littered drug-ravaged cites on an almost daily basis since President Felipe Caldern launched a military crackdown on the cartels.
At the same time, the "narcos" have been battling it out among themselves over the immensely profitable smuggling corridors to the US, the world's biggest consumer of illegal drugs.
In some lawless parts it now costs as little as $35 to have a rival murdered. Since 2007, beheadings have become commonplace - there were more than 300 last year - and now rarely make the evening news.
The gruesome violence of the Mexican narcos - as the drug traffickers are known - reads like the most extreme Hollywood horror movie script.
Limbs and heads sawn off, bodies hung from bridges, men and women burned alive and corpses dropped into the sky from jets.
In one instance at the start of the year, a gang member was kidnapped, killed and cut into seven pieces as a warning to members of a cartel.
So they wouldn't forget in a hurry, the 36-year-old victim's face was sliced off and stitched on to a football.
It was left outside the city hall in Los Mochis, northern Mexico, with a note that read: "Happy New Year, because this will be your last."
His torso, meanwhile, was found in a plastic box at a street corner,...