The Mexican Drug War, launched in December 2006 by then-President Felipe Calderon, is approaching its eight-year mark.
The series of conflicts, which has pitted the Mexican military, cartels, vigilantes, and police forces against one another, has had a profound effect upon Mexico. It killed over 60,000 people between 2006 and 2012 but is far from over: In early October, 43 Mexican students vanished from Iguala, a town about halfway between Mexico City and the Pacific coast. The search for the missing students has so far been unsuccessful, although drug trafficking organizations were almost definitely involved and investigators have discovered freshly dug graves.
The mass kidnapping came at the same time as a couple of high-profile busts. On Oct. 1, Hector Beltran Leyva, leader of an eponymous cartel, was nabbed by the Mexican army in San Miguel de Allende. The head of the Juarez cartel was arrested just days later.
The drug war can be seen as the Mexican state's long-overdue effort to impose order on the country after decades in which the government tolerated or even coddled the cartels' activities. But the war has also pitted the major drug traffickers against each other in excessively violent struggles to maintain, or expand, their positions.
Here are seven of the country's most notorious organizations, and where the last eight years of chaos have left them.