El Monstruo

Scenes from Mexico City, one of the world’s largest metropolises

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The Ancient Pyramids of Teotihuacán

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Taxco, Guerrero

A Colonial Silver Town Hits its Stride

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Mexico’s Lithium Lakes

Mexico discovers new treasure near colonial silver mines

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Photos from a story of mine for GlobalPost on a potentially multi-billion dollar lithium project in central Mexico

A “perfect trap” kills four in western state of Michoacán

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Washington Post correspondent Bill Booth and I recently took a trip to Morelia, in the mountainous western state of Michoacán, to interview state officials about an ambush on a convoy belonging to public safety directory, Minerva Bautista. Here are some of my photos of the scene of the crime, four days later. Broken glass and burn marks from destroyed vehicles are clearly visible, although authorities had cleaned up bullet casings and towed a semi-truck used to block the highway. Officials say roughly 40 gunmen fired 2,700 bullets in four minutes: an average of more than 10 per second. Nonetheless, Bautista survived the attack with only shrapnel wounds from grenades thrown by the gunmen. However, two of her bodyguards and two civilians were killed in the shootout.

Interior Secretary Fernando Gomez Mont claimed the next day that the attackers belonged to a group called La Resistencia, affiliated with the powerful Michoacán-based drug cartel, La Familia.

Taxco, Guerrero

The Zócalo at night in Taxco, Guerrero

Hannah and I took a weekend trip to Taxco, a colonial silver town built into the hills about two hours southwest of Mexico City. As you can see, the central plaza (or zócalo) is pretty extraordinary, surrounded by four hundred year-old buildings and overlooked by a stone Jesus that looks like the candle atop an elaborate birthday cake. It was a beautiful Friday night, marred only by the fact that I spent the next eleven hours sicker than I have been in my entire life thanks to food poisoning from one of Taxco’s quaint little restaurants.