The country's cartels have expanded their operations far beyond drugs, infiltrating the legal economy and the political system.

How do the cartels make money? 
Drug trafficking is still the big earner. Cartels make an estimated $12 billion annually from the sale of cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamine — mostly in the U.S. But in recent years, these organizations have diversified their criminal enterprises to include extortion, people smuggling, and arms dealing. And they have expanded into the legal economy as well. Narcos operate taxi and bus networks and tax avocado and lime growers. About 70 percent of lumber production in Mexico is now illicit and roughly 30 percent of fuel sold in the country is stolen or smuggled. The crime gangs have also aggressively infiltrated local and regional governments, allowing them to direct public contracts for road building and other infrastructure projects to their preferred firms. While data is limited, it's thought the revenue from all these schemes could rival the crime groups' drug earnings. "Today in Mexico we have a mafia-like criminal landscape," said Romain Le-Cour-Grandmaison of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. 

Why did cartels diversify? 
Because they saw new opportunities for profit. "El Narco [is] a monster that eats everything it can," said Mexico-based journalist Ioan Grillo. But this expansion is also a result of government policy. In 2006, then–Mexican President Felipe Calderón launched a war on the cartels, using the military as well as state and federal police to crack down on organized crime. Some 200,000 Mexicans were killed in 14 years of conflict, and the handful of big cartels splintered into many smaller ones. There are now more than 200 outfits employing a total of 150,000 people operating across the country. Many of these form shifting alliances with the remaining big players, such as the Sinaloa Cartel and Jalisco New Generation Cartel. To survive in this ultracompetitive and ultraviolent environment, "the cartels began to diversify their portfolios to try to gain resources," said Eduardo Moncada, an expert on Latin American crime at Barnard College. Extortion has proved to be one of the cartels' most lucrative operations. 

How prevalent is extortion? 
About 20 million extortion crimes are reported each year, a huge number in a country of 128 million people. But the true total is likely far higher, because many victims are afraid to file reports with local police, who are often allied with cartels. Almost every industry is subject to shakedowns, with small businesses proving to be especially tempting targets. At least 15 percent of Mexico's 135,000 mom-and-pop tortillerías are forced to regularly pay extortion, according to the National Tortilla Council. "We're practically at the point where criminals set the price of tortillas," said council leader Homero López. One shop owner in Cuernavaca, a city in south-central Mexico, told The Washington Post that thugs turned up three years ago, asking for $10 a week to "protect the neighborhood." Cuernavaca changed hands several times amid bloody gang battles, and the mob now in charge demands up to $900 a month in protection. Those who don't pay risk having their shops or homes firebombed or strafed with bullets — or being assassinated. 

What's the government doing? 
Not much. When the left-leaning Andrés Manuel López Obrador won the presidency in 2018, he declared the war on drugs over and enacted a new policy of "hugs not bullets." He scaled back cooperation with the U.S., dissolved the federal police, and tried to discourage young people from joining the cartels by expanding job-training programs. With security forces on the sidelines, cartels focused on expanding and fighting rivals for territory. López Obrador's term saw a record number of murders, with at least 175,000 people killed in six years. President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum, a former Mexico City mayor and an acolyte of López Obrador, plans to continue his policies. She will "start from below zero," said Guillermo Valdés, former head of Mexico's national intelligence agency. "Criminals are more powerful, there is more violence, there is more political control of territory." 

How do the cartels secure political influence? 
Through bribes and force. In the run-up to this year's June 2 vote — which included races for federal and state legislatures, governorships, and mayoralties — 37 candidates and dozens more people involved with elections were murdered, making this the bloodiest election in modern Mexican history. In the town of Maravatio in Michoacán state, gangs shot dead three mayoral candidates, including a respected doctor. Once in office, cartel-friendly pols can facilitate corruption and set police on their enemies. 

How does this affect the U.S.? 
It's contributed to the crisis at the southern border, where some 717,000 Mexicans were detained last year, triple the number in 2019. A Catholic aid organization reported that nearly 90 percent of the Mexican migrants it interviewed last year said they were fleeing violence, up from about 6 percent eight years earlier. Some of those migrants couldn't afford to keep up with extortion payments; others likely fled the "social cleansings" carried out when one gang seizes another's territory. But experts say the bigger danger to the U.S. is that the cartels' thirst for money could lead them to substantially expand their operations north of the border. "Our cartel problem," said Rodrigo Villegas, a Mexico City–based political consultant, "is your cartel problem."

Narco avocados 
The avocado toast and guacamole Americans love are part of a $3 billion agribusiness dominated by the state of Michoacán, where 75 percent of Mexico's crop is grown. Unsurprisingly, the cartels have grabbed a slice of this green gold. Crime gangs extort growers, trucking firms, and packers, but — in a sign of the tangled relationship between government, business, and the cartels — have also aided "the expansion of avocado-producing lands," said Le-Cour-Grandmaison. Cartels displace and kill people on protected lands, clear forests, and then secure the permits needed for "virgin land" to be converted to avocado ranches. In Michoacán, more than 25,000 acres of avocado orchards authorized to export to the U.S. are on lands that were covered by forests as recently as 2014, according to researchers at the University of Texas. Some of that land belonged to the indigenous Purépecha people, whose members have been kidnapped and killed for opposing the clearing of communal lands. "The avocados you're eating in the United States are bathed in blood," one Purépecha man told The New York Times.

"An explosion of blatant antisemitism by anti-Israel protesters" is alarming Jewish Americans, said Carl Campanile in the New York Post. In New York City, a pro-Palestinian mob recently gathered outside an exhibit memorializing the Jewish victims savagely murdered by Hamas at a music festival on Oct. 7. The protesters lit flares, chanted "Long live the Intifada," and held a banner reading "Long Live October 7." Last week, vandals defaced with red paint the home of Anne Pasternak, the Jewish president of the Brooklyn Museum, scrawling "White Supremacist Zionist" and inverse triangles, which are used by Hamas to identify Israeli targets. In another New York City incident, protesters with faces obscured by kaffiyehs and face masks boarded a subway car and demanded all "Zionists" raise their hands, warning, "This is your chance to get out." For many Jews, the "overt displays of hate" carried "uncomfortable echoes of Germany in the 1930s." 

I've covered 18 pro-Palestinian rallies in many cities, said Olivia Reingold in The Free Press, and have been repeatedly threatened, physically menaced, cursed at, and called a Zionist. I've seen Hamas and Hezbollah symbols "and even Nazi swastikas." As the spring's college demonstrations have moved to the streets, protesters have "become even more brazen and confident" in spouting antisemitism. At UCLA, protesters called a university rabbi a "pedophile" and shouted "Go back to Poland"; outside the White House, a protest mob chanted "Kill another Zionist now." The ugly incidents have prompted "a reckoning" for progressive leaders, said Emily Ngo, Nick Reisman, and Jeff Coltin in Politico. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hosted a discussion last week with Jewish leaders, and later warned, "Bigotry in organizing spaces imperils everyone's work." 

If such hate speech were coming from the Right, said Rich Lowry in National Review, it would be called a "national crisis." The pro-Hamas chants "aren't any better than the infamous 'Jews will not replace us' chant" that white supremacists delivered at their notorious Charlottesville, Va., rally in 2017. The Charlottesville event set off "shock waves," but the Jew hatred from leftists has been met with little outrage or attention. "Can you imagine the headlines" if these raging anti-semites were white supremacists carrying Confederate flags, instead of leftists brandishing Hamas symbols? "Every day is a Charlottesville now, but hardly anyone notices."

Diane Lane had an unusual introduction to the acting profession, said Emine Saner in The Guardian (U.K.). Growing up in New York with a singer and Playboy model mother and an acting coach father, she landed her first stage role at age 6. At 7, she joined an experimental theater group, La MaMa, and embarked on a world tour in its young actors' care. They performed "in Shiraz and Tehran and Beirut," says Lane, 59, often at ancient ruins "with fire preferably." There was nudity on stage and depictions of sexual assault; in Amsterdam, she mistakenly ate hash brownies. Does she wonder what her parents were thinking? "It definitely got me a seat in therapy," Lane says. But she notes that the 1970s were a more innocent time. "The comparisons are not on the same playing field. The experiences I had were extraordinary and multicultural and filled with intense experimentation and freedom."

After returning to the U.S., she acted in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard with Meryl Streep at 12, and at 14 starred with Laurence Olivier in the film A Little Romance, landing on the cover of Time. Her career has seen ups and downs since, but its unpredictability is "half the fun. You cycle through periods where there's work that nobody sees, and when you do something that's a hit, everybody goes, 'So glad you're working again,'" she laughs. "That's fine. Everything's not for everybody."