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By "they," he meant an irregular army of drug traffickers, who had created a no-man's-land in a grim little slice of Mexico.

Mexico's low-intensity "narco-war" has cast a daunting shadow over many of its backcountry areas, some of them wedged disconcertingly against the 2,000-mile-long border with the United States. The border's southern side is dotted with mysterious conflict zones, emitting rumors of burned houses, fleeing residents, and shadowy pseudo-armies of drug traffickers clashing by night.

Beltrán Leyva Cartel, El Gilo, the Zetas, El Chapo and his Sinaloa Cartel, the New Federation . . . This one little postage stamp of desert soil sounds like a package tour of "Narco-Mexico."

There, a rival of the Sinaloa Cartel, the Beltrán Leyva Cartel, reportedly runs two large militia camps in the mountains, each with about three hundred men. The Sinaloa Cartel's own force there, orbiting the same general area, is said to number four hundred, in fifty-man squads.

Over on the other side of the country, the greener side by the Gulf of Mexico, south of Texas, three of the cartel gunmen arrested in the August massacre were reportedly aged fourteen, seventeen, and eighteen.

Such is the typical age spread for an expedition like this: a not-so-clandestine grupo de limpieza, a "cleanup squad" sent by one drug cartel to quash another.

Interestingly, no Mexican police or army troops spotted the cleanup caravan that brought Ramón Mesa, though it frightened various small towns en route. The forty-five hundred Mexican Army troops deployed across the country in the drug war have struck some heavy blows against the cartels, and the troops are often more professional than some outsiders might imagine, but mysteries still abide.