The Zetas cartel has become the biggest drug gang in Mexico, overtaking its bitter rival, the Sinaloa cartel, a new report suggests.

Following an anonymous tip led Costa Rican authorities to a startling discovery, a ton of cocaine buried in the sand on the beaches of Quepos.

A report by a Mexican judicial official illustrates that while the country’s drug conflict has become dominated by the Sinaloa Cartel and the Zetas, the latter have established control in more territory. But this does not mean that they are now the more powerful of the two.

The first members of a criminal gang said to control much of the drugs trade on Colombia's Eastern Plains have handed themselves to the authorities.

The drug war’s fifth year throws up new trends, for better and worse

Even as drug gangs are taking control of wide swaths of other Central American countries, a gentle and unassuming 60-year-old grandmother appears to have held them off as national police chief of Nicaragua.

In the latest twist to Mexico's drug wars, a new group has vowed to launch a paramilitary offensive against a leading drug cartel in Veracruz, a city that has become a flash point in the violence.

Share A conflict in Brazil's northeast, where security forces launched an operation to quell a violent feud between criminal dynasties, is a reminder that in some rural parts of the country, state presence is as weak and crime as rampant as in urban favelas.

No one doubts that the 2014 World Cup in Brazil will be memorable, but there are doubts over how well organised it will be.

The FBI says six current and former employees of Puerto Rico's Department of Education have been arrested on charges that include bribery and money laundering