Mexico's drug war leaves a generation of narco widows

By Catherine Bremer

ARTEAGA, Mexico (Reuters) - Deep in western Mexico's sun-baked marijuana hills, where the presence of drug gangs hangs heavy in the air, Norma Bello and her five children live in a tatty storeroom since her husband was knifed to death and her eldest son jailed over a narco slaying.

Her eerily quiet town, Arteaga, sits in the shadow of a top drug lord's ranch in Michoacan state and Bello sleeps fitfully, reliving the night armed police kicked down her door and slashed grain sacks looking for cocaine.

In the nearby city of Uruapan, Isandra, 45, has battled to build a life for her kids away from the drug world that turned her husband into a womanizing coke-head and eventually killed him.

Behind the daily toll of drug murders, thousands of "narco widows", along with mothers, sisters and children, are paying dearly for a trade that has killed some 17,000 people in three years, the vast majority healthy young men.

"We are the ones who suffer," said Bello, 38, whose son is accused of working for the "La Familia" gang and taking part in the 2009 slaying of 12 police officers whose bound and partly stripped bodies were dumped by a road in a bloodied heap.

In Michoacan, where opium and marijuana have been grown for decades and corrupt former governments let smuggling flourish, poverty drives young men to work as cartel lookouts, informants and runners. Increasingly, many end up dead or in jail.

For every gruesome news photo of a hacked-up corpse or severed human head there is at least one woman, often several, left with her life in pieces. Some are women who entered the narco world as teenage beauties brought to adorn drug ranch parties.

The crackdown has also put some 80,000 suspected drug gang members behind bars, many of whom are beaten into confessions.