From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

Since January 2007, 6,800 people have been killed.

Since the year 2000, 24 journalists have been killed and 7 have vanished.

These aren't Iraq stats. They're from a war much closer to home.

The Mexican drug war raging in cities just across the U.S. border. In places like Juarez,

Nuevo, Laredo, and Tijuana, the mounting violence is all about the competition between drug

cartels for control of supply routes north. And for journalists, it is one of the most dangerous stories in the world.

Vicente Calderon is a veteran television reporter in Tijuana and editor of Tijuanapress.com.

Amy Isaacson is a longtime reporter for KPBS, the NPR affiliate in San Diego.

They spoke to us from Tijuana, where they're attempting to bridge the 15-mile divide between

their two cities by joining forces on an ongoing radio and web series about the drug wars

called Border Battle.

This is from a recent report, a recording they made at 5 a.m.

at the scene of newly discovered casualties in a residential neighborhood in Tijuana.

It looks like all of them are blindfolded and they have the hands tied up with duct tape.

One has his pants down. It's Friday. This is the fifth discovery of bodies early in the morning this week. There's been bodies every day since Monday. Calderon says he's been covering Tijuana for nearly 25 years,

and though there has been drug-related violence for some time, he's never seen violence of this scale

or severity. It's just not the death toll, but also the gruesomeness of many of these killings,

and also the fact that many innocents have been casualties of this war between two rival gangs.

It's almost like the different groups are trying to one-up each other with decapitations

...