Securing the United States's border from illegal immigrants, terrorists and weapons of mass destruction "continues to be a major challenge," says the United States Government Accountability Office in a new report. It is also proving to be expensive in both lives and money.

In dollar terms, the outlay is substantial. Every time someone breaks a hole in the U.S.-Mexico border wall, it costs about $1,300 to repair. The estimated cost of maintaining the 661-mile (1,058 km) double-layered fence along part of its 2,000-mile (3,000 km) border with Mexico over the next 20 years is $6.5 billion, the GAO report says. 

That is on top of the $3.7 billion allocated to the Department of Homeland Security's Secure Border Initiative since 2005 to build a system of fencing, lighting, sensors, cameras and radars to keep out job-hungry immigrants, terrorists and smugglers.

While border agents say the wall is a tool that helps them protect the United States, the GAO report found that U.S. Customs and Border Protection cannot accurately determine the fence's impact on improving border security, suggesting the money might not be well spent.

“What a waste in resources and creativity ," said Jorge Mario Cabrera Valladares of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA). "Our tax dollars are being wasted on an ineffective, old strategy instead of urgently working on serious, long term, workable immigration reform," he said.

Since the attacks on New York and Washington of Sept. 11, 2001, political pressure for tighter border controls has grown sharply and supporters of the border wall argue it is effective in keeping unwanted foreigners out.

But some border experts say the wall does not stop those trying to get into the United States and only makes it more dangerous, greatly raising the fees charged by people smugglers who charge up to $2 billion every year in Arizona alone. 

Some 5,600 people have died trying to cross into the United States since the U.S. government under President Bill Clinton dramatically increased border security in 1994 with Operation Gatekeeper and the first stretch of fence between San Diego and Tijuana.

That is according to a study by the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego and Imperial Counties and Mexico's National Commission on Human Rights (CNDH), based on Mexico's foreign ministry and media reports, who say the death of migrants is an international humanitarian crisis.

Before the stepped-up enforcement operations, experts say most deaths were due to traffic accidents as migrants dashed across freeways in border areas. Today, most die from hypothermia in the desert or by drowning in the Rio Grande and irrigation canals.

The U.S. Border Patrol's body count for border crossers this year points to the continued dangers. While the U.S. recession has caused a sharp drop in arrests on the borderline,  Customs and Border Protection has reported 416 deaths so far in 2009. That compares with 390 last year and 398 in 2007.

U.S. President Barack Obama has pledged to push comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, but the issue has little lawmaker support as Americans lose jobs in the recession.

(Additional reporting by Tim Gaynor)

President Barack Obama's signature battle to overhaul the United States' $2.5 trillion healthcare industry to extend coverage and lower costs for Americans has met fierce opposition from Republicans.

But a move by Democrat backers to exclude 12 million illegal immigrants from buying health coverage and restrict the participation of authorized migrants has drawn the ire of U.S. Hispanics -- a bloc that overwhelmingly turned out to vote for Obama in last year's election.

Hispanic lawmakers and activists are riled by the bill pushed in the U.S. Senate by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, which denies illegal immigrants the option to buy health insurance and places a five-year wait period on legal immigrants before they can access health benefits.

"When we effectively bar the immigrant community from buying private insurance, we force them further into the shadows of our society, and we relegate them to emergency room care ­at the highest cost to taxpayers," Rep. Luis Gutierrez, an Illinois Democrat, told a conference call with reporters this week.

Obama has so far been popular with U.S. Hispanics. His backing for comprehensive immigration reform, which seeks to allow millions of illegal immigrants in good standing a chance to pay fines and become citizens, helped win him two-thirds of the Latino vote in last November's election.

But activists say the push to exclude undocumented workers from paying for healthcare -- even for their U.S. born children -- is testing support for Obama among Latinos, who make up 15 percent of the population and 9 percent of the electorate.

"The Latino vote was based on promises that a new administration would lead us out of the darkness and finally bring about immigration reform," said Lorena Colin of the Mexican American Coalition for Immigration Reform, a Chicago-based pro-immigrant grassroots group.

"Instead, we are seeing the administration allowing undocumented immigrants to become scapegoats and the targets of widespread derision and hate in the healthcare debate," she added.

Reverend Luis Cortés, Jr., meanwhile, the president of a prominent Hispanic evangelical network Esperanza said he was disillusioned with the Democrats, and warned that Hispanics voters would punish lawmakers who denied immigrants care in the midterm Congressional elections in 2010.

"All we can do at this point is look at each local election, one by one, and punish those individuals-regardless of their party-who deny rights to legal immigrants and children, as well as the poorest in our nation, the undocumented," he said.

Ciudad Juarez, a Mexican town on the U.S. border where daylight murders and beheaded bodies have become the norm, could be the world's most violent city.

With 130 murders for every 100,000 residents per year on average last year, the city of 1.6 million people is more violent than the Venezuelan capital Caracas, the U.S. city of New Orleans and Colombia's Medellin. That is according to a study by the Mexican non-profit Citizen Council for Public Security and Justice, which presented its report to Mexico's security minister at a conference this week.

The fight between rival drug cartels over Ciudad Juarez's local drug market and smuggling routes into the United States broke out at the start of last year and continues to intensify.

Reliable global crime statistics are hard to pin down and a study last year by Foreign Policy Magazine placed Caracas as the world's top murder capital, also with 130 murders per 100,000 residents. (The Mexican study disputes that and puts the Caracas figure at 96).

But Ciudad Juarez's rising murder rate, currently at about 250 per month, appears to put it well ahead of other notorious world crime capitals such as South Africa's Cape Town, Moscow, Baghdad, and Papua New Guinea's capital Port Moresby, according to the Mexican and Foreign Policy studies.

In fact, in Ciudad Juarez during the first day of the conference where the Mexican study was presented, eight people were murdered in the city's streets, including a prosecutor, a lawyer, two policewomen, a clown performer and a gardener.

Ciudad Juarez, a manufacturing city across from El Paso, Texas, already has a stained history with the unsolved murders of hundreds of young women in the 1990s.

Perhaps most worryingly is not that 10,000 troops and elite police stationed there have failed to stop the drug violence, but that local officials say they have everything under control.

Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz says the city's fight against drug violence is "a successful process that the world can learn from." Chihuahua state Governor Jose Reyes Baez, who has long bemoaned the media focus on drug violence in Ciudad Juarez, says that troops can gradually leave as newly-trained police take over. The army denies any scaling back in its deployment.

After radioing for backup, he got out of his vehicle and started to follow members of the group as it split up. He was attacked, robbed of his weapon and shot several times in the head and abdomen.

Mexican police have rounded up five suspects believed to be coyotes, or people smugglers, and drug gang members, although the FBI, which is heading the investigation, considers the case unsolved.

While it unfolds, the probe into the murder of 30 year-old Rosas, father of two small children and whose memorial service is on Friday, is a test for U.S.-Mexican cooperation. Both countries are at pains to show a unified alliance in the drug war, underscored again by U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske's visit to Mexico this week.

But Rosas' murder is also a warning that Mexican organized crime is increasingly undaunted by U.S. law enforcement. In Mexico, well-armed drug cartels take on the army at will. Mexico's escalating drug war has killed some 12,800 people since late 2006, when President Felipe Calderon launched his army-backed crackdown on cartels.

Attacks are also rising against the Border Patrol on the U.S.-Mexico border as drug gangs, pressured by increased enforcement and the border fence, link up with people smugglers to use illegal immigrants to smuggle narcotics across the border.

Border Patrol agents often work alone in remote stretches of the 2,000-mile (3,200-km) border and traffickers are willing to use brutal violence against them if threatened. Last year, Border Patrol agent Luis Aguilar was intentionally run over and killed by a smuggler in a drug-packed Hummer in Arizona.

According to U.S. security consultancy Stratfor: "such deaths in the United States can be considered almost inevitable, especially considering that authorities report nearly 50 Border Patrol agents were fired on during 2008."  In Tucson sector alone in the first 10 months of fiscal 2009 there have been 171 assaults on Border Patrol agents.

Disarming Mexican drug cartels, who have easy access to assault weapons in gun shops in U.S. border states, is one of the central strategies of the drug war but one that is making limited progress.

In recent days, heavily armed hitmen launched coordinated attacks on federal police stations in western Mexico and dumped the semi-naked, bloodied bodies of 12 federal agents by a mountain highway, killed two U.S. Mormons in their Mexican community and killed a mayor in a northern ranching town.

A surge of 10,000 troops and federal police in Ciudad Juarez has failed to stop the killings there, which are in fact higher than last year when there were only a handful of soldiers on city streets.

President Felipe Calderon says the violence is a sign the drug gangs are weakening, but with 12,800 drug war deaths since he took office and reports of rights abuses by soldiers, calls are growing for a change of strategy.

Those making the calls include senators from Calderon's own party, opposition politicians, security analysts, Mexico's Human Rights Commission and international rights groups. But few if any are coming forward with proposals because the police forces that would replace the soldiers on Mexico's streets are corrupted and a drive to clean them up could take years. For now, Calderon is sending 5,500 more troops and police to his home state of Michoacan to stop the flare-up there.

One thing Calderon could do to weaken traffickers is to go after their cash. That could have a domino effect on cartels' power to buy guns and to corrupt officials. Headline-grabbing army operations may seem more impressive than the behind-the-scenes work of tracing money laundering, but U.S. anti-drug officials say it is key to Mexico's success.

So far, Mexico has fallen short. An International Monetary Fund report published in January found Mexican authorities have only made 25 convictions for money laundering since in 1989 and Mexican law does not allow for the quick freezing of traffickers' assets. In short, Mexican money laundering laws do not meet international standards and many cases are not properly investigated.

With $40 billion at the heart of the drug war every year, surely it shouldn't be too hard to find some of the dirty money.

Fox, a conservative who ended 71 years of one-party rule in 2000, wants a church wedding for his second wife and former press secretary, Marta Sahagun. The couple wed in a surprise civil ceremony in 2001 and planned to tie the knot before a Catholic priest in Asturias, Spain next year. Sahagun has already bought her wedding gown, Mexican media say.

(Photo: Vincente Fox and his wife Marta Sahagun, 26 Oct 2002/Claudia Daut)

According to confidential documents obtained by the Mexican online magazine Reporte Indigo, the Vatican last year annulled Fox's first marriage of 20 years, but only because he is "self-obsessed and narcissistic and has a personality disorder." That diagnosis by Vatican doctors means he is unfit to remarry in the Catholic church because he leads a double life, hiding his "hysteria" and his insincerity behind the politician's mask, it says. The Vatican did not question his fitness for public office, however.

On Dec. 7, Fox confirmed to reporters the existence of the Vatican documents, said they should never have been made public and argued they had been misinterpreted following their publication. He declined to comment further, saying the process was confidential. "I love Marta and as soon as I can I am going to marry her. I am saving for the wedding, " he added.

Fox stunned the country in 2002 when he knelt to kiss Pope John Paul II's ring during the pontiff's visit to Mexico.  The country has a long history of anti- clericalism and religious persecution. It only established diplomatic ties with the Vatican in 1992. Given Fox's support for it, the Catholic Church in Mexico may yet come to the rescue with some lobbying on his behalf. Mexican Archbishop Jose Guadalupe Martin, from the central city of Leon, says he sees no reason why Fox cannot marry in church.

(Photo: Fox kisses ring of Pope John Paul, 30 July 2002/Andrew Winning)

Mexico's best-known social commentator Guadalupe Loaeza says Fox, who was generally well-liked as president even though he achieved little in the way of new legislation, is misunderstood. "He's crazy all right, but crazy for love ... Is that a sin?" she asks in a column.