Escorted by heavily armed soldiers, a Mexican farmer returns to his ransacked ranch house near the front line of a war between drug cartels, whose acronyms are scrawled on bullet-pocked walls. Recently recaptured by the security forces, Palmas Altas in the northern state of Zacatecas is now a ghost town, apart from a few well-fed dogs walking under a blazing sun. Since 2020, the two cartels have been fighting over Palmas Altas and Zacatecas -- whose main city is a colonial center known for its Baroque-style architecture -- with the state's drug trafficking routes towards the United States, as well as ports on the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico coasts. IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES