Al Jazeera’s running a special report on the web and TV about the drug-related violence that has been racking Mexico of late as the government wages a “war” against drug traffickers and cartels fight amongst each other for control of trafficking routes.

The map embedded above shows areas of the country under the control of, or fought over by, Mexico’s major drug cartels. Click on the territories for a little more info.

Built using UMapper, which allows you to make Flash maps using Google’s, Yahoo’s, Microsoft’s or others’ mapping services. UMapper has a nice stats breakdown, but the best part is the ability to fullscreen maps, though that’s only available on their site, not in the embed.

But as javascript is still more cross-platform functional (to my understanding) than Flash, I ended up exporting the KML (mapping data) to Google and using that on the AJE site.

An added benefit of Google Maps is the thumbnail breakdown / legend key automatically added to the left-hand side of the map.