LATE last year, businessman Rafael Martinez was driving through Mexico City during the day when he was stopped by gunmen and abducted. His family soon received a demand for ransom - $US750,000 - but when they did not respond quickly enough, Martinez was executed and his body dumped in a suburban drug house.

''We are just lucky we got his body back, because most people who get kidnapped are never seen again,'' his nephew, Carlos Martinez, who is studying marketing in Canberra, says. ''They have sent letters to my parents saying, 'You are next.' They know where my little cousins go to ballet and soccer practice. It is terrifying. My father just tells me, 'Mexico is ruined now. We are old but you are young - you should remake your life somewhere else.'''

''In the past couple of years things have really gone crazy'' ... Dario Dimakis Galindo with his wife Anielka and children. Credit:Ben Rushton

Australians often hear about arrivals from Afghanistan or Sri Lanka, but some of our newest immigrants are from an unlikely source - Mexico. Long romanticised as a land of siestas and sombreros, Mexico is home to one of the bloodiest drug wars in the world, where more than 32,000 have been killed since 2006.

The violence, which is part of a wider phenomenon Mexicans call "la inseguridad", pits 50,000 soldiers and 20,000 federal police against the hugely powerful drug cartels, organisations like La Familia and Los Zetas, whose tactics are savage: beheadings and mass killings are commonplace, as is "corpse-messaging", where a mutilated body is left in public accompanied by a written warning ("Talked too much" or "You get what you deserve").