NPR, 5/1/2011
In Mexico’s drug war, children are getting increasingly sucked into the violent narcotics trade. Middle school-age kids are working for the cartels as couriers, lookouts and even assassins. Others are being killed, injured or orphaned in the crossfire.
In the past, drug violence was usually contained between gangs and security forces, but that’s changed. Recently, even toddlers have been targeted in attacks involving military-style assault weapons.
Children’s advocates say the broader danger for Mexican kids is that once they start working for organized crime, they can’t escape.
Before he was arrested, many people here thought El Ponchis was an urban legend. There were reports on the Internet of a vicious young killer, maybe 12 years old, working as a hit man for one of the drug cartels. The kid turned out to actually be 14. In a videotaped confession, Edgar Jimenez Lugo admitted to killing four men just outside Cuernavaca. “I slit their throats,” he told his interviewers. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”
Jimenez said he was forced — at the age of 11 — to work as an assassin for a faction of the Beltran Leyva crime syndicate.
Mexico Institute 