In Mexico, children as young as 10 recruited by drug cartels

MEXICO CITY » Jacobo grew up in the western Mexico state of Jalisco, home to the Jalisco New Generation drug cartel. Never comfortable in school, he had an abusive childhood: at one point his mother held his hands over an open flame after he allegedly shoved a classmate.

Now 17, Jacobo claims he didn’t do it. But by 12, he was recruited to carry out his first murder for the cartel. “They go around looking for kids who are out on the streets and need money,” he recalls. “At 12 years old, I became sort of a hired killer.”

Jacobo told his story to Reinserta, a Mexican nonprofit group that withheld the youths’ full names because all are under age, are currently being held at facilities for youthful offenders and most are scared of retaliation by the gangs.

“A neighbor asked me, ‘Do you want to earn money?’” Growing up in a household where his family could seldom make ends meet, the answer was obvious. “I said yes. Who doesn’t want money?” But the $1,500 he earned didn’t last long; he picked up a meth habit, in part to quiet the psychological effects of what he was doing.

By his mid-teens he was torturing members of rival cartels for information, killing them and cutting up their bodies or dissolving them in acid, by now on the outskirts of Mexico City.

It was his last job that did him in; the cartel ordered him to carry out a killing in public, with lots of witnesses. Police came looking for him, and he went into hiding. The cartel contacted him to say it wanted to switch his hiding place, “but it was a trap,” he recalls. No longer useful — like so many disposable teen street-level drug dealers, lookouts and hitmen — the cartel wanted to get rid of him.

“When I showed up to meeting place, they started shooting me,” said Jacobo, whose last name was withheld because of his age. “I was shot in the head, in the back, in the abdomen.” Left for dead, he somehow miraculously survived, and is now serving a four-year youthful offender sentence for murder.

Mexican laws allow sentences of between three and five years for most youthful offenders, meaning almost all get out before they are 21.

Reinserta works to prevent youths from getting recruited by drug cartels, and find ways to rehabilitate them if they already have.

That is a difficult job in Mexico; though he’s alive, Jacobo is still afraid; he knows from his own work for the cartel that it is everywhere, and won’t stop at anything. “Now I am just a target to be eliminated, a minor irritant for one of the most powerful cartels in the country.”

Marina Flores, a researcher for Reinserta, said the study suggests some common myths about kids in drug cartels aren’t true.

While kids almost always engage in drug use and leaving — or being expelled from — school prior to joining a cartel, membership in local street gangs no longer appears to play much of a role. Cartels in Mexico are directly recruiting kids as soon as they leave school.