How Mexico’s Drug Cartels Recruit Child Soldiers as Young as 11

By Robert Beckhusen 

In case you thought Mexican drug cartels had sunk as low as they could get, a new report details how they use children as young as 11 years old to do their murderous bidding.
In the last decade, the cartels “have recruited thousands of street gang members, school drop-outs and unskilled workers,” (.pdf) the International Crisis Group recently reported. The ICG, a non-government organization that seeks to prevent conflict, notes many of these “recruits” — to use a clumsy term — are younger than 18, considered expendable, and deliberately ordered to attack superior Mexican military forces.


According to military officers interviewed by the organization, the “cartel bosses will treat the young killers as cannon fodder, throwing them into suicidal attacks on security forces.”
First, the children are enticed or manipulated into joining the cartels, and given basic weapons instruction at training camps, many of which have been discovered in the jungles along the Guatemalan border. The weapons are varied, ranging from AR-15 rifles to Uzi submachine guns, and .38 and 9-mm caliber pistols. Next, the kids are put into cells led by experienced cartel soldiers, who have some prior training with the military or police.
One Mexican army lieutenant colonel told the ICG: “We will go on patrol and face an ambush by these young kids who don’t even know how to shoot.” The soldiers see little choice but to shoot back at children. And they do know how to shoot.

“When you have disciplined soldiers they are going to win in these shoot-outs,” the officer said. “But then maybe the troops are being held up, while the bad guys are moving drugs or carrying out a murder somewhere else. And by attacking the army, they are trying to show the population that they have the power.”
To strengthen their control in cartel-held towns, the killers are augmented by lookouts, or “hawks.” Like in U.S. cities, the lookouts, equipped with cellphones or radios, are positioned at distances of two or three city blocks. Their job is to call other cartel members if the military or police are entering an area. “When we get close, they know we are coming and change direction,” the officer told ICG.
The case of Edgar Jimenez Lugo, or “El Ponchis,” is one of the more disturbing. At 15, he was convicted of committing multiple murders for the Beltran Leyva Cartel, which he began at age 11, and was sentenced to three years in a juvenile prison due to maximum juvenile sentencing laws — while the case was flaunted in the Mexican and international press. More recently, accused 22-year-old assassin Adrian Ivan Pizana was arrested on a drug-related murder charge. Pizana had previously served time in a detention facility as a teen after being convicted of seven gangland killings.
Pay is likewise poor. A murder can be worth as low as $78. But other killers can make between $390 and $468 every two weeks, where a legitimate job might bring in as little as $298 a month.
As disposably as the cartels treat the kids, there’s a structural reason why the young “recruits” flow in. According to social workers interviewed by the group, the proliferation of child assassins results from neglect by families and the government.
Monterrey social worker Juan Pablo Garcia told the group: “The schools are closed, and there is no work and no opportunity. On the other side, the criminals, they say, ‘Come here. There is a job for you.’” That is, killing and victimizing others. Yet the killers are being victimized too