CONSEQUENCES OF MASS POVERTY

From the April 24 Borderland Beat:

MEXICO’S YOUNGEST ASSASSINS
For many of Mexico’s youths, a job with a narco-cartel is the only job they can find—and the only one they may ever get

By: Jana Schroeder
Homeland Security Today

An increasingly disturbing factor in the vicious violence that is plaguing Mexico is the youthfulness of the individuals involved, whether as assassins or victims. There is no doubt that the great majority of the rank and file of Mexico’s organized crime groups are young men in their twenties and, increasingly, in their teens.

According to the Mexican government, most of the 30,000-plus deaths occurring since President Felipe Calderón took office four years ago and began the war against the drug cartels can be attributed to rivalries between criminal organizations. Their violence continues to be part of daily life in many areas of Mexico. The mutilated, tortured bodies found on city streets, in remote mountain areas, in trash dumps and hung from freeway overpasses have become painfully commonplace. The only factor that varies is the exact daily count.

The intensity of this violence is clearly unprecedented in Mexico. Perhaps worst of all, it is intended to terrorize citizens, to challenge the government and to make it clear who has the power to act with impunity.

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“The labor force willing to enter into the criminal world is more than enough,” Luis Astorga, an expert on drug trafficking in Mexico, told Homeland Security Today. He said there is a “reserve army” of young people without options, from both rural and urban areas.

“We mostly hear about marginalized youth in the cities,” added Astorga, who teaches at Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM). “But there are large numbers of young people in rural areas who are involved in growing marijuana and opium poppies, in packaging drugs, for example, and they are also the hired assassins in those parts of the country.”

As concern mounted last year over the increasing numbers of young people with nothing motivating for them on the horizon, a new term was coined in Mexico: “ninis,” an abbreviation in Spanish for young people who are not studying or working, “ni estudian, ni trabajan.”

In the first week of 2011, Calderón’s administration acknowledged that only one in every three young people entering the economically active population found formal employment during the first four years of his current term, which began in 2006. Another third found work in the country’s “informal sector,” and the other third remained unemployed, according to reports in the national press.

Organized crime analyst Jose Luis Piñeyro, who teaches at Mexico City’s Metropolitan Autonomous University, told Homeland Security Today, “The most obvious change I see is that those being recruited as hit men or hired assassins are young people—very young people—who are unemployed and poor or drug addicts. They’re not professional assassins, and they don’t have particular knowledge of how to use weapons.” He added: “They’re disposable, they’re recyclable. They’re hired for an average of US $500 to $650 a month to kill an unlimited number of people or to carry out other acts of violence. Ten years ago, a hired assassin charged US $12,000 to $13,000 to kill just one person. So you could say that hiring assassins has become cheaper for drug traffickers.”

But no one in Mexico was prepared for the news in December 2010, when a 14-year-old nicknamed “El Ponchis” was arrested in Cuernavaca, Morelos, trying to take a flight to San Diego after appearing in a gruesome video on YouTube. He is believed to have been recruited by the Beltrán Leyva Cartel and told reporters he had participated in four beheadings. When asked how and why he could do such a thing, he said he was drugged and threatened with death if he did not participate.

CENTRAL AMERICAN MIGRANTS TARGETED

An equal dose of shock was felt in Mexican society in August, when 72 Central American migrants were found dead, blindfolded and shot at a ranch in the state of Tamaulipas. The national press identified those responsible as gunmen with Los Zetas, who kidnapped and then killed the migrants when ransom money was not paid and they refused to work for the criminal organization.

The mass killing brought attention to a not-so-new problem. Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) revealed that reports of such kidnappings go back to at least 2007. And the numbers are astounding. According to the commission’s figures, 10,000 migrants were kidnapped between April and September 2010. In general, these crimes have not been investigated, and whereabouts of most of the kidnapped migrants are unknown.

The kidnappings target the thousands of Central Americans who travel through southern Mexico, hanging on to the sides and tops of northbound freight trains with the hope of reaching the United States. But as characterized in the Mexican press, many migrants find themselves living their worst nightmare long before they reach the American dream.

The story of one migrant who managed to escape, a Honduran man named Eimar, was told in El Excelsior newspaper. He said he was forced off the train and taken to a safe house where there were more than 200 other migrants. They were beaten and sometimes tortured to force them to call family members already living in the United States and demand ransoms of US $2,000 to $4,000 each.

Los Zetas are reportedly the main organized crime group controlling the traffic of Central Americans migrating to the US, and it is estimated this criminal activity brings in millions of dollars in profits. The chairman of CNDH, Raúl Plascencia Villanueva, was quoted in La Jornada newspaper in January saying that in many cases there is evidence of police officers and immigration agents participating in “apparent collusion with criminals.”

Alejandro Solalinde, a Catholic priest, directs a shelter in Ixtepec, Oaxaca, for migrants who come through on the freight trains. He reported receiving death threats from members of Los Zetas, who demanded he turn over migrants who escaped from a mass kidnapping in December along one of the most dangerous stretches of the train route through southern Mexico.