Little children have been intentionally killed to prove that the assassins' savagery is boundless, writes ANNE-MARIE O'CONNORand WILLIAM BOOTHin San Luis Potosi, Mexico
ON A sunny afternoon last week, when the streets of this mountain mining city were filled with schoolchildren and parents hurrying home from work, gunmen entered a tiny apartment and started firing methodically.
The assassins killed everyone: the family matriarch and her adult son; her daughter and son-in-law, and finally, her 22-month-old granddaughter.
The child was not killed by mistake. Preliminary forensics indicate that the gunmen, unchallenged, pointed a pistol at Scarlett Ramirez and fired.
In Mexico’s brutal drug war, children are increasingly victims, innocents caught in the crossfire, shot dead alongside their parents – and intentionally targeted.
According to US and Mexican experts, competing criminal groups appear to be killing children to terrorise the population or prove to rivals that their savagery is boundless, as they fight over local drug markets and billion-dollar trafficking routes to voracious consumers in the United States.
“It worries us very much, this growth in the attacks on little children. They use them as a vehicle to send a message,” said Juan Martin Perez, director of the Child Rights Network in Mexico. “Decapitations and hanging bodies from bridges send a message. Killing children is an extension of this trend.”
The children’s rights group estimates that 994 people younger than 18 were killed in drug-related violence between late 2006 and late 2010, based on media accounts, which are incomplete because newspapers are often too intimidated to report drug-related crimes.
Few of the crimes are solved. “What worries us is the impunity in all of these cases,” Perez said. “If there is impunity, this use of children to send messages will grow.”
Government figures include all homicides of people younger than 17, which include victims whose slayings might not have been related to drugs or organised crime. In 2009 the last year for which there is data, 1,180 children were killed, half in shootings.
Recent, sensational killings of children – shot in a car seat, dumped in a field with a bullet in the head, killed as their grandmothers cradled them – have shocked Mexicans and shaken their faith that family is sacred, even to criminal gangs.
“Before, they went after their enemy. Now, they go after every member of the family, indiscriminately,” said Martin Garcia Aviles, a federal congressman from the Party of the Democratic Revolution from the state of Michoacan.
A Chihuahua state police commander was attacked as she carried her five-year-old daughter to school two weeks ago. Both died of multiple gunshot wounds.
In February assassins went hunting for a Ciudad Juarez man, but the intended target wasn’t home, so they killed his three daughters, ages 12, 14 and 15.
In March a young woman was bound and gagged, shot and left in a car in Acapulco. Her four-year-old daughter lay slumped beside her, killed with a single bullet to her chest. She was the fifth child killed in drug violence in the resort city in one bloody week.
“They kill children on purpose,” said Marcela Turati, author of Crossfire, a new book on the killings of civilians in Mexico’s drug war. “In Juarez, they told a seven-year-old boy to run, and shot his father. Then they shot the little boy.”
Historians of the Mexican drug-trafficking culture say that until recently children were considered off-limits in the rough code honoured by crime bosses, who once upon a time liked to portray themselves as Robin Hoods dealing dope to gringos and donating alms to the poor.
"The rules no longer apply – rather, there are no rules," said Bruce Bagley, an expert in the drug trade at the University of Miami. When the monolithic Institutional Revolutionary Party ruled Mexico, until 2000, Bagley said excess violence was tamped down by the state, which controlled the drug bosses with selective coercion and complicity. Now no such "pacts" exist, he said. – ( Washington Post)