Dwarfed by surrounding reporters and with her head bowed to avoid the television cameras, the slender 16-year-old hesitated slightly before she answered the question. "I'm a hitwoman," she said. Maria Celeste Mendoza was among 10 suspected gang members, including four teen girls and two young women, arrested this week by police after a shootout with authorities in central Mexico, one of the growing ranks of young people working for the country's drug cartels. Dressed in combat fatigues and with her face hidden, the girl from the northern border state of Tamaulipas described how she had been trained to use Kalashnikov assault rifles and other weapons by the Zetas, one of Mexico's most brutal gangs.
In a listless drawl, Mendoza said she was paid 12,000 pesos ($1,000) for two weeks' work, more than three times the national average. Although she said she was trained as a hitwoman, it was unclear if she had killed anyone yet. As is customary in Mexico, she and the other suspects were paraded in front of the media by police after their capture in San Cristobal de la Barranca, near the country's second city, Guadalajara. Rising youth unemployment, easy access to drugs and the quick cash cartels offer recruits are all blamed for felling the delinquency that has cast a shadow over Mexico's future.
Suspected members of the Zeta cartel, among them three female minors and one male minor who were told only to show their backs, are shown to reporters along with confiscated weapons, in Guadalajara on Tuesday.
"Organized crime has become a job provider for a section of the population who don't have a lot of other options," said Victor Clark-Alfaro, director of the Binational Center for Human Rights in Tijuana on the Mexican border with California. "Since 2000, the age at which people start getting mixed up in organized crime has fallen," he added. "And in the last few years, the age has dropped to about 17 or 18."
Detailed figures on the role of minors in the cartels are scarce, but newspaper Reforma said the number charged with involvement in organized crime jumped to 214 last year from 8 in 2007, citing data from the attorney general's office. The arrest of Mendoza and another 16-year-old girl with her, Isela Sandoval, is part of the trend. Sandoval also said she had been trained as a hitwoman but that she had not killed anyone yet, according to Mexican media reports. Around 40,000 people have died in escalating drug-related violence since President Felipe Calderon sent in the army to try to crush the cartels at the end of 2006.
Live fast, die young
In a recent gun battle near the Texas border, the Gulf Cartel chased Los Zetas out of the now-abandoned city of Mier, forcing them to run to the nearby village of Los Aldamas. When the Mexican Military finally arrived, they found out that they were outgunned and outnumbered. There were over one hundred vehicles full of armed men battling each other. The gun battle lasted all night, and the gunmen demonstrated sophisticated night-ops skills. The military finally received re-enforcements and took control of the situation by dawn.
