How Mexico’s cartels recruit children and groom them to become killers

Sol remembers her first kill for a Mexican cartel: a kidnapping she committed with a handful of other young recruits that twisted into torture and bled into murder. She was 12 years old.

She joined the drug cartel a few months earlier, recruited by someone she knew when she sold roses on the sidewalk outside a local bar. She started as a lookout, but rose quickly.

The cartel liked her childish enthusiasm for learning new skills, her unquestioning loyalty and perhaps most importantly, her status as a minor protected her from severe punishment if police caught her.

“I obeyed the boss blindly,” Sol, now 20 years old, told Reuters, speaking from the rehabilitation centre in central Mexico where she is trying to patch her life back together.

“I thought they loved me.”

Sol declined to say how many people she killed during her time in the cartel. She said she'd been addicted to methamphetamine from the age of nine. When she was 16 she was arrested for kidnapping, her only criminal conviction, and spent three years in juvenile detention, according to her lawyer.

Reuters is withholding Sol's full name, and the names of the city where she worked and the cartel she joined, to protect her. The news agency was unable to independently verify the details of Sol's account, though psychologists at the centre and her lawyer said they believed it was accurate.

Security experts said children like Sol are a casualty of a deliberate strategy by Mexican organised crime groups to recruit minors into their ranks by preying on their hunger for status and camaraderie.

In cartel slang they are known as “pollitos de colores” or “colourful chicks” after the fluffy baby chicks sprayed with lurid toxic colours and sold at Mexican fairgrounds. They're cheap, burn bright and don't live long.

Reuters spoke to 10 current and six former child assassins, and four senior cartel operatives, who said cartels are increasingly recruiting and grooming young killers.

Their experiences reveal the growing brutalisation of Mexican society and the failure of President Claudia Sheinbaum and past governments to address not only the expanding territorial influence of the cartels but also their extensive cultural holds.

Mexico's presidency and interior ministry did not reply to requests for comment.

The news agency contacted active cartel members through Facebook and TikTok. Many shared pictures of themselves holding rifles. One had a cap emblazoned with a cartoon chicken firing automatic rounds, a reference to the “colourful chicks”. They were aged between 14 and 17.

Most said they had been recruited by relatives or friends, joining principally out of a desire to belong to something. They usually came from homes wrecked by violence and drugs. Many were battling addictions to drugs such as cocaine or methamphetamine.

“You join with your death sentence signed,” said one 14-year-old child killer who has worked for a cartel for eight months, requesting anonymity to protect themselves.

“But it's worth it,” they said.

They're no longer hungry and have a sense of family.

Though 15 security experts and those within the cartels said child recruitment is becoming more common, a lack of hard data makes the issue difficult to track.

The US government's bureau of international labour affairs estimated about 30,000 children have joined criminal groups in Mexico. Advocacy groups said the number of vulnerable children prone to being recruited is as high as 200,000. It is not clear how the numbers have changed over time, though experts said child recruits are getting younger.

A Mexican government report into the cartel recruitment of children published last year found minors as young as six have joined organised crime and also highlighted the growing use of technology, such as video games and social media, to draw in young recruits.

The report said 70% of adolescents pulled into the cartels grew up surrounded by high levels of extreme violence. In 2021, Mexican authorities intercepted three boys between the ages of 11 and 14 in the state of Oaxaca who they said were about to join a cartel after being recruited through the violent multiplayer game Free Fire.

Mexico's national guard has since issued guidelines on the safe use of video games, while a legislative proposal is before the lower house seeking to criminalise the cultural glorification of crime in music, on TV and in video games.

“We see more and more criminal groups co-opting ever younger children,” said Dulce Leal, a director at Reinserta, an advocacy group focused on children who have been victims of organised crime. She said the trend has grown alongside the use of new technologies such as video games with integrated chat messaging systems.

At the rehabilitation centre in central Mexico, another former child killer, Isabel, 19, who is being treated for extreme trauma and depression, said her uncle recruited her when she was 14. The uncle helped her murder a former teacher who had raped her, she said, and they became a couple despite him being 20 years her senior.

He got her pregnant but she miscarried, she thinks because of her heavy drug use.

Reuters was unable to corroborate all of Isabel's account, but her arrest as an unnamed child cartel member was published in news reports at the time.

Isabel had tattoos with her uncle's name removed, but she bears a stencil of his faceless silhouette.

While the youngest children might only be useful for simpler tasks, such as delivering messages or working as lookouts, their loyalty and malleability quickly make them an asset. They're also cheap and easily replaceable. By the time they're eight, they can usually handle a gun and kill, one cartel member said. There are some parallels with child soldiers fighting in places such as Sudan and Syria, but Mexican cartels differ in their for-profit nature and arguably in the cultural sway they exert. Cases of child killers have emerged in other places too, including Sweden.

“The children are disposable, they can be used, but in the end, all they await is death,” said Gabriela Ruiz, a specialist in youth issues at Mexico's National Autonomous University.

In 2021, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights called on Mexico to combat the forced recruitment of minors after reports of children in the state of Guerrero joining a community defence force to fight criminal groups in the area.

Despite a government focus under former president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, and under Sheinbaum, on combating the social roots of cartel violence — including programmes aimed at keeping children away from drugs and crime — little measurable progress appears to have been made, the 15 experts who spoke with Reuters said. There are no specific government programmes aimed at rescuing recruited children, they said.

One problem is a lack of clear criminal law banning the recruitment of minors into organised crime. Another is the broader problem of child labour in Mexico.

In 2022, the most recent official data available, 3.7-million children aged between five and 17 were working, about 13% of that total age group in Mexico. By law, children in Mexico can work from the age of 15 if they meet certain criteria, including signed parental approval.

Daniel was 16 when he joined a cartel in a state on Mexico's Pacific coast in 2021. The group turned up to a party he was at and forced the children to join at gunpoint.

For the next three years Daniel worked for the cartel, starting as a lookout, becoming an enforcer collecting protection money, and eventually a cartel killer. Many of his friends died along the way, some at the hands of rivals, some by his own cartel, murdered to set an example because they refused to follow orders or because they were manoeuvring to rise up the ranks.

Last November, he fled the cartel, leaving his partner and three-year-old son behind, and escaped to Mexico's north, applying for a US asylum appointment through the president Joe Biden-era government app CBP One. The programme was dismantled when President Donald Trump took office.

He is hiding near the border. Afraid for his life and more scared his old cartel will come after his partner and child, he's saving to pay a smuggler to get him to the US.

“I have no choice, I'm scared to die,” he said at the migrant shelter where he was staying.

For Sol, her focus is on starting her life over in Mexico. She is studying for a law degree and wants to build a career and stable life away from the death and violence she wrought and suffered as a child.

She hopes to specialise in juvenile law and serve as a mentor for younger children tempted by a life of crime.

“I never thought I would make it to 20. I always thought I would die before,” she said, fighting back tears.

Reuters