Drug Killings Haunt Mexican Schoolchildren

October 20, 2008

By MARC LACEY
TIJUANA, Mexico — The little boy, his school uniform neatly pressed and his friends gathered around, held up 10 little fingers, each one representing a dead body he said he saw outside his school one recent morning. He was not finished, though. He put down the 10 fingers and then put up 2 more. Twelve bodies in all.

“They chopped out the tongues,” the boy said, seemingly fascinated by what he saw at the mass-killing scene outside Valentín Gómez Farías Primary School three weeks ago.

“I saw the blood,” offered a classmate, enthusiastically.

“They were tied,” piped in another.

Mexico’s explosion of drug-related violence has caught the attention of the country’s children. Experts say the atrocities that young people are hearing about, and all too frequently witnessing, are hardening them, traumatizing them, filling their heads with images that are hard to shake.

“Unfortunately, with this wave of drug violence, there’s been collateral damage among children,” said Jorge Álvarez Martínez, a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who specializes in post-traumatic stress. Such exposure to violence can hinder learning, interrupt sleep and linger for years, he said.






Nowhere is the trauma greater than along the border with the United States, where drug cartels are battling one another for a growing domestic market and the lucrative transit routes north. In Tijuana alone, a wave of gangland killings has left at least 99 people dead since Sept. 26, a death toll that rivals, if not exceeds, that in Baghdad, a war-torn city that is four times as large, over the same period.

Across Mexico, the carnage is impossible to hide, with severed heads and decapitated bodies turning up, sometimes nearly a dozen at a time. There have been more than 3,700 killings related to drugs and organized crime this year, up from about 2,700 last year, the Mexican attorney general’s office said early last week, with Chihuahua the most violent state and the killings continuing in the days since.

Exchanging gruesome stories is nothing new for schoolchildren, who have a way of overstating their brushes with danger. But the 12 tortured, tongueless bodies that were the talk of the playground recently were no exaggeration. In the early hours of Sept. 29, the bodies of 11 men and one woman, bound and partly dressed, were found in an abandoned lot opposite the school.

The headmaster, Miguel Ángel González Tovar, canceled classes soon after the bodies were discovered, but that did not stop some students from getting a glimpse of them and many others from hearing about them.

“There’s no doubt these images affect the children,” said Mr. González, who recently met with government psychologists to plan counseling sessions with the students. “Some of them are very quiet now. Some are asking us, ‘Why did they die?’ ”

And the bodies dumped outside the school are only one of several macabre displays, forcing teachers to compete with the killers for the attention of Mexico’s youth.

Indeed, it is hard to find a student here who does not know some of the gruesome details of recent killings, like the several vats of acid that were found outside a seafood restaurant, containing what the authorities said they believed were human remains. Or the two bodies wrapped in what resembled cellophane that were found near a road sign that said, “Thank you for visiting Tijuana.”

Bodies have been hung from bridges, sliced into pieces, decapitated, burned.

Mr. González’s biggest fear is that the awful scenes playing out across much of Mexico are so common that they will eventually lose their shock value among the young, making killing an expected, even acceptable, part of life.

“They may grow up with this sort of thing being normal,” he said. “They can say, ‘I saw 12! How many did you see?’ You could never have imagined this years ago.”

Youngsters today already know the names of the drug traffickers, not just from the nightly news but also from popular songs that extol them as heroes and from the Internet, where the grisly homicide scenes can often be watched on YouTube.

In Tijuana, the leader of the Arellano Félix drug cartel is Fernando Sánchez Arellano, a nephew of the group’s founders who goes by the nickname the Engineer. The authorities say they believe the outburst of killings here is the work of rival traffickers trying to seize control of his turf.

That explains the note found propped up on the dozen bodies outside the school: “This is what happens to anyone associated with the loudmouth Engineer.”

Mexico’s government has sent soldiers to trouble spots throughout the country to reinforce embattled local law enforcement agencies and in some cases root out corruption in their midst. But the drug traffickers have proved better armed in many cases and hard to contain. They are not just violent but also sadistic in their killing methods, and they seem intent on showing off their latest killings, to young and old alike.

“They are sending some kind of perverse message,” Mr. González speculated on why the 12 bodies were dumped near the front gate of his school. “They want attention, and they know leaving bodies in front of a school has impact. Now we’re worried that at any school at any time a body could turn up.”

This month, just before a high school was letting out, the police were on the scene of another killing, this time a barrel containing the body of a man whose arms and legs had been severed. The body, which had been left near the first-base line of a popular amateur baseball league field not far from the school, was whisked away by the authorities to the overflowing morgue before any students came upon it.

But it is not always possible to keep the drug violence hidden from young people.

In January, for instance, the police and soldiers engaged in a three-hour gun battle with narcotics traffickers from the Arellano Félix cartel in a residential neighborhood of Tijuana, requiring several schools to evacuate their students. Heavily armed police officers carried crying children to safety as other law enforcement officers crept along the sidewalk with guns drawn.

By the time the shooting quieted, six presumed traffickers had been killed.

“It was awful,” said Gloria I. Rico, director of the Garden of Happy Children, a preschool that was forced to evacuate. “Even when it was over and we tried to return to normal, any little sound would make the children jump.”

When a prison riot broke out here in September, and there was another eruption of gunfire, teachers at the preschool tried to distract the youngsters. “We told them they were fireworks,” Ms. Rico said, since independence celebrations had just taken place. “We said, ‘Don’t worry,’ but they were still anxious.”

On Wednesday afternoon, another shootout forced yet another Tijuana school to evacuate. This time it was Secondary School 25 that called off classes midway through the day and quickly emptied its classrooms in a panic. “It’s terrible what’s happening in Tijuana,” said Antonio Ochoa Pastrán, the headmaster. “It’s sad that now even in school children aren’t safe.”

Many children, Ms. Rico said, now associate anyone in uniform with violence, which is not an absurd proposition, not only because they may be fighting the traffickers, but also because many law enforcement officers around the country are on the traffickers’ payroll. “The children see the police and they are scared,” Ms. Rico said. “They fear that there is going to be more shooting.”

And there probably will be, which prompts parents to watch their children more closely than ever.

“You don’t know if he goes out if he’s going to come back,” said Patricia Beltrán, who looked on as her 8-year-old son, Marco Antonio, played near the spot where a killing had taken place, the blood still visible in the dirt.

Such fear is not misplaced, because innocent youngsters have been caught in the cross-fire. In addition, most of the victims are under 30 because the cartels use young gunmen to protect their merchandise and enforce discipline, the authorities say.

And given the extensive and often graphic media coverage of the killings, parents say it is impossible to shield their children psychologically.

“My kids are dreaming about this,” said Laura Leticia Quezada, who has three children at the primary school near where the bodies were dumped. “They watch it on the news, and they know every last detail.”

Jorge Fregoso, a television reporter, spends his days hustling from one homicide scene to another and then rushing back to the studio to put it all on the air. The father of two children, he says he understands the concern of many parents and tries to avoid extremely graphic images.

But at the same time, he said, reporting the awful events presses the authorities to take action and to make the streets safer.

“It’s hard for children not to know what’s going on,” he said. “You can turn off the TV all the time and hide the radio and newspaper. They’re still going to hear the bullets. And they might see a shooting themselves.”