Mexico’s Drug War and Its Assault On Children
October 20, 2008 by pablo
As I wrote earlier this summer, the drug war in Mexico is growing and the real victims are the children. As this article details, children there are basically living in a war zone, complete with symptoms of PTSD and other stress related health issues. Please read the article and consider helping the children of Mexico by sponsoring our youth workshop series.
The New York Times
October 20, 2008
Drug Killings Haunt Mexican Schoolchildren
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.
A child in Tijuana.
“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.
For the entire story, click here.
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