Organised crime: major job source in Mexico

Dwarfed by surrounding reporters, her head bowed to avoid the television cameras, the slender 16-year-old hesitated slightly before answering. "I'm a hitwoman," she said.

Maria Celeste Mendoza was one of six young suspected gang members arrested by police after a shootout with authorities in central Mexico, part of the growing ranks of teenagers working for the country's drug cartels. Dressed in combat fatigues with her face hidden, the girl from the northern border state of Tamaulipas described how the Zetas, one of Mexico's most brutal gangs, had trained her to use Kalashnikov assault rifles and other weapons.

She said she was paid 12,000 pesos (about $1,000) for two weeks' work, more than three times the national average wage. It was unclear whether she had actually killed anyone. As is customary in Mexico, she and the other suspects were paraded before the media after their capture in San Cristobal de la Barranca, near Guadalajara. Six of them were women aged 21 or below, including another 16-year-old, Isela Sandoval, who also said she had been trained as a hitwoman but had not yet killed anyone.

Rising youth unemployment, easy access to drugs, and the quick cash the cartels offer recruits are all blamed for the delinquency shadowing Mexico's future. "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. "Since 2000, the age at which people start getting mixed up in organized crime has fallen. In the last few years, the age has dropped to about 17 or 18."

Detailed figures on minors in the cartels are scarce, but the newspaper Reforma reported that 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. Around 40,000 people have died in drug-related violence since President Felipe Calderon sent in the army to crush the cartels at the end of 2006.

Women working as killers is highly unusual, Clark-Alfaro said — "this may just be an isolated case, but it may mean a new pattern is emerging in the world of organized crime." Teenage hitmen are not: last December, soldiers captured Edgar Jimenez, known as "El Ponchis," a 14-year-old US citizen who the army said had admitted killing several people while under the influence of drugs.

The pipeline starts young. "Kids are starting to take drugs younger and younger," said Alberto Islas, a security expert at the consultancy Risk Evaluation. "A decade ago, the average age was 14, now it's 10." Youth unemployment is now double what it was ten years ago, in a country with one of the youngest populations in the Americas. "Young folk are recruited because they're potentially more aggressive and less likely to care about the consequences than adults. They'll take more risks," Clark-Alfaro said. The attorney general's office calculates that young men who get mixed up in organized crime will, on average, be dead within three or four years.

The Network for the Rights of Children in Mexico (REDIM) estimates some 30,000 children work for criminal gangs. A 2009 government survey of 55,000 secondary schoolchildren in five Mexican cities found more than one in five had seen classmates carry a weapon, and one in eight would sell marijuana for cash if a friend egged them on. Those who graduate toward the cartels get a brutal schooling: Miguel Ortiz Miranda, a captured member of the La Familia cartel, described in an interrogation video posted online how new assassins were tested: made to kill, slit throats, and quarter victims "so that the new people would lose their fear."

Others end up as dealers, fixers, or lookouts — safer jobs that don't pay as well. Beatriz Hernandez, 21, one of the women arrested with Mendoza, said she earned 4,000 pesos every two weeks as a lookout.

With Mexico struggling to clean up its justice system or create decent jobs, some young people see gangland murder as a career option. "This is about the impunity here," Islas said. "Because of it, the perception of risk attached to committing this kind of crime is very low. Murders are not solved in Mexico."

Based on reporting by Reuters.