Rights Group Warns Mexico Children Increasingly Recruited by Organized Crime Agence France-Presse
go to original October 27, 2014

Young gang recruits (Wikipedia)

MEXICO CITY - The number of Mexican children abducted, recruited by organized crime, mutilated and murdered has surged alarmingly, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights said last week. The grim report from the OAS-affiliated rights body comes as Mexican authorities are scrambling amid a massive scandal over 43 college students missing and feared dead.

The group's investigator Rosa Maria Ortiz visited the country earlier this month and "received information indicating that there has been an alarming increase in the figures of (missing) children who have not been found. "The (Mexican government), meanwhile, has not given data," she stressed.

Several organizations report that at least 2,000 children were slaughtered between 2006 to 2014, often with "extreme forms of violence," she said. There have also been a huge number of minors being forcibly recruited to work for organized crime, especially in poorer areas.

Of Mexico's 118 million people, seven million still live in extreme poverty, many of them in Guerrero state and neighboring Oaxaca and Chiapas states. These areas, as well as several in Mexico's north, have seen years of bloodletting between rival drug cartels warring over turf and shipping routes.

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