Breathe
By Lydia Cacho
I wonder how many of these men played war as children - if any adults - filled them with resentment and rage, who planted in them the seed of cruelty, of unbridled ambition and that desire to rule the most innocent lives in order to cause destruction and generate great wealth. We know that Joaquín "el Chapo" Guzmán, Carrillo Fuentes, Nemesio Oseguera and the other leaders of organized crime groups decided, as the war strategists that they are, to use the model of human trafficking to recruit children from 10 to 18 years old in order to turn them into disposable slaves. This is a phenomenon that I have studied for a long time.
Years ago, while preparing a documentary series with interviews with children, I traveled to Sinaloa to film one of the chapters. We had to ask permission from the parallel state government (the narcos) so that they would not attack or kidnap my film crew or my interviewees. Several of the children between the ages of 11 and 15 that I spoke with expressed that their deepest fear, in all cases, was being picked up by members of the Sinaloa Cartel. When I asked the boys and girls the origin of this fear, one of them, a 12 year old, responded: "the bad guys don't ask permission, they just go to the houses and tell the boys and girls that they have to go to work with them"; the other children interjected, one of them explained that when he was a boy at the age of eleven his uncle taught him how to handle weapons to be prepared, but now he is afraid of guns. Another said that it is wrong that they say "recruit" because in reality they kidnap them with threats of harming their families. I documented how an organization of men dedicated to martial arts decided to create a project for these vulnerable boys and girls to spend the afternoon at the academy studying and playing sports; a good way to protect them.
