Beltran Leyva Cartel Hiring 12 Year-Old Hitmen

Just when you think the drug-related violence in Mexico can’t get any worse — it does.

This just in, police in Mexico are searching for a 12 year-old hitman nicknamed “El Ponchis” and a YouTube video recently surfaced showing a young man in his teens confessing to work for the Beltran Leyva Cartel, where he was paid $3,000 per kill. He was quoted saying, “When we don’t find the rivals, we kill innocent people, maybe a construction worker or a taxi driver.”

And this is what happens when you take a country’s economy, snatch out the middle, lure away their workforce and leave nothing behind.  After NAFTA took away many Mexican’s ability to make a living as farmers away, they left their families and came here, for those left behind there was little else to do but work in the maquilas.  Yet, as China has grown stronger as a manufacturing force, even those jobs are scarce.  The drug cartels have, in a sense, provided jobs where the government, the U.S. and private businesses have failed.

Left unseen are all those families left behind by the workers who built the U.S. into the housing bubble.  Raised without fathers, by grandparents, in fractured homes, where do they go?  What do they do?  Mexico’s violence is an US problem, it is a very long border after all, and the solution is not going to come simply by the U.S. pointing the finger, taking drugs, and then giving the money government for more guns.