Posts Tagged ‘U.S.’
READ THIS !! .. It seems the Borders are going crazy & and flying to Mexico from the U.S. will cause problems ? watch to find out more
CUERNAVACA, Mexico — Soldiers in Mexico have captured a 14-year-old U.S. citizen suspected of being a drug gang hitman as he attempted to travel to the United States.
Edgar Jimenez, known as “El Ponchis,” is believed to work for the South Pacific drug cartel in Morelos state, outside Mexico City, the army said on Friday. Media reports last month on the search for a boy with the same nom de guerre said he could be as young as 12.
The boy was caught late Thursday as he boarded a plane in the city of Cuernavaca. He was traveling to the border city of Tijuana with two of his sisters, one of whom is believed to be the lover of one of the cartel’s bosses, the army said.
He was brought to a regional office of the Mexico’s attorney general’s Office in Cuernavaca on Friday and told reporters there that he participated in at least four decapitations.
He said he was “drugged and under threat that if I didn’t, they would kill me.”
“El Ponchis” made headlines last month as reports of his grisly murders, including beheadings, surfaced. He acknowledged having killed at least seven people under the influence of drugs provided by a cartel leader, according to an army statement.
The Mexican daily newspaper La Razon said in November that “El Ponchis” was paid $3,000 for each murder he committed.
The three Jimenez siblings had allegedly wanted to cross to San Diego, where they have relatives.
Crimes committed by minors, ranging from shoplifting to murder for the cartels, have risen across Mexico this year, state officials say. Parents in the violent cities of Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana on the U.S. border say children as young as eight want to grow up to be drug lords, as the thrills and wealth of the trafficking world touches their lives.
Cartel teens confess on YouTube
Last month, police in Mexico detained another minor accused of working as a gunman for a drug cartel after shocking videos and photos surfaced online of fresh-faced boys mugging for the camera with guns and corpses.
One video, briefly posted on YouTube, showed a youth, apparently in his teens, confessing to working for a branch of the Beltran Leyva cartel. While the authenticity of the video could not be determined, cartels in Mexico frequently post such interrogation videos to expose their rivals’ crimes.
The youth tells an unseen questioner that his gang was paid $3,000 per killing.
“When we don’t find the rivals, we kill innocent people, maybe a construction worker or a taxi driver,” the youth is heard saying.
At the time of the first boy’s detention, the attorney general for the central Morelos state told a local radio station that authorities were looking for a second suspect, but did not say if either of the boys appeared in video posted online.
‘Terrible acts’
The attorney general, Pedro Luis Benitez, also did not reveal the ages of the suspect, but implied they were young enough to be playing with toy guns.
“These minors are still not fully developed and so it is easy to influence them, to give them a gun, pretending it is plastic, that it is a game,” Benitez said.
When asked directly about the teenage hitmen he said: “They’re persuaded to carry out terrible acts; they don’t realize what they are doing,” he added.
President Felipe Calderon, who launched the offensive against cartels in 2006, acknowledged several months ago that “in the most violent areas of the country, there is an unending recruitment of young people without hope, without opportunities.”
Suspects under 18 are prosecuted in a separate legal system for youthful offenders for most crime in Mexico. But there are growing calls for both that and the nation’s overcrowded adult prison system to be revamped.
Mexico has more than doubled the number of people in federal prisons in the last two years as part of the country’s crackdown on drug cartels, the country’s top cop said last month. While the federal prison system had about 4,500 inmates in 2008, there are now 11,000.
More than 28,000 Mexicans have been killed since late 2006 in drug-related violence, and 2010 is on track to
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