Thread: Mexico violence scares kids from schools

Mexico violence scares kids from schools
Kidnapping threats swell amid growing lawlessness
by Chris Hawley - Dec. 22, 2008 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic
JUAREZ, Mexico - The empty desks outnumber the students at Luis Urias Elementary School these days, a stark measure of the fear that hangs over this border city.

In a classroom usually filled with 40 fourth-graders, a single child bent over a worksheet on a recent afternoon. The class next door had 36 students absent and only two present.

In all, parents are keeping about 90 percent of the school's children at home because of a spate of kidnapping threats, Principal Berta Rodriguez said - a sign that a wave of violence in Mexico is seeping into one of the country's last refuges: its schools.

In cities across Mexico, there have been extortion threats against students and teachers, gunfights in school zones, bodies dumped near playgrounds and high-profile kidnappings of students on their way to school. On Dec. 12, the nephew of a key anti-drug official was gunned down outside his high school in Tijuana.

"People feel like the schools are no longer safe," Rodriguez said. "They're scared."

The crime now lapping at schoolyard gates is part of a wave of unrest that has swept over Mexico since President Felipe Calderón dispatched troops to fight the drug cartels in December 2006. The crackdown has turned border cities into battlegrounds as the cartels rush to fill power vacuums, beat back the police and seize control of plazas, or smuggling corridors.

Meanwhile, kidnappings not linked to cartels also have soared, with the official rate doubling since 2004.

Authorities don't think the cartels are specifically targeting schools, and it's unlikely that hardened drug traffickers are involved in the extortion demands, said Sergio Belmonte, a spokesman for the Juarez city government.

But the drug war has tied up police and created a sense of panic, and petty criminals are taking advantage of it, he said.

"These are neighborhood delinquents, not traffickers," Belmonte said. "But they know that if people think there is a general breakdown in law, they're more willing to succumb to their demands."

Since mid-November, the Juarez city government has posted guards and installed silent alarms at hundreds of schools after parents and teachers received extortion threats.

At one kindergarten, a sign appeared on the fence threatening to kidnap students if teachers did not pay up.

The Mexico City suburb of Cuautitlan Izcalli increased police patrols around 420 schools this month after six private schools and five public ones reported similar extortion threats.

At some schools, women dressed in red approached parents outside the schools, Mayor David Ulises Guzmán told The Arizona Republic. The women said the Zetas - the hit men of the Gulf Cartel - would begin snatching students if each family did not contribute 40 pesos, about $3, to pay them off.

Two Cuautitlan schools closed early for Christmas vacation because of the threats, Guzmán said.

"It's more like terrorism than extortion," Guzmán said.


Education on hold

Outside the Luis Urias School, parents were taking no chances. About a dozen crowded around the school's front gate last Tuesday afternoon as teachers handed out worksheets and homework assignments for them to take home to their children.

"I'm not taking my granddaughter there anymore, for fear something could happen to her," said Carlos Arellanes.

Teachers started getting telephone calls in mid-November demanding that they pay protection money or their students would be kidnapped, said Rodriguez, the principal. The school closed for a few days. The teachers all chipped in to hire a security guard for about $120 a week.

Only about 60 of the school's 565 students are showing up for the school's afternoon shift, Rodriguez said. Like many schools in Mexico, the same building is shared by a morning and afternoon school, each with its own name and staff of teachers.

During the mornings, when the school is known as the Maria Edme Ã

...as if Mexico needs even more uneducated children.....education is only compulsory until 6th grade....and now there's even less of an incentive to do that...Mexico's President should be ashamed.