Thread: Mexican Drug Cartels Targeting and Killing Children

Mexican drug cartels targeting and killing children.

By Anne-Marie O'Connor and William Booth

Saturday, April 9, 8:02 PM

SAN LUIS POTOSI, Mexico — On a sunny afternoon last week, when the streets of this mountain mining city were filled with schoolchildren and parents hurrying home from work, gunmen entered a tiny apartment and started firing methodically.

The assassins killed everyone: the family matriarch and her adult son; her daughter and son-in-law, and finally, her 22-month-old granddaughter.

The child was not killed by mistake. Preliminary forensics indicate that the gunmen, unchallenged, pointed a pistol at Scarlett Ramirez and fired.

In Mexico’s brutal drug war, children are increasingly victims, innocents caught in the crossfire, shot dead alongside their parents — and intentionally targeted.

According to U.S. and Mexican experts, competing criminal groups appear to be killing children to terrorize the population or prove to rivals that their savagery is boundless, as they fight over local drug markets and billion-dollar trafficking routes to voracious consumers in the United States.

“It worries us very much, this growth in the attacks on little children. They use them as a vehicle to send a message,â€

utterly sick and disgusting