Forget about blessing the beasts and the children; sometimes the children are just beasts.
Two teen girls -- one 13, the other 15 -- have confessed to gunning down a man in Guatemala City as reported by the Deccan Herald: "Criminal organizations are hiring and training minors as contract killers to exploit provisions in Guatemalan law that exempt minors from prosecution for such crimes, Interior Minister Mauricio Lopez said."
Gutemalan crime groups must be pulling a page from the playbook of the Mexican drug cartels.
In December 2010 Mexican authorities arrested Edgar Jimenez a/k/a El Ponchis or The Cloak, an American-born 14-year-old boy who admitted to beheading at least four people on behalf of the South Pacific Cartel, which spotlighted the use of child narcos in the drug trade as reported by Ioan Grillo for Time magazine:
Youth prisons in Mexico are now full of minors who have been arrested for crimes linked to the drug war. Most of the inmates had been convicted of drug-related murders, kidnapping and drug trafficking. Oswaldo Hogaz, a prison official in Juarez, Mexico, states: "These kids are cheap, bloodthirsty, and they know the government can't punish them much."
In 2009 police in Laredo, TX reported that Los Zetas signed up U.S. teenagers as young as thirteen years old to carry out enforcement hits on the north side of the border as then reported by Ed Lavandera for CNN. Two such teens -- Rosalio Reta and Gabriel Cardona -- now are serving lengthy prison sentences for their roles in several murders, and Reta admitted that he made his first kill at 13: "I thought I was Superman. I loved doing it, killing that first person."It's a mad world.
