Collateral Damage: Mexico's Lost Youth: Generation Narco

¡Ya basta!  Enough, already! How much more "collateral damage" can the U.S. wreak on the people of Mexico? Ciudad Juarez was a center of maquiladoras, export factories set up under U.S.-Mexican trade agreements, including NAFTA, which was supposed to rescue Mexicans from poverty. Even the factories, which pay very low wages, have fled. 

Mexico's Lost Youth: Generation Narco - TIME: "The gangsters behind the terror were not just veterans of the narco wars, but included several 18- and 19-year olds. The teenagers, paraded before the press with acne, scruffy hair and loud t-shirts, were also accused of hanging victims from freeway bridges, genitals sliced from their bodies.

The arrests highlight how a new generation of Mexicans is being swept up into the country's drug war as both killers and victims. At the heart of the problem is youth unemployment, which leads many young people to turn to organized crime for career opportunities. Mexican media talk about a new category known as los ni nis or "neither nors."

One of the largest populations of ni nis is in Ciudad Juarez, considered by many to be the most murderous city on the planet. A recent report financed by the government found that 120,000 Juarez residents between the ages of 13 and 24 — or 45% of the population — were in neither formal work nor school.

On a visit to the Juarez west side earlier this year, I heard young people relate how criminal cartels are one of the only organizations that offer them work. That mafia will now pay a young person $1,000 per trip if he or she smuggles drugs over the border; the youths say the drug gangs will fork over as little as $100 for someone to carry out an assassination." Nov. 7, 2010