Army surge in Mexico's drug capital silences teen guns

Ciudad Juarez: In Ciudad Juarez, North America's most dangerous city, the warring drug cartels have a new weapon more effective than rocket launchers or grenades. The latest additions to the bloodthirsty gangs are sicaritos, or child assassins.

As guerrilla forces found in Africa, 13 and 14-year-old children on the margins of society make fearless killers. In Juarez, now Mexico's drug addict capital, they are almost certain to be high on crack cocaine.

Around 80 per cent of the 2,000 people killed here in the past 14 months have been aged under 25.

The city of 1.8-million people, separated from El Paso in Texas by no more than a bridge over the Rio Grande, sits on a prime drug route and has been the epicentre of the violence gripping Mexico and creeping over the border.

In a city now empty of the Americans who used to flock here for the bars and flea markets, taxi drivers instead offer a tour of murder spots and streets where drug deals are conducted within yards of the local police.

In one, home to a strip of nondescript, cartel-owned bars, 16 people have been killed in the past two months. Usually the gunmen, teenagers among them, will saunter in and fire their AK-47 assault rifles indiscriminately, hitting both targets and bystanders. Few suspects are arrested.

A few streets away is a bar where a cartel chief nicknamed "Jesus the Devil" was recently killed three days after getting out of jail, shot seven times in the head. Those captured by the cartels are less fortunate. Many are tortured then beheaded.

Police officers, almost all suspected of working for the drug barons, have been among the dead. The local morgue is doubling in size to cope with demand. But at last Juarez's battered citizens have been offered some respite.

Army convoys now rumble through the narrow streets day and night, machine gun-armed troops and special forces soldiers crowded into pickups as they stop cars and raid houses.

Government officials were able to announce this week that a "surge" involving 10,000 soldiers and federal police had cut by 70 per cent a murder rate previously averaging five a day.

Belated efforts to tackle the cartels, long ignored by a US distracted by Islamist extremism, are being stepped up north of the border. Playing down an assessment that Mexico is likely to become a failed state, the US government has promised more troops and equipment along the border.

- The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2009