Mexican child soldiers demand action against drug cartels

— The children in this mountain village usually spend their days caring for goats or cows and playing with their dogs.

But on the rare occasions that the press comes to Ayahualtempa, the kids are lined up and handed guns.

They pull on the shirts of a community police force, cover their faces with handkerchiefs, grab their guns — fake wooden ones for the youngest — and line up in formation on the town’s basketball court to pose and march for the cameras.

The images have shocked people across Mexico and beyond. And that’s the point.

Few of those children actually wield guns on patrol, but such displays here and in other oft-forgotten communities are desperate attempts to attract the federal government’s help to fend off organized criminals.

“They are the poster children for a country at war that doesn’t speak of war,” said Juan Martin Perez, director of the Network for Children’s Rights in Mexico.

The remote region of Guerrero state is one of Mexico’s poorest and one of its most violent. It’s a key corridor for drug production and transit, especially heroin from opium poppies. Communities of the ethnic

Nahua like Ayahualtempa are caught between warring criminal bands and suffer kidnappings, extortion and murders.

On a recent afternoon, four boys cared for goats and played with puppies on a slope looking out over mountaintops running to the horizon.

Asked about training with guns, the oldest, 12-year-old Valentin Toribio said now they only march “when the reporters are going to come and interview us.” “It’s so the president sees us and helps us,” he said.

But there is at least some real training, too.

Valentin said he had liked learning to fire a gun and hopes to become a policeman when he gets older. His older brother taught him to shoot, though he normally only holds a gun for the performance. “When I’m older I’ll carry the gun because (now) it can be dangerous,” he said.

His 11-year-old cousin, Geovanni Martinez, is less interested in the performance because he is too busy. “I take care of the goats, then I go to my pigs and then to give water to Filomena,” his donkey, he said. If there’s any free time, he plays basketball. He yearns to return to school, closed for the past year by the pandemic.