How Mexico’s cartels recruit children and groom them into killers

A former cartel member, who requested to be identified as Isabel, speaks during an interview with Reuters in Mexico on April 3. PHOTO: REUTERS

UPDATED May 28, 2025, 06:57 PM

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MEXICO CITY - Sol remembers her first kill for a Mexican cartel: a kidnapping she committed with a handful of other young recruits that twisted into torture and bled into murder. She was 12 years old.

Sol had joined the drug cartel a few months earlier, recruited by someone she knew as she sold roses on the sidewalk outside a local bar. She started as a lookout, but rose fast.  

The cartel liked her childish enthusiasm for learning new skills, her unquestioning loyalty, and perhaps most importantly, her status as a minor protected her from severe punishment if the cops ever caught her.   

“I obeyed the boss blindly,” Sol, now 20 years old, told Reuters, speaking from the rehabilitation centre in central Mexico where she is trying to patch her life back together. “I thought they loved me.”

Sol declined to say how many people she killed during her time in the cartel. She said she had been addicted to methamphetamine from the age of nine. When she was 16 she was arrested for kidnapping – her only criminal conviction – and spent three years in juvenile detention, according to her lawyer.