STORY: "They always told me, ‘You are our little sister, the youngest and we love you very much.’ They said many beautiful things that I believed, I thought this was the best family I had. But over time I realized it wasn't true."

Sol was only 12 years old the first time she killed for a Mexican cartel. A kidnapping she committed with a handful of other young recruits twisted into torture, and then murder.

She had joined the drug cartel a few months earlier. She started as a lookout, but rose fast.

Reuters spoke to 10 current and six former child assassins, as well as four senior cartel operatives, who said cartels are increasingly recruiting and grooming young killers.

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Security experts say children such as Sol are a casualty of a deliberate strategy by Mexican organized crime groups to recruit at-risk minors into their ranks by preying on their hunger for support and connection.

In return, they get a stable of soldiers they can mold. The children cannot be sentenced to long prison terms. And they are easily replaced if they wind up in jail, or the grave.

"A child in organized crime actually lasts very little time, their life is ephemeral because they become disposable bodies."

Gabriella Ruiz is a specialist in youth issues at Mexico's National Autonomous University.

"These kids are disposable, their bodies and lives can be used, but in the end, all they await is death.”

"Well, they say that children have more capacity to learn than adults. So when they hire a child, they have more capacity to learn to use weapons to disguise things like selling drugs."

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Sol spoke to Reuters from a rehabilitation center in central Mexico where she is trying to patch her life back together.

She declined to say how many people she killed during her time in the cartel. Her lawyer said she'd been arrested and convicted for kidnapping at the age of 16 and placed in juvenile detention for three-and-a-half years. Were she an adult, she might have been incarcerated for decades.

Reuters is withholding Sol's full name and the cartel she joined, to protect her. We were unable to independently verify the details of her account.

Psychologists at the rehab center and her lawyer said they believed it was accurate.

The news agency contacted active cartel members through Facebook and TikTok. Many shared pictures of themselves holding rifles. They ranged in age from 14 to 17 years old.

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Most said they had been recruited by relatives or friends, joining out of a desire to belong to something.

They usually came from homes wrecked by violence and drugs. Many were already battling addictions of their own to drugs such as cocaine or methamphetamine.

A government report into the cartel recruitment of children published last year said 70% of adolescents pulled into the cartels grew up surrounded by high levels of extreme violence.

The report found minors as young as 6 have joined organized crime and also highlighted the growing use of technology, like video games and social media, to draw in young recruits.

"Today we see that the phenomenon has been evolving along with technologies. We see more and more criminal groups co-opting ever younger children."

Dulce Leal is a director at Reinserta, an advocacy group focused on children who have been victims of organized crime.

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"Right now Reinserta is updating the study due to social media phenomena, in which we will surely identify younger people who are already being contacted by criminal networks."

The U.S. government's Bureau of International Labor Affairs estimates that some 30,000 children have joined criminal groups in Mexico.

Advocacy groups say the number of vulnerable children prone to being recruited is as high as 200,000.

The 15 experts who spoke to Reuters said that, despite a government focus under former President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, and current leader Claudia Sheinbaum on programs aimed at keeping children away from drugs and crime, little measurable progress appears to have been made.

They added that there are no specific government programs aimed at rescuing recruited children.

Mexico's presidency and interior ministry did not reply to Reuters' requests for comment.

For Sol, her focus is on starting her life over in Mexico. She is studying for a law degree and wants to build a career and stable life away from the death and violence she wrought and suffered as a child.

"I said, ‘I probably wouldn't make it to 20’ and now I'm 20. And look, I'm still here."