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Drug gangs break code, kill kids

Mexican policemen guard children during a confrontation against hitmen in the border city of Tijuana, Mexico, on Thursday. During the shooting four policemen were injured, two of them seriously. PHOTO: EPA

Hit men from Mexico's drug gangs are breaking traditional codes of honor by killing children in a chilling new chapter of a narcotics war that President Felipe Calderon is struggling to control.

In unprecedented attacks, gunmen killed a three-year-old boy and nine-year-old girl and seriously wounded a twelve-year-old girl in the city of Tijuana on the US border this week as they targeted a senior local police officer.

Even hardened residents of Tijuana, where severed heads were dumped on city streets and more than 300 people were killed in drug violence last year, were shocked by photos of young Jose Luis Ortiz's body riddled with bullets.

"How much longer must we wait for results from the military? Now the narcos are killing our children," said a Tijuana shop assistant who gave her name only as Fernanda.

Ortiz and his mother and father were shot to death as they slept on Monday night. Gunmen apparently mistook the boy's father for a police officer and had no qualms about killing the three-year-old.

Moments later, they found the police officer they were looking for and murdered him, his wife and their youngest daughter. Their other child was wounded.

"This is a new strategy to attack children and families and respond to the government's military assault on the cartels. The gangs want to sow panic and fear to overwhelm the authorities," said Victor Clark, a drug trade expert at San Diego State University.

Over the past three decades, Mexican drug cartels hauling cocaine north to the US have generally held to a code of honor that bans killing women and children and stops them from becoming addicted to the drugs they traffic.

As the cartels feud over smuggling routes and fight troops and federal police trying to crush them, violence has escalated and many traffickers are now addicts, drug enforcement officials said.

Meanwhile, officials said they found six executed kidnapping victims inside a Tijuana house where gunmen took refuge on Thursday during a chaotic three-hour shootout with soldiers and police.

The victims, all male, were blindfolded and gagged and had been shot in the head, said Edgar Millan, a spokesman with the federal Public Safety Department, at a news conference in Tijuana.

Soldiers, state and local police were sent in to help control the firefight that began when federal agents prepared to raid a house near the US border that police now say was a shelter for a cell of the Arellano Felix drug cartel.

Three nearby schools were evacuated, and television showed police running with small children in their arms while shots rang out.

Millan said the shootout killed one gunman and wounded four officers, in the latest outbreak of violence across the border from San Diego.

Four gunmen were arrested -- one is a state police investigator and another a Tijuana police officer, he said. The four men will be flown to Mexico City for further questioning.

Millan said officials recovered 11 automatic rifles and three bulletproof vests inside the house.
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