Mexico’s Diabolical Drug Gangs

Mexico’s infamous drug cartels are known around the world. They skirt the law. They violently defend their illegal interests. They control officials and pay off law enforcement personnel. And they recruit children to assist in their schemes (Reuters, May 28, 2025).

Security experts believe Mexico’s gangs intentionally recruit children, taking advantage of their desire for friends, family, status, and even the basics of life, like regular meals. As Reuters columnist Lizbeth Diaz writes, these child recruits are “cheap, burn bright, and don’t live long.” Gang leaders know that children are easy to replace when they are killed in the line of “duty.” Gangs groom some of these children to become assassins. Many come from homes destroyed by violence and drugs, and many are themselves addicted to drugs. Child recruits often know they will die one day in service to the gang, yet they are motivated by the sense that they are a part of a family and the fact that they have plenty of food to eat. While many recruits are in their teenage years, one Mexican government report noted that some are as young as six years old. By age eight they can handle a gun, and some are recruited through violent, multiplayer video games.

Stories like this are heartrending. What kind of a person would consider involving innocent children in such dastardly work? King David once observed that an evil person “devises wickedness on his bed; he sets himself in a way that is not good; he does not abhor evil” (Psalm 36:4). The Apostle Paul also warned that many at the end of the age would be “lovers of themselves, lovers of money… unloving… brutal, despisers of good” (2 Timothy 3:1–5). Seducing children into violent lives certainly fits these descriptions.

To learn more about a future when children will be safe and their innocence protected, you can read or listen to Armageddon and Beyond.