In the line of fire - Mexico's gang wars

THE little boy, his school uniform neatly pressed and his friends gathered around, holds up ten little fingers, each one representing a dead body he says he saw outside his school one recent morning. He is not finished, though. He puts down the ten fingers and then puts up two more – 12 bodies in all.

"They chopped out the tongues," the boy says, obviously fascinated by what he saw at the scene of the mass killing, outside Valentin Gomez Farias primary school in Tijuana, three weeks ago.

"I saw the blood," offers a classmate.

"They were tied," pipes up another.

Mexico's explosion of drug-related violence has caught the attention of the country's children. Experts say the atrocities that young people are hearing about – and all too frequently witnessing – are traumatising them, hardening them, filling their heads with images that are impossible for them to cope with.

"Unfortunately, with this wave of drug violence, there has been collateral damage among children," says Jorge Alvarez Martinez, a professor at the University of Mexico, who specialises in the study of post-traumatic stress disorder. Such exposure to violence can hamper learning, interrupt sleep and linger for years, he says.

Nowhere is the trauma greater than along Mexico's border with the United States, where drug cartels are battling for a share of the growing domestic market and lucrative transit routes north. In Tijuana alone, a wave of gangland killings has left at least 99 people dead since September 26, a death toll that over the same period rivals, if not exceeds, that in Baghdad, a war-torn city that is four times as large.

Across Mexico, the carnage is impossible to hide, with severed heads and decapitated bodies frequently turning up, sometimes as many as a dozen at a time. There have already been more than 3,700 killings related to drugs and organised crime this year, up from about 2,700 last year. Chihuahua is the most violent state, with the killings showing no signs of slowing.

Exchanging gruesome stories is nothing new for children, who have a way of overstating their brushes with danger. But the 12 tortured, tongueless bodies that were the talk of the Valentin Gomez Farias playground recently were no exaggeration.

In the early hours of September 29, the bodies of 11 men and one woman were found, bound and partly clothed, in an abandoned lot opposite the school. The headmaster, Miguel Angel Gonzalez Tovar, cancelled classes soon after the bodies were discovered, but it was too late to stop some students from catching a glimpse of the grisly find and many others from hearing about it. "There's no doubt images affect the children," says Gonzalez, who recently met government psychologists to plan counselling sessions with the students. "Some of them are very quiet now. Some are asking us, 'Why did they die?'"

And the bodies dumped outside the school were only one of several macabre displays, forcing teachers to compete with the killers for the attention of Mexico's youth. Indeed, it is hard to find a student here who does not know some of the details of recent killings, like the vats of acid found outside a seafood restaurant nearby, apparently containing human remains. Or the two bodies wrapped in clingfilm that were found near a road sign bearing the message 'Thank you for visiting Tijuana'. Bodies have been hung from bridges, sliced into pieces, decapitated, burned.

Gonzalez's biggest fear is that the awful scenes playing out across much of Mexico are so common that they will eventually lose their shock value among the young, making murder an expected, even acceptable, part of life. "They may grow up to think this sort of thing is normal," he says. "They can say, 'I saw 12! How many did you see?' We could never have imagined this a few years ago."

Youngsters today already know the names of the drug-traffickers, picked up not just from the nightly news but also from popular songs that portray them as heroes, and from the internet, where the grisly homicide scenes can often be watched on sites such as YouTube.

In Tijuana, the leader of the Arellano Felix drug cartel is Eduardo Arellano Felix. The 52-year-old, who the US State Department once offered 5m for, was arrested by soldiers and federal police after a shoot-out in Tijuana last Sunday. His 11-year-old daughter was caught up in the turmoil.

One of Felix's main allies is his nephew, Fernando Sanchez Arellano, known as The Engineer. The authorities believe the outburst of killings here is the work of rival traffickers trying to seize control of his turf. That explains the note left on the dozen bodies outside the school: "This is what happens to anyone associated with the loudmouth Engineer."

Mexico's government has sent soldiers to trouble spots throughout the country to reinforce embattled local police forces, and in some cases root out corruption in their midst. But the drug-traffickers have proved better armed than the troops in many cases and hard to contain. They are not just violent – they are also sadistic, and they seem intent on showing off their latest killings to young and old alike. "They are sending some kind of perverse message," Gonzalez says. "They want attention, and they know leaving bodies in front of a school has impact. Now we're worried that a body could turn up at any school at any time."

Last month, just as the bell was ringing for the end of lessons at one high school, police were on the scene of another killing. This time a barrel was discovered containing the body of a man whose arms and legs had been severed. The corpse, which had been left in a baseball field near the school, was whisked away to the overflowing morgue before any students could spot it.

But it is not always possible to keep the drug violence hidden from young people. In January, police and soldiers engaged in a three-hour gun battle with Arellano Felix drugs-traffickers in a residential area of Tijuana, resulting in several schools being evacuated. Heavily armed police carried crying children to safety as other officers crept along the pavements with guns drawn. By the time the shooting stopped, six suspected traffickers had been killed. "It was awful," says Gloria Rico, director of the Garden of Happy Children, a nursery school that was forced to evacuate. "Even when it was over and we tried to return to normal, any little sound would make the children jump."

When a prison riot broke out here in September, and there was another eruption of gunfire, teachers at the same nursery tried to distract the youngsters. "We told them the noise was fireworks," Rico says. "But they were still anxious."

Another shoot-out recently forced Secondary School 25 to cancel lessons midway through the day and empty its classrooms in a panic. "It's terrible what's happening in Tijuana," says Antonio Ochoa Pastrn, the headmaster. "It's sad that now even in school children aren't safe."

Many pupils, Rico says, have begun to associate anyone in uniform with violence – which is not an absurd proposition since many police are on the traffickers' payroll. "The children see the police and they are scared," she says. "They are terrified there's going to be more shooting."

And there probably will be, which prompts parents to watch their children more closely than ever. "You don't know when he goes out if he's going to come back," says Patricia Beltran, watching her eight-year-old son, Marco Antonio, playing near the spot where a murder had taken place, the blood still visible in the dirt. Such fear is not misplaced, because innocent youngsters have been caught in the crossfire.

In addition, most of the victims are under 30 because the cartels use young gunmen to protect their merchandise and enforce discipline in the ranks, according to the authorities. And given the extensive and often graphic media coverage of the killings, parents say it is impossible to shield children psychologically. "My kids are having nightmares about this," says Laura Leticia Quezada, who has three children and three nieces and nephews at Valentin Gomez Farias school. "They watch it on the news, and they know every last detail," she says. "When they first told me there were 12 bodies outside their school, I told them to stop lying."

Jorge Fregoso, a television reporter, spends his days hustling from one crime scene to another and then rushing back to the studio to put his stories on air. As a father of two, he says he understands the concern many parents have about the scenes shown on the news, and tries to avoid extremely graphic images in his reports. But at the same time, he says, reporting these awful events presses the authorities to take action and to attempt to make the streets safer.

However, it's hard for children not to know what's going on, Fregoso says. "You can turn off the television all the time and hide the radio and newspaper. But they're still going to hear the gunfire. And they might see a shooting."