Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
The New Yorker: The Teen Killers of the Drug War
The New Yorker: The Teen Killers of the Drug War
By Patrick Radden Keefe, September 12, 2016 issue
The phrase “child soldier” tends to conjure images of places like Sierra Leone, and minors were used extensively there and in other African conflicts during the nineteen-nineties. But boys and girls under the age of eighteen have been deployed in battles throughout the world, from Colombia to Sri Lanka, and still fight on the front lines of many conflicts today. According to the United Nations, recruitment of child soldiers in Afghanistan doubled last year, with both the Taliban and government forces relying on underage combatants. In March, the State Department reported that the Islamic State is increasing its dependence on a cadre of juvenile conscripts, some as young as ten years old, who are known as the Cubs of the Caliphate. Historically, children often served in ancillary roles during wartime, as couriers, drummer boys, or “powder monkeys,” who ferried ammunition to cannon crews. But as weapons design evolved during the past century, and particularly with the advent of the AK-47 assault rifle, it became more practical to put children in front-line combat. P. W. Singer, in his book “Children at War” (2005), observes that the AK-47, with fewer than ten moving parts, is “brutally simple”: “Interviews reveal that it generally takes children around thirty minutes to learn how to use one.”
What juveniles lack in strength and experience they make up for in other qualities: they are coachable and often available in abundant supply. The uncertainty of wartime leaves young people acutely vulnerable; separated from family or other support structures, children can form a dependency on their military commanders that makes them easy to exploit. The warlord Joseph Kony, in the early years of his insurgency in Uganda, conscripted adults for his Lord’s Resistance Army. He eventually switched to children, because they were easier to indoctrinate. Of course, there is a moral taboo associated with defiling the innocence of youth, but a willingness to violate that taboo can amount to a tactical advantage. A professional soldier, peering through the scope of his rifle at a twelve-year-old, might hesitate to pull the trigger. And signalling that there is no boundary one is unprepared to transgress may demoralize one’s adversary. A recent report by the Quilliam Foundation describes Islamic State propaganda videos that feature children committing murder, and suggests that the group is broadcasting its willingness to flout international norms in a deliberate effort to seize “the psychological upper hand.”
One context in which we don’t often hear about child soldiers is the drug war on the U.S.-Mexico border. Yet, according to Child Rights Network, an alliance of civic and social organizations in Mexico, some thirty thousand minors have been pressed into playing a role in the country’s ongoing criminal insurgency, and several thousand of them have been killed. “Wolf Boys” offers a bracingly intimate glimpse of how this insurgency looks from the point of view of the young killers on the front lines. Prison can make a good correspondent of almost anyone, and, after writing to Cardona and Reta, Slater found himself drawn into an epistolary relationship of queasy intensity. He visited both boys in prison and spoke to them for hours. Reta eventually cut off contact, but Slater and Cardona continued to correspond, exchanging hundreds of pages of letters.
What juveniles lack in strength and experience they make up for in other qualities: they are coachable and often available in abundant supply. The uncertainty of wartime leaves young people acutely vulnerable; separated from family or other support structures, children can form a dependency on their military commanders that makes them easy to exploit. The warlord Joseph Kony, in the early years of his insurgency in Uganda, conscripted adults for his Lord’s Resistance Army. He eventually switched to children, because they were easier to indoctrinate. Of course, there is a moral taboo associated with defiling the innocence of youth, but a willingness to violate that taboo can amount to a tactical advantage. A professional soldier, peering through the scope of his rifle at a twelve-year-old, might hesitate to pull the trigger. And signalling that there is no boundary one is unprepared to transgress may demoralize one’s adversary. A recent report by the Quilliam Foundation describes Islamic State propaganda videos that feature children committing murder, and suggests that the group is broadcasting its willingness to flout international norms in a deliberate effort to seize “the psychological upper hand.”
One context in which we don’t often hear about child soldiers is the drug war on the U.S.-Mexico border. Yet, according to Child Rights Network, an alliance of civic and social organizations in Mexico, some thirty thousand minors have been pressed into playing a role in the country’s ongoing criminal insurgency, and several thousand of them have been killed. “Wolf Boys” offers a bracingly intimate glimpse of how this insurgency looks from the point of view of the young killers on the front lines. Prison can make a good correspondent of almost anyone, and, after writing to Cardona and Reta, Slater found himself drawn into an epistolary relationship of queasy intensity. He visited both boys in prison and spoke to them for hours. Reta eventually cut off contact, but Slater and Cardona continued to correspond, exchanging hundreds of pages of letters.
More
