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News > Latin America

Mexico Drug Cartels Trick Jobseekers Into Joining Boot Camps

  • Mexican marine soldiers stand guard outside a house after suspected gang members were killed in a gun battle in Mexico City, Mexico, on July 21, 2017.

    Mexican marine soldiers stand guard outside a house after suspected gang members were killed in a gun battle in Mexico City, Mexico, on July 21, 2017. | Photo: Reuters

Published 22 July 2017
Opinion

The victims were apparently lured by job offers on Facebook for private security guards or municipal police.

Mexican authorities have discovered two drug cartel training camps in the western Mexican state of Jalisco, where they believe about 40 people were trapped and trained after being tricked by online job advertisements. 

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Jalisco state’s attorney Eduardo Almaguer said at a news conference Friday that at one of the camps, 50 to 60 people were guarding and overseeing the training of 40 recruits. The authorities also found paintball guns for shooting practice.

Almaguer didn’t say if there were any arrests, but said at least one person was rescued.

In early June, authorities received six separate missing person reports. All of those missing had said they were going to pursue job opportunities in the village of Tala, about an hour west of Guadalajara, according to Almaguer. 

He said the victims were apparently lured by job offers on Facebook for private security guards or municipal police. Once the job seekers showed up, they were taken to the training camp and forced to build their own primitive shelters.

The news came on the same day as the Mexican government released statistics showing that June was the country’s deadliest month in at least 20 years, with murders reaching 2,234.

For the first six months of 2017, authorities nationwide recorded 12,155 homicide investigations, or 31 percent more than the 9,300 during the same period last year.

Murders remain high in states that have traditionally struggled with violence, like Guerrero and Mexico state. But killings have also risen in states unaccustomed to such bloodshed, like the tourist havens of Baja California Sur and Mexico City.

On Tuesday, Mexican marines gunned down eight suspected gang members in broad daylight on the south side of Mexico City. The marines were trying to capture the leader of a drug gang that controlled street-level drug sales in part of the city.

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"The city's authorities have lost control of the situation," said Jose, a veteran Mexico City policeman who spoke on the condition that his surname be withheld.

"Now the cartels are getting stronger, they can't control them any more. That's why they asked the marines to come in."

Mexico City and its urban sprawl accounted for roughly a quarter of the country's gross domestic product. Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera has also repeatedly claimed that drug cartels do not operate in the city.

Francisco Rivas, director of the National Citizen Observatory, a civil group monitoring justice and security in Mexico, said regardless of what constitutes a cartel, the days of the capital being isolated from drug violence are over.

"What's happening in Mexico City reflects the national outlook," he said. "We have a crisis of organized crime."

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