A former teenage cartel hitman,
who admitted to killing four people while employed by the former Beltran-Leyva
Cartel in southern Mexico has finished a three-year juvenile sentence in Mexico
(the maximum allowed for juveniles under Mexican law) and has returned to the
US, where he is a citizen. The now-17
year-old was reunited with family members in San Antonio. The Houston Chronicle
Reports that it is unclear
whether he faces charges in the US. The
young man Edgar, Jimenez Lugo was trying to flee Mexico in 2010 when he was
caught and admitted to killing four people whose beheaded bodies were found in
Morelos hanging from a bridge. The young man claimed that he was forced into
the cartel by drug traffickers when he was 11 and participated in the killings when
drugged and under threat.
He was born in San Diego but
raised in Mexico by a grandmother.
The interior secretary of Morelos
State said it wasn’t clear if the young man had been rehabilitated because his
crimes were so severe. He’s being taken
to a residential support facility in San Antonio.
We’ve posted before on the serious issue of teenage
cartel hitmen on the US border committing crimes in the US. The post, and the article it quotes are worth
reading again. This is an unusual story
of a former hitman coming back after serving a sentence for a crime he
committed while so young. Hopefully this
young man’s story is true, that he was forced into the gang. And hopefully he can be rehabilitated, like
teenage soldiers in the west African civil wars have been. (See memoir by Ishmael Beah).
He obviously needs lots of help. And the drug war that bred the type of
violence he was forced or drawn into needs to come to an end, either forcibly as
the Mexican government is doing by killing the leaders of the Beltran-Leyva
cartel that used to employ him, or with more sensible drug enforcement policies
on this side of the border.
Full article and picture credit: http://www.chron.com/news/texas/article/Teen-cartel-killer-released-in-Mexico-goes-to-US-5013310.php?cmpid=hpbn
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