Cartel hitman aged just 14 beheaded four victims as Mexico’s lawlessness exposed

Law and order has almost completely broken down in Mexico with around 90% of murders going unpunished.

In some states, it's so bad that for every 50 murders, just one results in someone being sentenced.

Investigative journalist Ioan Grillo recalled one particularly gruesome case of a teenage killer.

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“There were were videos of him where they had guys hanging up and he was part of the crew and he was like a little mascot," he told podcaster Shawn Ryan.

“The crew were beating and torturing these guys and when the military caught him, there were journalists around there.

“I know one of the guys who was there and they asked him this… this guy's got three sons and kind of knew how to talk to him…"

The journalist asked the pint-sized Sicario “what have you done?” and the cartel “mascot” casually replied: “I have decapitated four people”.

He continued: “A 14-year-old kid said that. I had it on camera it was on TV it became a kind of big scandal and the guy did five years or so he’s out, released probably…”

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“It’s a country where you have 35,000 murders in a year and no death penalty.”

But while the Mexican authorities don't have a death penalty, that’s not true for the cartels.

“A lot of the time they call the hits ‘executions’," he added. “They use the Spanish word for ‘executed’.

“From the cartel point of view they have a kind of process there. 'We made a judgment the guy’s got to go … we’re gonna execute them’.

“So you have all these executions.”

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Ioan believes there should be social programmes to educate the younger kids out of a life of crime, but admitted “there has to be law and order”.

Moves to declare the drug cartels terrorist organisations would only make matters worse.

“It’s not like there’s a thousand guys there you can take out,” he added. “In the country of Mexico it’s more like millions of people”.

The reach of the “sprawling organisations” go far beyond drugs, according to Ioan. The cartels’ interests extend into smuggling, human trafficking and all manner of other criminal activities.

But the difficulty with a conventional law enforcement approach is that the paperwork for a successful prosecution can take years to put together.

And by that time, Ioan added, “that guy’s been killed an someone else is running stuff”.

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