"Cops and narcos" playground games for Mexico kids

Children gather near a crime scene in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, January 1, 2010.

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (Reuters) - Children as young as 8 in poor Mexican border cities yearn to grow up to be drug lords and hitmen as the adrenalin and wealth linked to the trafficking world seeps deep into their lives.

Parents in the violent cities of Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana on the U.S. border say primary school kids are captivated by the drug gangs they see on the street and TV news brandishing guns, driving flashy black SUVs and outsmarting soldiers.

Rather than playing cops and robbers and admiring firemen or train drivers, children are inventing kidnapping games and forming playground gangs named after brutal drug cartels as they idolize the power of kingpins whose turf wars have killed some 23,000 people since late 2006.

The kids risk becoming a new generation of the adolescent hitmen prized by drug cartels as cheap labor, police say.

Crimes committed by minors, ranging from shoplifting to murders for the cartels, have jumped by a third this year in Tijuana, near San Diego, the Baja California state attorney general's office said. In nearby Mexicali, more than half the 10,000 minors arrested in 2009 were under 13, police say.

"One of my son's classmates told the children to bring pistols to school because they were going to form a drug gang and play at kidnapping children," said the mother of an 8-year-old boy in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico's most violent city with some 5,200 drug war killings since January 2008.

Another mother said her 9-year-old son recently told her he wanted to be a drug trafficker. "My son came home and said to me: 'Mom, I want to be like them. They've got lots of money,'" the mother, who asked not to be identified by name, told Reuters in a Ciudad Juarez community center.

At the same time, many children are traumatized by the horrific violence as rival gangs kill police, dump heads by roadsides and string up naked bodies from bridges. Troops have fought hitmen on streets outside schools, with bullets occasionally straying into playgrounds.

Hitmen shot a man around 100 times outside a kindergarten in Ciudad Juarez last week just as children were arriving.

President Felipe Calderon has staked his presidency on crushing the drug gangs, deploying some 70,000 troops and police across Mexico with strong U.S. support.

Escalating violence is frightening tourists away from beach resorts, prompting some businesses to freeze investment in border factories and causing the United States to wonder whether its neighbor may be overwhelmed by the violence.

But children in depressed border towns can also see that drug gangs are flush with cash from the trafficking that brings up to $40 billion a year into Mexico. With scant role models or access to good schools, children see their parents struggling to get by in manufacturing cities where thousands were made jobless by last year's deep recession.

"The narcos earn loads of money and nothing happens to them," said a girl called Rubi, 14, in Tijuana, who dreams of being a top smuggler. "Even the police help them," she said.

K IS FOR AK-47

In Ciudad Juarez, social workers blame parental absence, as workers toil long hours in maquiladora assembly-for-export plants, for children as young as 11 joining gangs.

"The conflictive behavior starts because the kids spend so much time alone," said social worker Aida Arellano. "They meet older youngsters, they take drugs and get hold of guns."

Parents and teachers say children are picking up on ballads on the radio, known as "narco corridos," that praise the escapades of drug smugglers. Others see films glamorizing narco lifestyles in videos on the Internet, often looking over the shoulders of older relatives who download them.

One mother said her son wanted to become a drug lord after seeing a TV program about the sumptuous gold-covered tombs that traffickers are buried in. Many are impressed by hitmen, idolizing their weaponry as if they were in a Hollywood movie.

"We wrote out an alphabet with some children and they associated the letter K with AK-47," said Lourdes Almada, head of a community organization working with kids in Ciudad Juarez. "They see that one of the few ways of getting ahead is to have a gun, and the bigger the better."

Calderon has promised more schools and welfare for border cities like Ciudad Juarez where residents are sick of gruesome violence. But the plan is moving slowly and school dropouts are getting sucked into the criminal underworld.

"The kids start with things like robbery, then they get more involved and make their way up to doing kidnappings and killings," said Martha Imelda Almanza, deputy prosecutor in Baja California. "We are seeing a significant increase."

(Additional reporting by Lizbeth Diaz in Tijuana; Writing by Robin Emmott; Editing by Catherine Bremer and Cynthia Osterman)