14-Year-Old Known as ‘El Chapito’ Arrested for Allegedly Killing 8 People at a Birthday Party

MEXICO CITY—A 14-year-old boy was arrested for allegedly being one of the gunmen in an attack on a birthday party in Mexico that killed eight people in January.

The massacre took place in Chimalhuacan, a suburb just outside of Mexico City, on January 22. Along with the eight killed, seven others were injured, including a 3-year-old child.

The teenager, identified by his nickname El Chapito, arrived at the party with another man known as El Ñoño, on motorcycles and unleashed a hail of bullets on the group in the early morning hours, according to authorities. Photos from the crime scene published in Mexican media at the time showed chairs scattered around the lawn, and an abandoned trampoline.

El Chapito and El Ñoño were arrested over the weekend in a series of raids along with seven other people, although the news of their capture was only released on Thursday. The group were allegedly members of a local gang headed by a man known as El Lenguas, who was arrested on February 25. It’s unclear if the group had a connection to any larger criminal organizations in Mexico, or worked independently.

Mexican drug cartels have a long history of using children as sicarios, or assassins in Spanish, because of lax laws that give shorter prison sentences to minors. 

In 2010, a 14-year-old boy nicknamed “El Ponchis” made international news after he was arrested and claimed that he carried out beheadings for a splinter faction of the Beltran Leyva Organization. El Ponchis alleged that he was kidnapped at the age of 11, drugged, and forced to carry out the heinous crimes. 

Another teenager, known as Juanito Pistolas, became infamous online in the mid-2010s after numerous narco rap songs bragged about his exploits as a child killer for a faction of the Zetas cartel. He was later reportedly killed in a gunfight in 2019 with authorities at the age of 16.

The Network for Children's Rights in Mexico (REDIM for its Spanish acronym) released a study in 2021 that estimated 30,000 children were working for the cartels as lookouts, street-level drug dealers, or sicarios, and another 250,000 were at risk of being recruited.

In April 2021, Mexico’s top security official, Rosa Icela Rodríguez, announced the formation of the National Observatory for the Prevention of the Recruitment of Minors by Organized Crime, to analyze the issue of child recruitment by drug cartels.

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