They’re called the children of the war on drug trafficking; they’re also the children of the maquila (factory). They grow up under a narrow horizon: they can choose to work 12 hours a day in the factory that already employs their parents — for $150 a week — or they can give in to the pressures of organized crime. They’re 14 years old and are used to guide migrants across the border, waking them from their beds at night, clearing the way, knowing the trails, and cutting the wire where the United States hasn’t yet built a wall. Or perhaps they’re too young, so they watch, observe, and warn their grown-ups. They’re children with a hidden gun. They’re detained and returned, arrested and released. They’re used and exploited. Turned into sexual commodities, abused, and recorded. All before the eyes of a state that has failed to protect them for decades.

Nothing that happens in their lives can be explained without explaining Ciudad Juárez. A paradigm of violence on Mexico’s northern border, the brutal murders of its women gave rise to the concept of femicide at the beginning of the century; a decade later, besieged by the struggle between organized crime groups, it became the murder capital of the world. Underlying this fracture is a lesser-told reality: how did a generation of children who only knew violence grow up?

The city, which grew massive in the wake of the free trade agreement with the United States, reclaimed land from the desert and built thousands of homes on the outskirts for the maquiladora workers who arrived from all over Mexico under the promise of a future without poverty. The government and business leaders built those rows of tiny houses, but they forgot about the parks, daycare centers, health centers, and schools. When the war began, there was nowhere to take shelter.

This border city suffered the brutal onslaught of organized crime and then military operations against the cartels. On January 30, 2010, 15 teenage students were massacred by hitmen in Villas de Salvárcar while holding a meeting. A year earlier, the cartels had taken 17-year-old María Guadalupe Pérez and dumped her remains in an old riverbed, after having lured her into a human trafficking ring, like hundreds of other girls in Juárez who were forced into prostitution in hotels and bars frequented by police and military officers. Today, 150 minors remain missing. Attacks continue to be the leading cause of death among adolescents here. There are wounds that, without justice, only persist.

Things have changed since then in this squeezed city, which journalist Sergio González, author of an investigation into the first deaths in Juárez, said 30 years ago “condenses an expansive evil.” Child sexual exploitation has found its perfect breeding ground in cell phones; children who are no longer allowed to cross the border due to Donald Trump’s policies are monitoring kidnapped people; suicides and diabetes are on the rise; and minors who commit small infractions are spit out by the system itself and devoured again. Experts call for the obvious: give them visibility, create policies and justice for them. “The voices of girls and boys must be heard and not invalidated as has historically been the case,” summarizes Ana Laura Ramírez, a researcher at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte. EL PAÍS dissects this neglect in four reports.

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