In parts of Mexico, children and teenagers are being recruited and used as lookouts, messengers, cooks and foot soldiers for organized crime syndicates and community defense militias. These battles are being fought as organized criminal groups seek to violently appropriate land, labour and livelihoods to control lucrative export commodities, such as poppies, avocados and lumber. In the absence of the state, community militias, or auto defensas, have arisen to defend their lands from these violent dispossessions. Children and young people are caught in the middle of these violent struggles – especially teenage boys – whose bodies, strength and stamina are coveted in the battle for territorial and economic control. Many youth are forcibly recruited, while others willingly join, caught up in the glamour of narco corridos, songs that glamourize drug cartels, violence, guns, and fast money. In response to this systemic violence, children and their families are fleeing to the U.S./Mexico border to seek asylum, a last dash hope to protect their children’s lives. This paper pulls from an interdisciplinary research project in Mexico that interviewed over 100 children, teenagers and families in migrant shelters along the U.S./Mexico border between 2020 and 2023. Drawing from first-hand testimonies, it explores the complicated ways children and youth are recruited into situations of armed violence in Mexico and explains why so many young people and their families are fleeing north.
About the Speaker
Dr. Kate Swanson is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in International Peace, Security and Children and a Professor in International Development Studies at Dalhousie University. She has been working with migrant children and youth in Latin America for over twenty years, and with unaccompanied migrant youth in the U.S./Mexico border region for over a decade. Much of her research adopts a child-centred lens and uses participatory techniques to understand displacement, migration, violence, detention, and deportation. Trained largely in human geography, her work has appeared in journals such as: Antipode; Urban Geography; Gender, Place and Culture; and Annals of the American Association of Geographers.
