Narcos use GTA, Call of Duty and Free Fire to recruit children, alerts the Government of Mexico

Organized crime in Mexico recruits minors by contacting them through Internet video games, the government denounced this Wednesday after the rescue of three children reported as missing.

“There are PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo games where, from anonymity, subjects enter into a relationship over the Internet (with minors) and begin this process of persuasion, recruitment”, said the Undersecretary of Security and Citizen Protection (SSPC), Ricardo Mejía.

This phenomenon extends to social networks such as TikTok e Instagramadded the official in the morning conference of the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

According to Mejía, sometimes minors are assigned to surveillance work to alert about the presence of authorities.

While playing online, criminals use user names such as “CJNG, CDN (acronym for the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and the Northeast Cartel) sicai0os, c4art3l and other variants”, indicated the undersecretary.

Mejía said that on October 9 the authorities rescued three minors in a home in the state of Oaxaca (south) and captured a woman who tried to transfer them to Nuevo León (north).

Minors, from 11 to 14 years old, reported as missing, were users of the free download video game Free Fire.

The minor “started a friendship with a user” who, after getting his phone number, “He offered him a job in Monterrey (Nuevo León), whose functions would be to stay on a hill, checking the radio frequency and notify if there was a police presence, with a monthly salary of 8,000 pesos ($ 400)”, explained the person in charge.

The boy accepted and invited two schoolmates to a bus station, from where a woman would take them to Monterrey. Because they were playing online, the authorities were able to locate them with GPS technology.

The authorities also warned that criminals also use other titles such as Grand Theft Auto V, Call of Duty, Gears of War and Fortnite.

“We are going to send a message to families, mothers, fathers, children and adolescents about the risk of electronic games, all this is very violent and undoubtedly affects, damages”, López Obrador said for his part.

The Network for the Rights of the Child in Mexico (Redim) denounces that thousands of children are recruited each year by drug trafficking and other organized crime gangs, identified as responsible for the spiral of violence in Mexico.

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