“We Were Born to Die”. The Child Assassins of La Tropa del Infierno Don’t Last Long

An image in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, revealed the existence of La Tropa del Infierno, but it was too terrible to be published in a media outlet. No journalist dared to print it in a newspaper or broadcast it on a television screen. It had to circulate on social media – and go viral – for it to become known in August 2019 that the Cartel del Noreste had grown a new armed wing. 

The photograph depicted the interior of a stolen Ram truck, with Texas license plates, from which high-caliber bursts of ammunition were fired, as if it were a mobile arsenal. Minutes earlier, the occupants of that vehicle were speeding along the highway leading to the airport and ignored the order to slow down at an official checkpoint. Immediately, they unleashed a shootout from which they would not emerge unscathed: there were six hitmen and eighteen police officers who began the chase; the civilians fled in that dilapidated Ram and the uniformed officers caught up with them in four new vehicles.

Both sides were armed with long weapons, but training and numerical superiority made the difference in favor of the police. After a confrontation that lasted a kilometer, calm returned to the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo: the six hitmen were killed and the eighteen uniformed men were unharmed. The result suggested that more than a battle, an extermination had occurred, a police officer recorded the crime scene with his cell phone camera in case he was accused of committing an execution. 

And of all the photos, one stood out for its brutality. Three bodies lay in the back seat: from the position of the corpses it seems that two of them died hiding behind the seats, while one remained upright. He is the focus of attention in the photo: his hand still held a long weapon loaded on his chest and his thinness made him look young, but it was difficult to verify with the naked eye. The high-caliber ammunition exploded and blew his head off. Decapitated, as if a grenade had been tied to his neck.

The identification of the human remains took several days. Thanks to his tattoos and a gold bracelet on his right wrist, the Tamaulipas authorities knew the identity of the man “neutralized” by the police: Juan N., nicknamed Juanito Pistolas. He was only 16 years old and already had the rank of commander among his troops.

This alias led the state prosecutors to identify several tributes on social networks in his memory. In all of them, the same hollow phrases and laments were repeated, as if he were a saint. Nothing extraordinary in these online funerals. But, again, the most important thing was in the photographs of the deceased: sometimes, Juanito Pistolas appeared posing with his childlike features with a high-powered rifle as long as his legs; in others, Juanito Pistolas who looked with sweet eyes at the camera while someone portrayed him talking with a walkie-talkie in his hand, as if playing at being a hawk.

Someone in the Tamaulipas state prosecutor’s office remembered that childish face, that immature look. He searched through the department’s files looking for the answer to that déjà vu. Where had he seen that round face and defiant pose? And there it was, among the records of those arrested and released for being young, a photograph of Juanito Pistolas during his first arrest in 2016: he was 13 years old and they already said he had a murderous record as if he were an old gunman. 

The fame of the child killer transcended his neighborhood, the dangerous Solidaridad, and reached the ears of Juan Gerardo Treviño Chávez, alias El Huevo, nephew of Miguel Ángel Treviño Morales, the feared Z-40. That was how the Cartel del Noreste extended an invitation to Juanito Pistolas to be part of its new branch. ‘Welcome, child, to the Troops of Hell.’

They recruited minors to avoid being arrested by the police

Each of the seven cartels that survived the democratic transition in 2000 created its own armed wings. The Gulf Cartel allied itself with elite military deserters and founded Los Zetas as its armed guard; the Juarez Cartel hired corrupt state police and created La Línea for the security of its bosses; the Sinaloa Cartel turned gang members and graffiti artists into ruthless killers and christened them the AA or Artists Assassins. “Having an armed wing became like having trucks or houses. All the big bosses wanted to have as many as they could, as a sign of danger. A boss without an armed wing is a poor devil,” summarized a military source deployed along the small border of Tamaulipas. 

Later, they not only served as bodyguards. Armed wings were also created for specific tasks. For example, the Limones Special Forces of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel are dedicated exclusively to the extortion of lemon growers in Michoacán and Los Cazadores de Los Chapitos have as their main task the administration of the passage of undocumented migrants through the Sonoran desert. There are some that only make people disappear, export fentanyl to the United States, fly explosive drones and even sexually exploit missing young women.

The Tropa del Infierno is one of those armed wings founded with a particular objective. The Cartel del Noreste – a split from Los Zetas that emerged in 2014 – created them to be a squad that is half assassins, half kamikazes. Gunmen summoned to suicide missions only for veterans or simple tasks that even a child can perform. Most have an ideal characteristic for their recruitment: that most of them were minors so that, if they were arrested by the police, they would have to be released immediately.

Cannon fodder that, when not disposable, returns and is recycled.

The boys didn’t know how to shoot or the weapons were so heavy that they missed their shots.

The Tamaulipas government informed the federal government of the existence of this troop of minors at the end of 2018, when bodies of children and adolescents shot down by the Federal Forces and the state police in intense but short confrontations began to appear more frequently. The reports from the uniformed officers are that the attackers were “neutralized” in a few minutes: they didn’t know how to shoot or the weapons were so heavy on their thin arms that they missed the shots. A war between children and adults.

But just because they were young, that didn’t mean that the Troops of Hell were harmless. The lack of shooting skills was compensated for by heavy and high-powered weapons. With this arsenal, they guarded the dirt rads and trails in Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros to serve as a wall for the bosses who operated high-profit illegal businesses such as the extraction of fuel or gas in the Burgos Basin. With almost unlimited ammunition and accessories to improve their aim, they could miss 100 shots with the certainty that one would hit the body of a soldier, sailor or rival.

“The Tropa del Infierno developed a reputation as a brutal combat force. Since 2019, it has engaged in regular clashes with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and the Mexican Army,” reads a diagnosis by Insight Crime, which adds the Tamaulipas state police as its mortal enemies.

They became the children of the Tamaulipas citizens who instilled fear in their parents. When they were not looking after their superiors, they operated small businesses that quickly made money: they extorted gas station owners, murdered debtors, dug the graves where they threw the bodies and trafficked drugs from one neighbourhood to another in school backpacks where they also kept weapons and two-way radios.

Officials in the administration of PAN Governor Francisco García Cabeza de Vaca began calling them “los chiflados” (the bratty kids). In northern Mexico, that is an adjective for spoiled children. And to pay for their loyalty to La Tropa del Infierno, the Cartel del Noreste mob pampered them with new clothes, stolen cell phones or crashed trucks with La Tropa del Infierno signs that made their way through heavy traffic and generated a mix of horror and respect.

The adjective also made sense in the country’s capital, in the offices of the Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection headed by Alfonso Durazo, where “crazy” is synonymous with deranged. The combination pleased the criminal leaders of the cartel: a troop of spoiled and crazy children.

The curse of any family. The nightmare of a country.

A rap song in memory of Commander ‘Juanito Pistolas’

Musical sensation El Comando Exclusivo composed a narco rap song in memory of Juanito Pistolas. The original track is from 2019, but this version with autotune – a voice modulator that corrects out-of-tune voices – was published for the first time on July 12, 2023 on YouTube. The song has 11 million 176 thousand views. It is played about 19,750 times every day. A success more than five years after the death of its protagonist.

Age doesn’t matter to be here working,

Of course, I’m a kid, but here I am working,

Juanito Pistolas, that’s what they’ve nicknamed me,

Patrolling in my region with six American weapons. 

At the nephew’s command (“El Huevo”), we move with no shame,

I go out to the street and my Santa Muerte deity protects me,

I’ve gotten along with my crew since I was a kid,

Juanito is 13 years old and doesn’t back down,

Reporting the work, whatever happens in town,

Whether in fast cars or armored vehicles, I don’t lose them,

I don’t forget ‘Rajas’, I remember my friend,

We were born to die, see you in hell.

It is alleged that the younger they are, it’s easier to make them adaptable and callous.

Juanito Pistolas wasn’t the first commander of La Tropa del Infierno, but he was probably the most famous due to his death. Before him, according to the region’s narco rap – the Tamaulipas variant of the Sinaloa narco ballad – El Comandante Chikilín, El Flaquito and El Nene Fain were in command. All the aliases appealed to his youth. The more childish, they boasted, the more malleable and insensitive. 

A year after the death of Juanito Pistolas, in 2020 the Network for the Rights of Children in Mexico published a study to measure how many other minors could join the ranks of organized crime, either through kidnapping or threats, or under the illusion of “voluntary entry.” The calculation resulted in 250 thousand girls, boys and adolescents at risk of forced recruitment. This is more than the entire population living in Cuajimalpa, Mexico City. 

By the time that report was published, La Tropa del Infierno had already found a replacement for its child martyr and the myth that he murdered 100 people: his command now fell to Omar B., alias El Brackets. His distinctive feature were his crooked teeth, typical of the disorderly growth of adolescence, which he wanted to correct at age 15 with root canal treatment paid for by the Cartel del Noreste.

El Brackets publicized his rise in the platoon the way he learned from his elders: traveling in an armored truck with high-caliber weapons, wearing a tactical uniform similar to that of Mexican soldiers, with a helmet and radio hanging on his chest. This time he was accompanied by an accomplice who would watch his back: El Pin Pón, in reference to the children’s song by Mexican composer Francisco Gabilondo Soler, Cri Cri.

Despite his pompous presentation to local organized crime, El Brackets didn’t last long as an active criminal. Suddenly, at the beginning of 2021, nothing was heard of him. The local authorities gave him up for dead as soon as they learned that someone else had taken his place: Fernando N., El Werko, whose alias is a colloquial way in the north of the country to refer to children. But his command was also fleeting: in August of that year he was captured in Nuevo Laredo with his brother, who would be his successor, a ruthless and bloodthirsty boy nicknamed El Malito (Little Baddy). 

Since then, many others have held important positions in La Tropa del Infierno and their future has always been the same: enter, receive a position, are arrested or killed and give up their place to the next individual who won’t even last two years as a free man or alive. The high mortality rate within the group gave rise to a joke among the military in Tamaulipas: they were called “colorful chicks” after the birds that are given away at popular fairs and that, because they are spray-painted, inevitably die within a few days.

Federal authorities believe that the platoon suffered a fatal blow on March 13, 2022. A physical and moral blow. On the night of that Sunday, elements of the National Defense, National Guard and Attorney General’s Office apprehended El Huevo, 42, the founder of La Tropa del Infierno, in Nuevo Laredo. Despite the resistance of the young demons, federal forces captured the last of the great Zetas who remained at large. A day later, due to his dangerousness, the Mexican government handed him over to the US administration via the Tijuana-San Ysidro Bridge.

Since then, La Tropa del Infierno hasn’t been the same. Like a school without teachers, the children scattered. Some sought refuge in other branches of the Cartel del Noreste, such as Los Zetas Sangre Nueva, and others crossed into the United States to avoid being arrested or killed by their rivals. The federal government believes that now only a few cells remain in northern Tamaulipas without much relevance. Other armed wings have replaced them.

Forgotten, there are some child assassins who feel nostalgia for that past in which they were the terror of the region. The times when parents were afraid of their children.

Source: Milenio