This article originally appeared in the Mexican edition of VICE Magazine, June/July.
"Hi my name is David," said a small boy sarcastically, causing his friends to laugh at his use of English. "Motherfucker."
David is nine years old, has a buzzcut, a cut off t-shirt, and is growing up in Ciudad Juárez — the Mexican border city which claimed the dubious title of the world's most violent metropolis in the world three years running from 2008 to 2010.
When the topic turned to his barrio, the tough kid facade dropped. He said life was "hard" and he felt "bad" when he saw stuff. "Like what?" I asked. "When they killed my dad," he said, very quickly.
David said he saw his dad gunned down when he was leaving for work, and he didn't know why it happened. "I always think about that," he continued. "Why did they kill him?"
But for David, the worst is when he sleeps. He said he has nightmares at least two nights a week in which people are murdered. Then he wakes up scared, sweating, and sad — all symptoms characteristic of post-traumatic stress disorder.
"I wish for a new, different life. Where I can live with my family, my dad," he said quietly. "When I grow up, I don't want to be sad. I want to be a soccer player."
Juárez is a scarred city, still reeling from a bloody turf war between rival drug cartels that left bodies strewn in the streets from 2007-2012. In 2010, the bloodiest year on record, Juárez averaged over eight murders per day.
After three years as the world's most violent city, followed by a year as the second most, Juárez finally fell out of the top 10 in 2012. The government claims the drop reflects the success of its security efforts. Others contend that it has more to do with El Chapo Guzmán's Sinaloa cartel defeating the homegrown Juárez cartel in the battle for control of the city's trafficking routes.
And now that the violence has lessened, its longer-term impacts are becoming more obvious.
"We have a lot of children who are very damaged, who are resentful and angry, and now we have teenagers who are committing high impact crimes," said José Luis Flores, director of The Network for Children's Rights in Ciudad Juárez, AC. "Now there's beginning to be an entire generation with post-traumatic stress that's not being taken care of too."
[For more of this story, written by Nathaniel Janowitz, go to https://news.vice.com/article/...rez-vicious-drug-war]
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