Video of Children Acting Out Mexico Drug War Goes Viral Angela Kocherga - KVUE News
go to original April 17, 2012

A video featuring children acting scenes of the drug war has gone viral in Mexico. The kids play the roles of kidnappers, drug traffickers, corrupt cops and politicians. The images are ripped from the headlines.

The four-minute video, produced by a foundation called Nuestro Mexico del Futuro (“Our Mexico of the Future”), uses children to portray both victims and villains: from the pudgy child businessman robbed by gun-toting tiny thugs who are later forced to hand over the cash to a small corrupt cop.

The kids are greedy politicians stuffing briefcases with cash and kidnappers stuffing their victim in the truck of a car at gunpoint.

“If it would have been done with older people it wouldn’t have the impact,” said Corina Martinez, a mother of three young boys. She lives in El Paso but visits relatives in Juarez.

Asked whether she’d let her children watch the kid drug war video, she said, “they already know.”

In one scene young bystanders scream and run for cover during a shootout between federal police and drug traffickers. Little girls dressed in the smocks worn by workers at border manufacturing plants known as maquiladoras duck as tiny police officers chase and capture a small drug lord dressed in a t-shirt like the one worn by Edgar Valadez, known as “La Barbie."

He’s then paraded before cameras and locked up in jail with other child criminals. It ends with a young girl surrounded by the other child actors who looks at the camera and directs a message to the Mexico’s presidential candidates, “Enough working for political parties rather than for us.”

Some have said the video titled “Ninos Incomodos,” roughly translated to discomforting kids, is the wakeup call Mexico needs. Others are critical of the clip and see it as an effort to skirt laws that regulate campaign ads in Mexico during the presidential election.

Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute said it had not received any complaints but by Monday morning YouTube carried a message that read, “This video has been removed by the user.”  Even so, plenty of viewers have reposted the video on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
 
The three leading presidential candidates had all reacted favorably to the video’s message.

Even so, Sira Rodriguez, a Juarez resident who watched the clip with her young grandson, doubted the candidates would come up with solutions to tackle the problems featured in the video. “They never do anything,” she said.

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