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For Tijuana children, drug war gore is part of their school day

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Richard Marosi reports:

The schoolchildren bounded up the rickety steps and followed the path of shattered glass into the two-story house on Laguna Salada Street. Two boys in neatly pressed gray pants flipped open their cellphones and took pictures of the pools of sticky blood. One teenager with a blue backpack pounced on a mangled bullet lying near a stained mattress. Downstairs, girls in blue skirts and white socks carefully avoided the blood dripping through the ceiling. The ‘Scarface’ poster hanging on the pockmarked wall disappeared. The day before, a shootout between Mexican soldiers and drug cartel suspects had left three suspects and a soldier dead in the safe house at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac. Police had cleared the bodies, including the corpse of a kidnapping victim stuffed in a refrigerator. But someone had left the door open. ‘Look, intestines!’ yelled one teen, who was among dozens of children who streamed through the house between classes at nearby Secondary School 25. ‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ said one boy, covering his mouth. ‘It’s shocking,’ said Victor Rene, 14. ‘I saw four dead guys last week, but that was clean. Their heads were wrapped in tape.’ As Tijuana’s latest flare-up in the drug war rages into its fifth week, with the death toll approaching 150, violence is permeating everyday life here, causing widespread fear, altering people’s habits and exposing the city’s youngest to carnage.

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-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

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