TIJUANA'S CHILDREN FACE WAVE OF VIOLENCE

Community leaders look to shield the city's youths from the
unprecedented wave of violence

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 cell phones
and took pictures of the pools of sticky blood. One teenager with a
blue backpack picked up a mangled brass bullet lying near a stained
mattress.

In the living room, someone slipped on a pile of human
entrails.

Downstairs, girls in blue skirts and white socks carefully avoided the
blood dripping through the ceiling. The "Scarface" movie 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 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," 14-year-old Victor Rene said. "I saw four dead guys
last week, but that was clean. Their heads were wrapped in tape."

Amid Tijuana's drug war, violence is permeating everyday life in the
border city, causing fear, altering people's habits and exposing the
city's youngest to carnage.

Civic leaders are calling for a 9 p.m. curfew for children. Archbishop
Rafael Romo has asked the media to refrain from showing gruesome
photographs. One priest halts his sermons every week to demonstrate
proper shootout-safety behavior: He cues a drumroll and then throws
himself to the floor.

But these and other measures haven't been able to shield children from
the violence near schools, neighborhoods, busy streets and popular
restaurants.

Grisly public displays of death have been the hallmark of the killings
since the latest violence between rival drug cartels started Sept.
26.

Bodies have been hung from overpasses. Twelve corpses, some with their
tongues cut out, were tossed into a vacant lot across from an
elementary school.

The toll of innocent victims also has been rising. A 24-year-old
teacher was kidnapped outside her school. Gunmen wielding AK-47
assault rifles killed two teenagers sitting outside their home after
they witnessed a drug-related killing. A toddler died when his mother
crashed her car trying to avoid a shootout between state police and
suspected cartel hit men.

Tijuana has endured years of violence and waves of kidnappings that
have led thousands of people to move across the border to San Diego
suburbs.

Still, the recent wave of violence is unprecedented in scale and
brutality.

More than 460 people have died violently this year, a record,
according to the Baja California state attorney general's office.

"It makes your hair stand on end," said the Rev. Raymundo Reyna, a
popular radio show host who keeps a tally that he calls the
muertometro -- or death meter. Reyna is the priest who demonstrates to
parishioners how to duck when gunfire breaks out.

"We show people how to prepare for an earthquake. Now we need to train
them for a shootout," Reyna said.

Down the street from Reyna's Monte Maria Church in a tough hillside
slum, kids play in another bullet-riddled former hide-out where a
family was killed this year.

Around the corner from the hide-out, teenagers stared glumly into the
open caskets of Isabel Guzman Morales, 14, and Victor Corona Morales,
17, cousins who were shot to death outside their home. More than 100
people squeezed into the tiny front yard of a relative, where the
caskets had been placed side by side under a tent.

Later, mourners climbed down staircases made of rubber tires to
another wake. Inside a teetering house made of wood scraps, the kids
looked into the open casket of another friend, 19-year-old Felipe
Alejandro Prado, who was also fatally shot with the cousins after
being chased down by unknown assailants.

While family members served coffee and cookies, relatives and friends
tried to piece together the tragedies. "The killers were probably
outsiders," said Prado's father, Martin Gomez Mejilla. "They're taking
so many innocent lives."

Friends suggested that Prado wasn't an innocent bystander; he was a
drug dealer who roamed the neighborhood's dirt streets, they said. One
11-year-old visitor seemed to want to emulate the dead teen. "When I
grow up I want to be a narco and get all the women and the money," he
said.

Such shows of bravado from youngsters, say parents and psychologists,
could mask deep-rooted trauma. Many children's anxieties are
increasingly manifesting themselves in eating and sleeping disorders,
they say.

"At night, some kids have nightmares," said David Sotelo, a
psychologist, "but what worries me more than the trauma is the social
costs, the desensitization and the low value some kids have for human
life."

Even more troubling, some say, is a growing exhaustion bordering on
indifference.

Teachers twice have had to evacuate Secondary School 25, where a
razor-wire fence rings the playground. The first time, police had
opened fire at the state prison a few blocks away, killing at least 20
rioting inmates. Two weeks later, a body was tossed in the street
outside the school.

The recent shootout at the safe house forced teachers and students to
hit the floor again.

When the youngsters returned for afternoon classes after visiting the
bloodied house, teachers had trouble getting their attention: They
were showing off their cell-phone pictures of the carnage.

A teacher asked an assistant principal to confiscate the kids' phones
and give them to their parents, so they could lecture their children.
The assistant principal, Marcos Alvarez Guardado, just shrugged: "I'm
sure they've already posted the images on the Internet," he said.
"What more can we do?"