Mexican police on Friday detained a minor accused of working as a gunman for a drug cartel after shocking videos and photos surfaced online of fresh-faced boys mugging for the camera with guns and corpses.

One video, briefly posted on YouTube, showed a youth, apparently in his teens, confessing to working for a branch of the Beltran Leyva cartel.

While the authenticity of the video could not be determined, cartels in Mexico frequently post such interrogation videos to expose their rivals’ crimes.

The youth tells an unseen questioner that his gang was paid $3,000 per killing.

“When we don’t find the rivals, we kill innocent people, maybe a construction worker or a taxi driver,” the youth is heard saying.

Pedro Luis Benitez, the attorney general of central Morelos state, told a local radio station Friday that police had detained a minor who allegedly worked as a gunman for a drug cartel and were looking for another.

He did not say whether the minor who was detained or the one being sought had appeared online.

Toy guns
While Benitez did not give the age of the suspects, he implied they were young enough to be playing with toy guns.

“It is easy for them (criminals) to give them a firearm, making it appear as it if were a plastic weapon and that it is a game, when in fact it is not,” Benitez said.

Local media reported that one of the boys police were seeking was a 12-year-old alleged killer nicknamed “El Ponchis.”

The boy is believed to be working for the South Pacific cartel in Morelos state just outside Mexico City, Benitez told local radio.

Benitez did not name the boy or give more details but when asked directly about the teenage hitmen, he said: “They’re persuaded to carry out terrible acts; they don’t realize what they are doing.”

Benitez said soldiers this week arrested a teenage boy and a pregnant teenage girl also believed to be working for the South Pacific cartel.

Crimes committed by minors, ranging from shoplifting to murders for the cartels, have jumped across Mexico this year, state officials say.

Parents in the violent cities of Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana on the U.S. border say children as young as 8 years old want to grow up to be drug lords, as the thrills and wealth of the trafficking world touches their lives.

In some depressed cities where role models are scarce, teenagers see that drug gangs are flush with cash from the trafficking that brings up to $40 billion a year into Mexico.

President Felipe Calderon, who launched the offensive against cartels in 2006, acknowledged several months ago that “in the most violent areas of the country, there is an unending recruitment of young people without hope, without opportunities.”

Suspects under 18 are prosecuted in a separate legal system for youthful offenders for most crime in Mexico.

But there are growing calls for both that and the nation’s overcrowded adult prison system to be revamped.

Prison population rising
Mexico has more than doubled the number of people in federal prisons in the last two years as part of the country’s crackdown on drug cartels, the country’s top cop said Friday. While the federal prison system had about 4,500 inmates in 2008, there are now 11,000.

“Where more disorder exists, there will be more violence,” said Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna. “The penitentiaries can be places where not only do people complete their punishments, but where future delinquent conduct is prevented.”