Ten gets you fifty that the above headline grabbed your attention. It’s not mine, but from James C. McKinley, Jr. If I were in charge of the first page, it would have been a five-inch headline at the very top of page one. Instead, it’s below the fold in a two-column spread, next to a two-column picture on the train crash in Washington, in which six died. Above the fold in living color is a photo depicting Iran’s uprising.

All are front-page worthy, but I would wish that the USA problem of losing our youth to Mexican cartels had merited USA headlines, above the fold. Headlines announce where the editor judges the importance of the story; in case you haven’t noticed of late, we are too often on the inside pages, both for attention, and Congressional hand-outs.

McKinley tells us that Mexico is luring our American teenagers to join the young Mexican gangs on their killing sprees. Mexico sends us drugs, and we export to them our young, murderous teens, trained on our streets, alleys and schools, tuition free.

McKinley says Rosalio Reta, who told detectives how that at 13, he was recruited by the Zetas, the infamous assassins of the Gulf- impoverished streets of Laredo, lured into the drug wars across the Rio Grande in Mexico with promises of high pay, fancy cars and sexy women.

We are informed that after a short apprenticeship, the young men lived in an expensive house in Texas, available to kill on a short-order basis. The Gulf Cartel was engaged in a turf war with the Sinaloa Cartel over the Interstate 35 corridor, the north-south highway that connects Laredo to Dallas and beyond, and is, according to law enforcement officials, one of the most important arteries for drug smuggling in the Americas.

The young men all paid a heavy price. Jesus Gonzales III was beaten and knifed to death in a Mexican jail at 25. Mr. Reta, now 19, and his boyhood friend, Gabriel Cardona, 22, are serving what amounts to life sentences in prisons in the United States.

Other young Americans who work for the Zetas have also ended up in prison, fled into hiding in Mexico, or have disappeared in the permanent way that people wrapped up in the Mexican drug trade end up missing.

In the minds of many Americans, the Rio Grande divides Mexico, a corrupt land, where drug cartels often seem to have the upper hand, from the United States, a nation of law and order, where the authorities try to keep criminal gangs in check.

But McKinley informs us the reality on the border is much more complex, and we are foolish, indeed, not to heed his warning that Mexico today can well be our tomorrow. The Mexican drug cartels from both countries operate their smuggling and murder-for-hire on both sides of the divide, though under slightly different rules of engagement.

He goes on to explain that the complexity was reflected in the short but bloody careers of Mr. Reta Gonzales and Mr. Cardona, who are linked to crimes in both countries, according to trial transcripts, court documents, and interviews with detectives and family members.

While working as hired guns in 2005 and 2006, the three Americans lived in a house rented by their employers on Hibiscus Street in Laredo, according to testimony at Mr. Reta’s trial.

The Mexican government, says McKinley, had been trying to crack down on the drug cartels, an effort that has left more than 10,000 Mexicans dead in the last 18 months. Some deaths are the result of shootouts between the cartels and authorities, with both sides heavily armed. But the assassinations of drug dealers involved in turf battles and of police officers and army personnel who get in the way – the kind of work Mr. Reta , Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Cardona did - also account for thousands of bodies.

The two teams of assassins took direction from Lucio Quintero, of El Viejon, a capo in the Zetas across the river, trial records show. They received $500 a week as a retainer and $10,000 to $50,000 for each assassination, and the triggerman was given two kilos of cocaine.

In addition to their retainers, the assassins received perks. At one point, Mr. Reta was given a new $70,000 Mercedes , for a job well done. Family members described how the young men would go to parties hosted by cartel capos. To keep up morale, the drug dealers would raffle off automobiles, fire arms and even dates with attractive women, the family members said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Most of the American youths were recruited in a discotheque, The Eclipse, on the main square in Nuevo Laredo just across one of two bridges that connect the two towns. It is a darkened dive where teenagers go to dance and flirt, and drink, while reggeton thunders.

“The cartels” – they just seduce you,” said Detective Garcia, who, with his partner, in the Laredo Police Department, Carlos Adan, broke up the ring. “They wave that power, that cash, the cars, the easy money. And these kids all have that romantic notion they are going to live forever.”

Mr.Cardona was the ringleader of the American cell of assassinations, a savvy, brash young man, who orchestrated at least five murders in Laredo of people connected with the Sinaola Cartel.

His mother, Gabriela Maldonado, a home health worker, said Mr. Cardona had grown with an abusive, alcoholic father, but had done well in school through eighth grade, when his father abandoned the family.

At first, he told his mother he wanted to be a soldier when he grew up, then a lawyer.

If Mr. Cardona was the brains of the group, Mr. Reta was the keenest to become a professional assassin, Detective Garcia said. In July 2006, Mr. Reta told detectives in a videotaped confession that he was 13 when he first killed a man, and that he had participated in at least 30 killings in Mexico, a statement that the authorities there could not confirm.

Family members say Mr. Reta grew up with nine brothers an sisters, living in a tiny wood house, propped up on cinder blocks, in a yard devoid of grass. His father worked construction; his mother was a hairdresser. Before the age of 12, he was a well-mannered boy, respectful of his elders, who did tolerably well in school and spent most afternoons playing ball in a nearby park.

On frequent trips to Mexico, he was also becoming involved with the law, and ran away from home. He was picked up for marijuana possession and spent a year in a juvenile prison for firing a gun in public.

On frequent trips to Mexico, he described killings he had witnessed and in some cases, participated in. “He sounded so excited when he talked about all those things he was doing.” wrote McKinley. “Now,” the writer tells us, “Mr. Reta lives in a cramped cell at the Robertson Unit, a State prison in Abilene, Texas. Despondent over being sentenced to 70 years for two killings in Laredo, he paid a fellow prisoner to tattoo flames and horn shapes on his face, giving him a demonic look.”

On page A18, there is a grotesque picture of Rosalio Reta, He is laughing, talking on the phone, not a bad looking young man, had he not paid the friend to tattoo his face. Not a care in the world, certainly no obvious contrition for the pain he has caused others, for the lives he has ended, for the mother whose heart he has broken.

She is also pictured on the same page, still a pretty woman in a black tank top, beige cut-off pants, with an expression of troubled despair on her face.

We owe a great deal to James McKinley for his courage in describing the details of the lives of crime lived by these young punks, with lives wasted and horrible crimes perpetrated on the innocents.

Now, I want to say something that will no doubt be misunderstood by many. Often, friends who are sincere, but misguided, devote much of their lives working for amnesty and open borders, without any common sense approach to the members of gangs who live like those in this article.

We all know illegal Mexicans who are honest, hard working, whom we would like as neighbors, but this does not sway us into speaking up for a blanket amnesty, with blind eyes to the high risk of opening up our borders to all who would like to walk across, no questions asked.

Let us be deadly serious about crime poised on the other side of the Rio Grande, ready to leap over the river and seduce our young people into lives of crime.

This is the fourth article in a series examining the impact of Mexican drug cartels on both sides of the border.

They would make an excellent junior and senior high social studies project, and might deter some students from choosing the wrong path in life.

My personal thanks and congratulations to Mr. McKinley! God bless.

Mr. McKinley’s web site: nytimes.com/national

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