Continued drug-related violence in Mexico is taking a toll on school children who are becoming both haunted and hardened by happening upon desecrated corpses and hearing stories about gruesome murders. Such was the case for students at Valentín Gómez Farías Primary School, where 12 bodies were found without tongues:

Exchanging gruesome stories is nothing new for schoolchildren, who have a way of overstating their brushes with danger. But the 12 tortured, tongueless bodies that were the talk of the playground recently were no exaggeration. In the early hours of Sept. 29, the bodies of 11 men and one woman, bound and partly dressed, were found in an abandoned lot opposite the school.

“There’s no doubt these images affect the children,” said Mr. González, who recently met with government psychologists to plan counseling sessions with the students. “Some of them are very quiet now. Some are asking us, ‘Why did they die?’ ”

Educators and therapists are worried that seeing and hearing about so many bodies might result in children having a warped view of death and murder. Even know, some school children excitedly brag to one another about the atrocities they’ve witnessed. Some know the names of several more prominent drug traffickers, sing songs praising them and watch videos of homicide scenes on YouTube:

“My kids are dreaming about this,” said Laura Leticia Quezada, who has three children at the primary school near where the bodies were dumped. “They watch it on the news, and they know every last detail.”

Traffickers are even thought to target places like schools and baseball fields deliberately in order to send a message and keep people on edge. And it’s working. Until children in Northern Mexico begin to grow jaded. Or until, perhaps more potentially dangers, they grow angry.

Drug Killings Haunt Mexican Schoolchildren [NY Times]