Cartels are recruiting Arizona teens. Don’t ignore this danger.

The Christian football players from Arizona who became “load car” drivers for drug cartels are a small part of a dangerous teenage trend.

If you’re a parent of teens and young adults, there may be another topic you want to add to the important conversations you have with your children.

Charge cars.

In his story about Glendale’s Arizona Christian University and its athletes who became “load car” drivers for drug syndicates, The Arizona Republic’s Jason Wolf makes an important point.

“The problem is much larger and more widespread than the court records suggest.”

Is it ever.

Mexican cartels recruit young Americans

Some of the world’s largest criminal organizations recruit American youth to transport migrants from the U.S.-Mexico border to areas deep inside the United States.

According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, the U.S. has become a major operational hub for Mexican drug cartels, which now operate in all 50 states.

The cartels have grown into transnational syndicates that extend their tentacles across Latin and North America and Western Europe.

In the United States, this means that high school and college students are lured with large sums of money to transport illegal immigrants.

In 2022, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office warned that cartels were offering American youth up to $2,000 per passenger, a small fortune for someone earning minimum wage.

At the time, the office said about 1,000 people a month drove into Cochise County to pick up passengers.

Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels said at the time that the human trafficking was the worst he had seen in 38 years.

‘No idea what they’re getting into’

The situation would only get worse.

By early 2024, that number had grown to 1,500 people a month coming to Cochise County to participate in human trafficking, Robert Watkins, patrol commander for the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office, told Cronkite News.

Many of these young people do not realize that they are committing a potential crime, for which they could face a prison sentence of up to 10 years for each migrant transported.

On Monday, The Republic’s Wolf targeted two Christian football players from Arizona (among others) who fell into this underworld and ended up in federal custody. Fortunately for them, authorities chose not to prosecute them.

That’s not always the case. The federal government waives prosecution in only 20% to 25% of arrests for human trafficking, Wolf reports.

In August 2023, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office announced it would charge 22 people with “conspiracy to transport illegal aliens for profit.”

Why I Talked to My Son About ‘Charger Cars’

Some of the accused smugglers were recruited over the internet, via Snapchat.

Young people “have no idea what they’re getting into (when they go to work for cartels),” former US DEA Chief of Operations Michael Braun told Fox News. “(There’s) just no way out once they make that first smuggling trip.”

“Anyone who believes otherwise simply does not understand how the Mexican cartels operate. They are the most powerful transnational drug trafficking and organized crime groups that law enforcement has ever encountered.”

Last year I heard my oldest son joking about cartels and I made a note to talk to him about “cargo trucks.”

Too many AZ teenagers think: It’s okay to smuggle people

At the right moment I took him aside and told him how the cartels operate. That they recruit young people in Arizona and all over America with the promise of big money.

I told him, “You never want to go anywhere near those people — the drug cartels. They’re so bad we can’t even fathom it.”

He assured me that he would never do that.

Five young men in Mexico suffered a terrible fate

This recruitment of young people began long ago in Mexico and has reached a scale not yet seen in the United States.

Last summer, five handsome young Mexican men, about the same age as my son, responded to an advertisement offering well-paying jobs in the western Mexican state of Jalisco.

A few days later they were reported missing.

Then a gruesome video surfaced on the Internet showing the five being tied up with tape, beaten, stabbed and beheaded.

Newspapers and websites showed a still image from the video of the five people tied up and kneeling with their mouths taped shut, their eyes filled with fear as they seemed to know what was about to happen.

One of the guys was wearing a jersey that said “Buccaneer.” It’s not the Tampa Bay NFL team logo, but it caught my attention.

That’s my son’s favorite team.

Phil Boas is a columnist at The Arizona Republic. Email him at [email protected].