Inside Mexican cartel training camps as cannibal hitmen 'forced to eat human hearts'

Mexican drug cartels are forcing trainee hitmen to eat their victims' hearts in horror training camps. The camps lie hidden in rural and mountainous areas, as recruit young men into .

The lure of mega cash for many young people convinces them to join the training camps. That was the case for Pedro, who was just 13 when he was approached by a . Having lost his parents while growing up, he was handed over to his grandparents. However, he was targeted by a criminal group who had just arrived in Sierra de Guerrero in south-west , and during a chance encounter offered him the ability to earn staggering amounts of money.

“I approached them and asked how much they paid, and they told me whatever I wanted to earn; there's a good offer in the trade,” he recalls in Las Puertas del Infierno (The Gates of Hell), a book by psychologist Mónica Ramírez Cano.

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He was given a rifle and dispatched to the mountains, along with his step-brother, where he would endure a horrific training camp and learn how to live without fear. He said: "They teach you to survive, to kill without fear, and to eat human flesh."

The training lasted just three months and was supervised by a former soldier. "They gave us each a pistol and told us only one would survive. I had to kill my brother," Pedro said.

Pedro was then a full-time hitman. "I had nightmares for about a week, but now I've killed hundreds, it's like drinking a Coca-Cola." He was later promoted to plaza chief - a cartel hitman who controls a mob in a specific area. He said: "I put in five years on the job; I don't know how many b******s I killed. I was in charge of my town. It's a problem bringing people into command, and it was complicated for me to manage expenses."

He also explained how violence is often used as a weapon against you in organised crime. "I started earning 4,000 pesos a fortnight as a hitman; then, as a plaza boss, they paid me 25,000, and they gave me 12,000 more for each guy I killed," he explained.

During his extreme training, he had to assemble a rifle in a few minutes, and if he didn't do it in time, he was beaten with dozens of cables. "They trained 10 at a time, for three months. They recruited teenagers mostly to be hitmen, and then whatever else came their way," he said.

Pedro, who had been addicted to marijuana since the age of eight, admitted his first killing was his own brother. "After my training, a few days later, we had a confrontation with the Navy, and I was already shooting."

Pedro also recalled how the person who introduced him to the cartel would make recruits bite into the hearts of his victims. He explained: "He was crazy. He tied up his family, tortured them, and ate body parts of his victims. Sometimes he ripped out their hearts and forced us to bite into them. If you didn't, he'd kill you. All I had to do was bite into the heart. We ate it raw… it tastes really awful, like chicken fat."