HIGH-PROFILE DRUG CASES RISKY, ATTORNEY SAYS

Mexican Lawyer Has Survived 4 Plots To Kill Her

Monterrey, Mexico --- She doesn't look like a likely target for assassination.

Silvia Raquenel Villanueva wears polyester pantsuits and oversized,
matronly glasses. Thick gold crucifixes dangle around her neck, and she
presses religious pamphlets into visitors' hands like a mother worried
about souls going astray.

But Villanueva, whose body is scarred by bullets, knows what it's like to
walk in the shadow of death.

The criminal attorney has nearly been killed four times because,
authorities believe, she has been involved in the prosecution of some of
the biggest drug smugglers wanted in Mexico and the United States.

"I have no freedom, it's true. But only God will decide when it's time for
me go," the 47-year-old Villanueva, a devout Catholic, said in a recent
interview in her bulletproof office.

She recounted how a gunman burst into her office during one attack and
pumped three bullets into her stomach. The assailant tried to finish her
off by shooting her in the head.

Smiling beatifically, Villanueva glanced over at a waist-high wooden statue
next to her desk.

"That's my St. Judas. He took two bullets for me that time," she said,
pointing out some nicks in the wood.

Villanueva practices law in Monterrey, a prosperous industrial city whose
location just two hours from the Texas border also has made it a way
station for drug dealers.

In 1998, the year of the first attempt on her life, Villanueva represented
a trafficker who turned protected witness in the U.S. case against Juan
Garcia Abrego, chief of a powerful cartel based on the Gulf coast.

After his arrest in Monterrey, the Texas-born Garcia Abrego was extradited
to Houston and sentenced in U.S. federal court to life in prison. The case
was considered a breakthrough against organized crime.

More recently Villanueva has represented several protected witnesses whose
testimony is key to the case against Mario Villanueva (no relation to
Silvia), the former governor of Quintana Roo state.

Mario Villanueva is in custody in Mexico, charged with collaborating with a
drug cartel based in Juarez, a city on the Texas border, and using Mexico's
star resort, Cancun, as a base for trafficking in Colombian cocaine.

The former governor also faces a federal indictment in New York for
allegedly smuggling billions of dollars worth of cocaine into the United
States.

"That case isn't over yet," Villanueva said ominously. "They haven't
arrested everybody."

The use of informants like those Villanueva represents has become a
critical tool in Mexico's battle against organized crime.

As the justice system has become more effective, threats have escalated.
Although authorities suspected members of the Gulf Cartel were the first
who were out to get Villanueva, she blames cronies of the Juarez Cartel for
orchestrating the most recent attacks on her.

The first attempt to kill Villanueva was in her law office. A bomb exploded
May 13, 1998, blowing in the front door and scattering debris. She wasn't
there.

On March 23, 2000, gunmen nearly succeeded when they ambushed Villanueva
and a former organized crime official she was meeting with in a Mexico City
hotel.

Bullets splintered her leg and ripped through her rib cage, collapsing one
of her lungs. The ex-official's bodyguard was killed, but she and the
former police officer survived.

Five months later, on Aug. 31, Villanueva was badly injured again in the
second attack to take place in her office.

"The doctors were surprised I didn't die," Villanueva said. "But both times
I was shot, I was still able to talk and was conscious afterward." She
hesitated, then pulled up her blouse for a brief peek at her scars.

Her abdomen bears long purple slashes from bullets and surgery.

Underneath her coiffed hair, her scalp and one ear are also disfigured from
bullets. One of her shins is a mass of blotches from skin grafts.

The most recent attack on Villanueva came last November, when she was
walking out of a courthouse in Monterrey. Men passing by in a car shot at
her twice, she said, but they missed because her bodyguards pushed her out
of the bullets' path.

Villanueva is now under 24-hour protection by federal agents. She's had
bulletproof glass and bars installed in her office windows. A video monitor
sits on a table next to her desk so she can observe all movement outside on
the street.

She said her religious faith is what sustains her now.

A single mother who used to practice family law, Villanueva refused to talk
about her one child other than that she is named after the Virgin of Guadalupe.

One thing the lawyer will talk freely about is her disdain for both U.S.
and Mexican justice.

"Here in Mexico and in the United States it's almost always those on the
bottom who get caught instead of those on top," she said.

Villanueva has attracted controversy because she has publicly excused many
of her clients' crimes, declaring they turned to smuggling because of poverty.

"I would never represent a real drug trafficker," she said.