TRAFFICKERS LURE KIDS TO DO THE DIRTY WORK OF SMUGGLING DRUGS FROM
MEXICO

Ciudad Juarez, Mexico -- She is a sweet-faced Catholic schoolgirl of
14. An architect's daughter. The sort of kid the teachers favor at
school. The kind who still sleeps with stuffed animals at home.

But on a hot afternoon four months ago on a bridge between her home of
Juarez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, Paloma left childhood behind.

At that moment, driving a stranger's car slowly toward a U.S. customs
inspection station, Paloma became a felon.

She knew there was a load of marijuana in the car. A friend had
convinced her that all she had to do was drive the more than 250 pounds
of pot into the United States to collect what seemed to her the
fantastic sum of $500. Maybe, Paloma thought, I'll spend it at the
mall. But when the teenager, lips trembling and hands shaking in fear,
got to the U.S. customs station, it did not take long for the whole
scheme to fall apart.

U.S. agents are used to seeing children like Paloma at the border.
Since Mexico's drug trafficking gangs began aggressively recruiting
youngsters to smuggle narcotics, the number of kids younger than 16
arrested for smuggling drugs into El Paso alone has jumped -- from 63
in 1997 to 148 last year.

In the first seven months of this year, there have been 111 such
arrests in El Paso and 610 elsewhere along the border, for a total of
721, compared to 500 nationwide in 1997, U.S. Customs Service agents
say.

All along the frontier, the story is the same. Kids -- many of them
private school students from middle-class families, most in trouble
with the law for the first time, some as young as 9 -- are increasingly
being lured into the drug trade by traffickers betting that their baby
faces will mask them against getting caught.

Across the border, in cities such as Juarez, the traffickers' new
tactic has become a scourge. Scary-looking men in flashy cars routinely
approach teenagers on the grounds of high schools asking them to
smuggle drugs. When the men don't ask, they threaten.

``We are a Juarez family, so we know that drug trafficking is part of
life here. But we don't participate in that life, so we never thought
it would touch us,'' said Paloma's mother, an executive at a credit
reporting agency who is raising Paloma and her younger sister as strict
Catholics.

Mexico's powerful drug cartels constantly search for new ways to move
their product to the vast market awaiting them across the border. They
have stashed drugs in secret compartments in cars, trucks and planes;
in balloons swallowed by elderly border crossers; and in backpacks
hauled across the desert.

The relatively new tactic of using children presents excruciating
challenges for U.S. peace officers, judges, prosecutors and the
juvenile justice system. With more than 250 million people and about 90
million vehicles crossing into the United States along the border every
year, the fresh-faced youngsters driving some of them are hard to spot.


No one knows the precise quantity of narcotics smuggled by kids.
Authorities doubt that the practice, while growing, accounts for more
than 15 percent of total cross-border drug traffic.

At Miami International Airport, where flights arrive daily from
throughout Latin America, agents have had to learn to be wary of even
the smallest children.

On July 4, 1999, a 9-year-old boy was arrested at the airport with two
pounds of heroin worth $125,000 concealed in a Nintendo game and three
pairs of shoes. The boy, a U.S. citizen whose mother lives in Colombia,
was flying alone.

Four months earlier, two girls 11 and 13 were arrested there getting
off a flight from Jamaica. They had secreted seven pounds of cocaine in
their shampoo bottles.

And this April, a Colombian boy of 14 was rushed to the hospital from
the airport. He had ingested 80 plastic pellets containing powdered
heroin.

Nowhere have more young people been recruited to smuggle drugs in
recent years than El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. A troubling percentage are
naive kids drawn into the trade for the first time.

They are usually offered about $500 to drive a load across one of El
Paso's four bridges spanning the border, payable upon delivery.
Authorities believe that many of the children, even those not arrested,
never get the cash.

And traffickers have been known to torture kids who do not succeed.
Last year, Mexican traffickers burned the soles of one 15-year-old's
feet with a red-hot wire because he lost his drug shipment, said David
Contreras, supervising attorney for the juvenile unit of the El Paso
county attorney's office.

Customs inspector Patricia Hernandez was halfway into her midnight-to-8
a.m. shift on a recent morning when a pimply-faced teenager pulled up
to her station on El Paso's Ysleta bridge in an aging sedan. Something
about his mumbled answers to her questions made her suspicious. Inside
the trunk, tucked into a badly concealed compartment behind the back
seat, were 41 bundles of marijuana, 159 pounds in all.

``He looked away. I stuck my flashlight in and saw it and he looked
surprised,'' Hernandez said. ``Then he started to fall apart. He turned
pale and started throwing up. He realized he was caught.''

Kids such as the one Hernandez arrested face an uncertain fate. Under
Texas law, teens found guilty of felony drug offenses must serve a
minimum of one year in jail or an equivalent amount of time on some
form of probation. With judges reluctant to send kids back home to
Mexico, where Texas courts and their families have no jurisdiction,
many of the Mexican kids arrested end up in a Texas Youth Authority
facility in Peyote, Texas, a 4 1/2-hour drive from El Paso, locked up
with kids guilty of violent crimes.

A decent student at Institute Mexicano, a private Catholic school,
Paloma had been lured into smuggling the load of marijuana by a friend
from another school she met when they both auditioned for a rock band.
The friend told Paloma she had moved several drug loads already and
flashed a new bass guitar that she said she had bought with the
proceeds.

At Paloma's initial court appearance in El Paso, 17 people showed up to
speak for her. Among them were the principal of her school, several
teachers, her priest and members of her church, her parents and their
friends from the neat, quiet neighborhoods where the family had long
lived.

``They took me to juvenile detention,'' Paloma said, recalling the day
she was arrested. ``I didn't believe it was happening. I thought my
parents would come and take me back home. But in one instant my whole
life changed.''

It was 28 days before Paloma, who had never before been away from home,
got out of jail.