YOUNGSTERS LATEST TOOL OF SMUGGLERS

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 didn't take long for the whole scheme to fall apart.

U.S. agents are used to seeing kids like Paloma at the border. Since Mexico's drug trafficking gangs began aggressively recruiting youngsters to smuggle narcotics across the U.S. border, 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 more elsewhere along the U.S. border with Mexico. The combined total of 721 compares with 500 nationwide in 1997, U.S. Customs Service agents say.

All along the frontier between the two countries, the story is the same. Kids -- many private-school students from middle-class Mexican 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 inoculate them against getting caught.

In American border cities such as El Paso, youth detention facilities are filling up with young drug runners from both countries. 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 Juarez high schools, asking them to smuggle drugs. When they don't ask, they threaten. Many parents fear that their children will be the next to fall prey to drug predators. Teachers and community leaders are banding together to tell teens what is at stake if they get involved in the drug trade.

Kids such as Paloma have all but ruined their young lives.

The driving forces behind this new trend are Mexico's powerful drug cartels and their constant 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 young kids 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 cars and trucks crossing into the United States along the southwest border every year, the fresh-faced youngsters driving some of them are hard to spot as drug runners.

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

The phenomenon is not confined to border cities such as El Paso and Juarez. 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.

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.

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, about 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."

By the time a reporter got to the scene a few hours later, the 13-year-old without a driver license was sitting in the back of a police car on his way to the juvenile jail on the east end of town.

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 student at Institute Mexicano, a private Catholic school, Paloma had been lured into smuggling the load of marijuana by a friend from another school whom 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 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 has long lived.

It was 28 days before Paloma, who had never before been away from home, got out of jail. Texas District Judge Philip Martinez, saying that he was swayed by the outpouring of support for the young girl, let her go home with a promise to enter the probation program of Rosa Maria Aguirre, a former nun and Mexican citizen.