TEEN TRAFFICKERS

Young Smugglers, Lured By Promise Of Easy Money, Paying A High Price

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - Erik has youthful good looks and a quick smile.
Just the kind of guy people trust. Which is why the tall, clean-cut
16-year-old was so good at his job - smuggling drugs.

"I partied all the time and stayed at the best hotels," said the Mexican
boy, who began trafficking last year. "I don't even know what happened to
all the money I made."

By his count, he raked in thousands of dollars and moved about 20 loads of
drugs before Mexican police stopped him at a highway checkpoint in May and
found 61 pounds of marijuana in his car.

"I think someone snitched on me," said the teenager, now halfway through a
12-month term at a juvenile jail in Ciudad Juarez. "It's a dirty business."

Lucrative, too. And it's that fast, easy money that is luring more and more
kids, Mexican and American, into the multibillion-dollar drug trade.
Arrests of traffickers under age 18 are expected to climb to 512 this year,
up 58 percent nationwide since 1997, U.S. Customs Service agents say.

Most of those arrested and convicted were given probation, not jail time,
prompting others to take the risk.

For some teens, drug smuggling has suddenly become a way to get not only
money, but also a quick thrill. Seasoned law enforcement officials are
stunned by the trend.

"Some of these kids are as young as 9. It's very upsetting," said U.S.
Customs Service Commissioner Raymond Kelly.

Stopping kid couriers along the Southwest border is especially difficult,
agents say. More than 250 million people and about 90 million cars and
trucks cross every year. Now throw in some fresh-faced kids - honor
students and high school athletes among them - who have pot stowed in their
car trunk or backpack.

"It becomes increasingly difficult for our people to sort out the few
people who are carrying drugs from the vast majority who are not," Mr.
Kelly said.

The lure of smuggling is especially strong in Mexico, where wages are low.

"Some of these 16- and 17-year-olds work for peanuts at the assembly
plants, getting $45 a week. So when a smuggler comes and offers $200 or
$300 for a day's work, it doesn't take a lot of math to figure out these
kids are going to go for it," said Rogelio Soto, chief of the Val Verde
County Juvenile Probation Department in Del Rio, Texas.

No matter how tempting the money, young smugglers are often exploited and
abused by adults who see them as throw-aways, police say. Mexican
traffickers stuck a red-hot wire into the soles of one 15-year-old boy's
feet because he lost a drug load, El Paso authorities said. In Juarez,
officers allegedly sexually molested an 18-year-old and stole 24 pounds of
the marijuana she was carrying, the teenager said from jail.

"These kids know very little about the drug business. They're a small link
in a very big chain," said El Paso sheriff's Lt. Marvin Ryals, assistant
commander of an anti-drug task force.

His office has that modern, post-Miami Vice look: Bulletproof vests hang in
a neat row a few feet away from electronic surveillance equipment. And
there's the "Hall of Shame," featuring anti-drug souvenirs: Rugrat stickers
peeled off packages of cocaine, seized silk shirts decorated with little
AK-47 assault rifles and marijuana leaves, and a confiscated Polaroid that
one proud 19-year-old smuggler took of his Dalmatian next to a load of
mota, or weed.

"Spot, get over here!" joked one of Lt. Ryals' agents, imagining what that
conversation was like. "Sit right there next to la mota. Now hooold
stiiiiilll."

Not all is fun and games. From June 1998 to May, task-force agents arrested
123 juvenile smugglers and seized from them nearly 6 tons of marijuana and
279 pounds of cocaine with a street value of $9.2 million.

"People always ask, 'How come you can't get the main traffickers?'" Lt.
Ryals said. "I tell them, 'There's just too many others in front of them.'"

A drug load can change hands a dozen times as smugglers move it from
interior Mexico to El Paso and beyond, he said. Most kid couriers are
pawns, bit players in a cast of thousands.

"They're young, naive and cheap to hire. They don't ask a lot of questions
and don't know much about the drug business," the lieutenant said. "They're
easy pickings."

Those running the show are the crime bosses who run Mexico's major
smuggling organizations, including the Arellano-Felix, Amezcua-Contreras,
Caro-Quintero and Carrillo-Fuentes gangs, U.S. agents say.

The Carrillo-Fuentes family is thought to control much of the trafficking
through the Juarez-El Paso corridor even though its leader, Amado Carrillo,
died in 1997, the agents say.

The gang's strategy is simple, Lt. Ryals said: "To inundate the area with
cars, trucks and people, all carrying drugs."

Just the other afternoon, customs agents in El Paso captured two girls, 15
and 16, with 170 pounds of marijuana.

Customs Inspector Daniel Gamboa said that the teenage driver seemed
nonchalant while crossing but that the veins in her neck were bulging. So
he had Buck, a Belgian shepherd, take another sniff of her car.

The inspector smelled silicone, often used to cushion secret compartments
so they seem empty. He and the dog looked further and found the hidden
marijuana "bricks."

When confronted, the girls cried.

"Sadly enough, one in eight loads we seize involves a minor," said J.J.
Lopez, chief customs inspector in El Paso. "Say you're into the partying
scene and here you can make $500 for doing absolutely nothing, for simply
passing a car across the border. Obviously, somebody's exploiting your
innocence."

Take the strange case of a Mexican girl, 16, who was stopped in Laredo in
July. Customs agents say 711 pounds of cocaine, worth $32 million, was
piled in plain view in the back of her pickup truck. She was quickly arrested.

Others are more clever.

Few would have guessed that a 9-year-old boy going through Miami
International Airport last summer had 2 pounds of heroin worth $125,000.
Customs found it in his Nintendo game and in three pairs of shoes. Agents
say that the boy, a U.S. citizen, had flown in alone from Cali, Colombia,
that he knew he was carrying drugs and that he probably had smuggled
before. But he was released because of his age and sent back to Colombia.

U.S. anti-drug agents say recruiters search for prospective smugglers at
schools, discos, malls, factories, even burrito stands.

One 16-year-old U.S. citizen - her identity is withheld because of her age
- - said a friendly couple in their 30s approached her and a 17-year-old
friend in Juarez.

"They said, 'Hey, you guys want to make some easy money?'"

Eager to go on a shopping spree, the girls jumped at the chance to earn a
few hundred dollars.

"You see a lot of people at school wearing all these new clothes. I wanted
to be like that," the 16-year-old said. "I thought it was going to be easy.
Boom! Get the money."

But as she drove her mother's van across the border at El Paso, customs
agents stopped her and found 62 pounds of pot behind the dashboard.

"I thought I was dreaming. I wanted to wake up," said the girl, wearing a
maroon blouse, jeans and thick-heeled black shoes. "I was scared of what my
parents would say."

Her mother, a teacher's aide, was devastated by the arrest of her daughter,
who was popular at school and ran track.

"It's like they put a dagger in your heart," the mother said, crying.

The two sat next to each other in an El Paso probation office, where they
had agreed to talk. The girl tugged at her long, black hair. Suddenly tears
came to her eyes, and for a moment she couldn't speak.

Under house arrest, she wears an electronic monitoring device around her
ankle and says she feels like an animal tagged for study. She leaves home
only to go to school, work at a pizza parlor and check in with probation
authorities.

If she stays out of trouble, her record will be wiped clean at age 18.
Still, she worries, saying her arrest "messed me up. I wanted to be a
pediatrician. Now I don't know."

Her mother said she changed her phone number out of fear that traffickers
would track down the family and avenge the lost drug load.

"They get these girls involved, offer them easy money, destroy their
childhood. I just thank God my daughter was caught the first time. If she
had been able to cross the border, maybe she would have liked the money and
kept on doing this."

Some parents force their own children to smuggle drugs, agents say.

On Oct. 19, a customs dog named Tag in Nogales, Ariz., took sudden interest
in a particular car. No drugs could be seen, so agents let it cross the
border.

The car, driven by a boy, 16, stopped a few blocks away, and his mother,
46, sister, 14, and her friend, 15, climbed inside. Agents later stopped
and searched the car. The three females had 4.8 pounds of heroin worth
$300,000 hidden in their underwear.

"Drug smugglers will stop at nothing," said Mr. Kelly of the Customs
Service. "They use any means they can. And if it works, they're going to do
it."

El Paso and Laredo are hot spots for kid couriers, but they also turn up at
airports. Customs agents say 72 young people between the ages of 10 and 19
were arrested while hauling cocaine or heroin between July 1998 and June.

Among the cases:

* A smuggling ring in New York City recruited 18- to 20-year-old Hasidic
Jews to bring in the designer drug Ecstasy from Europe. The pay: free plane
tickets and $1,500 for each successful venture. Federal prosecutors in July
charged Simcha Roth, 18, of Monsey, N.Y., Shimon Levita, 18, of the
Netherlands, and five others with importing more than 1 million Ecstasy
tablets. The suspects evidently thought the couriers' "young age, black
hats, dark suits and side curls would not arouse suspicion," said an Aug. 9
customs report.

* In April, smugglers in Jamaica dressed a 13-year-old girl and her
11-year-old cousin in their Sunday best, stowed 7 pounds of cocaine in
their luggage and sent the girls to Miami. Agents found the drugs in two
shampoo bottles.

* In September 1998, a 13-year-old boy at New York's John F. Kennedy
Airport admitted swallowing 90 latex-encased heroin pellets weighing 2
pounds. In a similar case in April, a 17-year-old flew into Miami from
Venezuela with 3.4 pounds of cocaine - two pounds in a garment bag, the
rest in his belly.

Teen traffickers give a variety of reasons for doing it.

Daisy Casares, 18, said she strapped nearly 9 pounds of marijuana to her
body and tried to smuggle it "for fun, I guess. Not necessity."

She's now serving a 10-year sentence in a Juarez jail.

An El Paso girl, 17, said she smuggled for the money and the thrills.

"I had never crossed that line. I had never been in trouble," she said,
nervously popping her knuckles. "It seemed easy enough to drive a car over
the bridge. I didn't think about the consequences."

She said a guy named Freddy, about 20 years old, recruited her at a Juarez
disco blocks from the border and asked her to move 10 pounds of pot across
the border.

Then 16, she was caught in El Paso with what turned out to be 42 pounds of
marijuana, sent to a detention center and never saw her $500 fee.

Traffickers target juveniles, she said. "They make more money than what
they give us, for sure."

Houston-born Ruby Carmona was living in a quiet Mexican village of 1,500
when a neighbor offered her $3,000 to smuggle a drug load. Then 18, she
said she had just bought a car and needed the money.

"He told me, 'Don't worry. If they catch you, they'll let you go.' So I
said, 'OK,' " she said.

Agents caught her at a checkpoint southwest of Juarez in March 1998 and
pulled 55 pounds of dope from her car's gas tank. Frantic, she later called
the neighbor for help.

"He said, 'I don't know you,' and hung up. These people use you, betray
you," Miss Carmona said.

Now serving a 10-year sentence in a Juarez jail, she believes she was
expendable all along - a decoy for a bigger drug load that breezed through
the checkpoint while agents arrested her.

"I had plans. I was going to go to Denver and finish school. Well, this is
my Denver," the 20-year-old said wistfully as iron doors around her clanked.

"I'm so sorry for what I did."

Not all teenagers are so remorseful.

Erik, who lived the good life while smuggling marijuana and heroin, said he
has only one regret: "That I was caught."

But he says he's convinced that won't happen again. After he leaves
juvenile detention in six months, he said, he'll finish school and become a
Mexican anti-drug agent.

That way, he said with a wink, he'll get rich off drug bribes and use his
badge to stay out of jail.

"It's cool over there," he said of Mexico's federal attorney general's
office. The agency has been plagued with corruption over the years, and
some officers have actually been caught guarding or transporting drug
loads. In 1997, the agency's top anti-drug official, Gen. Jesus Gutierrez
Rebollo, was found living in a powerful drug lord's luxury apartment and
charged with taking payoffs.

Erik said he's not worried about anything bad happening.

"People say you can get killed in the drug business. But if you make money,
spread it around and don't betray anyone, there's no danger."