ONE-TIME DRUG DEAL ENDS WITH MOTHER BEHIND BARS

HARLINGEN - Just days ago, Ingrid Villarreal Breton, 21, walked
without a prescription into a pharmacy in Matamoros, Mexico, across
the Rio Grande from Brownsville, and paid $150 for 260 pills of
Diazepam, or "Roche pills."

If she got across the border with them, she said her brother had told
her, she could sell them for $3 to $5 per pill in Houston, near her
hometown of Seabrook.

Getting the pills was easy, she said.

"It was like going to a store and buying candy. It was a one-time
thing."

She taped the pills to her calves and got aboard a bus that would take
her into Texas.

However, she was arrested while waiting at the Valley Transit Company
bus station in Harlingen, which police have targeted in their drug
interdiction efforts. They arrest one or two small traffickers daily,
they say.

Breton was arraigned on charges of possession of a controlled
substance. She was interviewed by the Valley Morning Star in the
Harlingen jail.

She smiled easily when the jailer offered her a magazine. Her demeanor
became sadder when the subject turned to her two children, who are now
far from her in the care of their father.

"It's been a very bad experience. I have two children and one is only
a month old," she said, sitting alone behind the steel bars of her
cell. She stared pensively at her hands and wondered what would become
of her.

"I thought about the consequences," Breton said, "but I didn't think
they would be this serious. I didn't think it would be this
emotionally distressing."

With a potentially big payoff, thousands like Breton are willing to
risk their freedom to transport a few pounds of marijuana in a
suitcase or 5-pound bundles of cocaine taped to their body, police
say.

The farther north drugs are transported, the more expensive they are,
authorities say.

Authorities estimate that a $20,000 profit can easily be made off one
kilo of cocaine, available in Mexico for $8,500.