Poverty Fuels Drug Trade : Smuggling: The risky job of bringing drugs across the border is done by ‘mules.’ This is the story of one, driven by the need to care for his sick family, who took the risk and was caught.

Diego Alvarado Quinones, 41, a bus driver, lives with his crippled wife and their eight crippled children in a three-room shack off a rutted, dusty street in Tijuana.

The children, ages 5 to 19, inherited from their mother a degenerative hip disease. They can still walk, though with varying degrees of difficulty and pain. She cannot.

Doctors have told Elvira Alvarado, 37, to get immediate medical help. But there’s no money. Most days, she spends in bed, enduring the pulsing, burning pain. “Sometimes I cry because the pain is so intense,” she said one day last week, clutching her crutches.

A few weeks ago, Diego Alvarado got desperate. At the market, two men offered him $1,000 to drive 15 pounds of marijuana across the U.S. border. It was illicit business and he knew it, he said. But his wife needed help. And $1,000 was a start.

U.S. authorities arrested Diego Alvarado. He never saw the cash, only the inside of a jail in San Diego, just another criminal in the ongoing U.S. war on drugs.

His case is a sad portrait of the pressures that drive the minor players in the drug trade at the border, the so-called “mules” who ferry drugs into the U.S.

But even in the midst of the much-hyped war on drugs, where the focus in the American courts is squarely on punishment, Diego Alvarao found justice tempered with mercy.

After hearing his story, prosecutors dropped the more serious of two charges. A judge in San Diego accepted a guilty plea to a minor charge and released him after eight days behind bars, telling him to go home to his family.

“Americans see marijuana as this horrid drug,” said Jeanne Knight, Diego Alvarado’s San Diego defense attorney. “Other people in other societies don’t. And just what is the lesser crime? To carry a few pounds of marijuana? Or to watch your family go on in pain day after day?

“This is a problem without a solution,” Knight said, referring to the drug trade, adding that she currently has a half-dozen other clients with stories like Diego Alvarado’s, Mexican men charged with driving marijuana-laden cars across the border. One man has a father with cancer, she said. Another has a pregnant wife who needs a Caesarean section, she said.

“It’s our fault, Mexico’s fault, nobody’s fault,” Knight said. “And until Mexico has an economy, it’s not going to go away.”

Each day, Diego Alvarado must put on and take off the two outside mirrors and rear-view mirror on his bus. Each night, he takes the three bulky mirrors home. Otherwise, thieves would rip them off the bus, and he’d be liable.

And on a salary of $15 or $20 a day, he can’t afford to lose them.

The shack that he lives in with his family has no running water. Uncollected garbage spills out of plastic bread bags just outside the front door. One bathroom serves all 10 people. The eight children sleep in one room, the parents in another. The parents have a bed. The children also have a bed--that is, one bed. Four or more sleep on the floor each night.

The family’s three dogs--Duke, Junior and the one with no name--stay outside, on a slab of fenced-in cement, lounging about the junk.

There’s someone else’s blue Volkswagen Beetle with four flat tires and a San Diego Gas & Electric bumper sticker. A shiny white toilet. Lines of steel construction bars. “Pointy edges,” said one of the children, 7-year-old Ontiel Alvarado. “You have to be careful.”

Inside, rocks poke out of holes in the linoleum. But the linoleum itself is spotlessly clean. A bookcase in the living room is lined with books, mostly Bible stories. Another bookcase shelters two family photo albums and a small plant, carefully nurtured in what used to be a tuna tin.

The poverty wasn’t always so grinding, Diego Alvarado said. He grew up near Mazatlan and was trained as an agronomist. For years, he worked in the Mexican state of Jalisco, teaching farmers about proper methods of irrigation.

He and his wife have been married for 20 years. When the children kept coming, he realized he needed more money. He left the fields and sold home appliances in Mazatlan. Then he drove a taxi.

Over the years, Elvira Alvarado’s medical condition worsened. Diego and Elvira Alvarado came to realize, too, that each of the children was afflicted.

One of Diego Alvarado’s brothers lives in Tijuana, working at a seafood restaurant. Hoping to find better medical help for the children, the family moved to Tijuana three years ago.

For a while, Diego Alvarado tried driving a taxi. That didn’t pay steadily. He tried selling encyclopedias. That literally earned him nothing. A couple months ago, he switched to the bus. It’s not much money but it’s at least steady, he said.

The three older daughters now work at a maquiladora , a low-tech assembly plant. The family essentially survives on what they bring home, about $70 a week in all.

One day, an American approached two of the daughters, offering free medical care at a U.S. hospital. He was affiliated with Shriner’s Hospital for Crippled Children in Los Angeles, one of the charity hospitals that offer free orthopedic and burn care to children.

Now, through Shriner’s generosity, the Alvarado children get free care until age 18.

“They all have a variety of what we call developmental dysplasia of the hip,” said Dr. Colin F. Moseley, chief of staff at the Los Angeles hospital. That means the ball and socket in the hip joint are not formed correctly at birth and, over time, degenerate, producing arthritis, Moseley said.

Most babies born in the United States and Canada are examined routinely for this defect, which occurs in 15 of 1,000 infants, he said. It’s often treatable in infants with a corrective harness, he said. But past ages 3 or 4, “the risks mount up and success is not very high.”

Children like the Alvarados, who first appear at the hospital past that age, usually are candidates for medicine to ease the pain, Moseley said. “You can always treat the symptoms but the basic problem is beyond treatment,” he said.

The oldest daughter, Arali Alvarado, 19, can no longer go to Shriner’s--she’s too old. Her hips hurt and she’s no longer sure how to get help. “We will see,” she said, smiling.

Elvira Alvarado, the mother, is far too old for help from Shriner’s. About the time the family moved to Tijuana, she decided it hurt too much to walk. She said doctors in Mexico told her she needs an operation to replace each hip.

“Ballpark,” Moseley said, “that’s about $20,000. For one hip.”

Last year, Diego Alvarado’s brothers and sisters scraped together all their savings, about $3,000, and invested it in a fund in Mazatlan that promised them a $2,000 return--meaning $5,000 total--in six months.

It turned out to be too good to be true, a fraud, Diego Alvarado said. “From one day to the other, they disappeared,” taking the cash with them, he said.

That loss dashed Elvira Alvarado’s hopes for relief.

“There are days that are filled with incredible pain,” Elvira Alvarado said. “When it’s hot, I feel better. When it’s cold, I feel more pain.”

Diego Alvarado said, “The reality is that my wife needs not just operations. She needs doctors to see her regularly. There are a lot of regular medical expenses. What to do? We have thought also of taking her to Jalisco, where there’s a natural healer who detoxifies the body.”

Last Dec. 29, Diego Alvarado was at a market down the hill from the shack, buying carrots and onions, when two men approached him in the parking lot. “They asked me if I had a passport. They asked me if I wanted to earn some money. They offered me $1,000,” he said.

“They told me it was marijuana,” he said. “I asked what I needed to do. They said, ‘Drive a car a short distance.’ I knew I was doing something wrong. But I felt the necessity, the need to get money.”

The plan was for Diego Alvarado to drive the car, a 1975 Volkswagen Rabbit, to the parking lot of a junkyard near Brown Field.

At 10:58 a.m. Dec. 30, as he drove the car through the Otay Mesa crossing, a U.S. Customs inspector noticed that the spare tire was lying on a piece of plywood in the back that was covering the spare tire well. The inspector asked Diego Alvarado to open the hatchback and raise the plywood.

Inside were 12 packages of marijuana, 15.8 pounds, with a street value in the United States of about $15,000, according to court documents.

Diego Alvarado was arrested. He said he was not afraid.

“I understood that in the United States, laws are very different,” he said. “Here, in Mexico, they beat you.”

U.S. prosecutors in San Diego charged Diego Alvarado with two counts of possessing marijuana, one a more serious felony, the other a lesser misdemeanor, a common practice in so-called border busts. Two charges give prosecutors the flexibility to play hardball or be lenient, depending on the circumstances.

Knight, a federal public defender, was assigned to Diego Alvarado’s case. At a hearing Jan. 7 before U.S. Magistrate Barry Ted Moskowitz, she told her client’s story.

Back in Tijuana, Diego Alvarado said last week he is grateful.

“I didn’t feel like a criminal,” he said. “It was for the family’s benefit. My father always told me I should never get involved in anything like this. It was the first time in my life. And I feel bad.”