Surviving a Skirmish in War on Drugs : Poverty: A Tijuana man, driven to desperation by his family’s plight, agreed to take marijuana across the border. He was caught, but later found justice tempered with mercy.

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

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

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

For the time being, the children under 18 are getting free care at Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children in Los Angeles, but once they are older, the offer expires.

A few months ago, Diego Alvarado got desperate. At a 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 him. He never saw the cash, only the inside of a jail in San Diego, just another criminal in the ongoing war on drugs.

His case is a sad portrait of the pressures that drive the minor players to the drug trade at the border, the so-called mules who ferry drugs into the United States. But even in the midst of the much-hyped war on drugs, where the focus in the American courts is squarely on punishment, Diego Alvarado 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, Alvarado’s 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 has half a dozen other clients--Mexican men charged with driving marijuana-laden cars across the border--with stories like Alvarado’s. One man’s father has cancer, she said. Another has a pregnant wife who needs a Cesarean 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.”

The shack that the Alvarados live in has no running water. The parents have one room and the eight children share another. At least four must sleep on the floor each night.

Rocks poke out of holes in the linoleum floor. But the linoleum 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 a tuna tin.

The poverty was not always so grinding, Alvarado said. He grew up near Mazatlan and was trained as an agronomist.

He and his wife have been married for 20 years. When the children kept coming, he realized he needed more money.

Over the years, Diego and Elvira Alvarado came to realize, too, that each of the children was afflicted with their mother’s ailment. Hoping to find better medical help for the children, the family moved to Tijuana three years ago.

For a while, Diego drove a taxi there. That did not pay steadily. He tried selling encyclopedias. That earned him nothing. A couple of months ago, he switched to the bus. The $15 or $20 he makes weekly is not much money, but it is at least steady, he said.

Three older daughters work at a low-tech factory. The family 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 Shriners Hospital.

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

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 is 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.”

Youngsters such as the Alvarado children 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.

Elvira Alvarado decided about the time the family moved to Tijuana that it hurt too much for her to walk. She said doctors in Mexico told her she needs an operation to replace each hip.

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

Diego Alvarado said: “The reality is that my wife needs not just operations. She needs doctors to see her regularly.”

Last Dec. 29, Alvarado was at a market down the hill from the shack, buying carrots and onions, when two men approached him. “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. 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.”

At 10:58 a.m. Dec. 30, as Alvarado drove a 1975 Volkswagen Rabbit through the Otay Mesa crossing, a U. S. Customs inspector asked him to open the hatchback. Inside were 12 packages of marijuana, 15.8 pounds, with a street value of about $15,000, according to court documents.

Alvarado was arrested.

U. S. prosecutors charged him with two counts of possessing marijuana, one a felony, the other a misdemeanor. Knight, a federal public defender, was assigned to the case. At a hearing Jan. 7 before U. S. Magistrate Barry Ted Moskowitz, she told her client’s story.

“I told him this is a very unusual case,” Knight said. “Of course, I’m a real hearts-and-flowers kind of person, so I really laid it on. But it was all true.”

Prosecutors agreed to dismiss the felony, sparing Alvarado a possible 16-month sentence. In exchange, he pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor. Moskowitz promptly sentenced him to time served--eight days at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego.

Back in Tijuana, Alvarado said he is grateful.

“I didn’t feel like a criminal,” he said. “It was for the family’s benefit. It was the first time in my life. And I feel bad.”

His wife knows everything. The children know very little about what happened. “I was not in agreement with what he had done, even though he had done it for me,” Elvira Alvarado said. “But on a certain level I understand. I understand how overwhelmed he was.”