Smugglers’ Youth Ends at Border

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Kids such as Paloma--whose parents asked that her last name not be published because they fear retaliation from traffickers--have all but ruined their young lives.

“We are a Juarez family, so we know that drug trafficking is part of life here. But we don’t participate in that life, so we never thought it would touch us,” said Paloma’s mother, an executive at a credit reporting agency who is raising Paloma and her younger sister as strict Roman Catholics. “We never thought it would come to our door.

“It’s like a glass of water falls on you in the street and you look up and you think: ‘What’s happened? Where did that come from?’ ”

Where it comes from is 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.

Authorities Face Difficult Decisions

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.

The kids who are caught, especially those from Mexico, are fed into an overcrowded juvenile justice system ill-equipped to serve them. Those who are detained often end up in facilities many hundreds of miles from the Mexican border staffed by people who do not speak Spanish. Their parents are often unable to secure visas to visit them.

The kids are bit players in the vast industry that transports cocaine, heroin, marijuana and other illicit drugs into the United States. Running the show are the crime bosses in charge of Mexico’s major smuggling operations. Their strategy is simple: inundate the border with cars, trucks and people, all carrying drugs. And kids are a particularly convenient way to move their product. Most of those who are arrested and convicted are given probation, not jail time, prompting others to take the risk.

“It’s heartbreaking and frustrating at the same time,” said Texas District Judge Philip Martinez, who tries most of the juvenile cases in El Paso. “I can understand that these kids are being lured with more American cash than they have probably ever seen at one time in their lives. And I know that these kids are the pawns of others who are taking advantage of them and we are not making a dent in the drug trade by prosecuting these kids. On the other hand, we simply cannot afford to let them get away with it.”

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% of total cross-border drug traffic. And they say that some of the teens may be unwitting decoys for more sophisticated smugglers hauling illicit cargo in trucks, tractor-trailers and railroad freight cars.

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 2 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.

Four months earlier, two girls, ages 11 and 13, were arrested in Miami getting off a flight from Jamaica. They had secreted 7 pounds of cocaine in their shampoo bottles.

And this April, a Colombian boy of 14 was rushed to the hospital from the Miami airport. He had ingested 80 plastic pellets containing powdered heroin.

Many Drawn In for First Time

Nowhere have more young people been recruited to smuggle drugs in recent years than El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. Some are street toughs or gang members, already in trouble with the law. Others are attracted by the adventure of evading capture. But a troubling percentage, in El Paso at least, are naive kids drawn into the trade for the first time.

They are usually offered about $500 to drive a load across one of the city’s four bridges spanning the border, payable upon delivery. Authorities believe that many of the kids, even those not arrested, never get the cash. And traffickers have been known to torture kids who do not succeed. Last year, Mexican traffickers burned the soles of one 15-year-old’s feet with a red-hot wire because he lost his drug shipment, said David Contreras, supervising attorney for the juvenile unit of the El Paso county attorney’s office.

Another young teenager, a girl, was raped by the traffickers who had hired her, Contreras said.

“They are just using more juveniles, and they are abusing them,” said Millie Sanchez, a juvenile probation officer in El Paso.

“Maybe they feel juveniles look more innocent,” Sanchez said. “Maybe they are easier to intimidate. It’s obviously working for them, because if this many are getting caught, who knows how many more are successful.”

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’s 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 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.

Another option for Mexican kids arrested at the border is a joint program administered by the Ciudad Juarez and El Paso County governments. Initiated 15 years ago at the instigation of Mexican authorities, it is designed to punish Mexican youths while still allowing them to go back to their homes.

In charge of the program is a former nun and Mexican citizen named Rosa Maria Aguirre. Working from an office at the El Paso Juvenile Probation Department in El Paso, she is parts counselor, probation officer and advocate for about 35 Mexican youths at a time.

Driving her rundown car back and forth between the two cities, she interviews the kids and their families, helps parents secure permission to travel to El Paso for court hearings and investigates kids’ backgrounds.

Sometimes, she places the kids with other relatives considered more responsible than their parents. In every case, she works with a Mexican police officer to design a probation program for each youth: community service hours, curfews, some sort of house arrest.

Because the youths live outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, once they are placed in the program, participation is voluntary.

Aguirre enlists parents and teachers to help ensure that the participants comply with the probation program. But in the end, it is the kids themselves who decide whether to abide by the rules.

The only stick U.S. authorities can wield is the authority to prevent the kids from reentering the United States legally. So far, that has been enough to ensure cooperation by every youth who has gone through the program, Aguirre said.

“I don’t say that all come out well, but the vast majority do,” Aguirre said. “Of the kids who have been brought in on drug charges, not one has gone back and broken the law.”

Offender Gets a Show of Support

It was Aguirre who realized that Paloma was the kind of kid who needed a break.

A decent 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 had long lived.

“They took me to juvenile detention,” Paloma said, recalling the day she was arrested. “I didn’t believe it was happening. I thought my parents would come and take me back home. But in one instant my whole life changed.”

It was 28 days before Paloma, who had never before been away from home, got out of jail. Martinez, saying that he was swayed by the outpouring of support for the young girl, let her go home with a promise to enter Aguirre’s program.

Meanwhile, the parents at Paloma’s school were mobilizing. They convinced Aguirre to speak at a school assembly about the dangers facing young drug carriers and are talking to other schools in the city about conducting similar assemblies.

A Voice of Contrition

Back home, Paloma’s days are quiet now. She cannot leave the house except to go to and from school, and never without her parents. She works several days a week at an orphanage to fulfill her community service obligation. In the peace of the small room she shares with her sister, she still cuddles her stuffed animals.

“I realized that my case was very difficult, even though there was so much support from my family,” Paloma said. “So many people went to court to support me. I wanted to make good on it for their sake.

“I think that one goes through something and maybe it is not a coincidence. Maybe I needed to know that many people love and support me. Maybe this was the only way. And maybe I will be more conscious in the future of the dangers that are out there. And maybe I will make better kinds of friends.”