Kids such as Juan have long been carrying narcotics across the Rio Grande. But as the United States has added new border agents, computerized license-plate readers and drug-sniffing dogs to its effort to stem the flow of drugs, traffickers have increasingly turned to teenagers to haul them. While many cases are no more sophisticated than deals made in nightclubs with drunken teenagers, U.S. Customs officials are investigating what they believe to be more organized operations to recruit kids–especially Americans. “Isolated cases are now connecting. There are cells of juveniles,” says Patricia Kramer, head of customs investigations in El Paso. For their bosses, adolescents are reliable, cheap and gullible. For the young couriers, a short jaunt over the bridge nets them easy spending money. Nowhere are teenage drug mules more popular than on the border with El Paso, a major gateway for narcotics that sits just across the border from Ciudad Juarez, headquarters to one of Mexico’s most notorious cartels. In 1997, 83 juveniles were arrested at the three border bridges into El Paso. This year such arrests are on pace to top the 2000 total of 155.
The odds of getting caught are slim. The estimated yearly U.S. consumption of cocaine–300 tons–would fit into several tractor-trailers. Of course, it doesn’t travel that way. It goes in small plastic-wrapped packs hidden under dashboards and inside tires. Marijuana shipments are much larger, but the principle is the same: send several loads and accept the occasional confiscation as the price of doing business. With the advent of the North American Free Trade Agreement, yearly commercial traffic across the border has increased 110 percent since 1993. Each day 15,000 pedestrians, 45,000 cars and 2,000 trucks cross into El Paso. That much traffic, combined with the pressure to speed up trade, makes it impossible for federal agents to inspect more than 5 percent of vehicles.
Before the traffickers started favoring youth over experience in recruiting mules, there were occasional arrests, mostly of Mexican kids. Cases like that of Oscar, a 16-year-old from Juarez, have multiplied in the last three years. For a month, two men in his neighborhood had been trying to recruit him to drive across a load of drugs. They promised him $1,000–an amount that would have taken him two months to earn at the factory where he planned to start work. He finally gave in when his infant son became ill and needed medicine. In April, border inspectors found 213 pounds of marijuana stuffed into concrete pillars in the back of the pickup he was driving. During the next two weeks, two 16-year-old friends, both girls caught with loads of weed, joined him in juvenile detention in El Paso. All three await sentencing.
Traffickers have learned that American border children make better mules because they arouse less suspicion. Many speak Spanish and visit Juarez frequently to see Mexican relatives or to party. U.S. kids account for more than half the juvenile drug arrests this year in El Paso. While most of those caught have Latino roots and come from poor families (many border counties are among the poorest in the United States), there have been several arrests of middle-class Anglos. “We see kids from the streets. We see kids from good homes,” says Judge Philip Martinez, who hears most juvenile cases in El Paso. U.S. federal investigators say recruiting rings are becoming increasingly organized. One girl, caught trying to drive more than 200 pounds of marijuana across the border, told NEWSWEEK that a mother-son team in El Paso recruited her and a half-dozen other U.S. teenagers over the past several months.
The young drug runners help fuel a seemingly endless cycle of seizures and arrests–tens of thousands of pounds of dope and 73 juveniles so far this year in El Paso. Back in 1914 the city passed what is thought to be the first law banning the possession of marijuana. Now it specializes in punishing young drug couriers, because the Feds rarely prosecute juveniles and instead turn over most cases to local courts. Most punishments are relatively light: probation or several months in detention. Unlike adults, who receive multiyear federal sentences, kids can quickly return to work. Meanwhile, business booms for the leaders of the Juarez cartel. Even when teenagers are willing to rat out their superiors, U.S. officials face a dilemma: further investigation requires working with Mexican officials, some of whom are in cahoots with the drug bosses.
Juan, who is now serving a six-month sentence, spoke on the condition that his real name not be used. The son of Mexican immigrants, he started smoking weed in sixth grade, dabbled in harder drugs in junior high and finally dropped out when he was in the ninth grade. Not long after his first arrest–for stealing a car–a friend recruited him as a courier. After several trips, he met the three men organizing the shipments. All in their early 30s, they snorted cocaine, listened to polkalike ranchero music, filled their houses with big-screen TVs and spent money with abandon. “I would see them in bars, buying drinks, going money-happy,” Juan says. He also saw them stuffing car tires and secret gas-tank compartments with marijuana and cocaine. “It’s all about the money,” Juan says.
Soon he was earning a few thousand dollars a month, not only making his own deliveries but also recruiting American friends to transport drugs. “The traffickers prefer Americans,” he says. “We live on the right side of the border.” Juan spent his earnings on “drugs, parties, girls and jewelry” and a car that he planned to give to his mother. “She’d be like, ‘Where are you getting all this money?’ I told her I was landscaping with a friend.” His bosses wanted him to drive shipments to New Mexico and Oklahoma, but he refused. “I was more scared of driving in the States than across the border.”
His employment ended this spring. One morning he drove a girlfriend to Juarez. While they were eating lunch his contact borrowed his car and loaded it with marijuana. The bosses had a quick order to fill in El Paso that afternoon. It was the first time Juan used his own car to move drugs. He was to leave it in the parking lot of a McDonald’s, but instead a border inspector asked him for ID and spotted a receipt in his wallet for a court fee related to his probation, and then the electronic bracelet around his ankle. After they found his stash, U.S. officials questioned him for several hours, but Juan says he refused to spill. “I was scared that it would affect my family. I told them it was my stuff.” In jail, he doesn’t resent doing time while his former bosses remain in business. “It’s worse for them. They’re in it deep. They’re going to die one day, because they work for somebody, too.” And that somebody can replace them as quickly as new teenagers have turned up to replace Juan.
