My Life as a Teenage Mule.(youths recruited to traffic drugs)(Statistical Data Included)

One day last November a friend with a cousin in Mexico asked Juan if he would like to make $500. All he had to do was drive a Camaro across the border into the United States. A U.S. citizen born and raised in El Paso, Texas, Juan told the border inspector that he was returning from a family gathering in Mexico and was waved through. No matter that he has never had a driver's license and at the time was on probation for car theft. He would complete the same trip 15 more times before customs officials arrested him in March trying to enter El Paso with 44 bundles of marijuana weighing nearly 60 pounds--with a street value of at least $60,000--packed in the bumpers and door panels of his Ford. He was 16. "The first time I was nervous. After a while I was always on something," often cocaine, he says, "so I didn't care."

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 ...