A Teenage Mule

One day last November a friend with a cousin in Mexico asked Juan if he would like to make $100. All he had to do was to drive a car across the border into the United States. A US citizen born and raised in El Paso, Texas, Juan told the border inspector he was returning from a family gathering in Mexico and was waved through. No matter that he had never had a driving 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 packed in the bumpers and door panels of his Ford. He was 16.

Kids such as Juan have long been carrying narcotics across 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 since adolescents are reliable and cheap. For the young couriers, a short jaunt over the border nets them easy spending money. Nowhere are teenage drug mules more popular than on the border with El Paso. Three years ago, 83 juveniles were arrested at the three border bridges into El Paso. At present such arrests are on pace to top the previous year’s total of 155.

The odds of being caught are slim. The estimated yearly consumption of cocaine – 300 tons – would fit into several tractor-trailers. Of course, it didn’t travel that way. It goes in small plastic-wrapped packs hidden under dashboards and inside tires.

Before 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 take 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.

The young drug runners help fuel a seemingly endless cycle of seizures and arrests. However, the Feds rarely prosecute juveniles and instead turn over most cases to local courts. Most punishments are relatively light: probation or several months of detention. Unlike adults, who receive multi-year federal sentences, kids quickly return to work. Meanwhile business booms for the leaders of the Juarez cartel. Even when teenagers are willing to rat out their superiors, US 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 condition that his real name not be used. The son of Mexican immigrants, he started smoking weed in the 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 shipments. All in their early 30s, they snorted cocaine, filled their homes with big-screen TVs and spent money with abandon. “I would see them in bars, buying drinks, going money-happy,” Juan says.

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. 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 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, US 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 are in it deep. They are 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.

(From ‘Newsweek’, abridged)