SILVIA RAQUENEL VILLANUEVA lawyer for Mexican drug suspects

By MARC LACEY

MONTERREY, Mexico - Sitting down with Silvia Raquenel Villa nueva can be nerve-racking, and not just because she is a sharp-tongued lawyer who curses like a sailor if provoked. There is also the delicate matter of the people who want her dead.
Four times, there have been attempts on her life. Explosives have been thrown. Automatic gunfire has been sprayed. She has been hit in the head, in the buttocks, in the lung, in the stomach, and miraculously, each time she has managed to recover.
She has bodyguards and protective glass on her office window . Still, Mexico’s most prominent “narco abogada,” or lawyer to the drug lords, continues to receive threats, which she deflects with prayer, a lighted candle in her office and, on the walls, scores of crosses and images of Jesus. “I can presume that God wants me to continue working in what I’ve always done,” she said. “I’m a lawyer for people who really need one.”
Ms. Raquenel acknowledges being a bit more circumspect, given the assassination attempts, about whom she will represent. Nonetheless, she has not withdrawn from the dangerous life enough to reassure her family. “My father says, ‘You’re so hardheaded. That’s why they shot you in the head and you lived.’”
She can name the exact dates of the attempts on her life. There was May 13, 1998, when an explosive went off at the front door of her office. And March 23, 2000, when she was hit by gunfire when entering a Mexico City hotel with her client, a police commander charged with working for traffickers on the side. Then came August 31, 2000, when someone stormed into her office and shot her eight times, and November 13, 2001, when someone fired at her on the courthouse steps in Monterrey.
“Some people would have left the country,” she said. “Not me. God has put me in the eye of the hurricane. The people I defend could be the worst of the worst or they could be innocent.”
Ms. Raquenel appears to care little about which of the competing drug cartels her clients happen to be affiliated with. She represented Carlos Resendez Bertolucci, a federal law enforcement official accused of collaborating with the gulf drug cartel. She has represented suspects linked with the Sinaloa cartel and with the Zetas, a group of military deserters accused of instigating much of the current drug-related violence in Mexico.
What angers Ms. Raquenel far more than a criminal is a government official profiting from crime. The really big traffickers do not need her services, she argues, since they have politicians, prosecutors and police officers on their payroll.
Her client list includes drug traffickers, corrupt cops and other wrongdoers - or suspected ones, since she has managed to free many of them from jail by pointing out procedural flaws, or what she prefers to call manufactured evidence.
She is similarly dismissive of charges that were filed against her in 2006, which led to her detention for three months. In that case, she was accused but never convicted of being involved in the kidnapping and killing of a law enforcement official.
Although she acknowledges having earned some six-figure payments from clients, she says she has no hidden accounts and lives not much more comfortably than she did as one of six children growing up in a workingclass family.
Ms. Raquenel, who is in her mid-50s, admits to having made mistakes over the years. “I’m only human,” she said, declining to offer details. Authorities, speaking not for attribution, say she has profited handsomely from dirty money.
She has her admirers, though. At least six bands have written songs about her, with titles like “The Bulletproof Lawyer.”
Each of the crosses nailed to the wall at the entrance of her office is from a client she has gotten out of jail, Ms. Raquenel said. There are scores of them, too many to count on the way out, with the door open and the bodyguards not around and the possibility lingering that someone, somewhere might still have a grudge against her.