Narcoabogados

A Spanish term for attorneys who defend accused drug lords.

In The Los Angeles Times, Ken Ellingwood and Tracy Wilkinson reported on the fate of lawyers who take on some of Mexico’s most dangerous clients:

Silvia Raquenel Villanueva, once hailed here as “the Bulletproof Lawyer,” could outrun the bullets no longer.

Villanueva, one of Mexico’s most controversial attorneys, was shopping in Monterrey in August when hooded gunmen with automatic weapons tracked her down amid stalls of handbags, perfume and videos, then pumped more than a dozen shots into her body. …

[Such] unsolved killings have focused attention on the lives of the so-called narcoabogados, or “narco-lawyers” – important but often-overlooked players in the drug wars that have roiled Mexico for nearly three years.

While narcoabogados may face violence from rival gangs or disgruntled clients, the job does have advantages:

The fees for handling drug cases can be intoxicating, and it doesn’t always take superior courtroom skills to win a client’s release (a favored method in Mexico is through a judicial order called an amparo). In an opaque justice system rife with corruption, who you know may matter more than what you know about the law.

Of course, murdered narcoabogados represent a minority of those killed in Mexico’s drug wars:

More than 13,000 people nationwide have died since President Felipe Calderón launched a war on the drug cartels in December 2006. Though lawyers – along with prosecutors and judges – represent a small percentage of that toll, attacks on them underscore the ability of the cartels to strike back at the judiciary system.