Four times there have been attempts on her life. Pistols have been fired at her. 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 amazingly, each time she has managed to recover.

She now has bodyguards and protective glass on the office window next to her oversize desk. Still, Mexico's most prominent narco abogada, or lawyer to the drug lords, continues to receive threats. She, a religious woman with a serious demeanour, deflects them with prayer, a lighted candle in her office and, on the walls, scores of crosses and images of Jesus Christ.

"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."

She does acknowledge being a bit more circumspect recently about signing on as a client a police officer whom the authorities had charged with kidnapping and killing the teenage son of a prominent businessman in a case that had traumatised the nation. A few months ago she backed off and found the officer a different lawyer after she said she received calls promising one more attempt on her life.

Nonetheless, Raquenel has not withdrawn enough from the dangerous life for her family. "My father says: 'You're so hard-headed. That's why they shot you in the head and you lived.'"

Raquenel can rattle off the exact dates of the various attempts on her life as though they were holidays. 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."

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 a drug cartel. She has represented suspects linked with the Sinaloa cartel and with the Zetas, which are a group of military deserters accused of instigating much of the drug-related violence that Mexico is enduring.

What riles Raquenel far more than a criminal is a government official profiting from crime. The really big traffickers, she argues, do not need her services since they have politicians, prosecutors and police officers on their payroll to make sure that no charges stick.

She is fatalistic about when and where her end will come, and she vows to continue her aggressive advocacy of any client she chooses to defend.

As a single mother, it clearly does bother her that her teenage daughter might be orphaned one day, and that has made her turn down clients, she said, that she might otherwise have represented.

Her client list has been a rogues gallery of drug traffickers, corrupt cops and other ne'er-do-wells, or suspected ones, since Raquenel has managed to free many of them from jail by pointing out procedural flaws, or what she prefers to call manufactured evidence on the part of the state.

She is similarly dismissive of the charges that were filed against her in the autumn of 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.

"The authorities have a perverse imagination," she said, adding that, in 2001, charges that she had been carrying an unlicensed firearm failed to stick.

As a result of her detention, she said, the American Consulate in Mexico City revoked her visa to visit the United States.

Authorities describe Raquenel as someone far too close to the criminal life who has profited handsomely from dirty money.

And her work rate is prodigious. Each of the crosses nailed to the wall at the entrance of her office is from a client she has sprung from jail, Raquenel said. There are scores of them, too many to count.