Laura Gozzi | Contributing Editor
While bored at work this summer, I started looking for new, interesting ways of procrastinating that wouldn’t make me feel as stupid and ignorant as most of my other distractions (read TV series) had so far. I opened a new tab and browsed and browsed and browsed, until I came across a series that was to deprive me of all my sleep for the following two weeks. National Geographic’s Locked Up Abroad is a “docu-drama” series that premiered in 2006, and that has been running ever since, with considerable success all over the world. In the series, various people who have been arrested, usually on drug charges and in countries not exactly renowned for the leniency of their legal systems, narrate their experiences in the horror of Colombian, Pakistani, or Mexican prisons; with an entertaining abundance of dramatic facial expressions by the actors who impersonate them. I slowly got addicted to the series because for once, I knew the stories being told were true. The episodes always followed roughly the same storyline. Small-town-induced despair, meetings with strange men who seem to have it all, dodgy proposals of flying to the other side of the world, all expenses paid; in exchange for a couple of kilos of heroin or cocaine hidden in the lining of a suitcase or in bulletproof vests. The wannabe-drug smugglers invariably get caught and jailed in the country they’d tried to bring the drugs out of – hence the name. So, at first, the series was pure, mindless entertainment. Then I started Googling the people who had told their stories in the episodes – because they were all real people, most of whom were now back to their lives in the Western world; but whose names had all appeared, at one time or the other, in a national newspaper.
“The foreigner was meant to get caught all along: he was unwillingly used as a decoy to distract the airport’s security attention from the actual, experienced smuggler; who goes unnoticed while carrying a greater amount of drugs.”
And so I found out about Brigene Young, a young South African woman who was jailed in Mauritius for seven years for having tried to smuggle heroin in the wedges of her shoes; I read up about Roisin Savage, an Irish woman who claims she was tricked into carrying cocaine back to Ireland; and Erik Aude, an American actor who “fought for years to stay alive” in Karachi’s prisons after being caught with opium in his suitcase. I became strangely intrigued by the whole business, and gradually started looking for information about “casual” drug trafficking.
I found out that the occurrences mentioned above are by no means exceptional, nor are they the fruit of the imagination of National Geographic producers. In 2010, the British Foreign Office declared that of the 2,582 Britons imprisoned abroad, although a large percentage are in the US, many can also be found in Peru, Thailand and Jamaica. Most are white men and more than a thousand are imprisoned on drug charges. But what do these people think when they take up “jobs” that could potentially ruin their lives?
One common reflection amongst drug smugglers is that they would have not been sent to do the job unless it was virtually risk-free. As one of the people interviewed by National Geographic said, “The big drug lords don’t want you to get caught and not be able to carry their drugs back to Europe, right?” Wrong. In many cases, foreigners are seen as gullible and their lives as dispensable. They are made to believe that they are carrying the whole load of drugs in their suitcase or on themselves, and that everything will go smoothly – sometimes the drug dealers even assure the part-time smugglers that the airport authorities have been bribed to let them through the security checks without stopping them. And so the hopeful foreigners who have agreed to do the job set off to the airport in a state of relative calm, confident that they are the key pieces in the business and that every detail has been taken care of; that in no time they will be back home, and that everything will be back to normal, except they will be more tanned, and richer. The inexperienced foreigner walks into the airport, smiles confidently at the girl at the check-in desk and winks at the security guard standing by the body scanner, supposedly his partner in crime, who sternly stares back at him before body-searching him. The guard immediately feels the packages tied around the leg, or notices a strange shadow while X-raying the suitcase. He raises his eyebrows at the foreigner. The foreigner smiles back, convinced that the guard is merely a good actor, and that he is in on it too. A half an hour later, the foreigner is handcuffed in a dirty airport cell, trying to come to terms with what just happened – and with the idea that the country he finds himself in enforces life sentences for drug-related offences. Back by the security scanners in the entrance hall, the real drug smuggler – a local, not a naive foreigner – carrying twenty-five kilos of drugs in his suitcase, proceeds undisturbed through the checks, all the way to his gate. The foreigner was meant to get caught all along: he was unwillingly used as a decoy to distract the airport’s security attention from the actual, experienced smuggler; who goes unnoticed while carrying a greater amount of drugs. (It is actually not uncommon for drug lords to tip off the police in order to protect themselves from further investigation.) The foreigner is thrown in a prison and forgotten about. But the drug trade goes on without him.
There exists a certain popular cliché about drug smugglers: big, scary, dodgy guys dressed in black, talking in a foreign accent of some sort and looking suspicious. Yet a quick Google search makes it obvious that the average British or Irish first-time drug smuggler is usually a fairly young and naive man or woman who, tempted by the idea of a free holiday in an exotic location and a cash reward, decides to take time off work or studying to fly overseas and get the job done. In the interviews with National Geographic, most swear that they had no idea what they were getting themselves into, some even had to check where the country that they were being sent to was on a map. Nearly all of them thought it would be a one off. Few stopped to think that the probable consequences of their decisions could last for a lifetime.
In a South American prison, life is stops being a right and becomes a privilege.
How do you go from being a normal, average citizen in a first-world country to being threatened with a knife by your Thai cellmate? “People make mistakes”, admits Zainab Amer, of the British charity Prisoners Abroad, “especially when they are in a desperate financial state, and have no idea of what they are getting themselves into.”
There is also a problem of ignorance when it comes to the risks one can face in faraway countries. “People are uninformed”, says Joanna Joyce of the Irish Council for Prisoners Overseas. “They think that the Irish government will be able to bring them home if anything happens to them abroad; but in these cases, no one can intervene. There is nothing to be done”. Many set off to their destinations without knowing what they are getting involved in. They simply do not know that certain countries in Asia enforce the death penalty for drug-related crimes; or that in Peru, even a minimal quantity of drugs in one’s suitcase can signify six years and eight months in prison. A young American man who went to Jamaica planning to bring some marijuana back to New York was surprised when he realised that, even in Kingston, the drug is illegal: “This is a thing here?”, he claims he realised once he got there. “You mean weed is not just cool?” It’s safe to assume that if people were better informed about what the real risks of getting into “the business” were, fewer would be willing to take the risk.
If the smugglers themselves do not necessarily fit the stereotype, the prisons they get sent to could certainly feature in the grimiest Hollywood film about the hell that is imprisonment in developing countries. Ms. Amer talked to me about the Peruvian prisons she visited: “They are overcrowded and structured exactly as you would imagine them – with a central patio and the cells all around it, where the prisoners spend most of their day. The patio would have a capacity of eighty people, but there are about two hundred inmates. The overcrowding leads to all sorts of problems – one of the most serious being frequent tuberculosis outbreaks.”
South American prisons are well-known for being particularly tough: inmates have to pay for everything, from food to drinking water to a mattress to sleep on. “The prisons are often ruled by the prisoners rather than the guards, who do not even attempt to control the prisoners and merely make sure that no one escapes”, says Joanna Joyce. Because of the length of the sentences in developing countries, prisons often become microcosms of people who create a new life for themselves within the four walls of the jail. Small economies made out of sexual favours and money sent in by the families thrive. Drugs and weapons can be found anywhere. Often, the prisons themselves are more dangerous than the streets around them – even in cities such as Bangkok or Bogota – and prison gangs are in a permanent state of war among each other. For Irish and British prisoners, who often do not speak the language nor understand the culture, even one day in a South American or Asian prison can be life-threatening. And with some sentences being up to twenty years, there is plenty of time to lose all hope and slip into drug addiction and alcoholism. Life stops being a right, and becomes a privilege.
Conditions in the prisons are so dire that it seems incredible that the vast majority of the foreigners who end up there make it back. But even then, what awaits them is a life shaped by their crime. “The period of adjustment is very difficult. Some people get back to their families and friends, but many of them have been away for so long that they find themselves to be completely cut off from society. Some have to deal with addiction issues and illnesses such as HIV that they contracted in prison”, Ms. Joyce tells me. “It’s such a horrible situation. You may have been tricked into carrying the drugs, you may have fully repented, and yet the criminal record for drug trafficking stays for the rest of your life, making it hard to find a job or insurance or even relationships, as anyone who becomes legally involved with someone that has been convicted for such a serious offence has to declare it.”
Thousands of people get caught trying to smuggle drugs from one country or hemisphere to the other, and end up paying for it. But one is naturally led to wonder about all the other hundreds of thousands who do make it through the security checks and scans and detectors and dogs. Do they just expel the condoms full of cocaine they had ingested, or cut off the packages of heroin that had been tied around their bodies, or rip the lining of the suitcases where the marijuana had been hidden, to then collect the money that they had been promised, and go about their lives? Or do they do it again and again until their luck runs out? How many of the drugs one might come across have been smuggled across the world by people who are just like the ones National Geographic interviewed – except luckier?
The business might work for some but they naturally keep quiet about it. Not like the ones who do get caught and spend years teetering between life and death on the other side of the world, wondering how they ended up there. Those ones tell their stories so that no one else ever makes that kind of life-altering mistake again. Both representatives of the two charities for prisoners abroad had only one thing to say when told that a student newspaper would be covering the issue of “casual” drug smuggling: “[Tell the students,] Don’t do it. You lose your family, your dignity, your youth, and your health. It’s not worth it. Nothing is.”
