Profuse sweating betrayed Nicole Bartscher’s internal panic over having 4.5kg of cocaine strapped to her body as she negotiated her way through Lima’s international airport in 2010 for a flight to the Netherlands.
Policewomen took the heavyset hairdresser aside, told her to strip and found the drug packages bound to her torso and legs. After a body cavity search, they arrested Bartscher and shuttled her to a crowded holding cell, where she slept on the floor, hungry and cold.
However, the woman from Dortmund, Germany, said the suffering and humiliation did not end after her sentence was commuted and she was released in March last year.
Bartscher says she deserved prison for breaking the law, but her life has become a purgatory of poverty and stigmatization. No longer behind bars, she cannot support herself and cannot leave Peru until she has paid the US$2,410 fine she owes.
It is a plight common for foreigners desperate or foolhardy enough to try to smuggle cocaine out of Peru through its most vigilantly policed port of embarkation.
TRAPPED
Hundreds of foreign “drug mules” — authorities cannot provide a more specific number — are trapped in this Andean nation that recently surpassed Colombia as the world’s No. 1 cocaine producer.
Until their parole runs its course, they have paid court-mandated fines and navigated bureaucracies to obtain resolutions of rehabilitation and expulsion, they are stuck in Peru. The process can take years.
Getting the expulsion certificate alone can take four months, said Sister Maria, a nun and lawyer who works with the mules. She refused to give her last name.
While most of the mules are men, a growing number are women, who find the limbo of parole especially trying. Few paroled female drug couriers manage to get jobs. Most say they opted for smuggling to begin with because they were in financial freefall.
Many are forced to live off charity and some days even go hungry.
“A lot of girls prostitute themselves,” Bartscher said.
There is little sympathy from the Peruvian government, which offers no financial help, work visas or plane tickets home.
“The state can’t be the social welfare service of everyone,” said prosecutor Juan Mendoza, who manages money-laundering prosecutions and previously handled drug mule cases. “Citizens who commit crimes need to find ways to readapt and re-socialize.”
The plight of female drug mules in Peru got international attention last year when two women, one Irish and one Scottish, were caught trying to smuggle 10.4kg of cocaine to Spain. They also pleaded guilty, and got the same sentence as Bartscher — six years and eight months.
In Peru, drug mule sentences range from that minimum to 15 years. However, inmates must stay in the country, even if paroled, until their full sentence ends and they have paid their fines.
In Spain, by contrast, the crime is punishable by three to nine years, and first-time offenders who get the minimum can be paroled in 18 months.
“It’s torture for us,” the 40-year-old Bartscher said, sitting on a bench at the downtown convent where she lives, cigarette in hand.
“Just let us leave is all I ask. We are free, but this is just another prison,” she added.
Bartscher lives with nine other paroled female drug mules at the Roman Catholic convent on a street chaotic with honking horns and choking exhaust.
Another convent houses female parolees in a high-crime district of Callao, by the airport.
SEEKING WORK
Bartscher, who studied music at Muenster University and likes to sing opera, earns only about US$70 a month by baking and selling cakes. She said her ex-husband left her for her best friend, but sends a little money every three months. She and other parolees say they are denied work because they are foreigners, and potential employers are suspicious.
Those that do offer work can be cheats, the women say.
Bartscher said she was denied wages after working for a month in a clothing store.
Ana Maria Imedio, a 48-year-old Spaniard who lost her home and job in the 2009 financial crash, worked six weeks knitting sweaters before realizing her employer had no intention of paying her, she said.
Ninety percent — or 1,483 — of foreigners currently in Peruvian prisons are in for drug trafficking and 253 are women, nearly all arrested as drug mules, according to statistics from October last year, the latest available, from the Peruvian Bureau of Prisons.
Peruvians call the mules burriers a fusion of “burro” and “courier” in this country of considerable Anglophile influence.
About half are European, and a growing number are female.
The women are principally from Spain, Mexico, Thailand and Philippines, in that order, according to the bureau. They are mainly from lower middle-class or poor economic backgrounds.
Bartscher said she ventured the risk because she could not make ends meet. She was to get nearly US$15,000 — a relatively small cut of the more than US$100,000 her load would have fetched in Europe.
She said she now regrets the crime, which also cost her friends in Germany.
“I don’t think any of them will forgive me,” Bartscher said.
Imedio also had her sentence commuted, but cannot leave Peru until she pays the fine of US$1,600.
She barely earns enough to eat by selling purses on Lima’s street and says a generous friend saved her last month from sleeping on the beach by offering to share her downtown room at no cost.
Spain assists its citizens while they’re imprisoned — Imedio got 60 euros (US$82) a month — but the money stops when they get out on parole.
Those who cannot pay can try to get their fines forgiven in court.
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