Every day they come. Drug mules from French Guiana in South America, carrying cocaine in their luggage or their stomachs, playing a cat-and-mouse game with customs officials at Paris Orly Airport.
Some get caught. Some do not. The risks are high, but they have little to lose.
In the customs office, 31-year-old “Henriette” waits on a plastic chair. Her name, and those of other mules in this report, have been changed to protect their identities.
Arrested on arrival, Henriette sits with her arms folded, head hanging, expressionless. Next to her, a large pink suitcase in which a scan revealed suspicious dark shapes.
An agent opens the case.
“There are only T-shirts ... it’s autumn here Madam,” she says.
Henriette, sporting a black T-shirt, does not reply: She does not speak a word of French, only one of a clutch of local languages used in Guiana, a French overseas department.
The agent pulls out seven packets marked as Asian seaweed.
“This is not complicated: It should be light and soft, but it is compact and weighs more than a kilo,” says an agent with a skeptical air who goes on to unwrap the packages and remove their outer layers of algae to reveal black, brick-shaped parcels.
Officers had detained Henriette because her hands were trembling as she gripped the handlebar of her luggage trolley.
Jean-Pierre, 21, was brought in because he had a “robotic gait” typical of people who tape cocaine bullets to their thighs or insert it into their rectums.
The Cayenne-Orly route, with two incoming flights per day, has become the most popular air passage for South American cocaine to France: Last year, 1,349 mules in or from Guiana were arrested, double the 2017 number.
With an estimated eight to 10 smugglers per flight, the drug gangs are trying to “saturate the control capacities” of French customs, customs official Olivier Gourdon said.
Some among the mules are “sacrificed,” given only hand luggage which means they will go through customs first, with only a bit of product, poorly disguised.
Sometimes they are given up in an anonymous call — all to distract customs officials while those with the bigger hauls slip through.
Costing about 5,000 euros (US$5,550) in Guiana, 1kg of the drug is sold for seven times that in France to dealers who can double their investment by hawking to individual clients.
Sometimes, the smugglers are made to ingest their cargo. If caught, they are taken to the Hotel-Dieu Hospital in Paris where they pass, under supervision, the drug-filled bullets they swallowed.
Nine rooms are reserved for this laborious and undignified task, under the watchful eye of doctors, police and lawyers.
After three days and with the help of a pink laxative gel, 26-year-old Sylvain has expelled all 49 cocaine pellets he had in his body, crouched over a toilet bowl with no flush mechanism.
Long gone are the days of swallowing cocaine stuffed into condoms — today’s smugglers have gone high-tech. All the Guiana pods are the same: small, black, heat-sealed capsules about 3cm wide.
Those willing to risk their health, lives and future are mainly poor, unemployed Guianans in their 20s with “no understanding of the death risk,” said a nurse who has heard many stories.
At a court in the Paris suburb of Creteil, which has jurisdiction over the Orly airport region, at least two or three smugglers appear every day. The court generally imposes a sentence of about one year per kilo of cocaine smuggled.
When Henriette appears, the judge talks of the dangers of cocaine to French society, while her lawyer highlights the misery of Guiana’s “neglected” youth.
A lenient punishment for her 8kg: Henriette gets two years’ jail time at Fresnes Prison south of Paris, where half the inmates are female Guianan drug mules.
Three months pregnant, and with eight other children in Guiana, she will give birth in prison.
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