More than a sixth of the cocaine consumed in France is smuggled into the bodies of drug mules from the poverty-stricken Guiana region of South America.
Women, some of them pregnant, and even children are among those who risk their lives for a few thousand euros (dollars) by swallowing tightly wrapped packets of the drug or hiding them in their body cavities.
“I had no choice. I needed the money,” said Tonio, 27, who, burdened by debt and jobless, took a flight to Paris with 800 grams of “Coke” in his stomach and hidden in his shoes.
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Having passed through the airport, he was caught at a train station and ended up in jail.
Thirty drug mules like him board each flight to France from the Guyana capital Cayenne, authorities estimate. The dealers, who can make a 1,000 percent profit on the drugs that pass through, simply flood the flights.
A kilogram (2.2 pounds) of cocaine bought for 4,500 euros ($4,835) in French Guiana, or 3,500 in neighboring Suriname, can be sold to traffickers in France for 35,000 euros, who then cut it up and sell it to their clients. for three times that.
The mules charge between 3,000 and 10,000 euros per trip, depending on what they carry.
“It’s not complicated, you just have to have the right contacts,” Tonio said.
And there is no shortage of candidates.
Despite being home to Europe’s spaceport, Guyana is plagued by extreme poverty and unemployment, a legacy of its history as a slave society and penal colony: the notorious Devil’s Island lies just off its coast.
Suriname, with which it shares a long jungle border that is almost impossible to police, is even poorer, with many of the former Dutch colony’s illegal immigrant drug mules.
Geography and poverty have made French Guiana “a narco-region and one of the main centers” of cocaine trafficking, authorities said. AFP.
A short distance from Colombia’s coca fields, an estimated one-fifth to one-sixth of the cocaine consumed in France passes through this sparsely populated region of the Amazon rainforest sandwiched mostly between Brazil and Suriname.
The mules’ center of operations is the town of Saint-Laurent on the wide, brownish Maroni River, which forms the border with Suriname for more than 500 kilometers (300 miles).
Without work or education – the education system cannot keep up with the city’s growing population of immigrants from Suriname – many of its 50,000 inhabitants are tempted by the easy money earned from smuggling cocaine.
Their perilous journeys to mainland France often begin just opposite Saint-Laurent du Maroni, in the small town of Albina, on the Surinamese side of the river.
It is there that many of the mules are loaded with cocaine.
Every day, hundreds of people from the French side cross the river in canoes to go shopping in Albina, where food and gasoline are cheaper.
The mules, like Julia and Lydia, return among the buyers.
“We knew the risks,” said Julia, a young mother of two from Suriname who spent two years in French prisons after her capture.
“It’s not a joyride… but when you have no choice, what can you do?” she said AFP.
“You go to jail and then they (the traffickers) leave you alone. I have paid my debt.”
Both she and her friend Lydia (both names have been changed at their request) are descendants of African slaves brought to Suriname by the Dutch.
“I had an empty apartment and I wanted to furnish it,” Lydia said in the local dialect, Taki-taki or Sranan, a mix of French, English and Dutch. “The traffickers promised me 15,000 euros if I took 3.5 kilos with me.”
Lydia was detained at the airport with 4.5 kilos of cocaine.
Some mules practice for the trip by swallowing small sausages, while others facilitate packets of cocaine with oil, soda, or okra. They were all capped with anti-diarrhea medication.
Once they’ve swallowed their cache, most make the three-hour drive to Cayenne airport in the shared taxis that ply the route.
Only one highway links the cities and the police often wait for them halfway in the sweltering heat of Iracoubo.
“We made several seizures in September, twice after stopping people on the road, and we got four kilos,” a junior officer there told AFP.
Almost half of those sets had been swallowed.
Most mules ride in the midday heat a few hours before check-in for Air France and Air Caraibes flights to mainland France.
“Once we have detained three in Iracoubo… I cannot detain more,” admitted Lieutenant Colonel Arnaud Amestoy, head of the area’s gendarmerie. “We need a lot more officers to be able to stop the flow.”
But the checkpoints are only the first obstacle the mules have to cross. Police and customs officers wait at the airport, and sometimes all passengers on a flight are searched.
They caught 512 mules in 2021, seizing 1.26 tons of cocaine.
Officers often only have a few minutes to identify suspects. The day AFP spent with the border force at the airport, a police dog sniffed out two young men.
The officers took them aside and a urine test for cocaine came back positive for one of them. He was arrested and taken to a secure unit of the Cayenne hospital for an X-ray.
If something turns up, “we activate the ‘buckshot protocol,'” said Dr. Karim Hamiche, who heads the special security room.
“The person will stay until the pellets are expelled, between 24 and 48 hours.”
Cocaine packets are sturdier than they used to be, but there’s still danger.
“In April, a 37-year-old man died in hospital after falling on the street in Cayenne,” Hamiche said.
“The autopsy found more than a kilo of cocaine inside his body.”
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the 305 passengers on the daily Air Caraibes flight from Cayenne disembark at Orly, Paris’s second airport.
A hesitant young man in a black jacket has attracted the attention of customs officers.
He is from Saint-Laurent du Maroni and has just turned 18.
After going to the bathroom, your luggage is X-rayed. The tension rises and a few moments later the suspect breaks down and takes a “bar” of cocaine weighing more than one kilo from his hood.
The young man breaks down in tears and admits to having swallowed packets of cocaine and having others hidden in his rectum.
He first said that he was going to sell them himself, before finally confessing that someone was waiting for the cocaine at the airport. He had been promised 8,000 euros for the trip.
Before Cayenne-Orly flights became their main route, mules were shipped mainly from Suriname by traffickers via Amsterdam Schiphol Airport. But the smuggling slowed when all the passengers passed through special scanners.
“As soon as we have a scanner here (at Cayenne airport), we will quickly solve the problem. In three or four months it will be a deterrent,” an official source told AFP.
The French interior minister has already indicated that a machine will be installed to scan everyone taking flights in Cayenne.
But many, like Cayenne attorney Saphia Benhamida, who represents some of the mules, believe it would be better to address the root of the problem.
“There will always be poor people here, so you will always have mules. You can’t check everyone at the airport. We’re not going to change things just by having more police,” he argued.
“If there were schools, jobs and adequate transportation in Saint-Laurent du Maroni,” that would also help, Benhamida insisted.
