Pubdate: Sun, 22 May 2005
Source: San Diego Union Tribune (CA)
Copyright: 2005 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
Contact:  http://www.uniontrib.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/386
Note: Does not print LTEs from outside it's circulation area.
Author: Sandra Dibble, Staff Writer
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/women.htm (Women)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/prison.htm (Incarceration)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Mexico

The Other War

SMUGGLERS' BLUES

Mexican Women Recruited As Narcotics Couriers Often End Up in Prison, Where 
They Become Forgotten Soldiers in Drug Fight

TIJUANA - There was something odd about the young woman who flew in alone 
from Guanajuato state. Her face was thin, but her body was not. When she 
went to claim her luggage at A.L. Rodriguez International Airport, Mexican 
federal agents pulled her aside and discovered her secret.

Beneath a loosefitting red outfit, the slender 31-year-old had concealed 
more than 10 pounds of heroin, a quantity that would be worth at least 
$400,000 on the U.S. retail market.

Fabiola Flores Sandria would seem an unlikely drug smuggler. A single 
mother of two, she had no criminal record before her March 17 arrest with 
26,000 pesos - about $2,300 - and five packets of a dense, 
dark-coffee-colored paste strapped to her body. But this was her fifth such 
mission to Tijuana on behalf of a drug ring - apparently all-female - based 
in Apatzingan, Michoacan, according to Mexican law enforcement authorities.

Growing numbers of women are being recruited as drug couriers, they say. 
The women typically come from central Mexican states such as Michoacan, 
Nayarit, Guerrero - where marijuana and heroin poppies are grown in 
abundance largely to supply the U.S. demand.

The women are often single mothers with low incomes, easy prey for the 
offers of drug-trafficking groups seeking to move their product to the border.

"They started telling me that I would get ahead, that I could fix my 
house," said Rosa Maria Morales Rivera, 43, who had been supporting five 
children on her hotel-maid wages. "I wouldn't have to be killing myself in 
the hotel, washing and making up rooms and ironing when my back pain was 
unbearable."

Amid the spectacular headlines of the drug war, these women are overlooked. 
Their capture merits only passing mention in news accounts. No one 
celebrates their exploits in narcocorridos. They're cut off by the people 
who sent them, and the women rarely speak out, fearful of repercussions for 
those back home. They spend years behind bars and are lucky to have 
families still waiting when they get out.

They are the drug trade's beasts of burden, women known as mulas, or mules, 
who tape packets to their bodies or carry them in suitcases with hidden 
compartments. And when they are caught, the punishment is severe. Because 
they crossed a state line, the minimum - and typical - sentence is 10 
years, though they can face up to 25. Prosecutors and agents say it is what 
they deserve.

"I wasn't thinking of the consequences; I wasn't thinking of anything," 
said Bertha Alicia Urena, 47, of Tepalcatepec, Michoacan, behind bars since 
her arrest at the Tijuana airport Dec. 29, 1995.

The words flowed quickly during a recent interview at Tijuana's La Mesa 
State Penitentiary as the widowed mother of 11 told of the nephew who 
recruited her, the fear she felt as she boarded a bus to Guadalajara, then 
flew for the first time, to Tijuana, with a package concealed between her 
legs. Her voice broke only when she spoke about her children.

"I was scared to death," said Urena, who had been working as a cook at a 
Catholic convent school. "But I never thought that they could catch me and 
I'd do so much time."

A U.S. film last year, "Maria Full of Grace," described the perils faced by 
young Colombian women who swallow sealed heroin pellets and fly to New York 
City. Written and directed by Joshua Marston, the movie is based on the 
real-life stories of women from rural Colombia recruited to carry drugs.

The details are different - the women in the film don't end up in prison - 
but the motivations of the Mexican women echo those of their Colombian 
counterparts. The seven female inmates who told their stories recently at 
La Mesa had been a hotel maid, a school janitor, a waitress, a school 
cafeteria cook, a tortilla-shop employee, a vendor of beauty supplies and a 
food-stand worker.

Two professed innocence, insisting they did not know they were carrying 
drugs. But the others spoke of poverty and desperation, and the dream that 
led them to commit the crime: a house that doesn't leak, medical help for a 
family member, a used pickup for getting to work and driving around with 
friends.

"We do this sometimes out of necessity, even though that doesn't make it 
right," Urena said.

They said they are trying to make the best of their new lives inside the 
three-story concrete cellblock known as Building 7. Some have learned to 
read, others to knit. They are studying the Bible, taking exercise classes, 
doing housework, watching television, weeping as they follow the Mexican 
soap opera "La Madrastra," which is about a woman who spent 20 years in 
jail for a crime she didn't commit.

Bertha Felix, 36, of Tepic, Nayarit, agreed to carry just over a pound of 
heroin for the promise of nearly $1,100. She said she was earning a little 
more than $50 a week at her janitor's job and needed to pay for medical 
treatment for her mother, who was dying of lung cancer. So on Nov. 30, 
2001, she took a flight from Guadalajara with two packets of a dark-brown 
substance that a stranger had attached to her abdomen in a hotel room in Tepic.

"I knew it was something bad," said Felix, but she didn't know it was heroin.

It was her first trip, she said. And it was her last.

She is a small woman with the sturdy, graceful build of a gymnast who keeps 
photographs of the son and daughter she said goodbye to six years ago, 
telling them she was going on an overnight errand.

Today the former elementary school janitor is serving a 10-year sentence 
and shares a cell with six women. Felix stays fit with aerobics classes, 
volunteers in the women's cafeteria and earns money by washing the clothes 
of other inmates. Last year, she said proudly, she was able to send home 
500 pesos, about $45.

Since Felix's arrest, her mother has died and her daughter, now 20, has 
become a mother. Her son, 15, has stayed in school and earns money teaching 
soccer.

"The hardest thing is not seeing my children," said Felix, who dreams of 
one day working in the United States.

She is one of some 400 female inmates housed in Building 7 at La Mesa; the 
total prison population is 5,800. There are close to three dozen women like 
her who are serving sentences for the federal crime of transporting a 
narcotic across state lines. Thirty-seven more are there for the lesser 
crime of possession.

Francisco Jimenez, director of the prison, says the women got the 
punishment they deserve.

"They poisoned a lot of people with what they've done," he said. "Drugs 
tear apart the social fabric. They destroy families, break up marriages; 
they cause young people to go astray."

To reach the U.S. border from the fields of central Mexico and slip past 
police roadblocks and checkpoints, smugglers use a wide range of methods. 
Drugs may come hidden inside compartments of cars and trucks, or mailed in 
packages carried by couriers, or smuggled by bus and airline. They may be 
flown inside private planes or carried up the coast by speedboats or 
fishing trawlers.

Traffickers must find ways to move marijuana, cocaine, heroin and crystal 
methamphetamine. Because of its bulk, marijuana is often driven inside 
large vehicles such as trucks and tractor-trailers, say Mexican 
investigators. Cocaine typically is shipped in smaller vehicles, they say. 
But because of its light weight and high value, heroin is almost always 
moved to the border by airplane, often by passengers who conceal it under 
their clothes.

A few years ago, female smugglers were a rarity. But now they make up about 
half of arrests, said a Mexican law enforcement source.

"They say women are more reliable than men: They don't talk. They keep a 
low profile. They're loyal," the source said, speaking on condition of 
anonymity because of the strict public-comment policy of federal law 
enforcement agencies.

Women occasionally will claim they were coerced into carrying the 
narcotics, and one veteran prosecutor said the women are sometimes enticed 
through a boyfriend. But more often, they are women who are struggling 
alone to support themselves and their families, said Francisco Martin 
Hernandez, head of the public defender's office in Tijuana.

"They are used by criminal organizations, exploited because of their 
poverty and their need, and while many of them fall, the powerful heads are 
rarely touched," Hernandez said.

Defending them is difficult because they are caught in the act, with the 
drugs strapped to their bodies, he said. But even prosecutors agree that 
occasionally women are duped into transporting the drugs. One of them told 
of the 2003 arrest of a woman carrying 300 grams of heroin inside a 
tortilla maker; charges were eventually dropped after she convinced a judge 
that she didn't know the drugs were inside.

Last year, Josefina Ceron Rodriguez, 36, of Atoyac de Alvarez, Guerrero, 
was unable to persuade the court that she didn't know two packets of heroin 
were in her suitcase when she flew to Tijuana. The widowed mother of three, 
who is learning to read and write, said she was going to the border last 
Sept. 12 to meet a friend who promised he would help her cross for work in 
the United States. She said she needed money to buy an $800 leg brace for 
her brain-damaged daughter, Luz Elena, 7.

But instead, she is at La Mesa, serving a 10-year sentence and longing for 
home: "I dream that I am back there, and I wake up and, well, I am here."

Fabiola Flores first told agents that threats to harm her family prompted 
her to fly to Tijuana with packets of heroin. Two people had approached her 
in a market in Mexico City, and she agreed to the trip, she said.

But Mexican investigators who later interrogated her tell a different 
story. This was her fifth trip to the border, they say. To get her load, 
Flores would take a bus to Apatzingan, Michoacan. The city of 100,000 is at 
the center of La Tierra Caliente, an area widely known for drug production.

Arriving in Apatzingan, Flores walked from the central bus station to a 
house 10 blocks away, they say. At the house, Flores would encounter only 
women, according to the investigation. The ringleader was a woman she knew 
only as "La Lupe" or "La Guera." There, she was fitted with the packets, 
given 30,000 pesos in cash - about $2,700 - and told to take a bus back to 
Mexico City and then to Leon, Guanajuato. From there, she would fly to 
Tijuana and deliver the packets to a woman who would find her at the airport.

Because Flores has not yet been sentenced, state officials would not grant 
access for an interview at La Mesa State Penitentiary, and attempts to 
contact her private attorney were unsuccessful. Baja California prison 
officials allowed interviews only with those who have been convicted, 
including two sisters from Apatzingan.

Rosa Maria Morales has been in jail since April 11, 1999, when she was 
caught on what she said was her third trip to Tijuana. She said she was her 
family's sole support after her husband abandoned them, and their small 
house was precarious shelter.

"When it rained, we weren't sure if we were inside or outside because we'd 
get wet from above and from below where the water seeped in," she said.

Relatives were too poor to help, but then a former neighbor stepped forward 
and connected Morales with a group of smugglers. She offers few details, 
except to say that she went to a house where women fitted the packets of 
drugs to her body. She would fly from Morelia to Tijuana, take a cab to a 
hotel and turn over the packets to a male contact.

"I knew it was drugs, but I didn't know what kind," said Morales, who looks 
older than her 43 years. "I never saw it."

Two and a half years later, on Nov. 28, 2001, it was her younger sister's 
turn. Divorced, with two children to support, Maria Elena Morales said she 
couldn't make ends meet. They were living with her father, and she hoped 
for a house of their own.

At a party, she met a couple who offered to help her out, paying her $2,500 
to fly with drugs to the border. She was arrested on her second trip, she 
said; a Mexican military report of her arrest states that she was carrying 
eight packets containing 11.3 pounds of heroin and 4.8 pounds of crystal 
methamphetamine.

Maria Elena Morales said she never heard from the couple who recruited her. 
Now she shares Cell 205-C with her older sister and four other women, 
including Bertha Urena, the mother of 11 from Tepalcatepec.

The older sister is hoping to get out of jail under a new federal law that 
allows early release for those convicted of certain crimes after they have 
served three-fifths of their sentences. The younger one has been 
petitioning for a transfer to Michoacan so she can be closer to home.

"I try to make the best of it," said Maria Elena, who plays basketball, 
volleyball and soccer.

Trim and athletic at 38, she exuded the energy of an aerobics teacher - 
until she spoke about her son and daughter.

"I thought it was only going to be two or three days, and I would be back 
together with them," she said as she wept.

For Urena, getting caught was a tragedy but also an opportunity. Since 
arriving at La Mesa, she has learned to read and write. She said she has 
found God, worships daily and shares her faith her fellow female inmates.

"I am a new person, with a new outlook," she said.

Because men and women were able to mix at the prison when Urena first 
arrived, she met a man and had her 11th child behind bars. He was released 
a year after they met and has taken charge of their son. The two are in 
Tijuana, waiting for her to join them tomorrow, when she expects to be 
released seven months early for good behavior. Her 10 older children are 
also waiting, in Michoacan and Tijuana.

Urena still loves to cook and hopes to open a food stand once she's out.

"It's a very beautiful story," she said. "I thank God every day and every 
minute." 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake