Drug Mules

Women in the International Cocaine Trade

J. Fleetwood

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137271891
• eBook ISBN: 9781137271907
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the British Society of Criminology Book Prize, 2015 Fleetwood explores how women become involved in trafficking, focusing on the lived experiences of women as drug mules. Offering theoretical insights from gender theory and transnational criminology, Fleetwood argues that women's participation in the drugs trade cannot be adequately understood through the lenses of either victimization or agency.

1

Introduction: Cartels and Cocaine Queens

Melissa Reid and Michaella Connolly made headline news in the UK when they were arrested for attempting to smuggle 11.5 kilos of cocaine out of Peru in August 2013. Aged just 19 and 21, footage of their arrest by Peruvian authorities quickly became the focus of a media furore. Initially, media sympathetically reported families’ shocked reactions and neutrally relayed the young women’s claims of having been forced to carry packages of drugs (McMahon and McMenamy 2013; Strange 2013). Some went further, describing them as having been threatened at gunpoint by a one-eyed gangster known as ‘The Cockney’ who was part of a ‘cartel’ (Bucktin 2013; Evans and Couzens 2013).

Although the initial press reaction drew on tropes of the drug mule as a victim, media reports soon became skeptical. Much was made of the girls’ supposed party lifestyle, and most newspapers featured photographs of them partying in Ibiza (where they were working) gleaned from Facebook. Former Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe accused the ‘silly girls’ of ‘behaving with more self indulgence than responsibility’, like so many modern celebrities (ignoring the fact that neither woman appears to have much expendable income). Widdecombe gave no credence to their claims that they had been victimised (2013).¹ Though initially sympathetic, The Belfast Telegraph later published this vitriolic commentary:

If all had gone to plan, she [Connolly] would be lounging on a yacht by now, sipping champagne ... She knew what she was doing when she tried to board that flight in Peru. Was she thinking about the dangers of cocaine or the countless lives it has ruined? I doubt it ... She is not a shy girl, as evidenced by photos that she has posted on Facebook ... Everyone in the whole sordid coke supply chain makes a choice when they get involved. As so did Michaella Connolly when she got involved with something that will impact on her life and that of her family for a very long time. (Sweeney 2013)²

Whilst the extent of media coverage was of an unusually large scale, it drew on well-worn tropes about women’s involvement in drug trafficking: the innocent victim, and the knowing deceiver (Schemenauer 2013). These are worth discussing in detail as they fundamentally shape popular, political, and academic ‘imaginaries’ about women in drug trafficking (Young 1996).

When drug mules first came to public attention in the early 1990s, women’s participation was understood solely in terms of victimisation. In the United Kingdom and the United States, reports concentrated on black and ethnic minority women mules from ‘Third World’ countries. For example, The New York Times described a mother from Haiti who was ‘terrorised by thugs into strapping a pound of cocaine to her’ (Clines 1993). At the same time in the UK, The Guardian reported on the plight of foreign national mules, highlighting multiple aspects of women’s victimisation:

The burden of bringing up a family on a low income is often the motivation for the women to get involved. Before being arrested, many were unaware of the sentences they risked from four to 14 years. Some claimed they were duped into carrying bags through airports without knowing the contents. Others were clearly implicated by swallowing scores of condom packages of drugs, any of which would have been lethal if it split. (Carvel 1990; see also Gillan 2003)

Reports about young British teenagers in the 2000s reprise the theme of violent traffickers forcing women to transport drugs (Francis 2008; Ward 2008; Sturcke 2007). Discourse about drug mules as powerless victims corresponds with historically persistent discourses about female drug users as victims: naïve and exploited, victimised by both male dealers and drug addiction (Maher 1997; Anderson 2005). It also incorporates dualisms about nationhood and gender in which women are vulnerable and require protection from the (masculine) protective state against foreign men (Schemenauer 2012; Kohn 1992; Seddon 2008). Equally, the subtype of the female mule as victim fits neatly with the political and popular image of the drug trafficker as menacing, evil, and greedy (Green 1998; Reydburd 1994; Harper et al. 2000; Schemenauer 2012). Thus, the (female) drug mule as victim and (male) trafficker as exploiter have been conceptualised according to a gendered binary in which men are knowing and threatening and women are threatened and victimised. In short, there is a tendency to think of men as the brains of the business, and women as mere bodies bodies.

In addition to the victim discourse, women’s involvement has been increasingly seen as ‘equal’ to men’s. In 2010, The Miami Herald declared: ‘Women break through glass ceiling of drug dealing underworld’ in the headline of an article describing the arrest of two women who allegedly ran drug trafficking organisations (Reyes and Guillen 2010). Sandra Ávila Beltrán (nicknamed ‘The Queen of the Pacific’ by the press in her native Mexico) was described as a powerful player allegedly involved in laundering millions of dollars. Angela Sanclemente, a Colombian model, was allegedly the ‘queen pin’ of an international drug smuggling operation that employed female models as drug mules (CNN 2010). This article refers to them as ‘cocaine queens’ (see also Contreras 2007; Tuckman 2007) and attributes the apparent success of women in the cocaine trade to feminism.

Apparently the struggle for gender equality has been won not only in the legal world but also in the notoriously macho criminal underworld. Whilst on the one hand journalists claimed that women were as successful as men, they were also depicted as stereotypical femmes fatales (Jewkes 2009): ‘sexy’, ‘stylish’, and ‘graced with both charm and beauty’ (Contreras 2007; McKinley 2010). Drawing attention to their expensive tastes in fashion appears to be an attempt to denigrate their financial power and successes in the drug trade on the one hand, and on the other presents them as a caricature of the post-feminist consumer: ‘empowered’, selfish, and vain (Power 2009).

This post-feminist rhetoric has gained popular credence in the UK. Tony Thompson claims that Britain’s ‘girl gangsters are getting ready to fight their way to the top’ (Thompson 2010). Citing a diverse array of examples, from all-girl gangs named ‘Girls Over Men’ to Angela Sanclemente’s ‘all-women gang that smuggles cocaine’, Thompson’s message is clear: women’s participation in crime is the dark side of female liberation (ibid.). These same ideas underpin Sweeney and Widdecombe’s descriptions of Reid and Connolly as selfish: motivated by champagne and yachts (Sweeney 2013; Widdicombe 2013).

The idea that feminism is to blame for female offending is not new (Adler 1976; Chesney-Lind and Irwin 2008; van Wormer 2009), but it is a relatively recent development when it comes to explaining women’s involvement in organised crime and drug trafficking, which have long been considered a ‘man’s world’ (Adler 1993; Zhang et al. 2007). Nonetheless, this notion has clearly gained popular attention. Emancipation discourse appears to directly contradict long-standing victimisation discourse, yet they are both underpinned by binary notions of gender. Victimisation discourses tends to depict women as passive vessels for traffic; emancipation discourse still positions women as bodies by linking women’s success in trafficking to their sexuality (Schemenauer 2012). Further, as ‘vamps’ and gender deviants, such discourses also serve to render them equally punishable (Fleetwood 2011; Schemenauer 2012). These discourses are not only significant in shaping popular conceptions of women drug traffickers, but are also echoed by policy makers, sentencers, and criminal justice professionals (Schemenauer 2012; Fleetwood 2011). Media discourse is particularly important given that organised crime is extremely hidden. According to Dick Hobbs ‘As science fiction has been so influential in shaping our visions of alternative worlds and distant galaxies, so crime fiction, television and film mould our perspectives of the serious end of the crime spectrum’ (Hobbs 1995: 1; Hobbs 2013; del Olmo 1993).

This book examines the reality beyond these gendered stereotypes and in particular seeks to unpack the relationship between gender, agency, and victimisation in the context of the international cocaine trade. As the news articles at the start of the chapter indicate, questions of women’s agency and victimisation are popularly and politically salient. The same questions are also at the heart of international drug policy reform (Fleetwood and Haas 2011; UNCND 2009, 2011). Furthermore, questions about victimisation/agency and women’s offending connect with contemporary debates in feminist criminology. They play a central role in research and theory on women’s violence (Batchelor 2005; Chesney-Lind and Irwin 2008), drug dealing (Denton 2001; Dunlap et al. 1994; Grundetjern and Sandberg 2012; Maher 1997), and prostitution (Phoenix 2000; Agustín 2007; Matthews 1997; Benson and Matthews 1995) as well as other non-acquisitive deviant behaviour such as gang involvement (Batchelor 2011; Joe and Chesney-Lind 1995; Laidler and Hunt 2001; Morgan and Joe 1996; Miller 2001; Brotherton 1996; Young 2009). Nevertheless, these issues have not yet been examined in relation to women’s participation in the international drug trade.

Recently, feminist criminologists have drawn attention to global dimensions of inequality, and the need for transnational feminist approaches (Sudbury 2004, 2005a; Reynolds, 2008; Cain 2000; Cain and Howe 2008; Renzetti 2013; Radford and Tsutsumi 2004). This book therefore seeks to extend questions about victimisation, agency, and women’s offending in transnational crime by examining women’s participation in drug trafficking.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork spanning five years, this book forefronts women’s narratives to better understand their experiences as both agents and victims in the international cocaine trade. It aims to make women ‘sociologically visible’ (Stanley and Wise 1993) in an area where women’s participation is routinely downplayed, misunderstood, and misrepresented. This book explores how and why women become involved in trafficking, and whether their participation can be understood as the result of poverty, social structural disadvantage and victimisation, or agency and choice.

This book also explores the processes surrounding trafficking drugs to consider how (or indeed if) women are disadvantaged by their gender. It focuses on the smallest scale of gender: human interaction. Doing so is necessary to be able to ‘see’ gender, coercion, and agency. This is not to discount the significance of large- scale social structures and geo-politics; however, as Chapter 2 demonstrates, research at this ‘scale’ has been problematic in accounting for the possibility of women’s agency. In contrast, this book explores how individuals make sense of their worlds through narrative, and how coercion and threat come into being through social interaction.

The rest of this chapter offers a snapshot of the scale of women’s participation in the international cocaine trade, before explaining why and how fieldwork was undertaken in prisons in Ecuador. This chapter concludes with a summary of the main argument and content of each chapter.

Women’s participation in the international cocaine trade

Women’s involvement in trafficking as mules was first noted over 30 years ago (Cloyd 1982), and there are noted examples of women undertaking leading roles for nearly 100 years (Campbell 2008; Kohn 1992; Seddon 2008). The hidden nature of the drug trade makes statistical measurement very difficult. Nonetheless, quantitative data show that although the majority of people arrested for drug trafficking are men, women comprise a significant minority. Most recently, in 2011, the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs attempted to measure the scale of women’s participation globally and concluded:

Women represent about 20 per cent of drug traffickers arrested worldwide. ... Whilst there is evidence of an increasing number of drug-related crimes worldwide, the data suggest that involvement of women and girls in drug trafficking has not increased disproportionately in comparison with that of men.

Compiling such a figure is inevitably fraught with methodological problems (Fleetwood and Haas 2011; Thoumi 2005); nonetheless, this figure is close to national studies which consistently report that 20 to 30 per cent of those arrested for the importation/exportation of drugs are women (Albrecht 1996; Bjerk and Mason 2011; Dorn et al. 2008; Harper et al. 2000; Green et al. 1994; Huling 1995; Lawrence and Williams 2006; Sentencing Council 2011a; Unlu and Ekici 2012; Unlu and Evcin 2011).³ Women’s involvement is perhaps higher than might be expected given that, in general, women are much less likely to be involved in crime than their male counterparts, and tend to commit less serious crimes (Burman 2004; Gelsthorpe 2004). For example, women represent just 10 per cent of those sentenced for offences related to drug supply in England and Wales (Ministry of Justice 2012, table 1.3a).

Arrest data may under- or over-represent women (Anderson 2005). Ellie Schemenauer’s research found that customs agents in the US were influenced by popular discourses about drug mules that stereotype women as victims and vamps (2012). Some women may be more likely to be arrested than others due to racial bias in profiling (Ruggiero and South 1995: 116; also Green et al. 1994: 480; Lawrence and Williams 2006; Newsome 2003). Interestingly, medical/forensic data paint a similar picture. The majority of ‘body packers’ seen in hospitals are male (Heinemann et al. 1998; Traub et al. 2003), although Traub et al. also note increasing demographic diversification to include pregnant women and children (2003: 2519).

Thus, all data show that the crime of carrying drugs across borders for others cannot be considered particularly ‘female’. Whilst arrest data gives a useful snapshot of the scale of women’s involvement, it does not indicate what women were doing when they were arrested (Harper et al. 2000; Fleetwood and Haas 2011). Whilst it seems unlikely that many of them were ‘cocaine queens’, it is not possible to assume that all were mules either.. Since ‘drug trafficking’ is ambiguously defined, arrest data will include offences such as include possession, use, growing, selling, or transport of drugs (Gottwald 2006).

Perhaps confusingly, a variety of terms have been employed by researchers to describe those arrested with drugs at international borders, such as ‘drug importer’ (Green et al. 1994) and ‘courier’ (see for example Harper et al. 2000). These terms have mainly been used to report the findings of quantitative research reflecting the legal ambiguity of trafficking and drug offences. These data probably include independent entrepreneurs and people carrying drugs for their own consumption, as well as people carrying drugs for someone else (Green 1998). Qualitative researchers have used terms like ‘swallowers’, ‘body packers’, or boleros, referring to the method used to smuggle cocaine (Zaitch 2002). This adds detail about the method employed, but not their role. Caulkins et al. usefully distinguish between ‘self-employed couriers’ and ‘courier-employees’ on the basis of interview data from respondents (2009).

The term ‘mule’ has been used to refer specifically to those employed by others to carry drugs across borders (Campbell 2008; EMCCDA 2012; Metaal and Edwards 2009; Sevigny and Caulkins 2004), however the term has derogatory connotations which are acknowledge by lawyers (such as the Working Group of the Criminal Bar Association of England and Wales 2011: 3, fn 4), professionals and academics working in this area (Harris 2011). Given that the term ‘drug mule’ brings with it assumptions regarding the gender, nationality, and agency of the drug carrier, many academics and campaigners in this area have used the word ‘courier’ as a suitable replacement (Green 1996, 1998; UNCND 2009). Whilst acknowledging that the term ‘mule’ has problematic connotations, the word ‘courier’ arguably lacks methodological clarity since the term has been used to describe drug importers broadly (for example in studies describing arrest data), rather than solely those who carry for others (mules).

I use the term ‘mule’ throughout this book. Firstly, it marks out a methodological and conceptual distinction: a mule is someone who carries drugs across international borders for someone else. This is a specific role in the cocaine trade and differs greatly from self-employed couriers (Fleetwood 2011). Secondly, respondents used the term mule (including mules, and those who had recruited, employed, and managed mules). Thirdly, I disagree that the word ‘courier’ is necessarily less problematic. It suggests similarities with the work of legal couriers who escort important documentation or goods internationally, a job which is ironically much in decline as a result of the proliferation of the kinds of information technology that are thought to fuel the increase in illicit traffic (Findlay 1999). ‘Courier’ also suggests business discourse that I problematise in the next cha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Cartels and Cocaine Queens
• 2  Imagining Drug Trafficking: Mafias, Markets, Mules
• 3  What Do Women Talk about When They Talk about Trafficking?
• 4  Who Are the ‘Traffickers’?
• 5  For Money and Love: Women’s Narratives about Becoming Mules
• 6  Beginning Mule-work
• 7  Mule-work and Gender
• 8  Backing Out
• Conclusion: Women’s Offending in Global Context
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index