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More than a sixth of the cocaine consumed in France is smuggled inside the bodies of drug mules from its poverty-stricken South American region of Guiana.
Women — some of them pregnant — and even children are among those who risk their lives for a few thousands euros (dollars) by swallowing tightly wrapped packages of the drug, or hiding them in their body cavities.
“I had no other option. I needed the money,” said 27-year-old Tonio, who — weighed down with debt and with no work — took a flight to Paris with 800 grams of “coke” in his stomach and hidden in his shoes.
Having got through the airport, he was caught in a train station and ended up in jail.
Thirty drug mules like him board every flight to France from Guiana’s capital Cayenne, the authorities reckon. Traffickers — who stand to make a 1,000 percent profit on the drugs that get through — simply swamp 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 dealers in France for 35,000 euros, who then cut it and sell it on to their customers for three times that.
The mules get between 3,000 and 10,000 euros per trip, depending on how much they carry.
“It’s not complicated, you just have to have the right contacts,” said Tonio.
And there is no shortage of candidates.
Despite being home to Europe’s Spaceport, Guiana is plagued by extreme poverty and unemployment, a legacy of its history as a slave society and prison colony — the notorious Devil’s Island is 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 drug mules illegal immigrants from the former Dutch colony.
Geography and poverty have made French Guiana “a narco region and one of the main hubs” of the cocaine trade, officials told AFP.
Within striking distance of the Colombian coca fields, between a fifth and a sixth of cocaine consumed in France is estimated to pass through this thinly-populated region of mostly Amazonian jungle sandwiched between Brazil and Suriname.
The centre of the mule operations is the town of Saint-Laurent on the wide, brown Maroni River which forms the border with Suriname for more than 500 kilometers (300 miles).
Without work or schooling — the education system can’t keep up with the town’s growing population of migrants from Suriname — many of its 50,000 inhabitants are tempted by the easy money to be made from smuggling cocaine.
