GLOBALY WANISHING HUMANITY

SEXISM IN PRISONS Penitentiaries are full of women who, in search of love or money, have been arrested for drug trafficking Women victims of drug cartels are very similar: poor and without a source of livelihood. Most were caught by police, although they did not even know they were carrying drugs By: Snježana PavićPublished: August 18, 2020 9:50 p.m. 8501883 AFP Facebook Twitter Messenger E-mail RELATED NEWS 8172189 AN AMAZING STORY Who was the queen of cocaine, colder than Escobar, about whom J. Lo is preparing a film spectacle DRUGS Passengers with opiates roam the south of Croatia: In a week, the police found 33 people with drugs Twenty-one-year-old Indonesian Yuni calmly put her bag in front of a customs officer at Hong Kong airport. A moment later, when she saw the bag dissolve under his scalpel and reveal the glittering powder, she realized she had been deceived. She ended up in jail for drug smuggling. Hours before she took off from the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, a man gave her the bag. She needed a job, and he was supposed to be her new boss. There’s clothes in the bag, he said, and he’ll get $ 1,000 if he takes it to Hong Kong. There were two kilograms of methamphetamine in the bag, worth $ 140,000. Yuni ended up in prison in a part of the world where drug trafficking is punishable by life imprisonment or death. As the countries of East and Southeast Asia tighten measures against drug trafficking, it closes full of women. As many as 82 percent of women in prisons in Thailand ended up there for drugs, as did 53 percent of Filipino women sentenced to prison. As the job becomes more dangerous so the bosses recruit more and more women: young, poor, in a difficult existential situation. The Indonesian woman arrested at the airport in Hong Kong could not say anything about the origin of the drug: the guy who gave her the bag she had just met, told her his name was Peter. It was supposed to be her boss, and the trip from Cambodia to Hong Kong was supposed to be the first task in a new job arranged for her by a compatriot. Yuni later realized that it was very stupid to accept that bag without even looking at what was in it. But the fact that her prints were not found in the bag helped convince the judges that she had no idea what she was carrying. She went with the police to the hotel where she was to meet the person who would pick up the bag. No one came. Today, Southeast Asia is the center of the world trade in methamphetamine, a "heavy" $ 61 billion a year in the Asia-Pacific region alone. Former opium poppy fields have given way to secret laboratories because the demand for synthetic drugs exceeds the demand for heroin. Hong Kong is a major transit point. Women used as mules, as often reluctant drug traffickers, are sentenced to 14 to 20 years in prison, Linklaters (Penlaters for Penal Reform International) reports. Police are arresting small fish, warns John Wotherspoon , a priest who has been helping arrested drug smuggling victims in Hong Kong for the past seven years. Smugglers are skilled at finding people who are in trouble, desperately need money and it is easy to deceive them. At the top of the pyramid are men, and at the bottom, where earnings are lowest and risk is greatest, women are increasingly common. Testimonials Since 2013, Father John has been asking inmates to write about their experiences and then post those testimonies on his blog. He travels and searches for evidence to help deceived women. When the priest showed Indonesian Yuni a photo of Peter , the guy who gave her the bag and sent her on a plane to Hong Kong, Yuni reacted with tears and anger. John flew to Cambodia to find Peter because 21-year-old Yuni was not the only victim of that man. He was unable to find him, but the priest told the police, women's rights associations and the media everything he learned. He hopes that the story will reach as many people as possible, so that fewer and fewer girls will be caught in the trap. Thanks to the help of a priest, Yuni is free, as is another girl who fell into the same trap two years earlier. The same Indonesian woman introduced her to him and Peter gave her a bag to take with her, and he would come after her. With the proviso that this girl was not looking for a job, but for a new love that would help her get out of an unhappy marriage. Romantic Peter took her to jail and then disappeared, but the unfortunate girl after two and a half years with a lot of luck managed to get out. Four months later, she testified at the trial of Indonesian Yuna. For a very long time, gender has been a blind spot in our understanding of criminal law, Delphine Lourtau told CNN. She analyzed gender inequality in the prosecution of women for drug trafficking. Among other things, women have less access to legal aid and bail money. Often women caught with drugs, at the bottom of the smuggling chain, earn a higher penalty than men at the top of the pyramid. Bosses are able to pay expensive lawyers and can negotiate with prosecutors about lower fines because they have information they can trade. Girls like Yuni don’t have that capital. Drug network Australian criminologist Samantha Jeffries researched the international drug trade in Southeast Asia and spoke to a number of Thai prisoners in Cambodia. All imprisoned Thai women carried drugs for someone else, usually a stranger with whom they were often in a love affair. None of them had been involved in crime before. Just about everyone belonged to a vulnerable group: the poor, the uneducated, with no source of livelihood. Most, not all, had no idea he was carrying drugs. If they happen to be caught with drugs in Malaysia, there is a high chance that they will be sentenced to death. According to Amnesty International, at least 1,281 death sentences have been carried out in Malaysia since February 2019, mostly against drug dealers. Among those sentenced to death in that period were 141 women, and 95 percent of them were convicted of drug trafficking. By comparison, of the men sentenced to death, 70 percent were fined for drug trafficking. And of the women sentenced to death in Malaysian courts, as many as 90 percent are foreigners, who find it most difficult to defend themselves in court. An instructive case is that of Maryam Mansour , a single mother from Tehran, who was arrested at Kuala Lumpur airport with an Iranian who introduced himself as her boyfriend. Police found 2.2 kilograms of targets in her bag. During the interrogation, her companion answered all the questions, and those that were asked of her. She asked for an interpreter, but he told her not to worry because he speaks English. He was eventually released on bail, and she was sentenced to death. Countries should concentrate on punishing gang bosses and smuggling organizers, not on couriers who are often themselves victims of organized crime, according to UNODC, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.