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Video length: 7 min
Cocaine trafficking: in Guyana, mules slaves to traffickers
Guyana is the main cocaine hub in France. To transport it to mainland France, traffickers use mules, who ingest pellets of cocaine before taking the plane, with the risk that they will burst and cause their death. – (France 2)
Guyana is the main cocaine hub in France. To transport it to mainland France, traffickers use mules, who ingest pellets of cocaine before taking the plane, with the risk that they will burst and cause their death.
In a corridor of Cayenne airport, dozens of people are suspected of being mules, of transporting cocaine to mainland France. The mules placed in police custody are transferred to Cayenne hospital, in secure rooms. It is here that they are incarcerated while waiting for the ingested cocaine capsules to be evacuated. Each is worth 70 euros in Guyana, and ten times more in mainland France.
Increasingly varied profiles
In ten years, Dr. Karmi Hamichehead of the forensic medicine department at CHC from Cayenne, saw mules with increasingly varied profiles arrive: elderly people in wheelchairs, pregnant women… The doctor indicates that all it takes is for a pellet to burst in the stomach for the person to die. The mules are recruited by traffickers in western Guyana.
Traffickers who “take advantage of the immediate proximity to Suriname, where the cocaine comes from, but [qui] benefit also an extremely high rate of poverty here”, reports journalist Claire Vérove, special correspondent in Guyana. The traffickers sell goods right up to the front of the schools. In 2023, the authorities estimate that they will have halved the number of mules, but Guyana remains the main hub for cocaine in France.
