The number of “mules”, these couriers who transport drugs, has continued to increase in recent years. Toby*, for example, served six months in prison after being arrested, like most mules, at Cayenne airport: “I must have had three kilos of cocaine on me. They had dogs, who sniffed what was in the suitcase. I can’t ingest myself. And it’s too dangerous.”
Some mules indeed swallow cocaine balls, hoping to pass the controls, but at the risk of overdose. Toby, 20, has an atypical profile: high school diploma, while the conveyors are often without diplomas. He then dropped out, caught up in his dating. “When it’s complicated, traffic appears to be the miracle solution. They give you 5,000 euros, at 19 it’s an astronomical sum! You transport quantities of which you have no idea; they tell you: ‘T ‘worried, there will be only that… Whereas there are perhaps three times the quantity.’ You don’t have a phone? They’ll buy you one… In the end, they become your best friends.”
Toby is currently in reintegration, welcomed by the Kaïros association in Cayenne, as is Souliki*, 27 years old. He has never been a mule, but cocaine has led part of his family behind bars in Fresnes prison. “My two little sisters, it was a kilo that they had ingested, and my mother had seven kilos in her suitcases. When I was young, we were in difficulty because of the absence of our mother. money from her, but that wasn’t what we wanted! If she were here today, if she hadn’t started dealing cocaine, I think I’d be a better person My life is prison: I’ve been there seven times…” Like Toby, Souliki was released from prison in July. He was convicted of robbery and forcible confinement.
At Félix Eboué airport in Cayenne, two flights per day are scheduled on average to Paris. With, before boarding, the classic formalities but also a whole series of additional controls: profiling of passengers, questionnaire on their point of fall, new interrogation in case of doubt, possible urine test… No boarding in case of refusal.
Passengers are therefore scrutinized, while traffickers are constantly innovating: “Since the summer of 2021, we have seen the increase in passengers originating from Nigeria, and clearly not for sightseeing, explains Commissioner Thierry Baurès, the head of the air and border police in Guyana. Either they come from Paris airports, and we are obviously working in collaboration with our colleagues from Orly and Roissy to reduce this flow. Either they depart from Amsterdam airport with a single ticket, land in Paramaribo (the capital of Suriname, the main entry point for cocaine in Guyana)cross the border and come to Cayenne airport with a ticket for a return flight to mainland France.”
Despite the reinforced controls, the authorities are overwhelmed. Because it is the strategy of the traffickers: to saturate the police and judicial services, which estimate that nearly one in six passengers is a mule. In total, that makes a hundred every day.
Hence this experiment carried out this summer and which ends on September 30: a conditional classification in the event of arrest up to 1.5 kilos of cocaine but six months of airport ban, to attack the traffic more than carriers. “We estimate that we have disrupted the flow to the tune of 2.5 tonnes or even three tonnes of cocainesays Cayenne Attorney General Joël Sollier. For the drug traffickers, it is extremely disturbing, because they are totally indifferent to the fate of the mules that we have been chasing for years: whether we sentence them to one year or ten years in prison, it is completely irrelevant to them. What interests them, on the other hand, is that narcotics can go towards Europe and recover the money from the sale of these narcotics. We are disrupting the flow and therefore undermining what is important to them.”
A disturbed flow but what it takes is “turn off the tap”, according to a police source in unison with the Attorney General. Police and justice have identical demands: additional resources, starting with a new scanner at the airport. There is one for drugs hidden under clothing but not for ingested cocaine.
*Names have been changed