Cocaine: how a hundred "mules" try every day to connect Cayenne and Paris

Caroline Baudry, edited by Alexandre Dalifard 1:04 p.m., September 29, 2022

The experiment ends.

The measure, put in place on July 1 by the Cayenne prosecution, will not go further than the month of September.

This consisted in classifying without prosecution seizures of less than 1.5 kg of cocaine at Cayenne airport in French Guiana with the aim of "reducing the load" of traffic and increasing seizures.

Four tonnes of white powder produced on the continent would land each year from neighboring Suriname, before joining France. 

1 to 4 mules per flight arrested by the police

A "mule", a person in charge of transporting drugs by plane, arrested with less than 1.5 kilos of cocaine could then be released with a ban on appearing at Cayenne airport and an entry in the file of wanted individuals.

A hundred travelers, according to the latest estimates from the city's attorney general, try to get the drug across the metropolis every day.

“Someone who arrives with eggs full of belly, I can guarantee you that she is not serene because if there is an egg which cracks: it is the overdose.

This kind of scene is daily for Olivier Lorry, border policeman at Cayenne airport.

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Every day, an average of 3 planes take off, heading for Paris.

Dozens of "mules" board each aircraft.

The cocaine is hidden in their belongings or ingested in the form of ovules, large capsules filled with white powder.

1 to 4 mules per flight are challenged by his team.

"When we ask them basic questions about police checks, when the person doesn't even know where they are going in mainland France, we already have a big doubt. Doubt allows us to carry out more in-depth checks. We do a urine screening, a blood test, and we do an x-ray, an MRI. And once the person is arrested, he is put in a prison room at the hospital. They provide him with treatment so that he can expel the eggs", underlines Olivier Lorry .

"People taken by the throat"

The method of drug traffickers: street recruitment and the lure of profit.

Half of Guyanese live below the poverty line.

So earning up to 8,000 euros in 8 hours of flight becomes obvious for some.

Morgane Fournier, a lawyer in Paris, defends smugglers arrested on their arrival in mainland France.

Most of these people are “very young unemployed adults”, she specifies.

"There was a period when it was pregnant women. A way of concealing the product or in any case the feeling that we would come to control them less. These mules are generally in an extremely precarious financial situation, even completely taken to the throat."

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The experiment caused an outcry

But faced with the scale of the phenomenon, the abandonment of prosecution for seizures of less than 1.5 kilos is an aberration according to Yvane Goua, spokesperson for the Trop Violans association which crisscrosses Guyana to prevent young people from giving in. to drug traffickers.

"It's sabotage. We are attacking the field work that the actors do. We have always asked for heavier sentences, which can be understood by a young person and can tell the traffickers: I don't want to do it because that going to cost me dear."

The experiment which had caused an outcry, stops.

On the spot, additional means are claimed to control more travelers in the airports and to prosecute the "mules" before the courts.