Easy targets: how drug mules fill women’s jails in Hong Kong


Hong Kong (AFP) – Zoila Lecarnaque Saavedra’s fate was sealed after a package with liquid cocaine was found in her luggage upon arrival at Hong Kong International airport. She spent eight years in prison before she could be reunited with her family in Peru. A quarter of Hong Kong’s prisoners are women, a record high percentage skewed by impoverished foreign drug mules who are often duped or coerced. Meanwhile, the real smuggling kingpins who control them rarely see the inside of a cell. “They find people who are in a precarious economic situation,” Lecarnaque Saavedra told AFP. “They look for them and in this case it was me.”

©AFP

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