That made me very happy, as the film might have saved at least one life." A 16-year-old Colombian boy called me to say thank you - he had been due to travel to New York as a mule, but watching the film the night before his due departure changed his mind. "The film has been very successful in Colombia," he says.
Did john marston deserve to die full#
But he's encouraged by the fact that Maria Full of Grace has highlighted the dangers. "ĭespite tighter controls being introduced in Britain and the US, the drug-mule traffic shows no sign of abating. And you only worry about getting caught, when you could die at any moment. These are dipped in olive oil and lemon so you can swallow them easier, but it still takes as much as 10 hours to swallow them all. "Then, on the day, you might be given Chloraseptic to loosen and numb the throat, and then you swallow as many as 50 seven-gram bullets, as they are called. Then you practise by swallowing grapes whole. Sometimes they will use an endoscope to check the stomach for holes or ulcers, because you might carry as much as 600 grams, which when cut might be worth £20,000. You eat very light food for weeks, food that will clean you out, and also food that will line and strengthen the stomach wall. "The traffickers pick you out, sometimes on the street, and then they prepare you for the journey. I met one girl in prison who did it to pay for her son's operation. "I thought I could make some money to pay off a serious debt. "The dealers can get a better price in London, so some traffickers prefer to target the UK, especially after American security tightened after September 11," says the 30-year-old mother. She was recently released after serving almost five years in Holloway prison in north London. Anjelica was arrested in London with two-and-a-half pounds of high-grade cocaine inside her. New York is not the only destination for the Colombian drug mules. The mother was so scared of the police and the mafiosi that she left her son to die in the hotel room." "When they arrived in New York, a pellet burst in the boy's stomach on the way to a hotel. "And then there was a mother and her 16-year-old son, who were both drug mules together on the same plane," Tobon sighs. As she got into a cab at John F Kennedy airport, a pellet ruptured inside her and she died on the way to hospital.
He tells me the story of an 82-year-old woman from Bogota who, unable to care for her mentally ill son, was convinced by drug traffickers that one trip to New York as a drug mule would earn her enough cash to secure him a decent future. The mafia are very bad people - all they care about is money."Īfter so many years, a few cases still stand out in Tobon's mind.
"Then they placed her body inside a plastic bag and set it on fire. I remember one when a girl died and the mafia opened her stomach with a knife and withdrew the drugs," Tobon murmurs. "Marston sat in my office for days, and his film is very accurate. It tells the story of a young drug mule (played by the Oscar-nominated actress Catalina Sandino Moreno) who travels from Bogota to New York having swallowed 500 grams of cocaine tightly packed in the fingers of latex surgical gloves. But that has ended with the release of Josh Marston's new film, Maria Full of Grace, in which he plays himself. Until recently, Tobon had gone about his business in relative obscurity. These aren't very bad criminal people, just ignorant people who are being used." "They are all very desperate and very poor. But all the mules have one thing in common," Tobon says. Some are found dumped near the airport, dead in hotels, they are all different. They are then picked up at their destination, driven to a safe location and given laxatives to ease the passage of the drugs.
The mules board the flights literally full to bursting after swallowing packages of cocaine.
0 kommentar(er)
