A Tragic Trail's End for the Yankee Mules

"In Peru I bought 2 kilos [4.4 Ibs.] of coke [cocaine] for $10,000. Four hours later I was on a flight to Mexico City. After landing, I breezed through passport control. The customs officer cleared my first bag without giving me any trouble, and I thought I was free--on my way home to the U.S. Then he drew out a measuring stick and found that the inside of my second suitcase didn't correspond with the outside. I was invited to a little room where they ripped out the bottom of the suitcases and discovered my haul."

Those are the words of a slim, quiet-spoken American who is an inmate of Mexico City's aging Lecumberri Prison. Two years ago, he was a graduate student (in international commerce) at San Francisco State College. Now, at 25, he is serving a seven-year term for smuggling drugs.

His fate is not unique. Today, reports TIME Correspondent Bernard Diederich, there are 510 Americans in Mexican prisons, 425 of them for drug smuggling or related crimes and most of them young, middle class and desperately naive. They had hoped to get rich quick by carrying Latin American-grown cocaine into the U.S. via Mexico. Instead, they found themselves doomed to the degradations of police interrogation and prison.

Dwight James Worker, 28, a San Francisco clothing manufacturer, tried to hide coke in a body cast and was nabbed when a sharp-eyed Mexican customs official noted that he had trouble remembering which leg had the limp. Charles Richard Helms, 25, selected in a lottery by some of his classmates at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., to smuggle coke through Mexico, was caught with 2.6 kilos concealed under his bell-bottom trousers. Katherine Lou Simmons, 25, a Hollywood pianist, was arrested when officials discovered that her roundly curved belly was not a sign of pregnancy; she had strapped a mound of coke to her lower abdomen.

Unlucky Amateurs. Others unsuccessfully attempted to hide their hauls in the hollows of platform shoes, aerosol cans or bras. In June alone, Mexican police arrested 33 Americans for smuggling. Sentences are now running from 7 to 13 1/2 years.

Cocaine, which comes mostly from Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Colombia, is often flown northward in light aircraft from Colombia to Caribbean coasts. After landing at a Caribbean island to "cool off," the cocaine is transported by boat or plane to Florida or flown to Canada from where it is smuggled southward into the U.S. It is the amateurs who try smuggling through Mexico and who increasingly are getting caught there.

Professionals derisively label the tyro smugglers "mules," but the amateurs could not care less: the potential profits are sizable--though not as big as the risks. One successful job can earn a mule $2,000 or $3,000. A junior high school teacher and his wife had joined a coke mule team for $5,000--a down payment, they hoped, on a farm.

The increase in the number of mules results from the importance the Latin American connection achieved after 1972, when Turkey prohibited its farmers from cultivating the poppy in return for $35.7 million in U.S. aid. Only last month Turkey lifted the ban, but while it was in effect it markedly reduced the flow of drugs from the Mediterranean, and many U.S. addicts switched from "Turkish White" (heroin) to cocaine from the Andes.

There are no reliable statistics, but U.S. narcotics officials estimate that each year several thousand mules make the trip. For the hundreds who get caught annually, the consequences are grim. Imprisoned American men are given the most degrading jobs, such as scrubbing toilets and scraping up excrement. Conditions are even worse for the 38 American women inmates at the Los Reyes Prison for women on the outskirts of Mexico City. One-third of them are under 21, and many were recruited by professionals who thought their good looks would help them get only cursory examinations by customs officials. Two, however, are considerably older. Jeanne McMichael, 60, of Buena Park, Calif., and Elizabeth Lankton, 55, of Oceanside, Calif., both grandmothers, were promised "bonuses" by big-time dealers that would let them retire comfortably if they would carry drugs back to the U.S.

Sensitive Areas. Some American women prisoners charge that when they were arrested, they were subjected to "severe beatings, broken bones, and electric shocks applied to the genitals and other sensitive areas of the body." They have not only been abused during interrogation, they have been attacked in prison by Mexican lesbians who resent the pale-skinned foreigners.

The American inmates accuse U.S. consular officials in Mexico of taking no interest in their plight. To prod the U.S. diplomats to do more for them, 73 American men at Lecumberri (joined by eight Canadians) and the 38 American women at Los Reyes went on a hunger strike last month. Although about half quit their fast in less than 24 hours, the others continued two weeks. Said one of the strikers, Joan Kay, 23, of Oakland, Calif: "I'd rather die here than go on with all the injustices committed against me."

Though the hunger strike brought no relief for those already imprisoned, it at least spurred the U.S. embassy to take some action to help other mules before they are thrown into jail. The embassy complained that Mexico has been violating the U.S.-Mexican Consular Convention by not allowing U.S. diplomats to interview American citizens immediately after their arrest, a practice that now presumably will stop. The embassy asked Mexican courts to move more quickly on untried cases involving Americans, many of whom stay in jail for months before they are brought to trial.

Meanwhile, the mules keep coming. One U.S. sociologist who has just visited the prisons concludes: "If mules continue to pack coke at the same rate we have seen this year, then gringos and gringas could one day outnumber the Mexicans in these jails."

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