Text: Iago Vieyra Illustration: César Carrizo*
When Maribel Rodríguez reached out to the contact she was given in the Bolivian city of Yacutiva, on the border with Argentina, she was given a package, $700 and precise instructions. “I just had to attach it to my belly,” she recalls. “I said yes to everything, it was the first time I had ever done anything like that.”
In July 2019, she was told to take a bus from Salvador Mazza, on the Argentine side of the border, to Córdoba, one of the largest cities in the South American country. Maribel was travelling with her young daughter, a kilo of cocaine, nerves, and guilt.
The bus she was travelling in was stopped by the national military police shortly after they set off. Maribel was arrested almost immediately, and charged with transporting drugs, a crime that carries a sentence of between four and 15 years in prison.
But, paradoxically, she was acquitted. The public lawyer she was assigned argued that she was carrying the drugs out of “extreme necessity”. The judge, Mario Juárez Almaraz, agreed.
Maribel’s daughter had been born with a congenital malformation on her left hand and needed surgery. Without the prospect of securing a job that paid above minimum wage, and a survivor of gender-based violence, she was unable to cover the medical treatment her daughter needed.
“Rodríguez’s actions were justified because she tried to give her daughter quality of life and in the vulnerable situation in which she found herself, she saw the crime as the only possible alternative,” Judge Juárez Almaraz concluded as part of his ruling.
Faced with a difficult dilemma, Maribel chose what she saw as the lesser evil. Argentina’s Penal Code stipulates that there shall be no punishment for anyone who commits a wrong in order to avoid a greater wrong.
But not everybody agreed. In the years that followed, a federal prosecutor appealed the acquittal and in December 2019, Maribel was convicted. The judges said her daughter’s condition was not life-threatening and that there was no justification to try and obtain money at any cost.
Little over a year later, a new judge reviewed the case and acquitted Maribel for the second time. The new judge agreed with the original ruling.
Maribel eventually regained control of her life. She still lives in Salvador Mazza with her family, a stone’s throw away from the border where many other women still face similar experiences to her. The weakest links in the cocaine trade.
Maribel has been unable to raise the money to treat Zamira, who is in second grade and has a special teacher who helps her adapt and improve the functionality of her left hand as much as possible.
The “perfect” business
Bolivia and Argentina share a 742 kilometre-long porous border.
The Public Defence Ministry estimates that around ten women are arrested every week carrying small packages of drugs.
Crime organisations see them as a cheap and safe option. Each woman is paid between US$600 and US$1,000 per trip, possibly much less than what it would cost to move the drugs in other ways, according to government officials.
“Organisations look for people with great needs so it is impossible for them to say no. People who transport drugs rarely know who is actually hiring them,” says Eduardo Villalba, head of the Federal Prosecutor’s Unit in Salta. “In a case I had in Jujuy, there was a person who was specifically looking for women who had sick relatives.”
The border courts receive “many women from Bolivia, including from indigenous communities, some of whom only speak Quechua, and come from all kinds of vulnerable situations. They are recruited and sent here,” says Matías Gutiérrez Perea, coordinator of the Public Prosecutor’s Office units in Salta and Jujuy.
These women’s conditions of vulnerability usually contribute to the high levels of risks they are willing to take, including by carrying capsules of cocaine in their bodies, which can be fatal if broken.
Experts say, however, that this dynamic seems to have grown less popular since the tragic death of Rosana López in 2022.
One of the 74 capsules she was carrying in her stomach exploded while she was travelling on a bus to the province of Chaco accompanied by Jessica Nahir Figueroa, who was in charge of monitoring and coordinating the operation. When the two women got off the bus, another member of the gang that owned the cocaine was waiting for them. After failing to get Rosana to expel the capsules, they dumped her body on the side of a major road.
Figueroa was sentenced to 10 years in prison for transporting the drugs in the victim’s stomach. But both she and her collaborator were acquitted of murder. The sentence is now under appeal.
A complex border
Prosecutor Eduardo Villalba says things have changed in terms of how these cases are handled.
“Today there is no ruling that does not cite the gender perspective. Five years ago, this was not something that was on the judiciary’s mind,” says Gutiérrez Perea.
Women involved in cocaine trafficking on the border between Argentina and Bolivia face different prospects depending on their nationality. Argentine women can either choose to plead guilty in an abbreviated trial, and be sentenced without going to prison or face a regular trial and prove they committed the crime out of necessity.
For foreign defendants, however, the situation is different. Macarena Fernández Hofmann, coordinator of criminal policy and violence in confinement at the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS) explains that what has been happening in many cases is that the parties agree to have an abbreviated trial so the individual can be quickly expelled from the country.
The main impediment to this is Article 64 of the Migration Law (Nº 25.871), which orders half of the sentence to be served before expulsion. Defence lawyers criticise this, however, as they say it is an impediment for the women to be reunited with their children.
Despite the challenges, there’s agreement that a number of changes in laws and practices have improved the way in which the judiciary deals with these cases.
“We now have a judiciary that comes face to face with people. This way, one becomes aware of those dramatic cases of extreme vulnerability. I was a prosecutor for 20 years under the previous system, and all you saw was the case file. When you get to know the person, things change dramatically, the hearing provides a completely different perspective on a case”, adds Villalba.
“There may still be a little resistance, but there is no longer any judge or prosecutor without citing the gender perspective. We are still discussing the scope, but there has been tremendous progress,” says defence attorney Gutiérrez Perea.
As for Maribel Rodríguez, there is something that, after facing by five judges and having been deprived of her liberty in her home for eight months, surprises her to this day: “neither the security forces who arrested me, nor the prosecutor, nor anyone else ever asked me who gave me the drugs or if I had a boss”.
* Iago Vieyra wrote this article with the support of the Red Federal de Periodismo Judicial de Argentina. The piece is part of the investigation “Women and drug micro-trafficking, a blind spot in the Argentinean justice system“. It is a project of the Network supported by the Fund for Research and New Narratives on Drugs (FINND) of the Gabo Foundation and the Open Society Foundations. This story is a version of the original spanish language article and it is being published by In.Visibles with permission.
