Problems in Peru – UK Drug Traffickers Overseas

The morning after watching the (not so) ably hosted “Cocaine Capital of the World” about the booming drugs trade in Peru, many of us woke to the news of two British teenagers having been arrested at Lima airport for attempting to smuggle drugs back to Europe.

It is hardly surprising this caused a lot of commotion in some areas with people calling for the UK government to help them avoid a lengthy stay without trial in what are regarded as some of the worst and most violent prisons in the world. 

Sadly this is not an isolated case. Recently Lindsey Sandiford, a British grandmother, was sentenced to death in Indonesia for smuggling an alleged £1.6million of cocaine into the country.

Sandiford’s case, if anything, caused more of a stir and led to various groups being formed to take donations to fund her legal defence.

Nobody would wish the conditions these women, and the hundreds of other UK citizens held across the world on similar charges, find themselves in on their worst enemy.

Peruvian and Indonesian jails are notorious for violence and bad treatment, Sandiford is likely to spend years, if not decades on death row, and Melissa Reid and Michaella McCollum will be forced to wait around three-years before they appear in front of a judge.

This undeniably bad treatment leads to many public and political campaigns to free these people and repatriate them back home, however, this view is bizarrely hypocritical.

For a long time now all western governments have actively encouraged countries like Columbia, Mexico and more recently Peru to act against the drug cartels operating in their countries and crackdown on smuggling.

This is the way things should be done. Tightening border checks in the UK to stop drugs getting into the country is certainly important, but inconsequential if the supply of drugs is increasing.

Hisotry shows the trade is so lucrative the smugglers simply find more and more ingenious ways of shipping their product, for example the submarines which have been found in recent years.

Naturally these countries, who cannot afford high-tech air and shipping port controls, sniffer dogs, specialised police or undercover intelligence, react to this by increasing the checks they carry out and imposing very tough sentences on those caught.

Of cause there are flaws in this plan. Without an efficient and incorruptible legal system you end up with situations where people spend years waiting for a trial, but then again they were caught smuggling drugs.

If Sandiford, Reid or McCollum was caught dealing drugs in this country nobody would have any sympathy for them.

All three of the women mentioned and no doubt many, if not all, of the people languishing in foreign prisons claim to have been physically forced or coerced into doing something they did not want to do.

This may be true in some cases, although it would be rather naive to think it was as common as claimed.

However, claiming ignorance or coercion has never been an effective legal defence.

In an admittedly bad comparison, war criminals often claim innocence because they were just following orders and there are numerous examples of wives and girlfriends who covered up for their partners illegal behaviour.

The reason for these being such ineffective pleas is because the law is an absolute state. If you were aware you were committing a crime you are guilty, regardless of the motive.

The problem when people react like this is it appears to make a distinction between foreign drug traffickers and British drug traffickers. As if by somehow holding a UK passport is a get out of jail free card for when things go wrong.

Essentially what has happened is the UK has asked for something and then people are criticising the result.

Everyone agrees more needs to be done to stop cocaine smuggling out of South America, but then are outraged when its UK citizens get arrested.

We cannot have both in this situation. Either the South American governments crackdown on trafficking and we accept some Brits will spend time in unpleasant prisons, or you have to live with ever increasing quantities of drugs ending up on the streets.

As residents of a developed nation it is right our government affords us help when we are wrongfully persecuted overseas, but this privilege should not be extended to those who have genuinely committed crimes.