Colombia offers new hope for jailed women
Ana Tabares was a broke and desperate single mother of two when she took a job preparing food in a cocaine laboratory, got caught up in a police raid, and found herself behind bars. The Colombian government, which considers the United States-led war on drugs a failure, is analyzing the cases of thousands of jailed women like Tabares, some of whom have already been freed under a new law.
Tabares was 36 when soldiers and police burst into the remote camp where she worked for cocaine manufacturers. She was arrested alongside three other people as part of a fierce war on drugs in Colombia, the world’s biggest cocaine producer.
A judge ignored her pleas and sentenced her to 10 years and eight months in prison for trafficking and manufacturing narcotics. Her boss remains at large.
“It is always us, the least involved, who pay the price,” Tabares told AFP in Buen Pastor, the main women’s prison in Bogota, where she spends her days cleaning and painting ceramics.
Colombia has spent decades battling powerful drug
cartels, using the military and millions of dollars from the United States, which pushed for harsh crackdowns in the country. But, the narco business is still thriving. Colombia’s leftist President Gustavo Petro is now seeking a different approach.
“We need to decriminalize and reduce consumption through prevention, given the global failure of the war on drugs,” he said in January at the Davos Forum. His government wants to stop going after small players such as coca farmers and other low-ranking workers and go all-in against the big bosses and those involved in money-laundering networks. In March 2023, Petro signed a law allowing poor women who are the main breadwinners of their families to serve their sentences outside of prison, by doing community service, with the authorization of a judge.
“The diagnosis is that the war on drugs has been highly costly in financial terms, but perhaps even more so in terms of people’s lives,” said Camilo Umana, vice minister of justice. The Colombian justice ministry estimates that 37 percent of the 7,000 women imprisoned in overcrowded prisons were there for crimes related to drug trafficking or microtrafficking—the small-scale distribution of narcotics.