Handcuffed, stripped naked -- then we were told: You’ll never see daylight again...
Michaella thought she’d hit rock bottom when she and her friend were caught with cases stuffed with £1.5m of cocaine. But her nightmare was only just beginning
THE SECURITY guard standing at my shoulder was massive – and so was the gun he was pointing at me. ‘ Come with me,’ he barked. I watched as my luggage was dragged off the airport’s conveyor belt. My friend Melissa’s suitcase had already been lifted on to a metal trestle table, where another guard wearing gloves was opening it.
Melissa didn’t look at me. Both she and I knew only too well what the officers were about to discover: £1.5 million worth of cocaine, hidden in cereal packages among our clothes.
Even though I knew what was in there, I was appalled at how easily they found it. A bikini, a few tops, some shorts… and more than a dozen sealed packets of narcotics. How could we be so stupid as to think we’d get away with it?
I felt the pinch as handcuffs bit into my wrists, but the physical pain was nothing compared with the shame of being led across Lima airport’s departures hall in front of crowds of people waiting to board their flights. Some were even taking photographs.
We were hustled into a small office where our feet were tied to our chair legs. It was beyond degrading. ‘What do you think they’re going to do?’ I asked Melissa, who was suddenly looking far from her usual confident self. There was a long silence. ‘Look,’ she whispered, ‘we’ll tell them we were forced to do it – that we didn’t have a choice as we’d been threatened with guns. They can’t keep us if we stick to that.’
‘I’m not sure,’ I whispered back. ‘How d’you think that’s going to work?’
‘It’s all we’ve got,’ she said. ‘Can you think of anything better?’
We were interrupted by a uniformed woman coming in followed by two men carrying our luggage. They took photos of us standing beside our cases, then emptied out their contents.
‘ Melissa Reid. Are these your drugs?’ they asked. ‘No.’ ‘They are in your case.’ ‘They are not my drugs. I was kidnapped and forced to carry them by a man with a gun. He would have killed me if I didn’t do it.’
There. Our amended version of the truth was out. Neither of us considered the consequences of what we were saying.
The woman asked me the same questions. Against my better judgment, I decided to follow Melissa’s lead.
Two women came running in and started to peel my clothes off. I thought the walk of shame through the departures hall was as low as I could go. Standing there naked in an airport room took the humiliation to new depths.
All I could think about was my family discovering what had happened. The news would utterly break them.
THE cell doors were solid black metal and very heavy. It took all the guard’s strength to get one of them open. This was the headquarters of the Dirandro – the narcotics division of the Peruvian National Police. We were ushered inside. The second we were over the threshold, the door clanged shut and we were plunged into darkness.
Through a small ray of light I could see that the room was tiny, and that there were two cement shelves sticking out of the wall.
‘ I think those are meant to be beds,’ I said to Melissa. There was no bed linen – not even a mattress.
I don’t know how long I slept, but I woke up in the pitch black, shivering. As my eyes adjusted, I sensed something ominous – something that was moving. I could hear them before I saw them: 40 or 50 cockroaches, each one two or three inches long, scurrying above my head and around my feet. I started screaming hysterically.
This was just the beginning. How was I going to survive this ordeal?
At breakfast we joined a queue of unsmiling women.
They were all holding their own plastic bowls and plates. Melissa and I had nothing.
When we got to the front, the guard tried to serve us food. ‘I need a plate,’ I said, making a shape with my hands.
He pointed to some stale-looking bread as if to say, ‘That’s all you’re having, then.’ As I picked up a slice another man appeared with two cups filled with watery porridge. It was the closest thing to hydration we’d get all day.
A fellow prisoner showed us round. The bathroom area was a hole in a grate with a small jug next to it, and a sink. If you wanted a shower you used the jug to pour water over yourself. When you used the hole as a toilet, you used the jug to wash it away.
I tried the tap in the sink but i t wasn’t working. Our guide explained that the water was only on for a short period every morning. ‘What do we drink?’ I asked. She pointed to the jug. ‘ You’re kidding me,’ I said. ‘We can’t drink that! It’s filthy! And there’s hardly any of it.’ She shrugged.
‘Why don’t we have water all day?’ I asked. ‘Is there a shortage?’
She shrugged again. ‘I think they just like to mess with us.’
Everything was so new t hat my eyes were like saucers. There wasn’t an inch of the squalor I didn’t study.
I noticed a pregnant woman smoking and, when we were out of earshot, I asked our guide where she would have got her cigarette from. ‘The guards,’ she said. ‘They make deals.’
‘What kind of deals?’ I asked. ‘I’ve got nothing to trade.’
‘Oh yes you have,’ she replied. It took a couple of seconds for her meaning to sink in. Then the full horror dawned on me. The guards would provide cigarettes in return for sexual favours.
‘Oh, my God! Melissa, are you
I slept on concrete – and awoke with cockroaches all around me
hearing this?’ I said. ‘Nothing would surprise me in this place,’ she said.
SUNDAY began like all the other days: a pointless roll call then i nedible gruel f or breakfast. Around mid-morning I was told a policewoman was waiting to talk to me.
‘You have nice hair,’ she said. ‘Do mine. And, by the way, my name is Maria.’
Whatever I was expecting her to say, it wasn’t that. I could not have been more astonished.
Later, Maria spoke to Melissa and me. ‘ Tomorrow you have your interview, OK?’ she said. We nodded. ‘Listen,’ she continued, ‘say “guilty”, OK? This kidnap story… not good. Police not like this.’
I started to protest, but Melissa dug me in the ribs.
The guard who escorted us back to our cell said the same thing. ‘You say “Guilty” or…’ he said, making a cutting motion across his throat. ‘Everyone guilty who want to live.’
As I fell asleep that night, their words played over and over in my head. What on earth was I going to do?
We spent the next day in a state of suspense, waiting to be called. Midday came and went. Nothing, apart from a message saying I had a visitor. I nearly fell over when I saw who it was. In front of me was Keith, my real, flesh- and- blood brother. We held each other for I don’t know how long, sobbing our hearts out. ‘How is Mum?’ I asked Keith. ‘Does she hate me?’
‘She’s not been well,’ he replied. ‘She had to go to hospital.’ ‘No! What’s wrong?’ ‘ What’s wrong?’ he repeated, fixing me with his eyes. ‘ You’re asking me that, Michaella? She’s been so sick with worry that she had a mini-stroke.’
I stared at him, processing the words. All the discomfort of the previous days meant nothing compared with the trauma I’d put my adored mum through. What kind of daughter was I? If I could have taken my own life there and then, I’d have done it.
Keith had brought a lawyer from Belfast who sat with us when Melissa and I were finally interviewed. Again, I spouted the same story that we’d rehearsed.
‘If you do go to trial, I recommend you plead guilty,’ said the interrogator. ‘Judges in Peru do not like liars or people who waste their time. If you admit your charges there is a very good chance the judge will be lenient, as it is your first offence.
‘But if you try to fight the charges and are then found guilty, which I have to say is a very real possibility, then from my experience you should be prepared to never see daylight again.’
The reality of our situation began at last to sink in. The interrogator told me it might be a year or more before we had a trial, even if we pleaded guilty. If we claimed our innocence, it could be longer. Guilty or not guilty, what did it matter? Whichever way I looked at it, I wasn’t going home any time soon.
THE question was becoming familiar. ‘Habla Español?’ Do you speak Spanish? We were being given a guided tour round Lima’s Virgen de Fatima prison, home to some of Peru’s most dangerous prisoners, and now ours too – and we didn’t understand a word of it.
‘Mel,’ I said to Melissa, ‘we really need to learn Spanish.’ We’d by now been told we could be looking at around four years until we got a trial. If we wanted to stay alive in this desperate place we needed to play the game – and to do that we needed to be able to understand the rules.
Four doors led into four cell blocks, which looked packed except one, which judging by the belongings next to the bed, had only one occupant. We learned she was known as ‘the Diosa del Amor’, or the goddess of love. A few women were playing cards, a couple were reading, but mostly they were doing make-up – each other’s and their own. The fact they still cared about their appearance gave me hope.
As we were being shown to our cell one of our fellow inmates rushed up excitedly brandishing a newspaper. ‘Famosa, muy famosa,’ she said. ‘You are very famous.’ There on the front page were pictures of Melissa and me, and hundreds of words. And now another visitor had arrived in our cell. Nearly 6ft tall, with a stained vest stretched thinly across a vast chest and belly she looked like a wrestler gone to seed. This was La Diosa – the woman who lived on her own.
The giantess was a terrifying sight, with tattoos on every inch of skin, including her face. Dark teardrops ran from under her eyes – a prison code meaning she’d killed people. On her arms and legs were clear wounds from self-harming and, I guessed, stabbings. She smelled terrible.
‘Famosa,’ she repeated, looking from the front-page picture to us and back again.
I was close to retching – not only from fear, but because of the stench. The woman kissed our pictures on the paper, then waddled out of the room.
Afterwards we heard her story. I wished we hadn’t. Her husband had had an affair and had a baby with his girlfriend. La Diosa had found out, but didn’t say anything to him and carried on as normal.
One night he came home from work and she fed him a stew, like she often did. But this tasted differ
The guards will give you cigarettes... in return for sexual favours