Ann Susanna Catharina van Schalkwyk (57) will spend the next six years in an Australian prison after being found guilty of smuggling cocaine into Perth from Durban. She was sentenced to 12 years in prison. At least half her sentence has to be served before she becomes eligible for parole. She was arrested in November 2003 at Perth International airport with 1.7kg of cocaine in her possession concealed in six bottles of Amarula liqueur, through an X-ray machine. She claimed that a man had approached her on a Durban beach and asked if she would drop off the bottles at a hotel in Sydney at a pre-determined time. She travelled with him to Johannesburg. A few days later, she boarded a plane to Australia, having received the bottles at the Johannesburg International Airport and assuming they contained alcohol. A month after her arrest, her husband was also arrested - trying to smuggle cocaine out of South America to South Africa.
Tracey Thompson (34), a Durban single parent, was recently released from a British jail after spending almost a year inside. She was sentenced to 4 months in prison after being found in possession of cocaine and dagga, but was found not guilty on charges of smuggling cocaine and dagga worth £20-million across borders. The analytical chemist was working as a waitress in the UK. She claimed that her partner, known to her as Richard Mahoney (52), led her to believe she was taking cigarettes and chutney from South Africa to the UK. He was recently arrested in Umhlanga Rocks and faces extradition to the UK.
There are 865 South Africans in prisons across the world for trying to smuggle drugs from South Africa into foreign countries. There are 118 South Africans in Brazilian prisons, 70 in Peru and 36 in Venezuela. Most of them were pulled in by syndicates as drug mules. The mules receive between R20 000 and R50 000. Seventy of the 107 drug mules arrested last year swallowed their consignments. It is mostly middle-aged, White people, who were financially unstable, that are targeted by the syndicates as they are regarded as a lower risk and can travel as tourists or businessmen.
