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Dead Cows

Reading Time: 4 minutes

February 14, 2013Produced by Hazel Friedman
They are promised trips to paradise, fully paid vacations to exotic, sun-kissed islands, for a job or just to deliver a parcel or two. But once there, the dream holiday becomes a nightmare for those naïve or desperate enough to believe in a free ride. They are coerced into smuggling drugs for trans-national syndicates. Even those who initially might be willing to carry drugs in exchange for a free trip and cash reward, dare not change their minds, express reluctance or make unreasonable requests. For if they do they become a liability to the syndicate, its weakest and most disposable link. They are the syndicate’s decoys, it’s sacrificial lambs or in the mixed-menagerie parlance of the drug world, its “dead cows”: meat to be thrown at the piranhas or customs officials while three or four drug mules, carrying much larger quantities, slip through undetected. And while the decoys are doomed to spend decades in a foreign country isolated from their loved ones, the syndicate members who recruited or coerced them in the first place get off scot free. In the last year at least 27 South Africans have been arrested abroad for drug smuggling. Many allege they were coerced into carrying the illicit cargo and none knew they would be used as dead cows. Most have named their recruiters – South African members of Nigerian syndicates based worldwide. Yet, although police insist they are making headway in nabbing the syndicates, none of these recruiters have been arrested. This is partly due to the fact the decoys are not interviewed by SAPS because they are arrested in a foreign country and left to their fate by the South African government. This makes South Africans attractive targets for syndicates as both mules and decoys. Should they be arrested abroad, they are simply locked up without the opportunity to provide vital information to the South African authorities on the recruiters and other senior members of the drug syndicates who continue to profit from this illicit economy with impunity.
In this week’s Special Assignment we infiltrate the underworld world of drug recruiters, mules and decoys and we expose a member of a Nigerian syndicate intent on finding a “white woman” to smuggle drugs to Brazil. We also interrogate the South African government on its recent statements that “talks are at an advanced stage” to establish a prisoner transfer treaty with SADC countries. And we spend time with a housewife-turned-crusader who continues to fight tirelessly for the rights of South African citizens incarcerated abroad to be returned home, so that they can spend the rest of their sentences at home close to their families – a right enshrined in our constitution.
Society views trafficking as the source of the “drug problem” but supply is nourished by demand. Every cocaine line snorted, every ecstasy tablet imbibed – even for recreational purposes – forms an inextricable synapses in the transnational drug trafficking industry. There is no prospect of successful resolution of this “war” unless the problem is tackled on both fronts. Along one frontier, governments, armies and corrupt officials aid and abet the lucrative global drug trade and, on the other, subsistence farmers and drug users unremittingly depend on the industry, as producers and consumers, respectively. In the mixed-menagerie argot of the drug cartels, the grey zone of couriership – the mules and their “dead cows” or sacrificial lambs – facilitate the trade, but ultimately do not dictate its future. As with all profit-driven wars, whose omnipotent kings and queens are aided and abetted by knights, bishops and impenetrable castles, they constitute the collateral damage and ultimately its pawns.

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