Steep price for a free trip to Peru

It seemed a sweet deal: A free vacation to South America. All expenses paid, and a hefty cash bonus. Just bring a parcel back home to Europe.

“I thought I had no worries,” said Vera Scheerstra, recalling when her boyfriend in the Netherlands suggested the trip. “I was stupid -- and in love, I guess.”

For the Dutchwoman, it has turned into a life-transforming experience -- but not in any constructive sense.

Scheerstra is among scores of Europeans now in Peruvian jails on charges of attempting to smuggle cocaine out of Lima’s airport. They are known as burriers, a fusion of “courier” and “burro.”

Many, such as Scheerstra, languish in jail for years awaiting trial as their cases proceed tortuously through Peru’s courts. Scheerstra and her boyfriend were caught in October 2005 with 16 kilos, about 35 pounds, of cocaine in suitcases.

She, like others interviewed in jail here, say they have acknowledged responsibility to Peruvian authorities for the smuggling attempts. Now they are working through the courts to expedite release after a minimum of two years in jail.

Already, Scheerstra has lost more than 2 1/2 years in the lives of her two sons, now 3 and 5 and living with friends back in the Netherlands. Her father, a lawyer and former suburban mayor outside Rotterdam, has cut off contact with his prodigal daughter.

“My entire family has suffered for my mistake,” said Scheerstra, 33, a former special-ed teacher, speaking in a yard at the cramped Santa Monica women’s prison in the capital’s seaside Chorrillos district. “It was the stupidest thing I ever did.”

Traffickers use land, sea and air to move their cocaine out of Peru, the world’s No. 2 producer, after neighboring Colombia.

Big loads are sent out as cargo via ship, car, truck and aircraft, packed in bricks, dissolved in liquids and concealed in practically anything that’s shipped -- tins of tuna, hollowed-out timber, plastic avocados; packages of nuts, door hinges or fertilizer.

River skiffs move bundles via porous jungle frontiers with Brazil. Recruits carry the loads overland to neighboring Bolivia, Chile and Ecuador for transshipment to the West.

But traffickers are always seeking new ways to move their prized product.

Many departing Peru on commercial flights are young Western tourists heading back to Europe, where cocaine brings a premium. An underground network recruits them -- in European cafes, on college campuses, in clubs and even in coded newspaper adds.

“They might approach you in a bar at night, or at the university,” said Elena Santos, 24, of Madrid, among the large contingent of jailed Spanish burriers. “They say it’s easy, you can make good money.”

The pledged remuneration may vary, but 5,000 euros (about $7,885) per kilo of cocaine is typical.

Traffickers help burriers conceal drugs stashed in checked luggage, taped to torsos, inserted into body cavities, swallowed in latex balls -- a potentially fatal technique, should a capsule rupture. Most burriers are Latin American. But a significant number are Europeans and some Americans, all supposedly inconspicuous because of their looks and passports.

But Peruvian authorities are onto them.

Using sniffer dogs and sundry detection techniques, police arrest hundreds of burriers each year at Lima’s Jorge Chavez International Airport. Four tons of cocaine were seized in 2007. Some travelers’ nerves give them away; sometimes it’s their odd travel itineraries -- a week in Peru without visiting the Inca capital of Cuzco?

Many crossed naively from comfortable existences into a menacing realm with no escape.

Santos, an animated chain-smoker with pierced lips, appearing every bit a hip young Spaniard, said she got scared once in South America and wanted out. But, she said, the traffickers threatened her loved ones.

“They told me they know where my family lives,” said Santos, who has a 4-year-old son in Madrid. “They’re capable of killing my son. What could I do?”

Like Scheerstra, she acknowledged responsibility for the smuggling attempt in an interview here.

The scheme was her boyfriend’s brainstorm, says Santos, daughter of a successful businessman in the Spanish capital.

Three days before she was busted, she said, her boyfriend traveled alone back to Spain with a kilo of coke swallowed in 89 capsules. She wasn’t so lucky, she added.

Santos says she agreed to insert 13 capsules with slightly more than a pound of cocaine into body cavities. She says she wouldn’t swallow them, terrified of the case of a friend who died when a swallowed capsule broke. She was busted within 10 minutes of arriving at the airport on Oct. 26, 2006, she said.

Like others, she believes she was set up -- “sold” by traffickers to corrupt cops so burriers with larger loads could pass.

The women’s jail here is severely overcrowded (hundreds sleep in hallways), and, according to the European burriers, serves execrable food and offers inadequate medical care. A South African burrier with AIDS died this year, they say.

But in general, foreign women said, no one bothers them. They take part in sewing and other workshops and have a lot of free time to ponder their missteps. They make friends. The Spanish and Dutch embassies, representing about 50 prisoners, provide books.

Both European women agreed to speak in the hope that others would not follow their examples.

“I can’t tell someone not to do what I did, but they must first think of the consequences,” said Scheerstra, speaking softly, with resignation. “The consequences are for the rest of one’s life. It’s not worth it.”

Santos pines for her family and misses the hubbub of urban life and her freedom.

“The easy money is an illusion,” Santos said. “Better to work hard and have fewer luxuries and never get thrown into a place like this.

“Liberty,” she concluded, “has no price.”

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patrick.mcdonnell@latimes.com