Watch: Brazilian sentenced to 17 years for drug trafficking – AI report

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Watch: Brazilian sentenced to 17 years for drug trafficking – AI report

7:09 CAT | 27 Feb 2020

Photo: Miramar

The Maputo City Court on Thursday sentenced a 24 year old Brazilian, Ariane Aragao, to 17 years imprisonment for drug trafficking.

Aragao was arrested in Maputo International Airport on 26 June 2019, as she disembarked from an Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa. She was found to be carrying 5.4 kilos of cocaine in her luggage. She had begun her journey in Brazil, changing planes in Addis Ababa.

When arrested she claimed to be unaware that she was carrying illicit drugs in her luggage, but in court she admitted she had been recruited in Brazil to carry cocaine that was to be sold in Mozambique.

She said she had been promised payment of 9,000 Brazilian reais (slightly more than 2,000 US dollars). This is an extraordinarily low wage for an inherently dangerous job, and wildly out of line with the prices fetched by cocaine. According to the United Nations, the average price of cocaine in 2017 in the United States was 96 dollars per gram. So 5.4 kilos would have a street price of almost 520,000 dollars.

This was the second trial of a foreign citizen on drugs charges by the Maputo City Court this month. Last week the court sentenced a 66 year old US citizen, Rodney Baldus, to 18 years for smuggling 4.6 kilos.

Baldus said he did not know he was carrying the drug. He told the court a complicated story of how he was on his way to Italy to pick up an inheritance. The person in the United States who told him he had this mysterious inheritance, said he must travel first to Maputo, and then to South Africa where he would take a flight to Italy

His flight to Maputo and his hotel accommodation was paid for by this unknown benefactor. In the hotel, he was visited by a man who gave him a suitcase to carry to Italy.

Baldus said he was unaware there were drugs in the suitcase – they were hidden in packets of biscuits. It seems that this far-fetched tale made little impression on the court.