Easy targets: Drug mules fill women's jails in Hong Kong

A quarter of Hong Kong's prisoners are women, a record-high percentage skewed by impoverished foreign drug mules who are often duped or coerced.

"They find people who are in a precarious economic situation," Lecarnaque Saavedra told AFP."They look for them and in this case it was me." She described how officers found two jackets inside her suitcase that had been filled with condoms containing about 500g of cocaine in liquid form. Official statistics show that a quarter of the 8,434 people serving time in Hong Kong last year were women - the highest rate globally, according to the World Prison Brief.

Wotherspoon, a bundle of energy at 75 years old, has travelled repeatedly to Latin America to try and help families of those arrested - even confronting traffickers at times. In 2016, Venezuelan national Caterina got 25 years in prison after failing to persuade a jury she was coerced into being a mule.

"I have been working for many years with vulnerable people, but this is one case that hangs over me," Patricia Ho, a lawyer who helped with Caterina's appeal, told AFP."What I cannot shake out of my mind is that I would have done exactly the same thing as she did." She later told the court that she came from a poor family from northern Brazil, had a mother who needed kidney dialysis and had fallen pregnant with a man who abandoned her. She gave birth in prison while awaiting trial.

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