Jesufina, the Drug «Mule»: Story of a Reportage about the Human. Or the Imperfections of Transatlantism

Abstract

Through transatlantic triangulation (Africa-America-Europe) of a woman convicted of drug trafficking, we address the issue of emigration, gender issues crime and journalism. Jesufina was pregnant with her third daughte when she traveled from Cape Verde to Brazil to stock up on the «packages» of cocaine she would be paid to transport. The mule, as women who carry and bring drugs in small amounts are known, was picked up at the airport. She will never return home. Nor to the minor children he left in Cape Verde. Sentenced to little less than five years in prison, she has the baby as a prisoner in the Tires Prison. This woman from Cabo Verde is just one of about 200 foreigners who inhabit the Portuguese seclusion system. In Portuguese prisons, these women represent 18 percent of those convicted. Most have children, and many live with them in prison. Drug trafficking is the main cause of detention of foreign women in Portugal. They come mostly from Portuguese-speaking countries such as Brazil or Cape Verde (although also from Colombia or Romania). They represent the wrong motive for the closeness that sharing of the same language can mean. The poet Rudyard Kipling wrote: «All good people agree/And all good people say/All nice people, like Us, Are Us/And All Others Are They:/But if we cross the Sea,/Instead of…/You can end up (think of it) to seem We/Like just some kind of They!». If any stranger is seen as ‘He’, a stranger who has committed a crime, is black, is a woman and is pregnant, has everything against her. But Transatlantism is also made of these realities, with which there is much to learn. About Us and Others. Or just about the Others who are also Us