In South America, drug peddling is neither new nor strange. What is however gaining attention is the means through which the banned substance is couriered from one country to another. Whereas a woman’s breasts are supposed to lactate for a baby to feed on, the newborn may no longer be too trusty of its mother that the content of those fat boobs is milk, as a Honduran woman has been caught at the El Dorado Airport in Colombia’s capital, Bogota, with 1.5kg (3.3 lbs) of liquid cocaine implanted in her breasts.
The New Breast Milk
Paola Sabillon was attempting to travel to Spain with liquid cocaine stuffed in two tied-up latex gloves inside her breasts.
Twenty-two-year-old Sabillon aroused suspicion because she was acting strangely in the security line at the airport, according to Diego Rosero, an airport police officer.
“X-rays revealed a recent surgery on Sabillon’s breasts and she confessed that an unknown substance had been implanted which she was meant to take to Barcelona,” Rosero revealed.
Authorities said a preliminary investigation showed that the surgery took place at a clandestine clinic in the city of Pereira, in western Colombia. The implants were removed at a Bogota hospital where Sabillon is also being treated for an infection.
Although unusual, it is not the first time that Spanish police have encountered a woman trying to smuggle drugs by using breast implants. In 2014, it was reported that Spanish police nabbed a woman smuggling 1.7kg. The woman who flew from Colombia was arrested at Madrid’s Barajas Airport for carrying 1.7kg of cocaine hidden in her breast implants.
The 43-year-old Venezuelan national had been on a flight from Bogota, which is seen by police as a common route for narcotics to be trafficked into Europe.
Paola Deyanira Sabillon
Also in 2012, police in Barcelona arrested a woman from Panama who was carrying 1.4kg of cocaine in her breast implants. She was also on a flight from Bogota.
When border police discovered fresh scars and bloodstained gauze on the woman’s chest, she was taken to a nearby hospital to check her claim that she had recently undergone breast implant surgery.
Breast implants are however the latest way of drug smuggling. Other ways in which drugs have been smuggled through the body include fake latex-made belly, swallowing and body packing.
Some 300 tonnes of cocaine are produced per year in Colombia, a hub for drug production and trafficking. So far this year, in Madrid Airport alone, the squad has seized around 500kg of cocaine and six kilogrammes of heroin and has made 189 arrests.
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