Quotes from the Women: Why did you get involved with trafficking?

Board President, Devin, conducts interviews

Welcome to a new series called Quotes from the Women! Last year, Ruraq Maki’s Board President, Devin Montalto, conducted a series of interviews with the women about their involvement in illegal activity and their lives in the prison. Throughout the coming weeks, we will share pieces of our interviews, to help you get a sense the challenges the women face before incarceration and during incarceration. 

One of the questions we are most frequently asked is why the women are incarcerated. The majority are incarcerated for drug trafficking, one of the most common and profitable form of work in this area. But how do these women get involved in trafficking? And why? 

Today we share a fews answers to our interview question: Why did you get involved with drug trafficking?

“I had five kids to educate and I didn’t have enough money to pay for five kids education and my husband was sick, he has stomach cancer. That is why I had to find economic resources to help him get better. [Before I started trafficking] I took care of my house, my kids and my farm. It wasn’t enough because my husband got sick with cancer and I no longer had enough money. Operations here in Peru are very expensive and so is medicine.”  – 50 year old mother of 5, serving a 12 year sentence

“I got involved because I am separated from my child’s father and because I didn’t have any support from my child’s father I had to work to give her the best that I could, to give her what I never had. I went to work at a place in [omitted for confidentiality] where I met a friend and he invited me work in trafficking, to travel, thats how I got involved in that work, its what I did to support my daughter, so that she could get ahead.” – 22 year old, mother of 1, serving an 11 year sentence 

“I am here for drug trafficking, because I didn’t have enough money to educate my children; to send them to school.” – 40 year old, mother of 5, serving a 6 year sentence 

“More than anything I was trying to help my son who is mentally disabled, he needs a medicine…because he has seizures and its very expensive and in that moment when she asked me If I would do it I thought of him and didn’t think clearly, just of him and how I’d be able to buy his medicine. And because of my lack of thinking my children are now alone, my grandfather takes care of them but he is 75 years old and because my son is disable my grandfather has to feed him, bathe him and change his diapers, its too much for him.” – 33 year old, mother of 5, serving a 7 year sentence 

“Its my husbands fault that I’m here, I was always studying nothing more and when I committed to him he was already involved. I was in the car with him, when he was busted and so they thought I was one of the bosses, same as him, because I was with him in the car with the drugs they didn’t believe that I wasn’t involved.” – 33 year old, mother of 2, serving a 12 year sentence