An n grandmother of nine being held in Brazil on drug trafficking charges has spoken out to reveal how she claims she was tricked into becoming a drug mule.
Veronica Watson, 59, from the Sunshine Coast, was recently released on bail from Santana Women’s Penitentiary in São Paulo, but has to remain in the country as she prepares to fight the charge in court.
She was arrested at the city’s airport on December 1 last year after customs officials found close to 1.5kg of cocaine in a hidden compartment in her suitcase.
Ms Watson, who is married, said she was given the suitcase only hours before her flight out of the country and had looked inside but saw ‘nothing suspicious’.
She had gone to the South American country after striking up a friendship with a man online two years earlier, who claimed his name was Norman Leach.
‘He introduced himself as an ex-army officer who was on his own suffering PTSD and so I thought I’d be a nice person and give him someone to talk to,’ she told Seven News.
The broadcaster was shown records of ‘thousands’ of text messages and calls between Ms Watson and the mystery man, who she had never met in person, and which eventually turned romantic.
She said she was ‘excited to go to another country’ when, after two years, she was asked by him to go to Brazil to collect investment documents that would fund their life together and deliver them to Sri Lanka because he could not go himself.
Ms Watson’s husband of 16 years, Stephen, said she had met some people online who promised to pay for her holiday if she went over to get the documents in person.
He said that he only found out about the trip when Ms Watson asked if she could go to Brazil over dinner one night.
‘I said, “what do you want to go to Brazil for?” – she goes, “I need to go over there to sign paperwork” and I said, “do you even know what you’re signing?”‘
Stephen asked Ms Watson how well she knew the people she’d met online and she replied they had only come into contact recently and that it wasn’t a particularly personal relationship.
Ms Watson also informed her husband that the documents were written in Portuguese and that she would ‘have someone there to explain’.
‘I said, “that’s not good enough” … [but] she was adamant [she would] go,’ Stephen added.
Ms Watson is being represented by a local lawyer who said he have seen many other woman manipulated into becoming drug mules.
He secured the release of another n woman who spent several months in the same São Paulo prison.
‘I don’t want to go back there (prison), I don’t know how I’d go,’ Ms Watson said from her basic one bedroom flat in the city.
She said it was a total ‘shock’ when security officials at the airport stopped her.
‘I want to get my story out If I can save one woman then I’ve done my job,’ she said.