Beetge has done her time

SABC journalist, Stephina Komane, tweeted this image of Tessa Beetge during an interview on Thursday.

SABC journalist, Stephina Komane, tweeted this image of Tessa Beetge during an interview on Thursday.

Published Mar 28, 2014

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Tessa Beetge is no hero. The South Coast smuggler committed a despicable deed six years ago, being part of a cocaine distribution pipeline to addicts and future addicts, for a dirty payday.

She was a mule for poison – 10kg of it. But her case attracted special attention among newspapers in Durban and other media because she was from KwaZulu-Natal, and one of a growing number of South Africans involved in this deadly trade.

Official figures in Pretoria have it that 893 citizens are imprisoned abroad, reflecting only those who have been caught and those the government knows about. Unofficial estimates go to more than three times that.

Between dud passports and drug mules, South African travellers no longer enjoy the reception they had at the world’s points of entry post-1994.

In Beetge’s case there were the intended victims, or customers as drug peddlers would call them. Then there was the collateral damage: her family’s heartache; her mother, Marie Swanepoel’s, tireless efforts to get her daughter back from Penitenciária Feminina da Capital prison in São Paulo, Brazil; and two children without their mother for almost six years.

This was a story of a mother’s dedication, her belief in her daughter’s version that she had been duped into it, and the sadness of her dying in October, without seeing her daughter’s safe return. It was also an intriguing tale of those who enticed Beetge to be a mule and were jailed for 12 years each.

Beetge, 36, paid for her crime, and has returned, hopefully a changed person. She has a life to resume and repairs to do, and she should be allowed to get on with them.

A useful role she should consider is backing a non-governmental group like Locked Up, to warn those who might be lured, as she was, by easy money. Talking about it far and wide might dissuade some, at least, from the same harmful stupidity.

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