Kiwi cocaine accused: My day from hell

Sharon Armstrong. Photo / Supplied

Accused drug smuggler Sharon Armstrong has told of her "day from hell" in an exclusive interview at her Argentinian prison.

The former senior public servant was arrested last week accused of trying to smuggle 5kg of cocaine on to a flight to London.

She's awaiting her first court appearance at Unidad 31 Women's Federal Prison.

The complex, in a rundown industrial zone 40 minutes west of Buenos Aires, is made up of a ring of single-storey cellblocks around an immaculate courtyard. They are fenced in by two rows of 4m-high barbed wire fences.

Argentine bureaucracy is as efficient at keeping visitors out as the prison walls are at keeping inmates in. There was a five-hour wait to see Armstrong.

There are lists of hundreds of do's and don'ts splashed across the entrance door.

Televisions, frying pans and tinned peaches can be given to inmates. Visitors wearing grey, blue, black or sky blue will be refused entry.

Family members and concubines, so the sign reads, must produce written documentation proving who they are.

Armstrong, 54, is waiting for me in the prison gym. She limps over, her arthritic hip the result of a motorbike accident decades earlier, and introduces herself with a gap-toothed grin.

The only possessions she held on to after her arrest were her jandals and jeans. She wears a borrowed T-shirt, the tribal tattoos on her back and forearms are visible.

Armstrong is known to everyone on the inside. The night before my visit, her story was profiled on an evening news bulletin. The guards and her cellmates have been talking about her ever since.

"I didn't want to be a celebrity in Argentina - not for this," she says.

Armstrong won't talk about how she came to be arrested. She says she will tell her story one day, when she knows her family are safe from the people who lured her in.

She is strong and focused on the hard days ahead, but when talk turns to her daughter Arianna, and her sister Leanne, she can't help the tears.

"My whanau are me and I am my whanau," she said.

Armstrong has a natural warmth, and is utterly believable as an innocent woman who has made a tragic mistake.

Of the modest gifts I have brought, cigarettes, newspapers, chocolate, a book, a picture of Mt Taranaki means the most to her.

Armstrong is clinging to the dream of one day returning to see her mountain and her 8-year-old grandson.

She said her "day from hell" - the worst since her arrest - began at midnight on Monday when she was told to be ready for a routine check in a few hours.

They came for her at 3am. In darkness she was led from the cells, handcuffed, and placed in the back of the prison van.

Armstrong spent five hours cuffed inside the vehicle with no food or water as it picked up other prisoners, male and female. There was the "creepy" man breathing down her back and several women with severe mental health problems.

She shudders recalling the experience. "It was a nightmare. I was pretty distraught. I tried to block it all out, and kept saying all of the karakias that I could remember."

One girl aged about 18, covered in dirt and blisters, entered the van and started sucking her thumb.

"It just about broke my heart to see that. She was just a child."

She was taken to a forensic medical centre in central Buenos Aires remand prison, where a doctor quizzed her about drug use (none) and her psychological history.

Afterwards she returned to the cell to await her journey back to Unidad 31.

She got there at 1am the following day.

"Half the girls in my cell were still up and they gave me hugs and a massage and made me a cup of tea.

"But it was easily my worst day since I was arrested."

Only the slow-moving Argentinian justice system can determine how many more hard days are to come.

VISITOR RULES

Gifts allowed:
* Televisions
* Frying pans
* Tinned peaches
* Cigarettes

No entry:
* No entry to visitors wearing grey, blue or black.

Identification:
* Concubines must show written proof of their identity.