Argentinian police recently arrested a woman for allegedly trying to smuggle four kilograms of weed in a fake baby bump.
Cops encountered the “pregnant” woman and her partner at a police checkpoint in Valle de Uco, Argentina. The would-be smugglers were traveling on a bus from Mendoza to Santa Oliva in Patagonia, a sparsely populated region at the southern end of South America that is shared by both Chile and Argentina.
During a routine search, police discovered that the woman’s partner was carrying two bricks of cannabis in his luggage. This discovery prompted cops to take a closer look at the woman’s suspiciously-shaped baby bump. Further investigation revealed that the woman was not pregnant at all, but was actually carrying 4 kilograms of weed stashed in a fake belly made from a starch-based paste.
Patricia Bullrich, Argentinian Minister for Security, shared pictures of the cunning disguise in a tweet tagged “Narco Pregnancy.” Bullrich explained that the suspect “made a belly out of paste, hid 15 cannabis bricks inside it and faked a pregnancy before trying to take it from Mendoza to Santa Cruz” in neighboring Chile. “At a police control the pretend mum-to-be and her accomplice were arrested.”
Gallery — Confiscate, Sell, Smoke, Repeat…
As unique as the concept of using a false pregnancy to smuggle drugs sounds, it’s been done before. In 2013, a Canadian woman was arrested at El Dorado airport in Colombia for trying to smuggle two kilos of cocaine in a false belly made of latex. Other amateur smugglers have also been caught trying to use lame disguises to conceal their stash, like the man who was busted trying to hide over $30,000 worth of coke under an obviously fake wig.
Drug smugglers seem to have no shortage of creative ideas about how to move drugs across interstate borders. Cops have busted people trying to smuggle drugs stashed inside coffins, soaked into the pages of children’s books, infused into plastic pellets, stuffed inside dead rats, in jalapeño shipments, or simply disguised as Christmas presents.
