by George Wiley
Krista Barnes is 21 now. She's tall for a woman, 5'8" or 5'9" she says. "But I was 6'0" in Peru," she laughs, as she towered over most of the Peruvians she met. Krista Barnes also has golden blond hair, blue eyes, and displays an innocence that belies her experiences over the last three years.
Barnes' features made her very conspicuous when she arrived for the first time in Lima, Peru in the early fall of 1996. She was 18 years old, straight from the South Bay, and had never been out of the country. She was also on a mission that in retrospect seems insanely foolish.
At the time, it seemed like a free trip and a big adventure. Barnes and her best friend, Jennifer Davis, who was then 19 years old, had agreed to fly to Peru, pick up an unspecified amount of cocaine and fly it back to the U.S.
They'd been assured and reassured that everything had been taken care of. They'd be cared for and handled. They'd never even have to come in contact with the cocaine itself.
All they had to do was fly to Lima, stay for a few days and fly back. It was that easy. And it would net them a free trip and $5,000 apiece. "That's a lot of money to an 18-year-old," Barnes recalls.
Barnes and Davis agreed to the trip. They wouldn't stand on American soil again for three years.
Those years have passed. Krista Barnes is back home in Redondo Beach. She's back in college. She works as a waitress in a popular South Bay eatery. When she got to Peru she couldn't speak a word of Spanish. "I'm fluent now-speak, read and write," she says proudly.
But there is so much that Barnes doesn't feel proud about. First, there was the fact that she agreed to be a cocaine courier in the first place. She doesn't dispute her guilt. When she was caught and locked into a Peruvian prison she saw violations of the human rights that she'd never even considered, let alone lived through. For months, she and Davis subsisted on rice and bread crusts that were contaminated with insects.
During her stay, Barnes made a list of 77 human rights violations. They are somewhere in the 32 volumes of her journals in which she documented her captivity.Barnes hopess to use these diaries as source material when she writes her own book.
"I want to travel the world telling my story," she says. "So that what happened to me won't happen to somebody else."
Barnes has already begun that traveling. She's appeared on one national TV show, and Thursday, Jan. 13, she'll be in New York City to shoot a segment for 20/20. There have been talks with publishers, agents and movie producers. There are projects in the works that Barnes doesn't want to talk about. But she insists her goal is not to make money, and plans to set up a foundation to help travelers caught in situations similar to hers.
Officially, Barnes and Davis, who has returned to her parents' home in Illinois, are barred from talking to one another. They are back in America, but by agreement with Peruvian authorities they remain on parole until 2004.Barnes is getting her second chance, and she's taking advantage of it. She's tougher and wiser than she was when she got on that plane to Peru. But She's not cynical or hardened. There's toughness behind her eyes that might not have been there before. But she's impatient to get on with telling her story. In the summer of 1996, Davis and Barnes agreed to share a San Pedro apartment with a third roommate. Barnes won't identify that person except to call him or her "an old family friend."
After a few weeks of living together, the family friend introduced Barnes and Davis to two men in their late 20s or early 30s. They were Peruvian and they dealt in cocaine. Today, Barnes believes those men had been trained to find prospective drug runners like Davis and herself.
Reassuredby the men and told positively that they'd never handle the drugs themselves except to check suitcases in and out of the airport, Barnes and Davis agreed. "They told us 'Everything has been arranged,'" said Barnes.
Barnes and Davis got passports and were on their way within a week. When they arrived at Jorge Chavez airport in Lima, they were met by two men, who took them to a hotel called the Pueblo Inn. "Even to this day, I don't know where that is," says Barnes. The men who met them in Peru took away their passports and their plane tickets, so that they couldn't change their minds about the cocaine and fly home.
"On the seventh night, I had a flash - what am I doing? - but there was no turning back," said Barnes.
The American girls were only at the Pueblo Inn for a few days when they were moved to another hotel, and then to a third. They had to spend nine days in Peru to meet their visa requirements and to give the appearance of being real tourists. The suitcases they'd taken to Peru were taken from them and two others were brought to them. They were told to repack in these, which they did. They saw no drugs. They told their Peruvian contacts they were getting bored sitting around hotels. They weren't going to be bored for long.
On the last day, a single man picked them up and drove them to the airport. They'd been coached on what to tell customs officials, where they'd been and what they'd done on their trip. When they got to the airport, they told their story as planned. To their shock, even before they could finish their story, the Peruvian customs agents directed them to a back room.
In the room, the customs agents took out a long, hollow tube. Poking the probe through the walls of the suitcases, they quickly found the cocaine beneath the false bottoms in the bags the drug merchants had given the girls.
"They knew. We were set up," Barnes said. In her impatience to explain she grabs a pen and draws a quick picture. It's a series of stick figures, starting small and growing larger and larger. "This is me," she says, pointing to the smallest figure. The rest are the others in the Peruvian drug-dealing chain. Barnes prints a single word in Spanish: "B-U-R-R-I-E-R-S." That was Barnes and Davis, the burros, the mules. "I didn't even know what a kilo was," says Barnes.
Still at the airport, Barnes and Davis were grilled about the cocaine. They were "screamed at" to sign papers in Spanish, which they did. "I was scared," Barnes says. The girls went from scared to terrified when they were shown a paper in English. They tried to read the paper, but they could only see one thing, a big 30 in the middle of the page. That was their probable prison sentence: 30 years. "At that point we just broke down," says Barnes. "We were just the little goldfish in the drug hierarchy. While we were getting caught, someone else was getting through." Peruvian customs had found 5.5 kilos of cocaine in Barnes' suitcase and 3.3 kilos in the Davis' bag.
The girls were first detained in a jail in Lima. Peruvian officials contacted their families. So did the American Embassy in Lima, which simply faxed them notices. "We and 10 other women were 15 days in holding cells," says Barnes. Their parents sent $1,500 for their legal defense, which Barnes said, was stolen by the first lawyer they tried to retain.
Eventually, the girls found themselves locked in Santa Monica de Chorillos Women's Prison in Lima. They were to remain there for two years and ten months. The food was so rotten and filthy that they couldn't eat it. It was served to the prisoners in big garbage pails. Both girls lost around 20 pounds. In earlier interviews Davis told the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights she had recurring bladder and kidney infections. Barnes also said she fainted frequently and vomited after eating. Other prisoners were complaining also. One Christmas day the prisoners rioted due to the poor food.
Barnes and Davis fell into despair. But even as they did so, chinks of light began to shine through the dank prison walls.
"During this time, we were depending on our families," says Barnes.
Barnes father, Craig Barnes, who in partnership with former girlfriend Denise Young owns a bike rental shop in Redondo Beach, was able to keep in touch with his daughter through telephone calls. Denise Young, who says "I raised Krista for 15 years," went to Lima to see the girls and found them "wallowing in depression.".
As the alleged human rights violations at the prison surfaced, Barnes and Davis found themselves cast in the parts of innocents, deceived and wronged by evil drug dealers who'd taken advantage of them. Both girls admitted their crimes. Barnes expressed her regret at having been so naïve and stupid.
Briefly but effectively, Barnes and Davis became the poster-children for campaigners attempting to end the violations in the prison. The John Marshall Law School in Chicago presented a 27-page complaint about the treatment of prisoners to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. American congressmen and senators took up the campaign, sending official letters to Peruvian diplomats demanding better treatment for Americans held in Peruvian jails.
To Barnes, time went by slowly. "Each day seemed like a year," she says now. But for Barnes and Davis personally at least, their conditions improved. Peruvian authorities had never attempted to separate the two young Americans. They began their captivity in what Barnes called a huge room - a "salon" - with 40 other women prisoners, but in the end Barnes and Davis had a room to themselves. They were never accosted by male prison guards or officials as other American women prisoners allege. They got better food, fruits and vegetables and salads, paid for by their families.
With the help of other Americans who'd been arrested in Peru, Barnes and Davis were able to find "an angel," says Barnes. Her name was Dr. Emelia Fishman, A prominent attorney in Lima, Fishman was "the godsend" who was able to get the girls sentenced after they'd been in prison for over two years.
The sentencing, it turned out, was the girls' first big step towards freedom. When Peruvian authorities counted up the time the girls had spent in prison, they were not only eligible for immediate parole, they had a time-served credit of a couple of months. They'd been held longer than called for under Peruvian law.
After another round of trickling paperwork, Barnes and Davis were released into the custody of Fishman. They still had to spend several weeks in Peru completing release papers between the American and Peruvian authorities that would allow the girls to come home but remain on Peruvian parole.
Krista Barnes got home on November 23. Since then, she has been leading a dual life.
On the one hand, she's trying to be a normal 21-year-old. She has a job and she's attending El Camino College working on a degree in public communications with a minor in Spanish. "I'm extremely happy," says Barnes. "I appreciate all the little things."
But Barnes is also pursuing her celebrity. She wants to write the book about her about her period of captivity.
"Three years is a long time to have taken away from you when it's between 18 and 21," she says. She rises to expertly bus the cups and saucers from a table in a café, and is on the move again. There are no cell walls holding her back. "I feel 21 going on 41," she says.ER