A grandmother-of-nine will miss Christmas with her family after she was arrested and jailed abroad on drug trafficking charges.
Veronica Watson, from the Sunshine Coast, is currently being held at the Santana Women’s Penitentiary in São Paulo, Brazil – a country with some of the most notoriously overcrowded prisons in the world.
Ms Watson was arrested after local authorities accused her of being a drug courier as she prepared to leave the country on December 1.
Ms Watson was reportedly found with almost 1.5kg of cocaine in a hidden compartment in her suitcase at the airport when customs officers attacked.
Her daughter, Sam, 59, said she was “in shock” when she discovered her mother had been detained.
She insists that her mother could never be guilty because she was against drugs and breaking the law throughout her childhood.
Ms Watson never traveled outside Australia before her arrest and her daughter, who lives in western Sydney, says the whole situation “doesn’t feel real”.
Her mother claims so lured to São Paulo, a bustling Brazilian city of eleven million, by the promise of a business deal offered to her online that required her to meet and sign a number of documents in person.
Veronica Watson, from the Sunshine Coast, has been arrested in Brazil after she was allegedly found with 1,483 grams of cocaine in a hidden compartment in her suitcase
Sam said she tried to warn her mother about the deal because it “sounded dodgy,” but she went ahead with the trip without knowing.
“I can’t believe she did it,” Sam told 7News.
Mrs Watson’s husband of 16 years, Stephen, said she met people online who promised to pay for her holiday if she signed the documents in person.
He said he only learned of the trip when Mrs. Watson asked if she could go to Brazil over dinner one evening.
“I said, ‘Why do you want to go to Brazil?’ She says, ‘I have to go there and sign the paperwork’ and I said, ‘Do you even know what you’re signing? ‘ he explained.
Stephen asked Ms Watson how well she knew the people she had met online and she replied that they had only recently been in touch and it was not a particularly personal relationship.
Ms Watson also informed her partner that the documents would be written Portuguese and that she would ‘have someone there to explain it’.
“I said, ‘That’s not good enough’… [but] she was adamant [she would] Go,” Stephen added.
Ms Watson is being held at the Santana women’s prison (pictured) in São Paulo, Brazil, and local authorities have seized her phone and cut off communications
Now Stephen said he was a “wreck” and that “there are no words to explain how devastating” it was that Mrs Watson had been jailed.
In recent days, Sam received a letter from her mother from Santana Women’s Prison explaining how sorry she was.
“Hi Sam, it’s mom. I’m so sorry this happened,” she wrote.
“I didn’t know…I love you guys (sic) so much.”
Her phone has been confiscated by local authorities, so she has no other way to communicate with her family or people outside the prison.
The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs has confirmed this is the case providing assistance to Mrs. Watson.
She is now taking on the prospect a long and expensive legal battle abroad.