For Teen Model, `A Free Trip To A Nightmare In Hell'

LIMA, Peru - Jennifer Davis was sick, terrified and deeply embarrassed for herself and her family, especially for her father, a state-prison captain back home in Illinois.

And the nightmare seemed about to worsen.

One night, three Peruvian prison guards were gesturing at her as they began opening her cell. She knew exactly what they wanted.

Davis, who does not speak Spanish, banged on the cell bars and shouted until the guards backed away.

As she lay shivering and exhausted on a cement slab at the prison in Callao, the tall, dark-haired 19-year-old from Danville, Ill., considered taking her own life.

Only days before, a new lifestyle of flashy living and fashion modeling in Los Angeles had consumed her. But the fantasy evaporated when police picked her up at the Lima airport with 3.3 kilos - more than seven pounds - of pure cocaine in her baggage. Krista Barnes, her 18-year-old roommate and traveling companion, had 5.5 kilos in hers. The day after the September arrest, Peruvian newspapers flashed pictures of them beside the seized drugs, awash in tears.

Davis - a small-town girl from a strict family - felt totally lost. She had never received even a traffic ticket. Yet she had agreed to carry cocaine for the promise of $5,000 and a three-day vacation to Peru, a trip that now could mean eight to 15 years in a Peruvian prison.

"It was a free trip, a free ride. They said, `You are not going to get caught,' " she recalls now, after five months of prison life. "It was sure a free trip. A trip to a nightmare in hell. Boy, was I stupid."

She rubs a hand against her face, looks away, and tears trickle down a cheek. In the prison yard, she looks frail and thin. She does not resemble the stunningly attractive youngster whose modeling career included a brief stint in Milan, Italy.

Now, she spends eight hours a day toiling in a prison garden, earning time off from her sentence - whatever that sentence will turn out to be. The strong Andean sun has deeply burnt her skin.

"Sometimes I feel like I'm never leaving here. Never going home," she says.

At the women's prison called Santa Monica de Chorrillos in a Lima slum, she talks on nervously and excitedly, because she rarely has visitors.

Nor does she have running water or clean toilets. Sometimes there is no electricity. Built for 230 people, the prison holds many more than that today. Sickness is common. So is despair. So are drugs.

The issue has burst onto world consciousness in recent weeks. One demand of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, whose guerrillas seized more than 500 dignitaries inside the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima in December, is improving the conditions for inmates of Peru's prisons.

Having admitted her guilt and having cooperated with authorities, Davis may nonetheless have to wait up to a year before going to trial - often the case in Peru.

She is a pawn discarded by Peruvian drug dealers who use young, middle-class Peruvian girls and foreign women to ferry cocaine to the rest of the world.

Davis is one of 19 Americans now serving time in Peru for trying to bring drugs into the U.S.

U.S. officials consider Davis another sad face in a lengthening lineup of couriers, most of whom do it for the money and have no idea how easily they can be caught or how miserable their lives made.

Disease, hunger, poor medical care, sexual blackmail, rape, robbery, violence, drug use - Peru's prisons are hell, although hell is commonly encountered in Latin America's prisons, say Peruvian and foreign human-rights officials.

"If you are coming here to deal in drugs, you should know that you will be caught, and you will spend time in jail, and it is going to be very hard time," says Fred La Sor, U.S. Embassy spokesman here.

Until the afternoon of Sept. 25, when the U.S. Embassy called from Lima, Davis' family never suspected their daughter could be involved in such trouble.

Her father, Denny Davis, 42, now tells his story, partially in hopes that his daughter will be treated in accordance with Peru's treaty obligations and according to the international standards of criminal justice. But he also hopes the story will prevent other young people from making the same mistake.

Jennifer Davis' journey began when she and Barnes, the daughter of a former Redondo Beach, Calif., police officer, were offered $5,000 each and three days of sun and swimming in Peru. They decided to accept immediately. Two young Peruvians, friends of their Peruvian roommate in suburban Los Angeles, assured them that they had arranged other drug trips and that nobody had been caught.

But after arriving in Peru and being shifted nightly to different hotels, they grew suspicious. One day they panicked and decided to go home without the drugs. But they didn't have their plane tickets; their Peruvian contacts did.

The night before the two were to fly home, their contacts took their bags and returned the next morning with two different and much larger ones.

Moments after arriving at the airport, three policemen took Davis and Barnes to a room where they cut open the bottoms of their bags. Cocaine dust poured onto the table. The two burst into tears.

They were put into a windowless cell at the central jail in Lima. There they were introduced to an attorney, who told them that with some extra money he could arrange for police to change their reports to their advantage.

Both sets of parents were dubious about payoffs. But they sent the attorney about $1,000 each so he would at least represent their daughters. He was never heard from again, the parents say.

With luck, their parents say, Davis and Barnes will be sentenced to six or eight years and then paroled after serving one-third of that.

"We are sending millions down there to improve conditions - judicial conditions too," Denny Davis says. "If my daughter committed a crime, I want her to be punished. But I want her punished in a humane way."

For now his daughter waits.

"I feel so bad, but mostly for my family. This is so hard for them." Jennifer Davis says. "Me, I'm going to start my life over, I swear, if and when I ever get out of here."