Peru Two’s Michaella McCollum looked sensational in a purple bikini as she soaked up the sun on the beach in Benidorm on Wednesday. 

As one of the notorious Peru Two, Michaella, 31, served three years in a hardcore prison near Lima when she was convicted of drug smuggling.

But she has now turned her life around, becoming mother of two, a public speaker and influencer – who this week warned of the hell that could await Brits accused of drug trafficking abroad.

It comes as the arrests of Bella May Culley, 18, and Charlotte May Lee, 21, have made global headlines in recent weeks as they face drug smuggling charges that could see them locked up for up to 20 years.

As she hit the beach, Michaella showed off her toned figure in the Louis Vuitton two piece as she cooled off in the sea. 

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Michaella – who had a boob job at the end of last year – wore her blonde tresses in loose waves over her shoulders and opted for a bronzed makeup look. 

Just this week she opened up about her time in prison as the two young women face time behind bars. 

She has vivid memories of prison paella, and the maggots lurking within. 

‘I remember how I’d lay all the rice out, to see which grains I could eat and which were maggots. Back home, it was reported that I’d gone on hunger strike, but I hadn’t.’

She also remembers her poor mum arriving, braving corrupt prison guards and six-hour waits in the blazing Peruvian heat, with bags of food, which Michaella would fall upon.

‘She’d bring a whole chicken, which I’d eat with my fingers, and there would be cockroaches climbing up onto the table and I’d just flick them away. I mean, they didn’t even bother me, by then. 

‘You become so used to it. And I suppose there is a level of guilt and shame that you feel it’s acceptable, even though it isn’t.’ The cockroaches bother her now, though.

She raises her forearm. ‘I’ve got goosebumps, just talking about them. But then… normal. It’s astonishing what you adapt to, and how resilient you can be.’

Even her resilience has limits, though. As one of the notorious Peru Two, Michaella served three years in a hardcore prison near Lima when she was convicted of drug smuggling.

She does not quibble with the sentence, acknowledging she deserved it, but reckons today that three years was her ‘top limit’.

‘I could not do 20 years in a prison like that,’ she said. ‘I just couldn’t. And that’s what those girls are facing.’

By ‘those girls’ she means the two young British women facing similar drug smuggling charges, currently locked up in prisons that must feel as far from home as hers did. 

The arrests of Bella May Culley, 18, and Charlotte May Lee, 21, have made global headlines in recent weeks.

The cases are unrelated: Bella, from Teesside, is charged with trying to smuggle 14kg of cannabis into Georgia; while Charlotte, from Coulsdon in south London, faces similar charges in Sri Lanka relating to 46kg of synthetic drug kush – which can be 25 times more potent than opioid fentanyl.

Charlotte appeared in court yesterday, handcuffed and tearful. If found guilty, both will be looking at up to 20 years behind bars.

Michaella was arrested with 20-year-old Scot Melissa Reid, whom she had never met before their fateful trip from Ibiza to Peru.

The pictures of the Peru Two as they came to be known, standing forlornly by mismatching suitcases – Michaella with her then black hair, scraped into a high, ‘doughnut’ bun – went round the world.

And now history appears to be repeating itself. Michaella says it was her mother who first heard about the arrest of Bella Culley and called her.

‘The situation was almost exactly the same. Her mum had reported her missing, then it emerged that she’d been arrested. There were such parallels with my case – except it was just in a different country.’

Her heart immediately went out to Bella, then to Charlotte, a former TUI air stewardess whose story emerged days later. Both women have denied the charges against them.

‘I couldn’t help but feel bad for them,’ Michaella says. ‘They are 19 and 21. Whatever they have done, it’s so young to be caught up in something like this, and I know what they are going to go through. And their families. It’s the worst thing anybody can have to face.’

Bella’s situation seems even more precarious. She told the court in Tbilisi that she was pregnant which, if true, adds a layer of horror. 

‘As a mum, I can’t even begin to imagine what it would be like to give birth in that sort of place, and to potentially have the child taken from you and put into care,’ says Michaella. ‘That adds a whole new, terrifying, dimension. It’s just incredibly sad.’

In some quarters there has been scant public sympathy for these two, which Michaella understands. She challenges it, though. ‘It’s easy to look at girls like this and think ‘how could you be so stupid?’ but I look back at myself and think exactly that.

‘I don’t know the circumstances in detail here, but I do know that of all the women I came across who had been involved in drug smuggling, only about 10 per cent were doing it as a business, who knew the risks and accepted them.

‘The vast majority were the victims of some sort of coercion, usually by men. Prisons all over the world are full of women who have been caught up in something like this.

‘And the men at the top rarely get caught. The men who pulled all the strings in my case were never held to account.’

Ironically, it wasn’t until Michaella cooperated with a 2022 Netflix documentary about her case that she started to regard herself as a ‘victim’.

‘It was when I was watching an actress do some of the re-enactments of my story that I realised there had been exploitation and coercion going on here.

‘At the time I was so high (on cocaine) that I could barely walk. Yet the men around me were all sober. I thought they were my friends, but actually they didn’t give a s*** about me. 

‘When you are 19 and 20 you are so hopelessly naive. You don’t even know that there are such bad things in the world, never mind that it could happen to you.’

Michaella had been offered £5,000 to smuggle those drugs – a pitiful figure, she admits. ‘But in a lot of cases like mine the money isn’t life changing, which makes me think even more that there is an element of being tricked into it.

‘I mean who would risk spending 20 years of your life in prison for £3,000 or £4,000 or even £10,000. Even £50,000 isn’t enough. No amount of money is worth your freedom.’

A few years ago, Michaella wrote a book about her ordeal, which brought understandable criticism from those who feel she should not have been allowed to capitalise on her notoriety. 

She denies it was a money-spinner (‘the financial return was very small, and I wasn’t paid for the Netflix documentary either’).

Her account of her three years in Lima’s notorious Ancon 2 prison is grim. Michaella shared a ‘bedroom’ with hundreds of other female inmates, sleeping on concrete bunks ‘like a zoo’.

The prisoners included a woman who had killed her own child and served the baby up as food for her unfaithful husband, and another who had murdered and dismembered her mother-in-law. Corruption was rife, with guards routinely taking ‘food, magazines, books, chocolates’ from visitors’ bags.

Also prevalent was the trading of sexual favours for basics like water. One of the first Spanish phrases Michaella learned was ‘don’t touch me’.

There were specific challenges that came with being white and British. ‘That made it worse for us. Some of the guards thought we were princesses. They just see white skin, blue eyes.’

She says she was also ‘scammed’ by legal professionals. ‘People see foreigners as money magnets and charge a lot more to help them. I remember looking back and thinking ‘we have been robbed’.’

Both girls were eventually sentenced to six years and eight months, after pleading guilty to drug trafficking. 

They ended up serving three years, and were released back home, on parole, in 2016. Michaella knows they were lucky – at one point they were facing 15 years.