Michaella McCollum 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 says. ‘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.

Few can possibly understand what they and their families are going through, but Northern Irish-born Michaella, who is now a 31-year-old mother to twin boys, can. She was just 19 when she made ‘the greatest mistake of my life’, effectively agreeing to become a drugs mule.

She 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. An iconic illustration of how stupid, and perhaps gullible, young people can be.

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.’

Indeed, Charlotte May Lee has already spoken to investigators about a mysterious British man called ‘Dan’ whom she claims she’d met on the beach in Thailand, who – she says – bought her a ticket to Colombo, promised to join her later for a holiday, then promptly vanished.

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’). 

Still, on reading it, you do rather wish it could be handed out with boarding passes to youngsters venturing abroad for the first time, as she was. To her credit, Michaella has worked with the police to tell her story to impressionable teens.

She grew up in Dungannon, County Tyrone, in a large and seemingly loving family, but her parents were separated and they were a Catholic family in a largely Protestant area.

She cites sectarianism as one of the things she wanted to escape, first with drink, drugs and partying, before heading to Ibiza, to work as a hostess in clubs.

She says she threw herself into the hedonism in the summer of 2013, taking cocaine and ketamine. ‘I think the drugs were a big part of what happened. Everybody was doing them. It was just normal.’ She ‘fell in with a crowd’ that included a drug dealer – ‘a Cockney called Dave’. 

Alarm bells should have rung over the fact he was always sober ‘when everyone else was drunk or high’, but they didn’t. The first time she was asked to transport a ‘package’, she refused. The second time, she agreed. 

The word ‘drugs’ was never mentioned, but she knew, ‘sort of’. The naivety is extraordinary but she reminds me she was ‘off her head, thinking in a way that wasn’t stable’. 

On that fateful trip, she flew first from Ibiza to Mallorca, where it had been arranged that she would meet up with Melissa Reid, and fly to Peru. To this day, Michaella maintains she was so clueless that she didn’t even know where Peru was. ‘I thought it was another city in Spain,’ she says.

When the two arrived, their orders were to pass themselves off as tourists – hence a surreal trip to Machu Picchu. It was on the return trip – with bags full of cocaine – that they were arrested. So began ‘the worst nightmare you can imagine’.

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.

Whatever sentence she served – and deserved – the toll on her family was horrendous. The saddest part of her story is when she talks about the impact on her mother, who had a stroke as Michaella was waiting for her trial.

‘She was suffering panic attacks. She was so depressed. Her life went on hold, the whole family’s did.’ Her mother, now in her 70s, made a full recovery but the guilt is still there for Michaella.

She counts herself fortunate that her family stood by her. ‘Some people in prison didn’t have that. Their families didn’t visit. They had no one on the outside. I only kept going because I knew I had to make amends to mine.’

The last year of her sentence was particularly difficult. ‘I think for the first two I tricked myself that it was fine, I was learning Spanish, getting my life in order – away from the drugs.

‘But that final year, I struggled. When you are in that environment – there was always noise, screaming, chaos – it’s hard not to go insane. I honestly don’t think I would have been able to do another four or five or ten years. I would probably have thought of just taking a way out.’

Michaella today is barely recognisable from the terrified young girl in those iconic photos. She jokes a little about her hairstyle: ‘I didn’t have a mirror. I thought I was making myself presentable.’

She and Melissa are only in touch via Christmas cards. ‘We obviously bonded through this experience that only we understood, but you don’t always want to be reminded of that’. 

She appears to have made good her promise to her mum that she would rebuild her life. She has since gained a degree in business studies, and is soon to start a masters in cybersecurity.

This reinventing of her life has gone alongside raising her twins, Rafael and Rio, who have just turned seven. There is no father on the scene. ‘No, they weren’t planned. I’m doing it on my own, but my mum has been my rock.’

One day, she will have to tell her sons about her three years in a Peruvian prison. ‘It’s probably something that will wait until they are teens, but I will be honest with them. I don’t think there’s any shame in explaining that I made a huge mistake.’

It may be too late for Bella May Culley and Charlotte May Lee, their fates very much in the hands of a legal system of which they have no understanding.

But what advice would she give to them now?

‘That’s a difficult one, but I would tell them to never let their current circumstances define their future. It may seem hopeless at times, but there is always a way forward and don’t let go of the fact that life can be rebuilt.’