This AI-powered chatbot reveals the story of a woman imprisoned in Paraguay for drug trafficking

This chatbot helps tell the story of how women are affected by drug trafficking in Paraguay.

— Hello, I’m Eva. It’s going to be ten months that I’ve been imprisoned here. They accuse me of international trafficking and organized crime, although I feel more like a victim than anything else. My lawyer says the sentence will be 10 years. And I told him that I cannot accept something that does not belong to me.

Thus begins the conversation with Eva, a chatbot powered by AI, developed by the independent media El Surtidor, in Paraguay, which offers an innovative perspective to tell how drug trafficking affects communities, particularly women.

The El Surtidor team, made up of journalists, conversational designers and UX writing experts, developed this project after conducting a series of interviews between 2022 and 2024 with several imprisoned and express women.

The chatbot, which gives voice to Eva, tells her story in the first person and without intermediaries. Both she and the details she shares are real; The El Surti team only omitted or modified circumstances that could compromise their safety. Eva is a 28-year-old woman imprisoned in the Buen Pastor prison in Asunción, Paraguay, accused of acting as a “mule” for a drug trafficking network.

Like many others, poverty, poor mental health, and lack of job opportunities led Eva to fall into the hands of drug traffickers who used her as a “mule.” The majority of these women are the last link in the drug trafficking chain: single, separated or widowed with dependent children, and more likely to be arrested than men for these crimes.

The chatbot allows you to tell your story while maintaining your anonymity:

— I was looking for a job and I approached this person myself to ask him to give me a hand. I knew he was dedicated to this. They used me. He had to carry a suitcase with cocaine from Asunción to a city in Europe. We had agreed on 2kg and they gave me much more.

Eva was arrested with more than two kilos of cocaine in her suitcase when she was trying to travel to a city unknown to her. Without any preparation, she found herself trapped in a situation shared by more than four hundred women imprisoned under Law 1340, which punishes the illicit trafficking of narcotics and dangerous drugs. In Paraguay, four out of ten women in prison are accused of violating this law.

According to data from El Surtidor, more than 400 women are imprisoned in Paraguay for crimes related to drug trafficking. This represents approximately 44.3% of the female population deprived of liberty in the country, accused of violating Law 1340, which punishes the illicit trafficking of narcotics and dangerous drugs.

What role does artificial intelligence play in this story?

According to the team, they chose this format “to offer a different perspective than that of stigmatization due to consumption. For that, taking care of each of Eva’s words was our priority at all times. The decision we made was to restrict the use of AI only to understanding what the user wants to ask, but everything Eva says was written by humans. We did not want to leave such delicate material in the hands of a technology that offers a percentage of hallucinations or that, in the best of cases, tends to transform particular stories, with all their nuances, into common places,” explains Surti.

Paraguay is known as the Western Hemisphere’s leading exporter of smuggled cigarettes, the region’s largest marijuana producer, and a key logistics point for cocaine trafficking in Latin America. However, little is said about the victims of the failed war on drugs. While the great leaders of organized crime accumulate power and even occupy public positions, prisons are filled with people stigmatized by consumption.

Anyone can turn you into a chatbot of artificial intelligence (and there is little you can do to avoid it)

Character.AI allows users to create bots in the likeness of anyone, without requiring their consent.

This chatbot offers an opportunity to make visible the disproportionality in the prosecution of certain crimes associated with punitive drug policy.

Through dialogue with Eva, it is possible to put yourself in her place and reflect on the circumstances of imprisoned women, marked by discrimination, exclusion and sexist violence. Eva’s story invites us to imagine alternatives other than criminalization and confinement.