1. I thank Rita Raley, Daniel Grinberg, Wesley Jacks, Alexander Champlin, and Jennifer Hessler for their generous comments on various drafts of this essay. I am grateful to Miriam Posner, Lauren Klein, and the anonymous reader for Feminist Media Histories for their incisive comments that helped sharpen it in its multiple stages.
2. Throughout this article, the terms "drug mule," "swallower," and "courier" refer to a person who smuggles drugs across international checkpoints by swallowing pellets and carrying them inside her body. For contrasting explanations on the various connotations of these terms, see Elaine Carey, Women Drug Traffickers: Mules, Bosses, and Organized Crime (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014), 55
3. and Jennifer Fleetwood, Drug Mules: Women in the International Cocaine Trade (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 7.
4. Alice Jacobson, “United States v. Montoya de Hernandez: Swallowing up Probable Cause,” University of Miami Inter-American Law Review 17, no. 3 (Spring 1986): 609–11.
5. Julie Chinitz, “Shiftiness: The Border in Eight Cases,” Zyzzyva: A San Francisco Journal of Arts and Letters 31, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 222.