She got life in a drug case. Decades later, Colombian woman free, thanks to Florida supporters

Married in her early teens, Evelyn Bozon Pappa says she was abused for years by her husband, a former helicopter pilot for the Medellin cartel kingpin, Pablo Escobar.

The husband would move on to direct his own drug-smuggling operation from a Colombian seaside city, pressuring his wife to manage a ring of passengers who carried suitcases packed with cocaine on commercial flights to Miami.

“If you don’t help me, you know what will happen to your mother,” he threatened her.

The couple, Carlos Horacio Romero-Paez and Bozon, would later both be charged with drug trafficking by U.S. authorities. He would never be caught. Her life would be destroyed. She was arrested in Miami, convicted and sentenced to life in prison in the mid-1990s, when the Cali cartel dominated the world’s cocaine trade.

But 26 years later, in a turn of fate, Bozon has finally attained her freedom. It took a village, as the saying goes, with collaborative support from her four grown children in Colombia, a team of former prisoners, a Florida State University law professor, two former federal prosecutors and a retired Customs Service agent, who recently came to her defense after putting her behind bars.

On Good Friday, the day after Bozon was granted “compassionate release” from a Tallahassee prison by a Miami federal judge, she flew from Orlando to Bogota and eventually to her hometown of Barranquilla. Her family members wept as they greeted her, jumping, hugging and kissing her, Bozon told the Miami Herald and el Nuevo Herald in an interview this week. One of her four children, a son, touched her hand and face, as if in disbelief that it was actually his mother.

“It’s real, it’s real,” Bozon’s son kept telling her. “God, thank you.”

Bozon said she had to muster even greater strength when she saw her 98-year-old mother, who suffers from memory loss. She worried that the mother wouldn’t remember her after all these years. “She took my hands and put them on her heart,” Bozon said. “She told me, ‘Why did you leave me?’ I was so happy.”

Bozon, 59, who gained a reputation as a sensitive mentor to other prison inmates, said she never lost faith after failing to get her sentence commuted three times by the Obama and Trump administrations. Bozon said she believed after all else failed that a petition for “compassionate release” — a 2018 law that allows inmates to appeal a prison warden’s decision opposing release — would likely prevail before a federal judge because of her history of obesity, diabetes and other health issues, along with the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Equally important, she was only one of a handful of women out of roughly 3,000 federal inmates who were serving a life sentence without parole. Moreover, her life sentence was drastically inconsistent with the lighter punishment of other defendants who cut plea deals in her same drug conspiracy case.

“When I received help from FSU, I was pretty sure that was the way,” Bozon said during the interview via Zoom from her youngest daughter’s home in Barranquilla. “This is a miracle. I’m a woman of faith. I believe in my God. He supported me all these 26 years.”

For Bozon to be released from prison, U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard had to find “extraordinary and compelling reasons” for releasing Bozon to a new sentence of time served. The judge granted her freedom after the original prosecutors in Bozon’s case, Jacqueline Arango and Paul Pelletier, and other key figures supported her release. The U.S. Attorney’s Office opposed her release, but only cited doubts about her claims of poor health and the risk of contracting COVID-19.

A former U.S. Customs Service agent who worked on both Bozon’s initial drug-trafficking case and her compassionate release petition said he believed the system worked at both stages. “Justice occurred then and justice occurred now,” said Tobias Roche, a Miami-based private investigator. He helped Bozon’s bid for freedom by working with a colleague, Lazaro Dominguez, to disprove a lingering accusation that Bozon was involved in an alleged kidnapping of a 10-year-old girl before the Colombian woman’s arrest.

During the pandemic hundreds of federal inmates like Bozon were seeking compassionate release, including the former head of the Cali cartel, Gilberto Rodriguez-Orejuela. They generally complained of bad health amid the risk of being infected by the coronavirus. But the one-time kingpin, after serving about half of a 30-year sentence, was denied compassionate release, mainly because his cartel was accused of smuggling 200,000 kilos of cocaine into the United States in the 1980s and 1990s and leaving a trail of violence from South America to South Florida.

Bozon’s case, by comparison, was a mere footnote in the U.S. war on drugs, which back then was at its peak with Congress passing severe laws of incarceration.

In 1995, Bozon, then 33, left Colombia with her four children to flee from her abusive husband. She tried to resettle in Miami, but both her husband and the law would catch up with her. He followed her to Miami and continued to threaten her, she said, though he slipped out of South Florida before he could be arrested.

Federal authorities set their sights on Bozon after one of the Colombians whom her husband hired to carry cocaine on flights to Miami was stopped at the airport by customs officials. The courier, Alvaro Velez-Camargo, agreed to cooperate with the feds. Customs Service and Drug Enforcement Administration agents also confronted Bozon’s cousin, Luis Robert Castro, who worked as a customer service representative for United Airlines. The cousin also agreed to assist investigators after they found out he was allowing Colombians like Velez-Camargo to bypass customs while pocketing thousands of dollars in bribes.

By cooperating first, those two defendants flipped on Bozon, who was caught in recordings of phone conversations with the cocaine courier, her cousin and other members of her husband’s organization. Both defendants also helped the prosecution’s case against her husband and six others in his cocaine-smuggling ring, making it possible for them to obtain relatively lenient sentences of about four years. Three others also cut plea deals and were imprisoned for five to seven years.

The husband and two other defendants sought refuge in Colombia. But the husband, who had a fondness for fancy cars like Porsches, Land Rovers and Mercedes-Benzes, would later be assassinated by gunmen in his home country.

In the end, Bozon went to trial with one other defendant in 1997. It proved to be a disaster, as her defense lawyer tried to argue that she was a battered wife forced to play a supporting role in her husband’s drug-smuggling network. She was convicted of conspiring to import more than 150 kilograms of cocaine, other trafficking offenses and money laundering, resulting in a mandatory life sentence under strict federal guidelines because of the amount of drugs. The other defendant was acquitted.

Bozon, who spoke Spanish and very little English at the time, was bewildered by the experience. “To this day, I never understood what was going on,” she said. “I really didn’t understand the magnitude of the situation.”

Even so, Bozon readily admits now that she was involved in her husband’s drug organization, although she says it was under duress.

She says the harsh reality of her fate quickly sank in during her incarceration at the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee. But Bozon, buoyed by her faith in God, developed a reputation as a motherly figure who would listen to younger inmates’ problems. She helped coordinate religious services with the prison chaplain, prayed with other inmates, taught classes on rehabilitation and passed her GED test.

Bozon made a lasting impression on several inmates, including Liz Mendoza.

“When I went to the cafeteria, I saw many people, all sitting with others in groups,” Mendoza recalled. “I didn’t know anybody and I sat at a table by myself. I couldn’t even touch the disgusting food that was served, and I started to cry. And out of 1,800 woman that were in that institution, only Evelyn [Bozon] came to me and she gave me a hug. And she told me that it was going to be OK.”

After her release, Mendoza joined others in supporting Bozon’s effort to gain her freedom, including another former prisoner at the Tallahassee facility, Damaris Ramos, and Jason Hernandez, who was serving a life sentence for crack-cocaine distribution when he was granted clemency by President Barack Obama in 2013.

While her clemency petitions failed, Bozon’s plight caught the attention of the Gender and Family Justice Clinic at Florida State University, headed by law school professor Carla Laroche. She said her clinic focuses on mass incarceration, seeking to help women who fall into a life of crime at an early age and have suffered from abusive relationships, like Bozon.

“My students worked on Ms. Bozon’s case for a very long time,” Laroche said. “Many of my students this semester and last semester understood that this injustice needed to be righted.”

“We thought of how we could humanize Ms. Bozon, who was not just another prisoner seeking compassionate release but a mother who had been away from her children for 26 years,” Laroche said. “Even though she was facing a life sentence without parole, she got her GED. Even knowing she was in a facility for the rest of her life, she would not just sit there and be.”

Bozon, now free and reunited with her family in Colombia, is mindful of all the people who helped guide her through her legal odyssey. “They all fought for me,” she said.

Now back in Colombia after a couple of weeks of freedom, Bozon says she is slowly adapting to her new life — just being with her four children, a medical doctor, architect, clothing designer and logistics coordinator. She said several members of her extended family have been infected with the coronavirus but that she has been vaccinated.

“My priority right now is to be with my family, make them happy and feel comfortable with them,” Bozon said.

In the long run, she said she hopes to join an organization that helps other women who have suffered from abuse and battery. “I want to get involved in that because I have the spirit now,” Bozon said. “I can give to them a lot of positive things and make them free.”