Each year, poor Colombian women fill their stomachs with pellets of cocaine to smuggle into the US. Some die there as a result. For 30 years, Orlando Tobón has given these 'drug mules' a decent burial.

To look at Orlando Tobón is to misjudge him. He is portly, squashed behind his New York desk in his chaotic travel agency in Jackson Heights, Queens. But those who know him call him “Don” Orlando, using the Spanish term of respect. Tobón earned respect throughout the Colombian immigrant community by being the man to go to if you get into trouble. He can find you a job without papers. He can find you a place to stay. He can even help you if you die.
 

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Death by overdose
Each year, an unknown number of so called “drug mules” - poor, young Colombian women - fill their stomachs with dozens of pellets of cocaine. They are given false documents and sent off to the United States to resupply American-based dealers. If all does not go well, then there are two scenarios. In the first, they are arrested and x-rayed. The second scenario is worse. A cocaine pellet opens in the mule’s stomach and she dies of a massive overdose, alone and anonymous.

And this is where Orlando Tobón comes in. For the last 30 years, he has recovered the bodies of Colombian drug mules and tried to identify them. If he can find the family in Colombia, he’ll repatriate the body. If he can’t, he’ll arrange for a decent funeral and burial. More often than not, he is the only mourner. “It’s terrible,” he says in his heavily accented English, “Just terrible”. The funerals are paid for by collections from the Colombian community in Queens.

Mafia suspicions
Orlando doesn’t know how many people he’s sent home or buried over the last 30 years. When he first started, the police investigated him for connections to the mafia. Now they call him up when they have a dead drug mule. Sometimes they even donate.

His reputation garnered him a supporting role in the 2004 film Maria Full of Grace in which a pregnant Colombian teenager becomes a drug mule and ends up in America, where it all goes wrong. Don Orlando plays himself where we see a fictionalized version of him helping Maria, as well as burying a friend who died on the trip over. 

How long?
Orlando is now 62 and, if you ask him how long he can keep this going, sighs deeply, falls silent for a moment and finally shrugs, “I don’t know… I don’t know… I don’t know.”

His son has no interest in taking over and Orlando admits he’s tired. It is his faith that has kept him going this long, that and the hope of a final reward.

“My mother said ‘If you do something for another person, then you’ll have a very good place when you die’.”