How one woman fled danger in Iran in the hope of building a new life in Canada—but instead ended up in a Brazilian prison.
Mahnaz Alizadeh was supposed to board a flight to Panama from Ecuador using her real Iranian passport. She was to carry a forged boarding pass that showed she was ultimately headed home to Tehran. Once she had shown that to gain entry to the international departures area of the Tocumen International Airport in Panama City, she was to discard it and take out a boarding pass for a flight to Toronto and a doctored Canadian passport, both under the same alias—Elina Adamlani.
When reformer Mir-Hossein Mousavi ran against hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, many Iranians hoped the government might finally change. Hopes were dashed when Ahmadinejad appeared to steal the election, drawing thousands of Iranians into the streets in the largest popular revolt against their country’s hardline fundamentalist government since the revolution in 1979. For a time it looked like it might succeed, but the Intelligence and Public Security Police won the day.
She spent three weeks in Evin for “acting against the national security of the Islamic republic.” After her release, Alizadeh kept returning to the protests; prison had entrenched her activism. Although she was careful to leave her cameras at home and turn her phone off to avoid detection, she couldn’t stay away.
Alizadeh was at even greater risk because she was in a secret relationship with a woman, which according to Iran’s legal code is punishable by imprisonment, 100 lashes or even execution. She feared for her safety, but also exposure, which could damage her friendships and family life. Even in progressive circles, being gay in Iran is taboo.
She sold her car, cameras and computer, and borrowed money from her parents so she could pay a US$5,000 deposit, half of the required total, to an intermediary. On Oct. 30, 2019, she signed a contract with an Iranian Canadian who lived in Vancouver named Reza Sahami, who she says offered to help with the travel plans. The document, written in Farsi, is titled “Canadian immigration agreement.
And while Alizadeh was getting ready to travel, Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, a Boeing 737-800 with 176 people aboard, including 57 Canadians, was shot down by Iranian anti-aircraft missiles minutes after it took off on its way to Kyiv. Alizadeh, who speaks some basic English and no Spanish, checked into an airport hotel in Quito and waited for further instructions, desperate with worry. When she finally heard from someone, after three days, she says he told her she had to pay the balance of the fee, even though she understood it was to be paid once she arrived in Canada. Otherwise, she would have to wait in Quito.
It struck her that Plan C, in which she would fly from Ecuador to Panama with her real passport, then on to Toronto using the fake one, was the only plan the smugglers had in mind all along. for tracking how many people are smuggled into Canada every year, but likely many thousands—at least until COVID-19 shut borders everywhere, stranding migrants in transit. Since 2017, about 20,000 so-called “irregular” migrants a year have been crossing into Canada through the land border, mostly at Roxham Road in Quebec. Others, such as the group Alizadeh was travelling with, attempt to enter through airports with tourist visas. In 2019, before COVID, 64,040 people applied for asylum in Canada.
That’s in the same ballpark as the fee paid by a group of Sri Lankan Tamils, some Canada-bound, who ended up in detention in Turks and Caicos. They entered that country illegally in 2019 on a crowded sailboat from Haiti, according to Tim Prudhoe, a lawyer representing the migrants. Prudhoe took on the case pro bono and was successful in arguing a case to have them released.
Smuggling is a massive global business. Three years ago, the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime estimated it to be a $6 billion-a-year industry and migrants pay the price, both financially and in suffering. An unknown number die every year—drowning in the Mediterranean en route to Italy, dying of thirst in the Sonoran Desert on the way to Arizona or being murdered trying to cross the Darien Gap into Panama. Others are sexually assaulted, cheated of their money or extorted.
By this time, Peru had been hard hit by COVID-19; strict quarantine rules meant Alizadeh was stuck indoors. “I stayed for six months, and every week I waited for the borders to open, and every week the quarantine was extended, and the wait was terrible,” she says. “The fear that if I got sick I would . . . die alone in exile.” The fear of death “accompanied me from the beginning.”
For Alizadeh, it was the next chapter of a terrible ordeal. The Brazilians transferred the Iranians in handcuffs to the Francisco d’Oliveira Conde Prison Complex in Rio Branco, an eight-hour drive from the Peruvian border. The prison has a capacity for 96 inmates but had almost three times as many around the time Alizadeh was there, according to a Brazilian media report. There were about 20 in Alizadeh’s cell.
Eventually, Alizadeh’s plight came to the attention of Solene Oliveira da Costa, a prison ombudsman Alizadeh describes as her “angel.” “Seeing this woman in handcuffs, without speaking Portuguese and crying copiously, made me cry, too,” Costa told Fabiano Maisonnave, a Brazilian journalist who wrote about the case.
According to court documents in Brazil, on March 4, 2020, Sahami and six Iranians with fake passports had been arrested by Peruvian police trying to board an internal flight. Sahami was charged with bribery for offering money to a customs official. He says in an email that he faced “a serious accusation in September 2020 in Peru and Brazil border by Brazilian border security and with no evidence I was detained for 45 days and I was released with no explanation and no apology from Brazilian government. This incident impacted my life on the hardest level for one year.”“Even that time I was relaxed,” he says. “I didn’t have stress. No. As soon as I arrived there, I found so many good friends inside there and they take care of me.
Dench blames the Safe Third Country Agreement, a 2004 deal between Canada and the United States that allows Canada to send asylum seekers who enter Canada back into the United States. That agreement has created the demand for false documents and routes through South America, she says.
A 2020 auditor general’s report found that the Canada Border Services Agency removed only 9,500 migrants in 2018-19. The agency “did not remove the majority of individuals who were subject to enforceable removal orders as soon as possible to protect the integrity of the immigration system and maintain public safety,” the auditor general says.
Crépeau, the McGill professor, sees it differently. He believes that many asylum claimants are actually just looking for a better life, but anyone would do that same thing in their shoes. But Canada can’t act alone. Facilitating safe migration must be done internationally, as envisioned by the 2018 Global Compact for Migration, a UN agreement organized in part by former Canadian Supreme Court Justice Louise Arbour. The difficulty is political. Setting aside populists who campaign against immigration, it is hard to build a constituency for reform.
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