
Michaella, Peru and the Drugs Run
Michaella McCollum leaves Tyrone at twenty, telling her family she has a dancing job waiting in Ibiza. Five weeks into the season she disappears from the island, and the next anyone hears of her she has surfaced 6,000 miles away in Peru, alongside a Scottish woman named Melissa Reid whose own family had no idea where she was. Peruvian police accuse both women of carrying cocaine, a charge they deny, and the film follows the case through Ibiza's West End bar scene, where promoters and workers who knew McCollum describe the island's party economy and how easily someone can vanish inside it. RTE's original report, shot for Irish television, uses local voices rather than narration to trace how a summer job turned into an arrest that could carry a six-year sentence. It stays close to the practical details, the flights, the missing weeks, the frantic calls home, rather than speculating about what happened in between, leaving the drug-mule accusation as the open question the two women now have to answer in a Peruvian court.