mst900 Why do all the movies & documentaries about white Americans in particular imply that they are innocent victims of barbaric third world countries' drug laws? They are depicted as completely gullible, innocently duped, scammed, coerced, or just trying to make ends meet by doing one innocent drug deal. The stories always go out of their way to make the audience enraged about the inhumane conditions outside the enlightened modern day humane U.S. system. In fact, abuses of this sort and worse happen daily in this country. The mentally ill, underage, and poor are physically, emotionally and psychologically tormented and permanently scarred. Isolation, rapes, beatings, huge financial profits by privatized prisons in this country have created a mass incarceration system that now moves babies with tantrums into the prison system for profit. Young ppl, especially minorities are economic fodder for this human rights disgrace because if you build it, you must fill it. The Pa. judges were putting young ppl, students (and they were white) into jails for truancy, disrespecting teachers by drawing unflattering pictures of them by the students and all sorts of excuses so the judges who had stock in these detention facilities as shareholders could increase their profits. We live in a country that imprisons more ppl than communist China, Russia and N. Korea together. 10s of thousands of ppl per day are arrested. 85% of them are never formally charged or convicted, but this allows overtime and monies to be made by the ruling oligarchy. Tax free padded police pensions in New York, judges' salaries, corp supply companies-food, laundry, etc.-all profit in the 100s of billions from the corrupt mega corp that is the U.S. injustice system.An aside regarding the authenticity of the story-How did the protagonist keep her gray hair in check all that time? The prison must have allowed Lady Clairol to visit along with the Botox/Juvederm/and plastic surgery touch-ups. Anothe problem with American TV-too much Hollywood.The daughter plays a nun who wears make-up.

evening1 Very-well-acted drama based on the jailing of an American tourist on trumped-up drug charges in Ecuador.Barbara Hershey is convincing as a woman from Hollywood, Fla., who takes her first trip outside of the US only to get thrown into brutal, filthy El Inca prison, where the guards are sexual predators and inmates act as enforcers.Rachel Leigh Cook excels as Chase's daughter, who suffers a psychological imprisonment of her own knowing how her mother suffers in a sordid place in which she can't speak the language, lacks treatment for her scleroderma, and gets beaten and robbed with regularity.Strong supporting performances come from Colombian actress Rita Bendak, as a cruelly manipulative lifer, and Cristina Marchand playing a nun who risks her own safety to help the Chase family.After many disappointing twists and turns, and 22 months that left her wobbly but still on her feet, Chase won her freedom in 2007, with the help of Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Jacksonville). The movie concludes with what looks like actual footage of the real Chase and her daughter ecstatically embracing at their airport reunion. If you follow the National Geographic Channel series "Locked Up Abroad," this movie may seem like the extended version of a particularly gripping episode. In all, it's a sobering reminder that life can take some unlikely and deeply troubling detours.

wizartd This movie depicts the true 1997 story of the anti-American injustices and backwards legal system experienced by 53 yr old "Anti-Drug" Sandra Chase (played by Barbara Hershey), who was held without trial or due process for nearly two years even while terminally ill in an Equadoran Prison (in Quito). Although claiming complete innocence, In real life, Sandra Chase (one of many) experienced beatings by other inmates, deplorable inhuman stench conditions, where prisoners are forced to defecate in the hallways (no toilets in overcrowded small cemented cells), where prison guards who take bribes and payoffs repeatedly brutally rape, beat and mentally abuse American prisoners. To make matters worse, Sandra Chase was denied medical treatment for her scelroderma, a fatal rare disease that attacks the skin and organs and was eventually thrown into a dungeon like atmosphere without food or clean water for 5 days, and when fed, barely surviving on chicken parts and vegetables (not depicted in the movie). "My bible was the only thing they didn't steal," Chase said, "That's the only thing that kept me going".There are scores of other Americans being held in Ecuadoran prisons. Since Rep. Brown's intervention, over 800 prisoners have been released and more than 2,000 are slated to be set free. Still, the backlog of cases creates a system where the innocent are punished more harshly than the guilty and families are incarcerated for a crime of one member. A Typical Situation, Rep. Brown said the Chase case is typical of many of the estimated 58 Americans being kept in deplorable conditions in Ecuadorian prisons.After watching the movie, I became outraged that so much bias and anti-American prejudice actually exists in such barbaric conditions by the Equadoran unjust and backwards legal system, not to mention, the high degree of danger of possible false arrest during your stay, for anything that would warrant an excuse to throw innocent U.S. victims into hellish prison conditions. Even if guilty, the punishment of such inhuman conditions hardly fits the crime, where you will be instantly treated as guilty before having any chance of proved innocent. To make matters worse, never knowing how many years before you even get a trial (with the possibilities of ending up with one of their non English, Spanish speaking lawyers}, You'll never know! Question I'm asking myself is, How many Americans or non So. American citizens have died in this countries stench overcrowded prisons? I gave this movie 10 out of 10 for it's descriptive warning like effect as a "Wake Up Call" for those who may have otherwise felt safe traveling abroad in drug trafficking 3rd world countries. No spoilers for the movie were used, other than my brief explanation of the true events. Point being, before traveling anywhere outside the U.S., It would be very wise to educate yourselves before leaving U.S. American soil and know what you are truly up against. Why take chances!

flh462002 It's another in the "Americans are never guilty" parade of films. The notion that US citizens are always duped victims in drug smuggling cases is naive at best. While they may not deliberately smuggle drugs in all cases, having worked in travel for many years I can declare that US citizens can be extremely gullible when abroad and equally gullible that "I'm a US citizen" immunizes them from local laws. This is a quite nicely predictable "US citizen unjustly imprisoned" film, and all the predictable people are evil and in league against the poor US citizen. That Americans are naive does not mean they are immune to legal consequences. "I was suckered" is too frequently heard abroad to serve as a defense. And being familiar with Ecuadorian government and law, I can say that they are not exactly the rampant fascists portrayed in this film