"I'm not trafficking in cocaine; it's my grandmother's mothballs"

The civil guards at Madrid's Barajas airport who opened the suitcase of Panamanian doctor Juan Enoc Rodríguez Lizondro sensed a strange smell in his meticulously folded clothes arranged in sealed bags.

"They smell funny. What do they have?" one asked.

"I don't know. I live with my granny. She irons my clothes with starch and then she puts them in drawers with mothballs to deter moths - maybe that's it," the doctor replied.

The agent took one of the items and sprayed it. Instantly, it turned blue and this happened with the other 107 pieces of clothing as well. In total, 19 kilos of clothes went blue. This meant, in principle, that they had been soaked with cocaine. This is one of the ways that drug traffickers use to transport their merchandise: they dilute the cocaine in water, soak the clothes in it and dry them before they put them in the suitcase. Once they've reached their final country, they put the clothes in water again to release the drug, decant it with ammonium hydroxide, filter it and dry it. The weak link of this system is that the clothes smell like cocaine. A similar smell, apparently, to the fresh clothes that came out of the mothballed drawers of Juan Enoc Rodríguez's granny.

In vain, the 34-year-old devout Christian - a Seventh-Day Adventist who had come to Madrid with a scholarship from the San Carlos III Health Institute to take part in a three-month course - tried to explain that he was neither a drug dealer nor a drug mule. That he didn't drink, smoke and definitely didn't take drugs. He was just an irreproachable doctor who worked in the emergency room in Bugaba, a small district of Panama, eight hours away from the capital and a volunteer at his church. None of his arguments helped his cause when faced with the clear blue color of the narcotest on his 108 pieces of clothing.

Doctor Rodríguez was arrested and put in jail on September 18, 2010. The attorney general requested prison for drug trafficking and the judge granted it as he thought the airport test couldn't have simultaneously failed 108 times. But it did. The bad luck of a fake positive and the long process that there was to finalize the second and definite test on his clothes kept him 175 days in prison.

The clothes were sent to the laboratory of the drug department of the Spanish Medicines Agency to verify that the results of the narcotest were correct. Almost six months after his arrest in Barajas, the second and more accurate test determined there were no illicit substances in the Panamanian doctor's suitcase. No signs of cocaine.

"This delay has ruined my life," he says by telephone from the emergency center where he works. "I was going to Spain full of hope and with a big project and everything turned into the biggest nightmare. It was one of those situations that happen on TV and you just can't believe it. Seeing myself suddenly in a cell, surrounded by criminals who all looked like bullies.

"I was sure no one had touched my suitcase because everything was the way I packed it and I knew that there couldn't be any drugs. But then suddenly everything turned blue as if there were.

"My parents wanted to come and visit me but I told them not to. I was scared that they would have something in their clothes that would also turn out positive and that they would end up like me.

"I didn't understand anything. In jail, I maintained that I was innocent but everyone laughed at me, political prisoners, and employees. They told me: 'Yeah, yeah, here in jail no one has done anything, obviously.'"

His strong religious beliefs helped him but also made it hard to accept what was happening to him. "I give young people talks about not taking drugs, I have a strong religious life. How could I ever do something like that?"

In the final report sent to the judge - dated March 8, 2011 - the same initials appear in relation to each of the 108 tested items: ND (no illegal substances detected). The doctor had been coming to Madrid to study, just as he had been saying for the last six months. Some substance that his grandmother used - the detergent, the starch or the mothballs - contained an element that reacted to the spray in the same way that cocaine does.

The judge who ordered his release, Raimunda de Peñafort, wasn't the one who put him in jail. But by that point, Dr Rodríguez had lost the opportunity to do the health course and his scholarship money. He was forced to tell his boss at the health center back in Panama, who had only given him three months' leave, that he was in jail in Spain for alleged drug trafficking, and to ask him to extend his time off in order not to lose his job. He also had to tell his friends and family that they had taken him for a drug trafficker. He spent Christmas and New Year imprisoned in a foreign country and turned 35 in Navalcarnero jail.

"The failure of the drug test isn't the airport guards' fault but what I cannot understand is how the second test report took so long and how the attorneys and judges didn't care about having someone in jail without confirmed proof for so long," he says. The doctor's lawyers, Jaime Ingram and José Luis Mazón, have just presented a 280,000-euro legal claim against the state. Juan Enoc Rodríguez Lizondro is also considering asking for the San Carlos III institute scholarship again.