Ms. Lloyd, whose daughter is often confused with the American soccer star with the same name, had reservations to stay on a Norwegian Cruise Line ship, docked in Rio next to the luxury liner housing the United States basketball teams. A series of canceled and missed flights from Southern California led the family to connections in Peru and Chile — and all the security checkpoints between — on the way to Brazil.

Finally in Rio, they took a taxi to the cruise terminal to check in. They gave their names, had their passports checked and handed over their luggage, like everyone else in line. They presumed that their bags would be in their cabin when they returned.

When they came back, the others were checked in quickly. Ms. Lloyd was stopped.

“They took me back to this room, and there were some really scary people,” she said. “They started interrogating me. I don’t know who they were, but there were five or six of them, all in uniform. And after about 10 minutes, they told me they blew up my bag.”

Ms. Lloyd said that she was told, in accented English, that two bomb-sniffing dogs had stopped at her suitcase. She was shown a photo of the contents, presumably from an X-ray machine. Asked to explain what different things were, she pointed to something that looked like the extra cellphone she packed, a phone charger and a bottle of shampoo.

“Maybe they thought it was something wired to a bottle, I suppose,” she said.

What she could not understand was why the authorities handed her the phone. They had opened the bag and retrieved the phone yet still proceeded to blow up the bag. And she could not figure out how a bag that had gone through several cities on different airlines without any suspicion was suddenly in pieces in front of her.