THE GRINGO PRISONERS

A. M. Daniels finds what

life is like for

foreigners in a Bolivian jail La Paz THE gringo prisoners in San Pedro jail in La Paz, says The South American Hand- book, would appreciate a visit from anyone with a few minutes to spare.

prisoners' wives; Richard and I to the left. We each emerged with a plas- tic card warning us that if we lost it we would not be allowed out of the jail.

Four prisoners de habla ingies were waiting for us in a courtyard. News travels fast in pris- ons. They crowded round us, laughing and expostulating like puppets control- led by puppetmasters with St Vitus's dance: they had so much to say that it came out in an excited, unin- telligible babble. One of them man- aged to ask us whether we would buy them a meal in one of the prison canteens, and we agreed.

`Boy, this is our lucky day!' On the way they explained the prison system. Everything could be bought in San Pedro. For rich prisoners it was like a luxury hotel with a few minor restrictions which could usually be circumvented. Col- our televisions, guns, liquor, prostitutes — all were available from the warders. The cocaine in San Pedro was said to be the finest in the world. Sixty per cent of the prisoners, and all of the gringos, were drug smugglers.

Life was very different for those without money. They lived in the catacombs. Any cell larger than a coffin sized hole in the wall had to be rented from the warders. If a cell possessed a light, the warders were paid for the electricity. They were exacting landlords: eviction to the catacombs occur- red at the first non-payment of rent.

The canteen had a few greasy tables near a steaming serving hatch. The prisoners ordered their food, and we heard the squelch of the anticipatory saliva in their mouths. The meal was a plate of dishwater in whose centre swam a large chunk of grey meat on a bone.

We had never seen people eat so rave- nously. All social inhibitions were aban- doned. A spoon proved too slow for one of them, who picked up the soup and poured it down his gullet, losing half of it in the process. But the meat was the real prize: they tore at it like hyenas.

The meal was over in 30 seconds. They sat back and patted their stomachs con- tentedly.

'Boy, was that good!'

Frances gave them cigarettes and they started to talk.

'We're not exactly innocents in here,' said one of them.

'We hadn't supposed you were,' said Richard.

The first was a 22-year-old Norwegian who had learnt English in the outback of Australia. He was tall and lean, and his hair was already thinning. When we passed a mirror he glanced at himself and said, 'Christ, I've aged!' and tears came to his eyes.

But his mood was otherwise buoyant. His three-year sentence would be com- pleted in only a month's time. The others shook their heads at his naive belief that he would be released at the end of his sentence. They had seen such hopes dashed before.

He thought that, unlike the others, his capture had been merely bad luck. He had all but boarded the aircraft at La Paz airport when he was pulled back. Several kilos of cocaine were. found strapped to his body.

'What is this white powder?' asked the man who searched him.

'You know what it is, you bastard.'

He was taken to another room where a crowd of policemen gathered. The chief took over the inter- rogation.

'Is this cocaine, gringo?'

'You know it is.' 'We had better make sure.'

He took out a che- mical testing kit.

'If this test turns blue, gringo, it's cocaine.'

know it's cocaine, you bastard, there's no need to test it.'

`It's cocaine, gringo. Tut-tut.'

The chief put some on his palm and took a deep sniff.

'It's very good, gringo. Where did you get it?'

'I'm not telling you, you bastard.'

All the policemen took a turn at sniffing the cocaine, and then the chief dismissed them from the room.

'You're in trouble, gringo. You could go to prison for 20 years. That's a long time.' He paused. 'Unless you give me $20,000.'

'I don't have $20,000.' 'Come on, gringo, cocaine like this is worth a lot of money.'

He lowered his demand to $10,000, but the Norwegian was unable to pay even this. In any case, there was no reason why, having taken the money, the policeman should have released him. Bribes in Bolivia achieve their end only often enough to keep the institution of bribery alive. The Norwegian received a comparatively short sentence on account of his youth.

We asked him whether he would resume drug smuggling after his release. He said no; but he added that one successful trip could set up a man for life.

The second of the prisoners was a young blond Canadian who would have been handsome had he not been so obviously wracked with disease. The others whis- pered that he was an alcoholic: if he didn't find alcohol by ten in the morning he grew desperate, and even had fits.

He had been caught not by the Bolivian police but by the American Drug Enforce- ment Agency (DEA). Acting on a tip-off, the Bolivian police had searched his hotel room (the hotel in which we were staying) but found nothing. The day before his departure three American agents broke into his room, pushed him into the bath- room and held a gun to his head.

'We have no authority here in this country,' they said. 'But you are going to tell us everything you know.'

Before long, they had found the cocaine, stuffed into a pair of aqualungs (he had told the Bolivians he used them for diving in Lake Titicaca).

He had been in San Pedro three years before he was sentenced. He paid lawyer after lawyer, who said: 'Don't worry, it'll be all right, but we have to wait until the appeal comes up in Sucre'; and then they disappeared with the fee. In three years he had appeared in court 35 times, without ever speaking in his own defence.

The only purpose, he said, of having a lawyer in Bolivia was to act as a conduit for your bribe to the judge. But the bribe often failed to reach the judge; or if it reached the judge, he took no notice of it; or if he took notice of it, political turmoil ensured that by the time your case came to judg- ment he was no longer a judge. Besides, there was every incentive for a conviction. The DEA paid the authorities a bounty for each smuggler convicted; the prisoner went on bribing; and finally, they got the cocaine.

The blond Canadian had lost $30,000 in this way. But he was sentenced all the same to 15 years in jail, with a $2,000 fine to pay before he was allowed to leave the country.

The third prisoner was another Cana- dian who looked physically at the end of his tether. His hair was unkempt, his spindly arms were covered with sores and scars from injections with dirty needles, and he told us, not without a certain gallows pride, that he now weighed less than 70 pounds. He was a drug-addicted, habitually vio- lent criminal. His first conviction for armed robbery was in Montreal at the age of 16. Having eaten his free meal and procured a packet of cigarettes, he drifted off, no longer interested in us.

The last of the four was a French- Canadian with no cause to love the third. He came from a small, economically- depressed village in Quebec where there was no work. After his father drank himself to death he moved to Montreal where, being completely unskilled, he found no work either. Eventually someone offered-him $5,000 to bring some cocaine from Bolivia, with the third of the prison- ers as companion in the enterprise. The French-Canadian made it safely through customs, but his companion was caught and immediately grassed on him, since he did not relish the thought of languishing in a Bolivian jail alone while the other col- lected his $5,000. Each of them was sent- enced to 10 years and an $8,000 fine at the end of it.

We asked him whether he did not wish to kill the man who had betrayed him thus.

He replied that at first he had been subject to murderous inclinations, but his Catholic faith helped him to overcome them, and now he merely pitied him.

All of them, with the exception of the Norwegian, half-expected to die in San Pedro. Not long before, a warder had been found upside down with his head in a latrine. A Colombian prisoner had hanged himself after murdering a compatriot over a quarrel during a game of cards. Two prisoners had needed operations, one for appendicitis, the other for a broken ankle: both died under the anaesthetic.

They wanted to show us their cells, and we walked through the prison with them. We saw the kitchen where the gruel for those prisoners who could afford no other food was prepared. In the centre of the kitchen was a boiling cauldron, large enough for a man to drown in. The walls, the floor and the ceiling were thickly caked with dried gruel that had turned black with age.

The 'cook' stirred the contents of the cauldron with a crowbar and gave us an evil, sweaty grin.

We crossed the main courtyard where the prisoners spent much of their time, day after day, year after year. Old lags stood exchanging stale prison gossip. Various prison characters were pointed out to us: notorious homosexuals, the controller of the illicit still, a prostitute whose boast it was to have had intercourse with every prisoner in San Pedro, including the 85- year-old doyen.

We saw the prison mascot, a mongrel bitch.

'That bitch has pups every six months,' said the blond Canadian.

'1 suppose they're half-human,' I said. 'Don't joke,' he replied. 'That bitch is the most fucked bitch in Bolivia.'

He told me the Quechua word for one who find dogs attractive. `That's the kind of Quechua I speak,' he said.

We went to his cell, a dark room five feet by eight up a rickety ladder in a neglected part of the roof. We had bought him a bottle of spirits — oleaginous and industrial-tasting. He drank half a bottle at a gulp.

'You've made me happy for a day,' he said.

He showed us his sketches, portraits of others prisoners mostly. He was a talent- ed draughtsman but had run out of paper and pencils. He hoped his mother would send him some for Christmas in six months' time.

Sic months! The mention of time stirred his emotions and his voice cracked. He would be more than 40 when he left San Pedro, if ever he did, his youth gone, his life in ruins. He finished the bottle.

The French-Canadian showed us his cell too. It was a kind of penthouse, he said, for no cell was higher up. We noticed a crucifix hanging above his bed, and noticing that we noticed he said: 'I still say my prayers.'

Suddenly ashamed, he added: 'My prayer says, God get me out of here.'

He laughed, but there was a plaster statuette of the Virgin by his bed as well.

'I'm just about keeping it together,' he said, referring to his sanity.

If ever he left prison he intended to go straight: work as a labourer in the Cana- dian North, where the wages were good and temptations few. After four years of existence at the outer edges of experience, his ambitions were entirely ordinary: to be married, to have a son, to own a house.

Before we left his cell he showed us his special treasure, folded in a tobacco tin under his bed. It was a doggerel epic of prison life, bequeathed by a former inmate of San Pedro.

A kind of ceremonial attached itself to the reading of this epic, performed only on special occasions. Each line was greeted as an old friend; they laughed in anticipation of the jokes. When the poem was over, it was folded away sadly.

We returned to the prison gates via a catwalk from which there was an unim- paired view of Illimani, the mountain of 21,000 feet that towers over La Paz. It was silent, calm, majestic, and they looked at it almost with reverence. To them it symbol- ised the outside world, freedom. They said they never failed to gather there to watch it as the sun went down.

`If they really wanted to punish us,' said the French-Canadian, 'they would build a wall to blot it out.'

The three of them strained at the gate to catch a last glimpse of us.

`Boy, was this our lucky day!'

This article is abstracted from Coups and Cocaine: Two Journeys in South America, to be published by John Murray in Spring 1986.