In Jail

San Pedro prison in the heart of La Paz unbelievably became a tourist attraction when the English drug-trafficker Thomas McFadden, who was incarcerated in San Pedro, started giving tours to gringos through the prison. An Australian backpacker (Rusty Young) was so intrigued by the set-up in San Pedro that he befriended Rusty and bribed the guards so that he could spend three months on the inside with Thomas. Rusty Young wrote a book about the experience causing even more tourists to drop in and visit even though Thomas McFadden had been allowed to buy his way out of prison for $5000. I havn't managed to read his book 'Marching Powder' but I went along with a bunch of Irish guys I met in a hostel in La Paz. It is supposedly illegal for tourists to visit the prison, however, i can only assume that it has become accepted practice as there are a few tours a week going through it.

The reason for visiting this prison is that it is quite an unusual jail. The government gives them pretty much nothing to live on forcing them to create their own economy so that they can buy what they need. Once a week they might get chicken and at the start of the month they get a small quantity of butter, sugar and rice to see them through. Effectively the government leaves them to starve but this never comes to pass as they are reasonably enterprising. It is this enterprise that allows tourists to enter as it is both favourable for the prison guards and the prisoners that we visit. If you are a prison-guard earning only $100 per month then you are happy to cut a deal with the prisoners and take a share of the gate-receipts. If you are a prisoner then you laughing as you can have something like 40 gringos a week paying $65 each just to get in. Of course, not every prisoner is in a position to do this. This is because San Pedro prison is split in two. Both parts sit within the same high-walled compound that you can walk around if in La Paz but there is the section for the 'population' and then another one for what can only be considered upper-class criminals. I believe that there are two operators of the tour on the inside, one main operator and then other guys who are allowed to get the overflow. I'm sure this monopoly position is maintained by the guards who obviously desire that everything is kept discreet. However, having said that walking into the courtyard of the Upper Class section there are plenty of people sitting around plastic tables on plastic chairs under Pepsi parasols. Family of prisoners can pretty much come and go before the doors are locked at 7pm. Indeed, such is the strangeness of the prison that girlfriends, wives and children live there. I'm guessing there is a price for the privilege but it is seen to be a good thing that some prisoners have their wife and children around as it keeps them calm. The other thing to note is that although the prisoners have to get-up for role-call at 7.30am, that they are pretty much free to do as they please after that. They are not locked up so they can wander around the prison as they please or go back to their cells. There is not a whole lot of the upper-class prison to wander around but they can hang out in other prisoners' cells without any hassles from the guards.

Once incarcerated you must be part of the system if you want to survive. However, this takes money or connections. To simply have the right to access the upper class section you need to pay $500. Remember that this is Bolivia so unless you are a successful criminal then this is expensive. To actually live in the upper-class section of the jail then you need to get on the property ladder. There are a whole range of cells at different prices. There are communal cells which can be rented or bought or individual cells of increasing sizes and prices. Jose (not his real name) whose cell we had to pay $9 to hang out in owned a two-storey affair. It wasn't massive but it had a small kitchen and a clean bath-room downstairs with a lounge, TV-room and bedroom upstairs. It was big enough that 12 gringos could hang out with an assorted mix of murderers and drug dealers. The actual 'tour' of the prison lasted about five minutes as it is a small section of about 100 people and so there is not much to see. Thus, we just chilled out chatting to Juan (not his real name) who had perfect English and a house in every country in South America it seemed. Juan is head of security for the General Jose. Jose is the right-hand man (on the inside at least) for the supposed future president of Bolivia. His appartment/cell is a three-story affair and costs $17,000 at current market prices. Reading between the lines the 'future' president of Bolivia is the former vice-president elect. There is all sorts of stuff going on at the political level in Bolivia. The US considered Bolivia to have one of the most corrupt political systems in the world. Ironically this was when the country was pretty much run by the US ambassador as opposed to the Bolivian president. Evo Morales, the current President, is quick to remind people that the level of corruption has decreased now that he has effectively evicted the US ambassador. According to the prisoners, however, Evo Morales is the biggest drug-dealer in Bolivia. I'm not certain who to believe, for sure the dealers know their business but they also claim that the 'future' president was framed by Evo. The fact is that this guy was arrested for massacring twenty people for no apparent reason. Inevitably where power and money is concerned there is a huge amount of tactical self-preservation going on. Bolivian politics is surely no more corrupt than Fianna Fail.

While my Irish amigos were happily indulging in nose candy I was buying the most expensive tins of beer for my incarcerated German friend. Drugs are cheap on the inside but for some reason alcohol is expensive, perhaps due to its conspicuousness. A tin of La Paz beer (Pacena) was costing me 40Bs where it would only cost me 6bs in a shop ... this is for 33cl. A gramme costs 90Bs for 70% and 150Bs for 96% purity. If you like your white powder then this is cheap as chips compared to developed countries but when you are buying beers for your new friend from Munster (Germany) then it all adds up considering we spent five hours in the prison, ten minutes of which were getting in and out and another five minutes of which were the 'tour'. Basically these guys were having a laugh and making us feel obliged to buy all sorts of things so that lesser prisoners would have an income. There was the hand-made jewellery or the fake release papers in your name to say that you had been incarcerated in San Pedro. Not wanting to take a camera into a place full of criminals I paid for a photo that I never got over email.

I got to chatting to Hans (not his real name) to see what the hell was going on there. He was a professional smuggler who managed to get caught in the airport of La Paz. The whole ordeal was quite friendly as once he knew that they knew, he just accepted his guilt. Instead of stringing his innocence through the courts he took the more direct route; pleading guilty his court session lasted 8 minutes and he was locked up for 8 years knowing that he would only have to serve 2/5 of his sentence. He was 14 months in when I met him and was having a great time ... as far as prisons go San Pedro is apparently the best. He had spent a few weeks in jail in Amsterdam and while he was well looked after with a daily menu, a great library and TV, he still had to spend large chunks of time in his cell. According to Hans you do not want to smuggle into Japan as if you get caught they don't just physically break you but they mentally break you too. Still, he had even done that once pretending to be on honeymoon.

Hans route was to fly from La Paz to Lima, to Buenos Aires, to Frankfurt and onto Amsterdam. That sounds crazy to me. He got caught for two reasons; 1) they gave him a false-bottomed suit-case - the oldest trick in the book, 2) they put 10 kilos of coke in his cabin-bag which he wasn't expecting and so when a security guard picked it up going through the scanners the penny dropped that it was unusually heavy for a cabin-bag. The pay-off for successfully getting the coke to Amsterdam was only $25k. Why would you?

One has to realise that the impression one gets of these guys is that they are nice criminals. You have a laugh with them and they tell you stories. It's all very friendly stuff but in the back of your mind you have to remember that they are gangsters. They have made decisions that most people wouldn't make in being involved in the drugs game or in killing people with their own hands. Naturally you'd be an idiot to believe everything they say but they try to run the tour business properly knowing that it is a great source of income and that they need positive feedback from people that visit to generate a new crowd. Naturally they are very experienced in business as the drugs game is an industry like any other with its sourcing of raw materials, manufacturing processes and international distribution. These guys are very well connected internationally and so this fact was quite exciting for Hans; he had access to really good contacts and supply if he ever wanted to return to his trade once he gets out in a year or so.

Hans is an interesting guy. Being European he had a good education but he never went to university preferring instead to enter the drug's business. From the age of fourteen he always wanted to be a drug-dealer. As soon as he finished school he hitched a lift to Amsterdam. It starts to get even odder when he successfully established himself in Amsterdam. He had an 'office' where he made his own LSD and supplied everything bar heroin. He had regular customers and business was good. For some bizarre reason, which made no sense to me, he decided to turn his 'office' over to someone else and get involved in smuggling. He mainly smuggled between Amsterdam and India and was making a living from this knowing the trip inside and out. The most likely way to get caught with narcotics is when you are moving them. It is strange how the risk/return stacked up for him such that he would leave a steady-business off the radar in Amsterdam for international drug-smuggling but that is what he did. He still loves coke himself but has managed to wield himself off heroin twice. He used methadone for a couple of weeks and then endured three months of no-sleep to manage this. Eventually he righted himself and regards heroin to have no physical consequence to the body once you keep using it. He was active and fit and loved his mountain-biking at the time.

Just before 7pm we made our way discreetly out of the prison. It was an interesting place for sure. The prison-guards, while happy to take the cash, are prison-guards nonetheless and so the prisoners have as little as possible to do with them. They are on friendly terms but they don't engage in conversation. The part of the prison that would have been most interesting to see would have been the population. This consists of about 1000 people and so they have critical mass versus the upper-class. At times there are out-breaks where the have-nots try to storm the haves and so it is only possible to visit the prison during periods of calm. It was while visiting the carpentry room that I noticed a corner of a door missing. There were two gringo traffickers peering through the hole at us. These guys did have access to the upper-class section but had misbehaved and so had gotten thrown out. The anger in their eyes was palpable. It was clear that these guys had gone past their breaking-point and were so fueled by jealousy or regret that they had resorted to violence and sheer drug-induced craziness. I will never forget those eyes.

Marco

Comments

[John P.]

glad to see your trip is going strong my friend. it seems that you've gulped some serious K's. nice to read your adventures too.
keep strong.