32

‘ONE OF THE WORLD’S MOST
BIZARRE TOURIST ATTRACTIONS’

Many of the tourists who visited San Pedro were so fascinated by the prison and my stories that they came back to see me several times. I estimated that every tourist who visited me told at least five other travellers, and at least that number of people again when they got home. Tourists started coming in larger and larger groups and many of them had to be turned away at the gates.

During my second and third years in San Pedro, it seemed that the prison cocaine parties would never end. I had quickly gained a reputation for showing people a good time, so when backpackers arrived saying they had heard about me and wanted to try some coke, I never felt that I could refuse them. The trouble for me was that one group would arrive and want to party hard for a whole night, but while they spent the next day recovering, I had to get up and run another tour and party all night again with the next group.

Luckily, not everyone wanted to try cocaine. Once the word had spread that the prison wasn’t dangerous for tourists, it was no longer only young backpackers who visited San Pedro. People of all ages and from all walks of life began to visit me and the tours became more respectable. So much so, that Lonely Planet listed the prison as one of the ‘things to do’ in the La Paz section of its South American guidebook, describing it as ‘one of the world’s most bizarre tourist attractions’.

With all the publicity, I sometimes worried that the tours might be getting too big and would cause me problems, but they never did. What went on inside San Pedro was no secret to the people of La Paz. The prison was like a sad joke that had been repeated to them over and over again. They had been hearing about it for decades, and an endless stream of articles continued to pour out of newspapers and television about it. The drug police were filmed delivering suspicious-looking bags to the prison gates after midnight. Countless prisoners were said to have died under suspicious circumstances or from lack of medical attention. Wealthy inmates, who were supposed to be in their prison cells, were photographed at shopping malls with their girlfriends. The prisoners regularly organised hunger strikes to protest against court delays and judicial corruption; when the police accused the protesters of eating, many of them sewed up their mouths to prove that wasn’t the case. A racket of bringing prostitutes into the prison was uncovered – there were even allegations of inmates prostituting their teenage daughters.

The corruption in the Bolivian prison system went all the way to the top. One of the friends I made in San Pedro knew more about the high-level corruption than most of us. He was a Brazilian inmate named Samir Mustafá Ali, and he was probably Bolivia’s best car thief. Samir could break into a vehicle and hotwire the ignition in less than sixty seconds. He was a little crazy, but we immediately became friends. Samir had been in and out of jail since he was a boy. Every time he got drunk, he used to tell me stories about the time he was in prison in Santa Cruz and how several high-ranking officers used to take him out of his cell at night to steal cars. They did the same in San Pedro. They would have him back in his cell before morning lista and pay him a few hundred dollars each time to keep quiet.

The stories that came out about the maximum-security prison, Chonchocoro, were worse. During one surprise raid police found hundreds of litres of chicha (an alcohol the inmates manufactured themselves by fermenting corn), several kilos of cocaine, four handguns and two dead bodies. Inmates were regularly tortured to death by the police if they threatened to expose the police corruption. Among all this, the availability of drugs was barely an issue.

‘San Pedro Prison: Cocaína for 3 bolivianos. Basé for 1.5 bolivianos,’ read the headlines, and hardly anyone battered an eyelid.

Occasionally, these exposés caused a brief scandal. There were often crackdowns and promises by the politicians and police to fix up the prison system. However, one corrupt administration was always replaced by another, so nothing ever changed. And to the people of Bolivia, who had been living in poverty and political turmoil for centuries, it all seemed inevitable. For them, things would always stay the same and a few tourists getting high in the prison wasn’t anything amazing.

Every now and then, the guards would warn us that they were about to conduct a requisa. If there wasn’t enough time to hide your stuff properly, or if you were afraid that they might bring dogs, there was an arrangement that all contraband would be dumped in the bathrooms. The guards could then collect all the drugs, alcohol and illegal weapons on a table and show the media how they were cleaning up the prison, but none of us would get busted because they couldn’t prove who everything belonged to. That way, everyone was happy.

After a requisa, prices went up because the prison was supposedly in ‘drought’. In the meantime, all the confiscated contraband was placed in a small room in the punishment section called the depósito for safe-keeping, away from the main prison population. That place was like a small fortress; it had thick walls, no windows and a metal door with two padlocks. No one would dream of breaking into it – the guards would’ve killed you. Besides, we never needed to break in because the droughts never lasted too long, just until the guards sold our stuff back to us.

As far as the tours went, the police caused me very little hassle. I was more concerned about the gangs, especially the one controlled by Fantasma. Eventually, he had told me himself about how he’d blown away his friend at a party. It was one evening when we were doing coke together in his room. There was a knife on the table and he became very agitated.

‘You know, that guy was my best friend.’ He looked over at the knife again. ‘Just like you are now, Thomas. And he pissed me off, so I killed him.’

When he mentioned helping out with the tours, I invited him to join my business.

Fantasma was dangerous. Before I met him in Alamos, he had been kicked out of Posta for having cocaine and fourteen bottles of whisky in his room. Eventually, he got kicked out of Alamos, also. The inmates complained because he did coke at night and walked around talking to himself. He said he was communicating with the devil. Then he killed a black cat by twisting its neck, because the devil had told him to. He had to move to Pinos, but then he was kicked out of there and eventually ended up in Prefectura.

After he killed the cat, I didn’t visit Fantasma for quite some time. We were still on reasonable terms, but I only saw him when he wanted to help with the tours. Then, one afternoon, he unexpectedly showed up at my room.

‘Thomas! Open up!’ he yelled, banging on my door urgently. I pretended not to be there.

‘Now! Thomas, open it! It’s me.’ As soon as I unlatched the door, he thrust something wrapped in a T-shirt into my hands.

‘Quick! Take this,’ he said, looking around to make sure no one had seen him give it to me. ‘I’ll be back for it soon.’

I didn’t see him again for two days, but when he finally reappeared to collect his package, I was relieved. Inside the T-shirt was a gun. He was more relaxed this time and wanted me to hold it, so that I would know how powerful it made you feel to have a gun in your hand.

‘No way, man,’ I said, making my fingers into the figure of a pistol and touching them against his temple. ‘I might get carried away and shoot you.’ But really, I wasn’t stupid enough to put my fingerprints on any gun owned by Fantasma.

‘No hay problema, homey.’ He gave me a friendly punch in the chest that knocked the wind out of me. From that day on, I stayed on Fantasma’s good side. He was no longer acting tough, he was tough. And since he now wanted to run the tours himself, I had to come to an agreement with him.

Of course, I still had my bodyguards, although they sometimes gave me problems, especially Lucho. During one of the gang wars he had been stabbed five times in the stomach with a huge knife. Before passing out from loss of blood, he managed to strangle his two attackers almost to death. When he returned from hospital, Lucho had become a legend, and with all the money he was making he became lazy and often refused to work. Other times he was too drunk or hungover to help with the tours. He was also jealous of the friends I made and all the girls who came to see me. Eventually, I told him he couldn’t be part of the business anymore. That very afternoon, Lucho was waiting for me in the stairwell with two other inmates as I went down to the bathroom.

‘We need to talk, Tomás,’ he said, pulling his jacket aside slightly to reveal a machete hidden underneath. The other two had hunting knives tucked into their pants.

‘OK, then. Fine,’ I said, turning my back on Lucho to show him I wasn’t afraid. ‘Follow me.’

I led them up to my room and invited all three to sit down, which caused them great embarrassment because they had to take their knives out of their pants and didn’t know where to put them.

‘That’s OK,’ I said. ‘Just put them on the table there.’

‘Now Tomás,’ Lucho began, slapping his palm down hard on the table and looking at me fiercely. ‘You listen to me.’

‘Wait!’ I interrupted him, and walked casually into the kitchen. ‘Who wants tea or coffee first?’

When I came back and sat down, Lucho had lost a lot of his confidence. They insisted that I give him his job back. I apologised for what I had said earlier in the day.

‘Lucho. I like working with you. We’re socios and we’re amigos. But just remember that I am the one paying you,’ I said, picking up one of the hunting knives from the table. Lucho made a sudden dive for his machete, which was leaning against the wall, but I dipped the tip of the knife into the sugar bowl and used it to stir my tea. The other two laughed and even Lucho shook his head and managed a smile.