43

A SPECIAL VISITOR

Samir took several days to recover from his beating. When he did, he was sentenced to another ninety days, and conditions in La Grulla went back to the way they had been when I first arrived there. All privileges were withdrawn: they took away my heater and all our blankets; they fed us on soup twice a day; they removed the light bulbs from their sockets; and yard time never lasted a minute longer than four hours. Things probably would have stayed that way, if it hadn’t been for the arrival of a very special visitor.

The politician, Gabriel Sanchez, arrived, escorted by two policemen. He was wearing a suit and tie and walking ahead of his escorts, who were wheeling two large suitcases. As he walked down the corridor, the other inmates rattled their doors and hissed at him. He ignored them, but he looked tense.

‘You’re dead, Mr Politician,’ Chapako whispered, spitting on the back of his suit. His police escorts didn’t say anything.

Sanchez had been sent to La Grulla for his own protection. It wasn’t difficult to have someone killed in a Bolivian prison – families of murder or rape victims did it all the time. Some of the poorer inmates would do anything for money, but in the case of a politician who had stolen forty million dollars from the Bolivian people and spent it on plastic surgery and a beach house in Miami, they would have performed the service for free. The only other place the politician might have been safe was in Posta, with all the other millionaires. But even there, someone probably could have got to him.

‘Wait ’til tonight, cabrón!’ yelled Chino. ‘You’d better have your money ready or we’re going to cut you up alive.’

Sanchez was placed in the seventh cell. By then, the guards had moved the remaining contraband elsewhere. As they closed the door behind him, Samir shouted, ‘Señor político, we’re going to give you a new face that your plastic surgeon won’t be able to fix!’ On their way back down the corridor, the guards were smiling to themselves. I didn’t think the politician would last long.

His first night was hell. The others stood at their doors explaining to him in great detail what they were going to do when they got hold of him.

‘No one’s going to save you in here. The police are on our side. They’ll give us the key to your cell and they won’t find you until the next morning.’

Samir was the loudest, although you couldn’t hear him properly because at night the guards kept him handcuffed to the water pipe at the back of his cell so that he wouldn’t escape. ‘You’re ours now. You’re going to die very slowly, cabrón. Eight hours is a long time to bleed.’

Sanchez didn’t say a thing all night. However, when I saw how tired his face was the following day, I knew he’d been awake and had heard every word. He was smart, though; when it was morning yard time, he refused to come out. Instead, he bribed the guards to bring his soup to his window. Chino rattled his door and laughed at him.

‘You have to come out sometime, bastardo. Politicians have to shit too, you know. And your shit stinks worse than ours, so you can’t do it in your cell.’

In the afternoon, Gabriel Sanchez did come out to take his yard time, but it was after the rest of us had been locked up again. He had the entire exercise yard to himself. And since he wasn’t in La Grulla as punishment, the same restrictions didn’t apply to him. He was given as much yard time as he wanted and got to decide when he should go back to his cell. He sat in the sun, smoking cigarettes, listening to his CD Walkman and reading the newspaper, while the other inmates stood at their doors, going out of their heads in frustration.

Over the next few days, their anger grew. They threw burning toilet paper and cups of urine through his window, but the politician simply stayed at the back of his cell. Samir tried to pick the new padlocks. Sanchez was smarter than Samir, though; he had made a phone call to the governor and had the door reinforced and extra locks installed on the inside. They tried everything to get to him, but no one could even get close.

During this entire time, I didn’t say anything to Sanchez. I didn’t attempt to stop the others from taunting him – that would have been suicide – but I didn’t join in, either. After a while, the politician noticed this. Sometimes, when we were filing past his cell on our way to the lista, he would be standing at his window and he would try to catch my eye. I smiled at him once or twice when the others weren’t looking.

Sanchez had a lot of visitors – his lawyers, rich friends and some family members. They brought him the daily newspaper and books, and home-cooked meals. Sometimes, he would call the guards and send me his leftovers. I always shared these with the other inmates. Then, on top of my normal yard time, Sanchez started to invite me to join him when he had his.

The others called me a traitor, but when I got Sanchez to persuade the guards to give them extra yard time also, they began to see that having a politician as your friend could be more beneficial than trying to kill him.

Gabriel Sanchez’s brother was in prison also. He lived in Posta and the family was given permission to get together for Christmas. Owing to the dangers involved in entering the main prison population, the politician applied to have his ‘bodyguard’ accompany him. That bodyguard was me, and it was the best Christmas I ever had in San Pedro.

In Posta, the rules were already relaxed because the inmates were rich, but at Christmastime, you wouldn’t have even known it was a prison. There were streamers and party hats and people drinking and tables set up outside in the sun. They treated me like one of the family. They even wrapped me up a present – a bottle of Black Label scotch whisky.

To be honest, I wasn’t much of a bodyguard. After a few glasses of whisky, I couldn’t have protected anyone. To keep me alert, the politician’s brother gave me a few puntitos. It was the purest coke I’d ever had in San Pedro. It seems that the people in Posta had very good connections. Officially, we were permitted to stay only until 6 pm on Christmas Day, but Gabriel rang the governor at his home and had our leave extended to the next day. Everyone kept drinking and dancing, while I sat in the corner bullshitting and doing cocaine with Gabriel’s brother. The seasons may have been reversed in the southern hemisphere, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t have a traditional white Christmas in Bolivia.

After the Christmas celebrations came the New Year’s Eve party. And on the following day, another special prisoner was transferred into La Grulla from the main prison. They moved Chapako into Chino’s cell to make space for him. No one saw who the new prisoner was or knew why he was there. We were all too hungover to pay any attention. He was gone the following day. Later we found out why: he had been transferred to Chonchocoro for his own safety.

While the whole prison population had been partying, one of the women hadn’t noticed that her six-year-old daughter was missing. When she sobered up the following morning and raised the alarm, everyone in the section went looking for the missing niña. They called and called. They looked in all the likely hiding places: under the stairwells, in the bathrooms, in the laundry, under clothes. They asked the other children. No one had seen her. The mother began to panic. They checked to make sure the niña hadn’t fallen into the empty swimming pool. And although it was unlikely, they climbed up on the roofs to look for her there.

As word spread to the other sections, the whole prison population stopped what it was doing. Hundreds of worried people joined in the search. San Pedro was filled with the hysterical screams of the little girl’s mother and the sounds of people calling her name as if she were a lost puppy. Still, they couldn’t find her. The guards came into the prison and demanded that each prisoner open his door. They searched every single room, one by one, with a growing crowd following them.

When they finally found the girl, it was too late. Her tiny body was discovered in one of the inmate’s cells. She had been raped, then strangled and left naked on the bed. The body was cold. The prison doctor sedated the mother and I finally understood properly about la piscina. The inmates began filling it with water and a mob went looking for the culprit, but he had already made it to the main gate and bribed the guards to be sent to La Grulla. That wasn’t the only bad thing that happened. A couple of weeks afterwards, I got more bad news.