46

MEETING RUSTY

Even with Roberto to keep me company, I got very lonely during that period without the tourists coming in to see me. Sometimes, when Fantasma was locked in La Muralla or La Grulla, the guards would call me to take a tour group. However, almost none of the tourists were allowed to stay the night. One of the only people who did stay during my fifth year in San Pedro was Rusty, a 25-year-old backpacker from Australia. He boasted to me that he had a law degree, although I didn’t believe him at first. He didn’t seem like a proper lawyer to me. For a start, he had hair down to his shoulders and dressed badly in dirty jeans and a T-shirt. Also, he laughed a lot and didn’t seem to care that any of us were criminals.

Rusty thought he was pretty clever because he spoke more Spanish than the other tourists, but I knew straight away that he was genuine. During the official tour, I told the whole group about a Brazilian prisoner who had been bashed and brutally stabbed for being a suspected informant. The Brazilian’s injuries were so severe that the guards sent him to a hospital outside the prison, but after the doctors stitched him up, he couldn’t afford more treatment and his wounds became infected. Every one of the tourists that day promised to come back to San Pedro to drop off some medicine for me to send to the Brazilian, but Rusty was the only one who kept his word. In fact, he went directly to the hospital where the Brazilian was supposedly being kept, only to discover that he had been transferred to a cheaper hospital. Then he went to find the new hospital. When the police guarding the Brazilian told him he wasn’t allowed to visit, Rusty bluffed them that he was an international human rights lawyer and therefore had the legal right to take some antibiotics to the patient. The Brazilian later thanked me and told me how Rusty had stood in the hospital ward arguing loudly until the police gave in.

It seemed that Rusty wasn’t afraid of the police. He would have made a good drug trafficker. For that matter, he wasn’t afraid of the Bolivian inmates either. As soon as I told him that tourists used to sleep the night in San Pedro, he insisted on staying. That evening I took him to the inside sections to see the conditions of the poorer prisoners. He appeared to get along well with everyone, including the base addicts and the dangerous prisoners. Even Crack Cat purred when he picked him up.

The next time Rusty came into San Pedro, he had photocopied a colouring-in book and bought some marker pens. He organised a drawing competition for the little children in Alamos and handed out small prizes to the winners and made hot chocolate for all the entrants. I knew by then that he was the one who should help me with the book I had decided to write about San Pedro. He agreed to stay with me in the prison to conduct recorded interviews so that he could understand how the inmates lived.

I bribed the governor to get a permission slip that allowed Rusty to go in and out of the prison whenever he wanted. To avoid suspicion, I told everyone that he was my cousin who was here to visit because I had medical problems. I also explained to Rusty that you had to make the guards laugh in order to keep them happy. When the guards asked how he could possibly be my cousin, if I was black and he was white, he repeated to them exactly what I had told him to say: ‘Thomas was born at night and I was born during the day.’

The only trouble with Rusty was that he didn’t take things seriously enough. He thought it was fun to bribe the police, and he didn’t seem to realise that I would be the one who would get into trouble if something went wrong. If anyone found out what we were doing, it wouldn’t be hard for the police to get to me.

I didn’t tell Rusty about my new charges, because I was sure the police didn’t have a good case and I didn’t want him to worry about me. However, maybe I should have told him in order to stop him from treating everything like a game. Rusty rented an apartment near the prison and I knew that he was partying a lot on the nights he stayed outside San Pedro. One time a whole bunch of tourists he must have met in a nightclub came to the main gate asking for ‘el australiano’. The guards sent them away, saying that there were no Australian prisoners in San Pedro, but they began to get suspicious about why Rusty was going in and out of the prison all the time.

On the morning of the first hearing in my new trial, I told Rusty not to come in because I was sick. I waited at the gate with the other prisoners to be transported to court. The guards called our names, handcuffed us in pairs and put us in the transport van. My name was called immediately before that of Jorge Velasco. He had avoided me ever since the new charges had been laid and he panicked when he saw that the guards were about to handcuff us together.

‘No. No!’ he said, stepping away from the guard. He must have thought I would try to strangle him on the way.

‘It’s OK. Tranquilo,’ I reassured him. ‘No hay problema.’ I still hated the Velascos. They had tried to set me up and I knew they were responsible for having Abregon transferred to Chonchocoro. But there was no point in fighting. It wouldn’t bring Abregon back and now that we were being tried together for the same offence, it was better for us to be on reasonable terms.

‘Vamos,’ ordered the lieutenant impatiently. Reluctantly, Jorge allowed himself to be handcuffed to me. We didn’t speak the whole way to the court. Nor did he say anything to his father. I should have known by the awkward way he sat next to me that something else had happened to make him fear me more.

My lawyer visited me in the court holding cell just before the trial started. His name was Manuelo and he was a public defence lawyer. It was only because I was a foreigner that I was fortunate enough to get any assistance. I told him that I would pay him a bit myself, in order to make him try harder on my behalf. Sometimes lawyers didn’t try their hardest in drug cases because if they won against a powerful fiscal, they might ruin their careers.

To start the trial, the fiscal stood up and made his opening address. For the sake of efficiency, the prosecution was to be done by joint trial, although we each had our own legal representative. The prosecution case against me was very weak, and until halfway through the hearing I felt confident that I would be let off. When the charges were read, I was asked to stand and Manuelo stated my plea: inocente. My defence was simply what had happened – that I had no knowledge of the drugs, was not inside the room where the drugs were found, had no money on me and had nothing to do with any of it whatsoever.

I knew the Velascos would also plead inocente. No one ever pleads guilty in Bolivia – if you admit to a crime, the judges give you a higher sentence. However, I couldn’t imagine what their defence would be. There were two hundred grams of cocaine that had to be accounted for, and those two hundred grams had been found in their room. They couldn’t deny it and, in fact, they didn’t. Their defence was this: they had been acting under police instructions in a sting operation to catch Thomas McFadden, a known drug dealer in the prison, in return for the promise of an earlier release.

When the Velascos’ lawyer said this, I was stunned. I looked at the Velascos in disbelief, but neither one of them would turn his head. I hardly heard another word of what was said by the fiscal because I was in too much shock. I kept staring at the Velascos. I could feel my muscles tensing up. Jose Luis continued to look directly at the judge, and Jorge wouldn’t look at me either. The policeman at the front of the courtroom tapped his wooden baton to get my attention. He shook his head at me and tightened his grip around the baton. He knew that what the Velascos were claiming was untrue and he could also see what I was thinking.

This changed everything. The Velascos were supposed to be defendants like I was, but their defence turned the case into something completely different. Rather than being defendants, they effectively became witnesses for the prosecution in the case against me. I couldn’t see how they could possibly prove that they were undercover agents, but that was what they were claiming. It was now their word against mine.

At the end of the hearing, the guard told me and Jorge to hold up our hands. He unlocked the cuff on my left wrist and handcuffed Jorge to Jose Luis. I got my own set of handcuffs. For the rest of the trial the guards used this same system; the Velascos were always put together, and I was kept away from them. They placed us in separate holding cells at the court. And whenever they could, they transported us in separate vehicles.