4

THIRTEEN DAYS IN HELL

I was taken to the FELCN building back down the hill in La Paz. FELCN stood for Fuerza Especial de Lucha Contra el Narcotráfico – Special Force in the Fight Against Drug Trafficking. There, I was introduced to the capitán who was to be in charge of the investigation. He undid my handcuffs, shook my hand and was very kind to me until he realised that I wasn’t going to cooperate. When he asked me to sign an official statment – known as a declaración – admitting my guilt, I refused. I said I wanted a lawyer. The capitán laughed.

‘This is not the United States of America. You are in Bolivia now, Señor McFadden.’

He asked me over and over again where I had bought the cocaine, who I’d bought it from, when, and how much it had cost. He told me he wasn’t after me. He wanted the sellers. If I gave him the information he needed, he would let me go.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I answered every time. He pointed at the suitcases, which had been placed on the desk in front of me. Most of my possessions, including my business papers, as well as the various items of women’s clothing, were spread out beside them.

‘But here is the evidence.’

‘Those bags aren’t mine,’ I answered. ‘I have never seen them before.’

‘Who is this man, please?’ he asked, holding up the business card Tito had given me. It had the colonel’s phone number on the back but there was no way I could dob in the colonel without admitting my guilt and getting Tito in trouble. I had stupidly forgotten to take it out of my briefcase the night before. ‘He is your principal, yes?’

‘I don’t know. It’s not mine.’

‘We will see,’ he said, placing Tito’s card back on top of the pile of fruit juice documents.

Eventually, the capitán gave up on me and began to weigh what was left of the cocaine. While he was busy balancing the scales, I leaned forward and retrieved Tito’s business card, which I then slipped into my underwear without anyone noticing. Later, in the cell, I tore it into tiny pieces and swallowed them. When the scales balanced, the capitán read the weight out to the other officer, who wrote down the figure, and then they both signed it. The capitán saw that I was listening.

‘Eight hundred and fifty grams,’ he repeated in English for my benefit, sealing up the merchandise in an official evidencia bag and handing it to the other officer to take away. ‘You had a lot of cocaine, no?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s not mine.’ What was I supposed to say – ‘No, there was actually five kilograms’? Anyway, I thought that being charged with a smaller amount would be to my advantage.

‘Yes. Of course it is not yours, Señor McFadden,’ the capitán said sarcastically. ‘I understand. The police planted it in your suitcase, yes?’ He nodded to the guards to take me down to the underground cell. And that cell was where I spent the next thirteen days.

Those thirteen days were the toughest of my life. I honestly thought I was going to die. For that whole time the police fed me only a piece of bread each morning and a cup of unsweetened tea made with cold water. The bread was always stale. When I complained about being hungry, the guards just shook their heads because they were under strict instructions not to talk to prisoners.

By the third day, I was so hungry that I pounded my fists on the door all morning until the guard on duty got sick of the noise and came to quieten me down.

‘Food. I am hungry. Food,’ I begged him, as soon as his face appeared at the observation window in the door. He looked at me blankly, so I put my hand to my mouth and pretended to chew, then patted my stomach. He shook his head sadly and said something back to me in Spanish. When he realised that I didn’t understand him, he fetched another guard who spoke a little English. This second guard had a kind face, but he also looked at me sadly.

‘My friend. We no have money to buy the food for you.’ He explained that prisoners under investigation were supposed to provide their own food.

‘But how can I eat, then?’ I asked. The other prisoners in the interrogation cells had families that could bribe the guards to give them food, but I didn’t know anyone in La Paz and the police had stolen my money. The guard shrugged his shoulders.

‘Sorry. No money. No eat.’

He did, however, go upstairs and find my carton of cigarettes for me. I didn’t even smoke before then – I’d bought the cigarettes at the airport just to take up some time and do a final check for specialists. When I lit the first cigarette and inhaled, I could feel the smoke ripping at my lungs. I started coughing, but I forced myself to keep going; it was the only way to stop feeling hungry.

The cigarettes suppressed my appetite, but they didn’t stop my body from slowly starving. I had to get food somehow. Every time I heard the guards change shifts, I banged on my cell door in the hope that one of them might feel sorry for me. The nicer ones sometimes brought me an extra piece of bread to keep me quiet. However, most of them wanted money.

‘Dólares, my friend,’ they said, rubbing their fingers together. I promised to pay them hundreds when I got out, but when they realised that I didn’t have anything on me, none of them would help.

‘Food,’ I begged repeatedly, making gestures so they would understand.

‘No hay,’ they said, while stretching one hand out in front, palm down, and rocking it from side to side, like people do in England when they’re telling a friend that a movie they have seen is only OK. I worked out very quickly what this meant in Bolivia: ‘There is none.’

The seventy grams of cocaine that I had swallowed came out a few days after I was arrested. The guards always waited outside the bathroom whenever I went in, so I had no choice but to wash the balls and reswallow them.

After several days with no food and smoking a lot of cigarettes, my stomach had shrunk and I felt only a tight pain in my abdomen. Then, I didn’t notice it so much. I only knew that I was weak. Besides, there was something worse than the hunger: the cold. It was colder than you could ever imagine in those FELCN cells. La Paz is the highest major city in the world. It’s in a kind of valley, so the cold gets trapped at night. The walls and floors of the cell were made of concrete, and there was nothing to keep me warm. Absolutely nothing. Not even a blanket or a mattress to lie on. The police had taken everything I owned: my clothes, my jewellery, my money. Everything. The only thing I had been allowed to keep was the suit I was wearing at the airport, although they confiscated my shoelaces, socks and belt so that I couldn’t hang myself.

Because of the cold, I took to sleeping during the day, when the floor was slightly warmer. I was not allowed any exercise time on account of being listed as ‘peligroso’. At night I remained standing or crouching on the spot, shifting my weight from foot to foot. My muscles and joints constantly ached from remaining in the same position for hours on end. I would have paced up and down in an attempt to keep warm, but I had no energy left. I couldn’t even lean against the wall for support because it was too cold. Even with my shoes on and changing feet all the time, the cold still got in. It penetrated through the leather soles of my shoes and started by attacking my toes until they were frozen. Next, I could feel the blood in my feet getting colder and the cold then travelled through my veins into my ankles, up my legs and then worked its way around my body, chilling it bit by bit. Each night I shivered so much that I didn’t think I’d live to see the morning.

I complained to the capitán about wanting my clothes back. He shook his head. All my possessions were needed as evidencia, he said. He then gave me a receipt and told me that I should claim them back after my trial. There was nothing more that I could do. Apart from the guards, there was no one to complain to because during the FELCN investigation period, I was officially incomunicado – I wasn’t allowed visitors, or even phone calls. This also meant that the interrogation police could do anything they wanted to me. If I hadn’t been a foreigner, they probably would have tortured me, like they did the Bolivian prisoners. Many of them died before they even made it to court.

I wasn’t completely cut off. The police did allow a stream of lawyers to visit me. In fact, they had called the lawyers themselves, hoping for a kickback when I agreed to hire one of them. The lawyers all promised to have me let off, but I had to pay them up front. When I said I had no money on me, they left their business cards and told me to call them when I did.

I eventually managed to bribe one of the guards with a full packet of cigarettes to ring the British Embassy. As soon as the embassy got word that I was there, they sent someone around. Simon Harris was a serious man with a good heart. He brought me some supplies, including orange juice, sandwiches and a few magazines to read. He asked me whether I had been tortured or mistreated. I said that I hadn’t because I was worried that the police might take revenge on me if I made a complaint about being deprived of food.

However, I did complain about not having a mattress or blanket. The capitán pretended to be outraged when Mr Harris questioned him about this. He ordered his men to fix the problem immediately. They gave me a sack filled with straw to lie on and two blankets. But as soon as Mr Harris left, they took them away.

I thought the investigating police were treating me harshly in order to make me confess. But it wasn’t that. After four or five days I made my declaración stating my innocence, and signed it. I thought that now the police would send me to court to be charged in front of a judge, but they just kept me imprisoned in my cell. They seemed to want to punish me because I hadn’t given in and confessed.

After another week in the FELCN interrogation cells I became extremely sick. By then, even if they had let me out to exercise, I couldn’t have. I was too weak to remain standing, so I spent most of the time lying down. I no longer noticed how cold the floor was. I could see my ribs poking through my skin. I had also developed a severe cough. At first I thought this was because my lungs weren’t used to smoking, but when I started coughing up blood, I knew it was something more serious. I spat the blood into the corner of the cell because there was nowhere else to put it. Gradually, the wall became stained with small red and green lumps where the bloody phlegm had trickled down and dried against the cold concrete. Some mornings, after the colder nights, I noticed that little crystals had formed on them. The guards refused to call a doctor because I had no money to pay for a consultation, or even for the phone call. I knew for certain that I was dying.

On the thirteenth day, I had a fight with the guards. When it was time to return to my cell after the morning toilet break, I refused to go back in. There were two guards and they were nice about it at first.

‘My friend, por favor,’ they said, patting me on the back and pointing into the cell. But I refused to go in. I was thinking to myself, if I go back into that cell, I’m a dead man. I won’t ever come out again.

‘Vamos, Enkono,’ they said, still trying to get me to cooperate voluntarily. They called me ‘Enkono’ because I reminded them of Thomas Enkono, a famous black goalkeeper from Cameroon who had been contracted by one of the Bolivian football clubs.

For a few minutes, they tried gently to persuade me. Then they ordered me in, and finally they tried to drag me in by force. But I wouldn’t go. I was weak, but even two of them couldn’t get me in there because I was so afraid that that would be the end of my life. I started panicking and thrashing about with a strength that came from fear.

‘Let me go! Help! Somebody!’

A third guard arrived when he heard me yelling. Between the three of them, they got hold of me and lifted me up to carry me into the cell. However, they still couldn’t get me through the doorway. Each time I got near it, I wedged my legs against either side of the doorframe and pushed back with all my remaining strength. They almost succeeded, but I went crazy, twisting around and punching out at them and yelling at the top of my voice for someone to save me. I think they were afraid because they knew that my file listed me as dangerous.

‘OK. Tranquilo. Tranquilo, Enkono.’ One of them went to call the capitán, while the others attempted to calm me down.

When the capitán came down the stairs, his face was flushed red. He was very annoyed at having been disturbed and I thought he would simply order his men to use more force on me. The sudden strength I had found when fighting with the guards had disappeared. I was now very weak and my body was trembling. I wouldn’t have been able to resist them again.

‘What this time?’ demanded the capitán, looking at me angrily.

‘I want to go to court, please señor,’ I said, trying not to show him how much my muscles were twitching or that I was on the point of collapsing.

The capitán gave me the same excuse as every other time: I couldn’t go to court until the police investigation was complete.

‘But I’ve already made my statement,’ I said.

‘The judge will only send you direct to the prison. You want to go to the prison, yes?’ he asked sarcastically.

‘I’m sick. I need food. Can’t you see? I’m dying here.’

‘And you think the prison is better?’

‘It can’t be any worse.’ The capitán laughed at this and translated it for the other guards, who also laughed.

‘Really? You are sure?’ he asked, smiling.

I already had a mental image of what a South American prison would be like. There would be fifty prisoners crammed into a single room. The small amount of food we would get would be infested with maggots. The toilets would be overflowing. Rats would crawl over my face in the middle of the night. The guards would be corrupt and violent. They would torture prisoners. And the inmates would have blunt, homemade knives with which to attack new inmates.

As a foreigner, I mightn’t last long in a Bolivian jail. However, I knew that if I stayed at the FELCN, I would die anyway. Besides, there was a slight chance that I might survive in prison – they would give me some food, a blanket and a uniform that would be warmer than my suit. I might even get a bed. There would at least be a prison doctor. With a little nutritious food, I could get back enough strength to protect myself in a fight.

Two weeks before, I would have done anything to avoid being sent to a Bolivian prison. However, at that moment, I actually wanted to go.

‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘I would prefer to be in prison.’

When the capitán and his men had finished laughing, he looked at me sternly. ‘You know what they do to the gringos in the prison of Bolivia, my friend?’ I shook my head.

‘This is what they will do to you.’ He put his hands forward as though he was clutching someone’s hips and started pumping his groin back and forth, making grunting noises. The three guards laughed again and joined in groaning and squealing as he thrusted. ‘You still want to be in the prison?’

‘Yes,’ I answered determinedly, meeting his gaze. The other guards stopped laughing and waited for the capitán’s reaction. He made another joke in Spanish, probably saying that I would enjoy being raped. I continued to stare back at him while they laughed.

‘Fine, then, my friend.’ He threw his hands in the air. ‘You will go to the court. Then after you will see how is the prison in Bolivia.’