Prison in Bolivia
Graham Spinks writes about how he got to shake hands with a dozen Bolivian murderers
Before I set out for Bolivia I had been told that I must try to visit the prison of San Pedro in La Paz. The first person to mention it was a friend who tells a chilling tale of his twenty-one-year-old self smoking pasta with some of the inmates during a gap year at the end of the seventies. The second was my, very much younger, barber who recommended Rusty Young’s book Marching Powder. He claimed that, while not really a reader, he had found this book so fascinating that he had finished it in record time.
To European eyes, San Pedro is an extraordinary place. Reputedly, prisoners are required to buy their own cells – meaning that the wealthy narcotraficantes live in penthouses while the poorer prisoners find themselves sharing squalid cells. The wives and children of prisoners are allowed inside and some even bring up their families within the prison. And the prison has the reputation of being the source of the finest cocaine in the world.
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