OTR Dispatches - January, 2004

In the last months of the 1990s, my girlfriend and I traveled in Peru and Bolivia, picking up a few bugs and a little Spanish.  From the glacial peaks around Bolivia’s capital, La Paz, to the lost cities on the Peruvian north coast that were swallowed by the Inca; from the no-longer white ashlar walls of Arequipa (discolored by pollution since former President Alberto Fujimori of Peru cut deals with Japan and Korea to cheaply buy up cars that won’t pass emissions tests) to island towns in Lake Titikaka that turned off their power stations and went back to candles, there is a endless world of varied cultures and topographies densely gathered in and about the shadows of the stark Andes. Being backpacker-type, low-budget, high-interaction travelers, we saw as many of these microcosms as we could manage, but there can be no question about which was most startling. San Pedro Prison, within the cramped city limits of La Paz, is a penitentiary maintained and controlled entirely by its inmates, a miniature city-state from out of time.

We were on an Amazon “ecotour” near the Bolivian town of Rurrenabaque when we first heard of the place. An excitable English girl described the “prison you can tour” with a relish that seemed suspect. It stuck with us, though, the morbid curiosity, until Catherine and I, along with the two German carpenters and the Swedish missionaries’ son whom we had also met on the tour, finally admitted to one another that we wanted to check San Pedro out. It wasn’t in any of our guidebooks, but might as well have been; its status as a tourist destination is an open secret. And so we found ourselves looking up at the imposing plaster walls of a Bolivian prison on a Wednesday afternoon. The walls were yellow and evidently thick, with towers at the corners. It faced a rather bedraggled plaza, in a less-than-posh part of town. The sign clearly said what visiting hours were, and there were none on Wednesdays, but there was a line of people ahead of us, mostly Bolivians, who were gradually vanishing into the place. Soon we were at the heavy double iron gates.

We visiting gringos were unmistakably anxious. Was this really permitted? How? As it turned out, very matter-of-factly. When we reached the gates, there were a couple of European girls outside, and two tour guides, prisoners, on the inside – all had been waiting for a large enough party to form to constitute a worthwhile tour.  Our group now met that quota.  We were greeted by our guide, Victor (I doubt that was his real name), then we gave some bored guards with ancient guns our passports and a small “fee,” and were ushered inside the prison.

I don’t think I had any real idea what the inside of any prison looked like, let alone an infamous South American prison. What were my reference points? Kiss of the Spider Woman and thick stone walls? Lori Berenson in her high-altitude solitude? Victor was chatting away as soon as we were through, but initially my awareness was overwhelmingly visual. There was a small courtyard, with official buildings to the left and right. This was as far as the guards ever go. The guards are cowed, outnumbered, or corrupt enough that their goal is merely to keep the inmates in, and leave maintaining the prison to them. We, the tourists, were to continue, however. The courtyard ends at a narrow alley between two dormitories whose walls held small, barred windows, close together. These are the shoddiest residences in San Pedro, and thus the cheapest, Victor explained. A lot of addicts live in them, if they have cells at all.   In San Pedro, prisoners are not assigned housing; they buy it. There is an office, in the front, for the leases, and it’s all very formal. The prison contains many neighborhoods, and they have different characters. One very well off inmate bought two cells, one over the other, and had a stairwell put in, as well as a piano. What if you have no money? we asked. There are businesses inside to work in, or one can start one’s own. But without money, an inmate sleeps on the street, he explained, just like in New York City.

Once through the corridor, we arrived in an open square, with two thoroughfares branching off to the left and the right. Victor pointed out the commissary, but said that no one eats there if they have any choice. The prison expenditure for food is very low, he explained, and the kitchen staff is made up of prisoners who are being disciplined by the internal culture of San Pedro. Far preferable is to eat at one of several inmate-run restaurants, including the Chinese place. At the intersection was a fruit and vegetable stand, operated by a woman, and some children were playing in front of it. Women and children enter the prison every day, much as we did, for a gratuity. Hundreds of children live there. They leave in the morning for school, and return in the afternoon. After all, explained Victor, if a man is imprisoned, who can take care of his family? One of the inmates even runs a daycare center. (The Bolivian government has a program, Prisons Without Childhood, which is working to reduce the numbers of these children. San Pedro, apparently, is representative.) Also on this plaza was the furniture shop, whose woodworking services he commended highly.

Victor explained the overall economics of the place as we made our way through unlocked wrought iron gates to his own cellblock. The prison contains several times the number of inmates it was built for, and can afford a very limited number of guards. It’s far safer for the guards to maintain only the perimeter of the prison, and leave the inmates to work out the rest for themselves. Thus, they police themselves, in an enforced community of independent wills. A pocket prison anarchist community.  With accommodations so limited, it was only natural that a black housing market would develop, and in time it became codified. The prisoners, many of whom are awaiting trial, sometimes for years, keep the order themselves, and infractions are dealt with severely. With women and children inside, there is no patience for inappropriate conduct. The last rape, he said, had occurred two years previous, and the culprit had been executed by other inmates. Murder is rather more common, but is more in the nature of maintaining the social order than interfering with it. With no law inside but that they create, these inmates, held in great majority for non-violent drug offenses, have proven to be very stern.

We met a friend of Victor’s on the second floor of his block, and were taken to see his cell. This was a small room, maybe eight feet by twelve, with a jury-rigged crawlspace built into it where a friend was staying until he could buy his own place. There was a bed, a small television, a Coca-Cola calendar and a swimsuit poster. It was not unlike a college dorm room. The inhabitant, a dead-eyed man a little over six feet, had something to attend to, and asked Victor to close up when we were done gawking, which, as uncomfortable as we were, didn’t take long. We stood and talked on the balcony passage for a while. One of the Europeans asked why we were safe, if we were, in a city of criminals. Victor explained that he and the other tour guides had a good job, paid a share to the powers that be within, both official and inmate, and that these powers had a vested interest in keeping the business healthy. Further, he bragged, one makes one’s reputation in San Pedro in one’s first months inside, and he had proven himself to be a man better left unmolested.

He indicated the iron bars at either end of the passage. The inmate chosen to hold the keys for each sector locked these at night. Revenge and theft were most likely to be attempted at night, and so the inmates lived in miniature gated communities. Each sector had a soccer team, and gambling on the games was such an important aspect of the community that section heads would buy nicer cells and offer them as incentives for promising players. (Rumor has it that the Coca-Cola Company sponsors teams as well, in return for a big-house monopoly on soft drinks.) The other sport that influenced the locking of the gates at night was the occasional duel,by which conflicts were sometimes resolved.

Then, Victor pointed out, there was the matter of dealing with undesirables. The crimes of newly-admitted convicts are common knowledge, and some new residents, particularly sex offenders, are subjected to the prison equivalent of hazing. Victor explained that when such an undesirable was brought into San Pedro, the community throws him, naked, into a pit (a former fountain, pictured) that contains broken glass and feces. Often, a hot pepper is inserted into his anus. He will then be pelted or pummeled until immobile. If he survives (and the prison hospital costs money, too), he serves six months labor in the commissary, and after that is considered a regular citizen, but on a kind of perpetual probation. The rationale for this, again, is the presence of women and children in San Pedro. And after all, Victor noted, many men find that they can provide a better community within than without walls.

So who exactly were these civic-minded criminals, who had founded their own society within the walls of a prison many would never leave inside a beautiful colonial city 3,800 feet above sea level in the rugged Andes? Mostly they came from El Alto, the constantly growing suburb of La Paz that surrounds the old city on all sides. Little more than a vast shantytown, El Alto is where the indigenes who can no longer make a living in the mountains wind up. The third sons, the immoral daughters, the workers whose sweat lubricates a poor nation’s capital, these people expand El Alto and swell San Pedro’s population. They are not inherently criminal, there is no strange murderous streak in the population there. But the Andes grows coca, and is good for very little else in the world economy.

Victor made it clear that one benefit of the tour was the opportunity to order any drug for later delivery at one’s hostel or hotel, at significantly below-market rates. The great majority of inmates, after all, are in San Pedro for drug crimes, large and small, and they know all the right people. (Prostitutes could be ordered as well, without as well as within, but as prostitution is legal in Bolivia, there’s much less call.) Of course, Andean peoples have been chewing the coca leaf to help get up and down those harrowing mountain passes since England was illiterate. We chewed coca leaves on several long hikes, enjoying a buzz milder than I get from coffee and hoping for the renowned resistance to altitude sickness that is known to come from the leaf’s alkaloids. One can still buy a garbage bag of leaves in a street market or boxed tea-bags of coca leaves legally, but the growers, the cocaleros, are subject to constant pressure from the US DEA just the same. When the DEA decides to fly over fields of coca trees and drop defoliant onto the rainforest, they drive the price of refined cocaine up, and continue to make the production of cocaine the only truly profitable venture in the lee of the Andes. And from grower to smuggler, the chain of cocaine production provides endless grist for San Pedro and other Bolivian prisons, which are overcrowded and under-funded.

According to Human Rights Watch, “[t]he impact of U.S. counternarcotics pressure on Bolivia cannot be overstated: Bolivia has passed laws, created institutions and adopted antinarcotics strategies shaped by U.S. concerns and dependent on U.S. funding.” As HRW puts it, under Bolivia’s central DEA-inspired legislation, Law 1008, “Bolivians charged with drug offenses – no matter how minor – are imprisoned without the possibility of pre-trial release and must, if acquitted, remain in prison until the trial court’s decision is reviewed by the Supreme Court, a process that takes years. During that time, prisoners are held in appallingly overcrowded and miserable prisons.” Our guide Victor himself had been, he said, convicted, but felt sure he could have his conviction overturned, and be released, if only he could raise enough money. Thus our visit.

We elected not to accept Victor’s offer of a potential thirty years’ mandatory sentence in a small plastic bag. As engaging as we found San Pedro’s experiment in anarchistic community, none of us would have lasted long there, I fear.

On the way out through the long dark alley between the cheap housing, one of our party was pelted in the back by something. It might have been a hard ball of bread. While touring the prison, we had of course sidled past some sinister-looking individuals, but this was the first contact made, the first reminder that we really were, physically,  helplessly, in this strangely organized anarchy. Victor spun wildly, looking at the countless, small, dark windows for some sign of the offending party. The old wall stared blankly back. He assured us that he would find the culprit, tonight. People here would talk eagerly for a fraction of the (What was it? Two dollars? Sixty cents?) fee we had each paid to enter.

We thanked him, and agreed to tell others to “ask for Victor.” Then we got our passports back at the gate, thanked the guards, and did the one thing that Victor could not: walked back into the afternoon light outside San Pedro Prison.

David Gassaway, a.k.a. "Daupo," is an OTR Editor and the Illustrator of the OTR site. His work can be found at Daupo.com.