The Cocaine Diaries: A Venezuelan Prison Nightmare (16 page)

Now the fear and panic started to go. I relaxed a bit. There was obviously a big search of the wings going on. Now, with the fear fizzling out, I remembered I had been in a toilet queue in the wing, bursting to go when the troops marched in. I’d forgotten with the shock of the soldiers rounding us up. Now it was coming back. My stomach groaned with cramps. I had to go, but I couldn’t. I convinced myself I could hold it. Then time went on. About an hour passed and we still lay there, faces on the concrete. Boots marching back and forth.

My stomach groaned again. More cramps. I squeezed my abdomen and tried to stop them. My face grimaced. Hold it, Paul, hold it. Suddenly my rear end exploded in my jeans. I lay there thinking I hadn’t gone to the toilet in my trousers since I was a kid and had just done it next to more than 1,000 grown men. The smell was bad, but I didn’t think anyone noticed. I knew one of the lags behind me, Maleta. So I started to make light of it and blamed him. ‘Maleta, Maleta,’ I shouted, ‘smell, smell.’ Some of the Venos understood and started laughing. I doubted they believed it was him, but it got a laugh and I felt a bit better.

Another hour passed. Then another, and still I was lying there in trousers soiled by my own excrement. I was glad there was a bit of a breeze.

Finally, after about three hours, the army called another headcount and we were all then marched down to the cells. I walked along the passageway towards Maxima, feeling the sludge in my trousers. I got through the door and made a beeline to the toilet to finish my business.

I stepped back out and took a survey of the cell block. The wing was in bits. The boys in green had turned the place upside down. Mattresses had been ripped apart. Garbage bags had been upturned. The buckets had all been emptied out and the whole yard was a sea of the prisoners’ belongings. Clothes, toothbrushes, runners, flip-flops, everything was strewn over every inch of ground in the yard. Prisoners went crawling down on their hands and knees, looking for their possessions and gathering them together. One man wept when he looked in his bucket and saw one of the troops had taken a dump in it. Other troops had pissed in them. Some inmates found their clothes seeped in urine and sludge next to a manhole. The soldiers had obviously used them to search the sewers, lying on the clothes to keep themselves clean.

It was all a sickening and sorry sight. These were men who had almost nothing, and the little they did have had been destroyed. It was senseless vandalism. The National Guards, to me, weren’t soldiers, men of combat who defended their people and got respect. In my book they were just thugs and bandits – no better than the murderers and rapists they were guarding. Maybe worse. They were in a position of authority and they abused it.

Some of the lads had gashes on the backs of their legs and across their arms from the troops smashing down on us with swords. One inmate had a nasty cut on his upper arm. ‘
Verdes, hijos de putas,
’ (‘Verdes, sons of bitches’) shouted a Veno. ‘
Verdes, mama huevo
’ (‘Verde, cocksuckers’).

Ricardo showed me his upper arm. ‘Look, Paul, look. They got me, bastards.’ He’d been hit with the bullets the troops shot at us as we ran scurrying from the yard. His arm was covered in little dents the size of peanuts. ‘This is the second time they’ve done this to me, these wounds. They did the same in a search before.’ The bullets the troops fired weren’t meant to kill, just hurt: like buckshot that hunters use to fire at birds, the bullets spraying out in a scattergun way to increase the number of targets but not strong enough to pierce a man’s skin a few metres away.

The bosses walked around taking in the damage. They were hit hardest, as they had luxuries such as TVs. Three of the portable ones they kept beside their beds were on the ground, smashed. One boss looked like he was close to tears after inspecting his stereo. It didn’t work when he tried to power it up. The guards had pissed on it and left a puddle of urine on the floor. I saw another of the bosses pulling at the plaster that was now hanging off the walls in the cells. It was where the jefe and his ‘troops’ hid guns and ammo in the walls.

I started to look around the yard for my own belongings. I saw my talc bottle on the ground. I grabbed it and popped off the lid. I couldn’t believe it. The coke was all still there and intact. My stash had survived yet another búsqueda.

We started to clean up and put the wing in order. With the anger starting to fizzle out, the standing joke was all about how I’d dirtied my jeans up on the roof. The bosses were jeering me, saying I had
miedo
(fear) of the troops in the search. The Venos started calling me ‘Kaká, Kaká’ and laughing. I thought this was great, smiling that they were calling me after the nickname of the famous Brazilian footballer Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite. ‘No,
caca
– it’s Spanish for having a shit,’ said Eddy. That wiped the grin off my face.

That evening it was time for the wing’s weekly meeting. It was always held on Monday, which was, conveniently, the day the wing was torn apart. The air was tense. We prisoners took our place sitting on our buckets in the yard. The jefe and his henchmen stood by the cell-block door, looking bare without their arsenal of heavy weapons. I could see they’d been badly hit by the raid, but they still had pistols and revolvers the army couldn’t find. The luceros still had their knives, too, swinging on their wrists.

The weekly meetings were supposed to be a chance for inmates to voice any gripes or suggest how to improve the running of Maxima, but if anyone did speak up they were always laughed at or shouted down by the bosses, so few bothered. We all knew the meeting was a farce: mob rule pretending to be a democracy, and the bosses making out they were actually earning their causa by doing stuff for us. It was usually banal things raised at the meeting, such as the bosses telling us the price of detergent had gone up so they had to raise two million bolos, or four hundred euro, for cleaning products for the wing for a month. No one believed them – that was about twice the salary of a cop or nurse in Venezuela. If you spoke out, though, you might get called in for a meeting with a baseball bat.

Everyone was edgy. The wing had been pulled apart, and the bosses in particular needed to recoup their losses of TVs, stereos, mobile phones, cash and guns. Fidel wasn’t pleased with the loss, stomping back and forth next to his army council, giving a sermon. All I could really make out was
plata
(money) and other words such as
armas
(guns). Worried faces. Furrowed brows. Sighs. I knew this meant something bad for us but not exactly what. I got up off the bucket where I sat and went up to Eddy.

‘I don’t get it. What’s going on, all the talk about money?’

‘It’s not good, that’s what it is,’ he said. ‘There’s a special causa. It’s 100,000 bolos [or 20 euro] to get new guns and ammo. And we pay for it.’

‘And everyone accepts it?’

Hanz walked over, scratching his beard, and joined in. ‘Yes, you pay,’ he shrugged. ‘You think they’ll make cardboard boxes so we can put in voting papers?’

‘It’s bullshit,’ said Eddy. ‘Bunch of bastards, mate, all bastards.’

‘We can pay it OK,’ said Hanz, putting things into perspective. ‘Most of us get money from our embassies or back home. Twenty euro is not much, but the Venezuelans, for them it’s a lot.’ True enough, 20 euro wasn’t much out of the 350 that were on their way to me, but it was a big jump for the Venos. The usual causa was 5,000 bolos (about a euro) a week. The 100,000-bolo causa, about 20 euro, was a big hike. Most inmates knew they’d have problems getting it.

But the irony was that the bosses would restock their guns and other contraband from the same source that robbed them of it: the National Guard. Nothing got in or out of the jail without them knowing about it. The verdes might not police the wings but they controlled who and what came in and out of Los Teques. I was getting a picture of another cycle in the prison’s life: the army would storm the wings and seize weapons, then later the same arms would end up back in the hands of the bosses. You could get what you wanted into the prison – TVs, phones, guns – but at twice the street price. It was one big racket.

‘As well as to rearm themselves, they want the cash for Crimbo,’ said Eddy. ‘A tree and decorations, food and entertainment for all their families.’ He buckled over laughing. You had to; it was too much to take seriously. I was wondering whether I was in Neverland Ranch rather than Los Teques. I kept waiting for Michael Jackson to moonwalk and sing out a chorus of ‘Beat It’.

* * *

My Western Union from my sister still hadn’t come through. Eddy, though, loved the coke sample I’d given him on his birthday a few weeks before, and he started selling it for me. He was bringing in cash for a few sales. I earned about fifty or sixty thousand bolos and went ‘shopping’: I finally bought my own tobo. It was an old cooking-oil drum one of the lads sold me from the kitchen. I also bought myself a bowl, spoon, plate, knife and fork and a mug. Now I was able to go to the rancho and get the slop in my own bowl and take it back to the yard and sit down and eat. And not with my fingers.

But my business plan wasn’t quite working out with Eddy. I was sure much of the coke was disappearing up his nose. I’d given him about six or seven grams to sell at thirty thousand bolos a pop. It was five thousand above the odds, but it was more potent than the stuff the jefes were selling. So I’d given Eddy about seven grams, but he’d only given me the money for two sales. My blood was boiling.

I knew what was going on. Eddy was into the crack and was a loose cannon. In the yard in the evening I’d watch him sit down with the other zombies, smoking crack out of crudely made pipes. They were little glass vials with a hole punched in the side and an empty biro shoved in. The stone was put in the vial and lit, with the crackhead sucking on the end of the biro. They were zonked afterwards, walking around spaced. Eddy would often run about looking for a white mouse. ‘Did you see him? Did you see him?’ he’d say, smiling. No one ever answered him, and he’d run off into a cell or a toilet looking for the elusive rodent. I was livid with him, though. I’d given him more than 200,000 bolos’ worth of coke and he’d earned only about 60,000 bolos, snorting the rest. He was wasting my time.

I pulled him up in the yard after the headcount one day before the luceros started their evening shift selling coke and crack. ‘Eddy, this isn’t working. I’m trying to make a few quid here. You’re not selling the coke, you’re snorting it. You just wanna get wasted.’

‘I know,’ he said, his eyes studying the ground, ‘I’m sorry.’ He was a nice guy and I couldn’t get annoyed with him for long, but I needed another salesman. And Eddy, in fairness to him, didn’t tell anyone about the stash. I noticed he’d sold a couple of lines to Silvio and Roberto. I trusted Silvio and went to him when he stepped out from the cells.

‘Silvio, I’m trying to run a little business.’

‘A business?’

‘Selling coke.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘That stuff you bought off Eddy the other day is mine.’

‘That was yours? Where’d you get it? It’s dynamite.’

‘I swallowed it in a few johnnies. Look, it’s not working out with Eddy; he’s selling most of it to buy crack for himself. I need someone else.’

‘I could have told you that; you should have come to me first.’

‘I wasn’t sure who to go to first, so I just gave it to him.’

‘How much are you selling it for?’

‘It’s thirty thousand across the board for a gram. I don’t care if they want one gram or twenty grams – that’s my price. I won’t take any less.’

Silvio had a good network of potential customers among the Italians. His countrymen wouldn’t snort and tell, he assured me. The jail was full of them. I was starting to think drug smuggling was a national pastime in Italy. We agreed he would sell it to his buddies in the Special wing. He had a mate who ran the shop there who could flog it to the load of Italians in the wing. So we put our plan into motion. Silvio put out the feelers to the shopkeeper and he put in an order for ten grams. Brilliant, I thought. We even had a great spot to divvy out the coke: the classroom. I brought my talc bottle to the next Spanish lesson. After the others left we put on our drug-dealer hats. On a table next to the map of South America, I popped open the talc-bottle lid and tapped out the ten-gram deal onto a sheet of paper, guessing the weight.

Silvio’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. ‘Where you get all this?’ he said.

‘Swallowed a few balloons.’ I was sticking to my story.

Silvio later went up to the Special to do the sale. I was sure I could trust him and rely on him. He liked his bit of coke, but he wasn’t an addict. He didn’t go around strung out on the stuff. I agreed to give him a nice kickback of a gram or so per ten-gram sale, and he was happy with that.

The Italians gave my ‘merchandise’ the thumbs up. ‘Paul,’ said Silvio, as we sat in the yard, ‘this guy, he says he’s never seen a grade this good. He wants another ten grams.’

That’s 300,000 bolos, I thought, nice little earner. ‘Done deal.’ I knew I’d need money in here; nothing was free. The list of weekly expenses was adding up: the causa, and cash I would need in the future, as I was looking at up to eight years in here. I also had my eye on a bed. I wanted to get off the floor some day. Getting your hands on a bed wasn’t just about money, you had to wait for someone to go free or die. Let’s see.

* * *

After Spanish class on Thursday morning, we divvied up another round of coke, then myself and Silvio left the classroom and went down to the cantina. It was about 1 p.m.: time for the kitchen and admin workers, including Silvio, and a few of the cops to eat. I followed him in on the off chance I might get a bit of rice and beans – or even chicken, which the workers got. The chicken was skin and bones by the time the dish of the day had worked its way down the pecking order from prison staff to inmate workers and then to common prisoners like me; sardines was about it every day. Silvio sat down on one of the stone benches next to a cop with a gap-toothed grin. I was bursting to use the toilet. I walked past the cookers at the back wall and went towards the toilet there.