El Infierno

by Pieter Tritton

  This worried her, and she told me, ‘You have to pay them something or it could cause you problems.’

  ‘Problems? PROBLEMS? Do you think I could have more problems than I do already? What are they going to do? Put me in prison?’

  When I next saw Eva she had read through the case papers and also brought me a copy to look through. In British prisons in general you had to have a copy of your depositions so people could check you out and make sure you weren’t a sex offender or a snitch (informant). If you didn’t produce your papers you could possibly encounter problems from fellow prisoners. It really was a big deal. The other inmates at the Interpol station thought I was being strange to insist on having my papers. In Ecuador, everyone kept their papers to themselves, if they even had them, and didn’t really discuss their cases much with each other.

  The Interpol headquarters was the centre for antinarcotics and in the main dealt with drugs offences and associated crimes. I was expecting a great pile of papers like you might get in a prison in Britain or America, with all your depositions, witness statements, surveillance etc., but here I received perhaps just 30 pages. More of a general summary than anything specific.

  I asked Eva when I would be going to court. She explained that you have a pre-trial hearing and then a trial with three judges. The first hearing wouldn’t be for a good few months yet, four to six months being the usual wait. However, due to the current chaotic state of the Ecuadorian justice system there were people in the prisons who had been waiting on remand without sentence, without even a hearing, for as much as five years. This shocked me. I thought, there’s no way in hell I’m waiting for five years without even having had a hearing. Yet again Eva reassured me that everything could be manipulated if you had enough money. Cases could be slowed down, speeded up, evidence lost or changed – anything was possible.

  She explained that the first thing we needed to concentrate on was getting moved from Interpol to the main prison but avoid going via the holding area that most prisoners had to wait in until allocated a wing. This was called the calabozo, or dungeon, and was notorious. You would be robbed and probably beaten before leaving it. Eva was therefore making arrangements for me to be transferred – along with the Arabs – to the same wing and decent cells without having to endure the calabozo.

  Eva’s boyfriend was a Colombian guy who was also a prisoner and on the same wing we were going to be allocated to. This meant she would be able to speak to me on a regular basis as she went to see him most visit days. Eva seemed to be very genuine and I was immensely grateful to Hassan for having introduced us.

  The next important stage was ensuring that Nicky’s and my papers ended up in a ‘good’ courtroom or tribunal – preferably one where Eva had good relations with the secretary of the courtroom and the three judges. They would be open to ‘negotiation’. To achieve this, she was going to have to pay off the people in the Ministry of Justice who decided to which tribunal your case would be attributed. This is called the sorteo, or draw. It was like fixing the World Cup draw – you could imagine them picking the balls out. But obviously instead of football matches it was legal cases and instead of stadiums, courtrooms. This meant only one thing: the sorteo had to be sorted out.

  For $5,000, Eva managed to have my case allotted to a tribunal where she was friendly with the judges. It seems she was as good as her word. It was expensive but at least she got things done. She had negotiated with the judges in this tribunal previously, so knew they were open to offers. This was music to my ears. Eva said she would begin negotiations immediately with a view to having Nicky’s case thrown out and me being sentenced to the minimum of eight years.

  However, there was one major problem with this. The British police were keeping a close eye on the case as they knew how corrupt the legal system was here. The judges were going to be wary about being too blatant in taking bribes. Furthermore, I now knew that the British police wanted to extradite me if I was sentenced to less than ten years. They also made it very clear that if I served anything less than six years they would re-sentence me on my return to Britain. They were out for blood and said that had I been arrested in Britain I would have faced a minimum 20-year prison sentence, which would have meant serving at least ten years. There was no bloody way I was serving ten years anywhere! I planned to be out after no more than three years at the very most.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  INTO HELL

  FIVE SLOW, TRAUMATIC weeks had passed, with me and Nicky being held in the dark, dank cells of Interpol without once glimpsing sunlight or being permitted a single breath of fresh air. During this time the whole prison system in Ecuador was in crisis. A protest by the prisoners had closed the main prison, which meant no transfers were taking place because everywhere was in a state of lockdown.

  It was then that my very first chance of escape came. The Interpol building was tucked away out of sight of the street behind a row of commercial premises. I had been looking around, assessing possible ways to escape from the building, but couldn’t really see any. We were never taken outside for fresh air or sun and the only occasions we were allowed out of the cells were when the embassy or lawyer came to visit. These visits were closely supervised by armed police. There was no obvious means of getting out.

  Then, in a moment of frustration, I came across one weakness. I had been sitting on the concrete shelf that acted as my bunk and, feeling angry, had hit the wall behind me. I was surprised when there was a low hollow thud. Instead of a solid wall it appeared to be a fairly flimsy partition wall. I tapped some more, over an area in the middle of the cell. The whole wall appeared to be very thin indeed. My mind started racing. Imagine. The guards never came in to check the cells, they just came to the gate and did a roll call, often without even verifying it was the right person responding when their name was called.

  I had to find out what was on the other side of this wall. I didn’t want to dig through just to land in the sergeant’s office. And I didn’t have any implements with which to dig, nor any idea of where I would go once I got out. I had no money, no ID, no contacts and couldn’t speak the language. Another huge consideration was that it would also mean abandoning Nicky to her fate. I thought about this a lot, and found a time to talk it over with her. I explained carefully and as best I could. We knew by now what sort of sentence I was facing and she selflessly told me to go for it if I thought I stood a good chance of making a break.

  I needed help but didn’t know who to turn to. I knew Hassan wouldn’t be interested so I asked another guy who I had been talking to. I pulled him aside and quietly explained my discovery and the need for digging tools. Within minutes he had one of his friends scratching carefully away at the wall with a metal fork, with me and him keeping watch at the gate in case anyone came. He knew the area and told me there were offices the other side of the wall, which were closed at the weekends and had no security personnel watching them. A window of opportunity.

  The guy doing the digging had picked a spot under the bottom of the lower concrete sleeping shelf. When viewed from the doorway of the cell it was completely in shadow, so couldn’t be seen unless you got on your hands and knees. He was slowly making the wall thinner and thinner, so as not to actually break through. Things were going well when the guy who had been helping me was transferred on to the remand centre, the CDP (Centre for Detention and Prevention), located next to the prison. The very next day both Nicky and I heard we would also, finally, be transferred, thus ending our chances of escaping from Interpol. So close!

  I heard shortly afterwards that the police had discovered the hole, beaten everyone, repaired it and swapped the women into these cells and the men into the women’s. I often wondered if I would have succeeded and just how far away I would have got.

  It may have been a disappointment not to have had a shot at escaping, but it was a relief to be finally leaving the terrible conditions we had been living in. We should have only spent a couple of nights there, but it had now been over fiv
e weeks.

  However, transfer to the main prison, Penal Garcia Moreno, meant separation from Nicky. She was taking it all hard. She was the first to leave, with a bunch of the other women, who promised to look after her once they reached the women’s prison. The group included a woman called María, who spoke good English and looked out for Nicky. Her husband Nizar was also connected to the Arabs, but had been captured at an earlier date and was awaiting the arrival of Hassan and his friends in the main prison.

  They reassured me that within three months I should be able to arrange for her to visit me every Thursday – inter-prison – for the whole day for íntima, or a conjugal visit. She was tearful and so was I, seeing her disappearing, not knowing where or when I would next see her and what kind of hardships she would endure. I told her I would make contact by phone as soon as possible and instructed her to get a mobile number to our lawyer. I would also make sure she had plenty of money to keep her going.

  After Nicky was taken off we had to wait a few hours, during which ‘the colonel’, a fellow inmate reassured me she would be all right. He was an ex-colonel of police who had been arrested with 300 kilograms of pure Peruvian cocaine. He spoke good English, which he’d learnt while serving a lengthy prison sentence in North America following his extradition some years earlier on drug trafficking charges. When the transport returned, the colonel, the Arabs, myself and a bunch of others were loaded into an armoured box van with no windows, under armed guard. We began a bumpy trip along the choked streets of Quito to the Garcia Moreno prison in the old sector of the city. We first had to go to the CDP, from where we would be allocated to our wings in the prison, a bit like county jail in the USA. This place was notorious for being violent and very basic, so I was feeling fairly apprehensive. We pulled up outside the CDP, which is next to the prison on a dead-end street opposite a market.

  Carrying our mattresses and bags, we were led through a high iron gate and through another door in the side of what looked like an office building. This opened up on to a courtyard or small exercise yard, with a three-storey concrete structure on the left that resembled a half-built car park. I could see through the bars of the ground floor a dark, open space in which some gruesome ghouls with filthy-looking faces were milling about like something out of a zombie horror film. I could see a couple of them brandishing knives quite openly and gesturing through the bars in my direction that they intended to cut my throat. Fuck!

  ‘Bloody hell!’ I exclaimed. ‘We’re not being placed in there, are we Adnan?’ A note of panic was creeping into my voice. Adnan, Hassan’s friend, turned to me, smiling. ‘Don’t worry my friend, we are not going in there, just you!’ He was laughing by now, along with a couple of the others who had overheard. ‘No, no. I am joking. We all go top floor, penthouse with all the foreigners and traffickers. These people bad people, killers, robbers, drug addicts. No good. Very bad people.’

  I looked through the bars at the desperate crazed faces of human beings caged like wild animals. I was frightened.

  ‘Come on, we go,’ Adnan said, and I followed him, Hassan and the others. As we passed by, arms came flying out of the windows, trying to grab our bags – or possibly us.

  The top floor of the CDP was a long, open area in which people had constructed wooden bunks, some with curtains across them for privacy made from whatever they could get their hands on or bribe the guards to bring in. The Arabs who had taken me under their wing were well-received and invited me to share with them. Within the hour they had a mobile phone and were calling their families and friends. They promised to let me use it the next day to phone England, so that I could speak to my family.

  The conditions were a little better here. At least there was fresh air coming through an open window, and everywhere was cleaner. There was a toilet cubicle that offered some privacy and a makeshift cold-water shower at one end. Here people could cook, play cards, talk, smoke. Occasionally fights broke out.

  The day after our arrival we were allowed into the exercise yard for a couple of hours to finally get some sun. It was a good feeling to be outside breathing reasonably fresh air after being locked up so long. It was during one of these exercise periods that I first witnessed real brutality by the prison guards.

  Juan, the young Colombian I had helped out in the Interpol station by paying for his mother to be released, had decided to climb the chain fence in the yard to call to her – she had come to try to visit him. I was laughing and joking with one of the Arabs as we walked around the yard when a guard spotted Juan, who by this time was almost at the top of the fence. The guard went ballistic, cursing in Spanish, and rushed to fetch a five-foot-long piece of wood from the office. He started towards Juan, who was now descending rapidly. He hit the ground running, just as the guard gave an almighty swing of the bat. It made contact with the kid’s legs, grounding him instantly. He then dealt a couple more blows across Juan’s legs and back, leaving the guy in a crumpled heap, sobbing. I thought his legs must be broken but luckily it turned out he was just bruised. It shocked me how quick and brutal the punishment had been and without warning or a caution, and this was only for a minor infraction. What would happen if you had a fight or genuinely tried to escape?

  On Saturday and Sunday we were permitted a visit and it wasn’t long before the colonel’s family arrived, bearing food and drinks. He called me over and introduced me to his wife and his daughter, who was very attractive. He half-jokingly said he would like me to stay in Ecuador, marry his daughter and go into business with him exporting prawns. I should probably have taken him up on his offer as we were to meet again many years later. We spent the afternoon eating chicken, drinking cola and chatting as best we could, he interpreting between his daughter and me.

  My lawyer Eva came to visit both me and Hassan to bring us documents to sign, allowing her to proceed with her preparation of the defence. She explained that we would not be staying long in the CDP as she was in the process of making arrangements for us to be transferred to the prison more quickly than normal (for a fee) and to be put on the best wing. In Hassan’s case she was arranging for him to share a cell with his brother.

  We spent about a week in the CDP and from there, for the ‘fee’ of $200, we managed to bypass the calabozo.

  In E wing – a kind of holding area where we were to be kept until we moved up to the main prison – we were greeted by a crowd wanting to inspect this new group of inmates. Within minutes I was talking to an English lad called Nick, who came from near Manchester. It felt surreal meeting someone from home in such an alien environment. Although, at the end of the day, prison is prison wherever in the world you are: bars and walls, solid doors.

  We dumped our bags and mattresses in the holding area and Nick said he would show me around. I was apprehensive about leaving my kit as I could see all the eager looks of the inmates at the prospect of a new haul of expensive clothes, shoes, electronics, toiletries – all of which could be stolen and sold or swapped for drugs. We decided among ourselves that someone from our group would stay with the bags at all times. Just as well, because when I returned, I could hear one of the Arabs shouting at a guy who had been trying to cut a deal for my stuff to watch his mouth and fuck off.

  From my guided tour, I could see that it was a typical three-storey stone prison, open in the middle with cells and landings on either side. There were at least 300 prisoners living on each wing, generally three per cell but sometimes as many as six or seven. The cell doors were metal, but oddly enough they seemed to be locked from the inside, which was new to me. Another peculiarity was that there were shops run by prisoners, offering pretty much anything from bread, cola and sweets to vegetables, rice, meat and chicken. Cash, Nick explained, was allowed in the prison and there was a whole micro-economy within the walls, much akin to a small village, with grocers’ shops, laundries, bakers, clothes sellers, ironmongers – but also dealing in drugs, firearms, alcohol, prostitution, gambling and the sale of cells.

  One of the first thi
ngs Nick told me about himself was that he had been stabbed several times. When I asked him why, he became a bit defensive and said he had been in a fight. I soon found out that Nick was actually on this wing for his own protection because of drug debts in the main prison. I knew from time spent in British prisons that you generally only ended up in serious fights if you got into debt, allowed yourself to be victimised or there was something ‘not right’ about you – maybe you were a sex offender or grass. I knew it was going to be slightly different here, as it had already been forcefully explained to me that being a foreigner meant you were regarded as a cash cow and therefore likely to be a target of extortion or robbery.

  I was glad of the tour as the Arabs and I ended up spending about four or five days sleeping fifteen to twenty of us in a space barely big enough for two people as we waited to be moved into the main prison. We spent our time taking it in turns to sleep like sardines and in the day we would sit around in the exercise yard or in other people’s cells, chatting.

  I quickly discovered that the regime at Garcia Moreno was quite different to any English prison I knew of. The guards would start coming into the prison at around 6am to take the padlocks off the cell doors. At 8am they would carry out a count and everyone had to be at their cells. It didn’t matter if you were lying in bed, just so long as you were present. Failure to make the count could result in your being taken to the calabozo or punishment block, or otherwise having to bribe the guard ten or twenty dollars. After this count you were then free to roam around the wing until they locked the cell door in the evening at nine o’clock. The exercise yard was usually closed at 5pm when they would take another count and the last count was at 9pm – bang-up. You rarely saw the guards. You could tell this was not a place of rehabilitation, merely of containment: a human warehouse.