El Infierno

by Pieter Tritton

  However, one thing that really shook me was a cell midway along one of the landings that was permanently locked. There was a plaque on the wall next to it with the name of a former president of Ecuador. He had been imprisoned and subsequently murdered in that very room. This made me think, if an ex-president can be murdered in here, then how easy is it to kill another inmate or, more to the point, to be killed yourself? This I would soon find out once we were moved into the main section of the prison a few days later.

  I found out from someone else that Nick had originally been arrested with his father. However, his father had become ill after a couple of years in the poor conditions of the prison and very sadly died here. I felt so sorry for Nick. It is one of the worst things that can happen to you in prison, a parent or sibling dying while you were locked up. It must have been terrible for the both of them. I quietly thought to myself that I hope neither of my parents dies before I am released. My mother was a constant worry, with her poor health and now the added stress of my situation. It weighed heavily on my mind.

  CHAPTER SIX

  C WING, GARCIA MORENO PRISON

  AFTER A FEW days living like sardines in a can, we were finally moved into the main prison and C wing, where the majority of the foreigners were housed. This I was pleased about. At least we would be in a proper cell and not sleeping on the floor, and also it would be great to meet the other Brits, of whom there were three or four, and some other English speakers.

  Dumping our gear down in a pile, we waited to be allocated to cells. This task fell not to the officers but to the caporal – an inmate who is an elected representative charged with managing the wing, similar to the Number One on a British prison wing. The caporal of C wing was named Youseff, and on first appearance he could easily have been mistaken for the governor of the prison. He was a heavyset Egyptian of six foot two inches, well dressed in a shirt and dark trousers with smart leather shoes and coiffured black hair. Youseff guided us up three flights of stairs to the top floor, passing on the way a small gym, some offices and the telephone kiosks (cabinas). Youseff then began sorting out which cells we were going to be staying in. In the case of the Arabs this had been arranged in advance thanks to Eva, and about $2,000.

  My first experience of corruption on C wing came within a few minutes of meeting caporal Youseff. He explained to me that everyone coming onto the wing had to pay a small fee called the ingresso, or entrance fee. This varied between the wings, C wing’s being the highest at about $70. This money went into the wing’s fund for maintenance and upkeep. There was also a separate tax or charge of one or two dollars a week, collected every Sunday and called the guardia. This money was used to pay the guards off daily to ensure they didn’t hassle people on the wing too much and that they turned a blind eye to basic infractions, making everyone’s life a little more bearable.

  Youseff explained that I could buy a cell, which was a new concept to me. The average cell price was $2,000 and you also paid a fee to the caporal to witness the transaction between you and the current owner. A contract would be drawn up and you would then pay a fee to the person in admin. This wasn’t supposed to happen but the authorities turned a blind eye as they were getting paid. You still had to have at least two people living with you but it meant you had your space, which was particularly important on visit days. These were all day Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday from 9am to 5pm, and once every two weeks your girlfriend, wife or a prostitute could stay the night in your cell on the Saturday. This was music to my ears. Sex in prison!

  I thought I would wait a while before I bought a cell, as I was determined to get out of here soon and I viewed buying a cell as settling down and being resigned to being in for the long haul. I should have bought one then and there!

  I was allocated to a cell owned by a Frenchman called Jean, who shared it with a German by the name of Johann. Jean spoke only a little English and was a slim, athleticlooking guy with quite a highly strung, nervous manner about him, who rarely sat still. Johann spoke good English and was distinctly Aryan-looking with blonde hair, blue eyes and pale skin. He was quite stocky and a relaxed friendly guy, but with that serious German nature. They were both serving sentences of eight years.

  Two of the English-speaking guys had heard that another Brit had just arrived, so came to introduce themselves. The first was perhaps 60, an old boy by the name of Arthur, who had a grandfatherly manner. He was of medium build and about the same height as me – five foot ten – with short grey hair brushed to one side and blue eyes that peered at me over the tops of the spectacles that rested on his nose. He introduced himself in a softly-spoken south London accent, which was nice to hear. Arthur was sentenced to eight years and had been in the prison over two years already, so was well accustomed to the place. The second guy, Victor, was Colombian but had been raised around the Brixton area of London so spoke English perfectly. He was about my age, early thirties, and muscular from working out in the gym. He had short black hair and dark skin. Victor had been in the prison some three years and was reaching the end of his sentence – or at least approaching a possible release date.

  Another Brit appeared a little later. Felix was a tall, solid black guy from London, of Nigerian descent, and had been studying medicine. He was two years off finishing when he decided to act as a mule and carry a few kilos of cocaine back to Britain to help finance his studies. He didn’t make it out of the airport in Quito and was awaiting sentencing. He was well-spoken and intelligent with a kind face, but had shifty eyes. There was something about him I didn’t quite trust.

  Each wing in Garcia Moreno prison housed between 300 and 500 men, an overall total of well over 1,500, although the prison was originally designed to hold far fewer. The prison was for men over the age of 18, convicted or charged with crimes ranging from petty theft through to drug trafficking, rape and murder. There were also a number of serial killers held there. Very few of the foreigners were being held for murder – virtually all of them were in for drugs offences. The sentences in the prison ranged from a few months up to 25 years, with exceptionally bad cases receiving a whopping 35 years with no parole.

  The inmates of C wing were almost all foreigners, with 40 to 50 nationalities represented. There were a lot of Spanish men, probably since they were the most obvious target of traffickers because of their shared language and ease of obtaining a visa. There were quite a few Russians and Africans, with Nigeria in particular well represented. There were many Colombians in the prison but they tended to live on D wing, which was more or less controlled by them. A number of the Colombians were or had been professional assassins for the drug cartels of Colombia, carrying out contract killings.

  B wing was almost entirely Ecuadorian with a few foreigners – just one Englishman and a number of Colombians. Arthur and Victor warned me to be careful over on B wing as the locals could get ‘a bit funny’ and sometimes took exception to foreigners wandering around in their territory. They explained that it was run in the main by a gang from Quito whose head was a dangerous young guy called Enrique, along with another called Christian, both of whom had committed multiple murders.

  Some of the bigger traffickers were being held on A wing, which was a smaller, self-contained maximum-security wing, controlled directly by the police and not the prison guards. These traffickers were usually being held with several other members of a cartel, often up to 15 people on charges of trafficking anything up to ten tons of cocaine. Broken down, that is ten million grams, and after being cut with other substances more like 20 million grams of cocaine for sale. That’s a lot of blow!

  I soon discovered that the remand and sentenced prisoners weren’t separated as in some prisons in the west, nor was there any differentiation between short-, mid- or long-term prisoners, everyone instead being thrown in together. It seemed to me that the authorities didn’t really care what happened within the walls of the prison just so long as it was contained there. This job of containment came down to the guards and the police. The
guards maintained internal security and in general didn’t seem to be armed apart from with pepper spray or tasers and batons. The head guard, or jefe de guia, had a pistol of some kind. In comparison, the police, who patrolled the perimeter, were armed to the teeth with M16 assault rifles, various machine guns and Glock 9mm sidearms. They were under orders to shoot to kill anyone trying to escape.

  It wasn’t just the Brits who warned me how dangerous the place was. It seemed there was an average of one or two murders a week – usually by knife, but sometimes there would be gunfights between gangs for control of one of the wings. The thought of being in the middle of a gunfight in a prison wasn’t a happy one for me, particularly without a gun. This was something I had to think about. I would have to be careful here. Any arguments or fights could end in death pretty easily.

  I had also heard about the riots – the ones that had prevented my transfer from the Interpol station. The aim of the riots was to draw attention to the plight of the prisoners and their families. It had so far been futile, which could only mean one thing – we were in for more. It looked as though I had arrived at a very volatile time.

  On one of my first evenings on the wing there was a guy cutting people’s hair with electric clippers near where the communal TV hung on the second floor, very close to my cell. I was standing nearby, chatting, and, as a joke, the guy with the clippers buzzed the side of my head, cutting some of my hair off. I didn’t find this funny and before I knew it we had squared up to each other. People intervened and broke it up. Only later did someone tell me that the guy with whom I had been fighting was a sicario, or hitman, for a Colombian cartel and the son of a capo, or mafia boss, who was in the maximum-security wing charged with trafficking nine tons of cocaine. I had only been there a week and had already made an enemy of one of the most deadly and feared people in the prison. Luckily, Tigre, as he was called, was suddenly transferred for some other problem, thus creating space between us.

  Towards the end of my first week Felix, the black guy from London, took me to meet the boss of B wing. An hour after I’d met the guy, there was a lot of commotion and Felix came to find me to tell me that the boss I had just been talking to was dead, having been shot, stabbed and hanged to give the pretence of a suicide. Now, it’s fairly obvious that you don’t shoot and stab yourself before hanging your own body up. However, the authorities there didn’t care and it was chalked up as just another suicide, one less problem for them.

  So that was my welcome to C wing: riots, a boss murdered and making an enemy of a Colombian sicario, all within a week. And it was starting to seem that I was looking at a sentence of at least 12 years – some people had even suggested it might be 25 years. At this rate, I wouldn’t even last six months.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  JUST ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE

  THE CELLS AT Garcia Moreno prison were small, about six feet by eight with two bunks and one person sleeping on a roll mat or mattress on the floor. This was my current position and it meant I had to get up and out of the way just prior to the first count at 8am so that the cell was clear to move around in. I would fold up my bedding, roll up the mattress and store it under the bottom bunk. It was a pain, but I wasn’t yet ready to buy a cell.

  The main benefit of having your own cell was that you could relax by yourself whenever you wanted to. Not owning one meant basically wandering around from 8.30am until 9pm or spending time in friends’ cells. It was awkward. I tried to set a routine, which I have always found passes the time best in prison. Occupy the hours and the days go a lot more quickly.

  First thing in the morning, I would go down to the exercise yard and spend at least an hour doing circuit training with a few others. I would then have a shower outdoors in the exercise yard to freshen up. I had discovered that Arthur, the old boy, was a keen player of cribbage, a card game I had been taught by my father. When I was a child, helping him on a building site in my school holidays, we would play in the pub at lunchtimes. I didn’t get to play games with my father that often so it meant a lot. I remember a police officer telling my dad to get me out of there one lunchtime, thus stopping our game, and me resenting the police after that.

  I would find Arthur and together we would sit at one of the restaurants in the small exercise yard of C wing, playing crib for a good couple of hours. I would buy us both breakfast/brunch from Ivan, the gregarious Russian who ran it. He was an ex-KGB officer with huge hands, a real Russian bear. He would cook us large plates of chicken livers and a massive Spanish omelette.

  While Arthur and I played crib, Ivan would sit and drink strong coffee – often laced with alcohol – smoking cigarettes and swearing in throaty Russian at anyone who came too close to his restaurant, which was in a red metal Coca-Cola stand-cum-shed. I learned a few words of Russian from him, nearly all of them swear words, mostly because of the frequency with which he used them. This was generally how my mornings were spent, as well as reading a book, calling family and friends, and planning either to defend the case or try to escape.

  My first near escape from the prison came not long after arriving there and being allocated to C wing. It involved Martha, an interpreter I had hired on the recommendation of the embassy. We had a meeting arranged at the prison in order to run through exactly what I planned to say in my defence. She had spoken with the director himself, who had kindly offered her the use of his office. This was located at the entrance to the prison, to the right of the main door as you face the building.

  It was a Wednesday and visit day as normal. A guard came looking for me mid-morning and told me I was to follow him to the director’s office as there was a visitor waiting for me from the embassy. We were allowed our own clothing in the prison, so I was dressed quite smartly in a blue fisherman’s jumper and beige trousers with tan shoes. I followed the guard off the wing, through the centre and down the narrow, dimly lit corridor, heading towards the main gate. We were stopped at the end of the corridor by the jefe de guia, who wanted to know where the guard was taking me. The guard showed him the pass stamped by the director and this was sufficient to open the main gate. The ‘gate’ was actually a very solid old wooden door, with dozens of metal rivets holding in place iron reinforcing that had barred the way to freedom for countless lost souls, some of whom never made it out alive.

  We passed through it and down a set of old stone steps, turning left into the director’s office. There sat Martha, a smartly dressed middle-aged Ecuadorian. The director ushered us into his space and then disappeared to give us privacy. Martha told me the director had allowed us as much time as was necessary to go over the details. She went on to tell me that the embassy had in fact taken care of booking the appointment, which explained why the director was being so amenable. The staff from the British embassy were highly respected in Ecuador and treated most courteously wherever they went.

  We spent the next 45 minutes going over my defence, Martha suggesting changes she thought would improve how well it might be received by the three judges. Once we had finished we walked out of the office to where there were visitors being searched before going into the prison for their visit. Martha said goodbye and turned to the left on to a concrete ramp that led down to a police checkpoint and then the road.

  I went to turn right to go back through the main entrance door and into the prison. A lone guard stood on the steps aimlessly gazing about, paying no particular attention to anyone and particularly not me. I paused for a minute, watching the visitors filing past me and being searched. Could I make it if I turned left on to the ramp, as Martha had done? Would I be able to get past the police checkpoint without arousing suspicion? I knew they generally held your IDs here if you were going into the prison, but in Martha’s case I wasn’t sure because she only went to the director’s office and not actually into the prison. Perhaps I could tell them the same thing – that I had been to see the director and not speak in Spanish: ‘Sorry, must be on my way now old chap. Toodle pip!’

  I just wasn’t sure what
the procedure was. Damn it! I was outside the prison. I was free. No one was paying me any attention. My mind was spinning out of control, uncertain as to what to do next. I gritted my teeth and turned to my right, towards the prison and captivity. I felt sick. The guard stopped me and asked where I thought I was going. I couldn’t believe it – he didn’t even know I was a prisoner. Shit! I actually had to ask him to ‘please open the door so I can go back in because I’m a prisoner’. I was nearly in tears walking back up the long narrow passageway, knowing that I may have just committed one of the worst errors ever in my life – well, second that is to being caught. I should have just had a go then and there and tried to bluff my way through. But I didn’t and I very much regretted that decision a few times in the following years. It was Midnight Express for real. Who knows, perhaps I would have ended up dead.

  At lunchtime, between noon and one o’clock, when the sun was at its most extreme microwave strength, I would avoid being outside. Quito, being on the equator and at nearly 2,500 metres altitude, is a great deal closer to the sun than Brighton beach or Weston-super-Mare. It takes just a couple of hours to achieve what the average sunbather manages in weeks on one of those beaches. If you do expose your skin to the solar radiation of this midday sun you can see red blotches start to appear where your flesh is actively cooking. This is the perfect recipe for skin cancer, especially with the lack of protection we had. I got burnt and ended up with sunstroke several times. Often the newcomers, particularly the Europeans, would rush to get a good suntan and end up making themselves very ill.

  Being ill in prison is never a good idea. And here, this prison being a third world one 5,000 miles from my loving family home, comfortable bed and the NHS, it was probably the worst idea ever – apart from, that is, trying to traffic nearly eight kilos of cocaine in Ecuador. From my and Nicky’s very first meeting with the embassy staff they had cautioned us to be careful with our health in the prison: wash your hands frequently, stay clean in general, don’t smoke, drink alcohol or take drugs, try not to become ill and avoid people with diseases. Of course, this was virtually impossible in a prison full of sick people. The embassy staff had stressed to us the importance of keeping strong both physically and mentally if we wanted to make it through this ordeal alive. Just being in prison takes its toll on you in so many ways: the poor diet, stress, lack of sleep, lack of daylight in some places, lack of exercise, lack of stimulation, little contact with family and friends, the generally all-male environment and poor conditions. One of the big problems in Ecuador, both in prison and on the street, is the fact that very little education is free, and at this time what there was of the national health service was run down and swamped by mismanagement and poor funding. Ignorance really does breed disease.