El Infierno

by Pieter Tritton

  I went up to Santiago straight away to have a chat and see where I stood, as I didn’t want any surprises popping up. I had always been on reasonably good terms with Santiago. As an ex-marine he had a large strong build. He told me how he had used me as cover to kill Gato when I had knocked on the door to deliver his plate of spaghetti Bolognese. I felt sick. The whole gunfight had begun basically because I had taken my friend a plate of food, thus costing him his life. Santiago confirmed what I had suspected – that had I entered the cell he may well have shot me in the back to get at Gato. I could tell he was watching my reactions in order to gauge with whom my loyalties lay. I played along and tried my best to convince him that the whole situation had come as a complete surprise to me, and that as a foreigner I really wasn’t involved or a member of either gang. This was basically true, as I had friends in both gangs, but I had become far closer to JL’s brother Carlos and thus the Choneros gang.

  I asked Santiago outright whether or not they had a problem with me staying on the wing. He laughed and said that it was fine for me to stay, absolutely no problem at all, but I could see a couple of the other gang members exchanging looks between one another that made me wonder just how welcome I really was. I told Santiago I would be willing to help them out if I could, perhaps selling the cocaine on the wing or maybe some other role. He said he would think about it and let me know once the tension had died down a bit and things had returned to normal – or at least his idea of normal.

  Over the next few days it became clear that the atmosphere on the wing was far more oppressive. Under Santiago’s leadership the extortion of newly arrived foreigners became worse. Upon arrival, foreigners would be split up and allocated to different wings across the prison. The gangs had contacts among the guards and staff working in the offices, who would notify them when people arrived. They wanted to make sure they got the wealthiest foreigners allocated to their wing in order to extort the greatest amount of money possible from them. For this they would pay them a few hundred dollars, depending on how much they managed to squeeze out of the person.

  The ingresso charge used to be a couple of thousand dollars for Europeans, North Americans, Canadians and anyone from rich countries. However, if there had been a lot of attention from the media and it had been reported that you were involved in a case with either large quantities of drugs or money, then they would target you and charge even more. The money would have to be sent by Western Union or MoneyGram to someone in the family of one of the gang members, such as a wife or girlfriend. Once collected, the money would be split, some going to the boss of the gang, a percentage to the prison staff and the remainder would be pocketed by the wing boss, with some also going to those who had assisted him in extorting the unlucky victim.

  It was horrible seeing and hearing people being heavily tortured, particularly as you couldn’t do much about it, as to interfere would mean you taking responsibility for that person’s debt. The unsuspecting new foreigner would be greeted with great bonhomie and welcomed into a cell where a group of the gang would be waiting with guns, knives, machetes, iron bars, barrels of water, electrical cables and a rope tied in a noose. The door would be closed behind him and a few people stationed outside to prevent anyone entering or leaving.

  The group would quickly make it very clear that they expected the victim to call their family, using the phone they provided, to arrange to have whatever amount of money they were being charged transferred over to the given name. This is where the problems would begin. Most people would just outright refuse because they had no way of paying. The whole reason they had ended up in the prison was because they had acted as a mule, carrying drugs, and they would only have been paid after delivery. They would have been doing this in the first place because they had no money and neither did their families. So how were they going to be able to pay the gang? The gang members didn’t understand this and assumed that all westerners had huge bank balances and were loaded. They simply couldn’t comprehend the fact that there is a great deal of poverty in Europe as well.

  At this point the gang members would usually start by hitting and slapping the victim, threatening them with knives and machetes. If this didn’t work, they would become progressively more violent. Their favourites were drowning, waterboarding or simple strangulation. The reason for this was, if it went too far, as it did on numerous occasions, and the person died, they could easily stage a suicide by hanging them up. When this happened, the police would come in, take a few photos and generally that would be the end of it. It was extremely disturbing being on the wing and knowing someone was being tortured just metres away. One morning a noise woke me at around five o’clock. I soon realised it was the sound of a guy from Slovakia being tortured by the Worm and a few others in a cell at the opposite end of the wing. It was chilling hearing it and makes me feel sick just remembering it. They had been torturing this guy for nearly a week, day and night, taking it in turns. There was nothing we could do. I told the British embassy but they said they were powerless. You couldn’t talk to the guards or the director as they were all involved, and if you interfered you ran the risk of at least being tortured as well, if not killed. It was a horrendous situation.

  One Spanish inmate who had just arrived was being tortured and he had broken free somehow and was running up and down the wing screaming for help, asking the guards at the gate to please help or take him off the wing. They just laughed and carried on watching as he ran up and down the wing, shouting, crying and begging. There was no escape and no help – no one was coming and there was no way out. Sometimes people killed themselves rather than endure the torture – they knew there was no way they were going to be able to arrange the money. The gang were relentless. Human life meant nothing to them. Their only interest was money.

  It was so, so awful when things went wrong and someone ended up dead. They would sometimes chop the body up and dispose of it in the rubbish, down the drains, in the sewers, buried under concrete, fed to dogs. They would pay the guards to remove the person’s name from the list so it was as if they had never existed. One gang member I knew was killed for trying to bring in drugs on the side, strictly against gang rules. They stabbed him to death and then dismembered him in a room in which I witnessed the bloody mess and the terrible smell. They then decided to try to burn the body in the same cell. All night a horrible, stinking smoke billowed out of the window and door as they slowly fed parts of him to the fire. It was like a horror film, except it was real and right in front of me. I will never forget it.

  I tried to keep a low profile and stay off the radar as much as I possibly could. This did not work at all and in fact not only did I reappear on the radar, but I became a huge glowing beacon and the absolute focus of Santiago’s attention. The reason behind this was crack cocaine.

  No one in the prison was selling crack. Nowhere in the entire place. Like in Quito, they only sold polvo, which they liked to smoke in a joint with tobacco and marijuana – a very toxic combination they called maduro. I saw a huge opportunityto create a new market with all the foreigners as I had in Quito. I had tried to talk to Caiman and had also tried to explain my idea to the head of the drugs business. He took it on board and liked the idea as it signified large profits. But for some reason, unbeknown to me, they decided against the sale of crack, which I viewed as madness considering they were already selling polvo.

  The problem that arose for me was with Santiago, who of an evening loved to smoke copious amounts of maduro. Santiago had imposed a curfew of 9pm on the wing. By this time everybody had to be in their cells with the doors shut and locked. A select few were allowed to remain out, usually just the other gang members. Everyone else had to remain in their cells until the following morning. If they needed something like drugs or alcohol then a runner, usually whoever was acting as security on the gate, would procure it for them at a small cost. Santiago liked it this way because of the extreme paranoia the combination of drugs he was consuming could frequently induce. I becam
e involved in this because someone had whispered in Santiago’s ear that I was a master chef when it came to cooking crack cocaine. He came to visit me early one evening, not long after taking control of the wing, and asked me whether I could prepare him some crack if he paid me in either drugs or cash. My door would also remain open all night and I was under his direct ‘protection’ in return for doing him this favour.

  At first I thought this was a good deal. I very quickly realised though that I was in for a very nerve-racking next few months, or however long he stayed in charge of the wing. The problem was that Santiago consumed an incredible quantity of drugs every single night. Once everyone was locked up, he would come to my cell and hand me six or eight bags of cocaine that he wanted converted into crack cocaine. He would then mix the gram or so of crack this produced into his joint. I remember the first time I watched Santiago prepare this. He would join together two rolling papers to make it larger, then break a cigarette into the papers and mix in three or four grams of marijuana. Next he would sprinkle three or four packs of the vile-smelling polvo into it. The final ingredient of this mammoth drugs cocktail was the gram or so of crack cocaine I had prepared. When I saw the amounts of each drug he was putting in I assumed he was going to share the joint with at least four or five other people as they normally did. But Santiago intended to smoke this all by himself.

  He left the cell with his killer joint and I thought that I wouldn’t see him until much later on, or maybe the next day, as this quantity of drugs would last the average person most of the night. But an hour later a sweating, shaky Santiago was at my door again with five or six more bags of cocaine, wanting me to make more crack. I couldn’t believe it. I cautioned him that this was a lot to be consuming so quickly and explained that the crack I was making him was extremely strong and could easily cause him to have a heart attack. The fact that he was mixing it with huge amounts of other drugs would only exacerbate the risk. I now started to worry a great deal. I couldn’t refuse to make it for him as he would turn on me and have me either tortured or thrown off the wing. If he became ill or died I would be instantly blamed and very probably killed shortly afterwards by the gang. I was in a really precarious position. Santiago would start smoking at ten o’clock every night, once everybody had been ordered back to their cells. He would then carry on right through until 3 or 4am and I would have to prepare him crack every hour. This lasted for nearly six months until he was transferred to another prison. Every time he left my cell with a handful of rocks I was worried he would die. It was six months of pure anxiety.

  However, I now saw an opportunity to take revenge on Santiago for Gato’s death. I had vowed never to teach anyone how to cook crack cocaine if they were a user, as this was the ultimate recipe for total disaster and personal destruction. In the past I had shown the recipe to a couple of people after they drove me mad pestering me. I still regret it to this day and feel very bad for having done so, as those people went on to become serious drug addicts, sold all their belongings for drugs, and ended up either dead or destitute. I hated myself for having been the direct cause of this. I therefore reserved this especially for my enemies. I would show Santiago and let him be the agent of his own destruction.

  Of course, Santiago kept on hassling me to show him the process of making crack cocaine. I pretended to be reluctant and even explained why it was such a bad idea. I kept this up for a few weeks, but eventually ‘bowed to pressure’. After all, I had warned him – it was his choice. I showed him exactly how to do it, hoping that once he knew how to cook it, he would make it for himself. I thought that his knowing how to do it himself would either lead to his death from a self-inflicted overdose, or else cause him to mess up the running of the wing and thereby land him in big trouble. If he dropped dead from an overdose it would also relieve me of my responsibility. However, I was wrong and he preferred me to keep on cooking the crack for him, so on went my own little nightmare as well.

  It proved to be the latter – he messed up and became a turncoat, betraying Caiman’s gang to join another one. I believe in fact that he joined Los Choneros, even though he had slain one of their members. Many others followed suit as they saw Los Choneros becoming ever more powerful in the country and Los Cubanos slowly disintegrating, as the prison authorities kept transferring all the bosses from the wings, including Santiago, and the upper echelon of gang members along with them to other prisons.

  With the transfer of Santiago, the three gang members directly below him assumed joint control of the wing. I called them the Three Blind Mice. One was the Worm, the skinny guy I narrowly escaped from when he came to my cell after the shoot-out when Margarita was visiting me. The other two were Pedro the pretend priest, who would pray to God for forgiveness and lead services, then hours later be torturing some poor person just for the sake of a few hundred dollars and killing others who he disliked. The third was Cholo, who was particularly nasty and vindictive. He had no friends and was brutal and psychotic. I knew that everyone’s life on this wing was now going to become a living hell, mine in particular as they really disliked me and viewed me as a possible threat. I would have to be extremely vigilant to avoid falling foul of one of the traps, the ones they called cerebro – mind games.

  The Three Blind Mice called a wing meeting shortly after Santiago was transferred. At this meeting they told everyone they were now in charge of the wing and everybody had to respect them and do as they said or face severe punishment. The first changes they announced were the doubling in cost per week from five to ten dollars for both the guardia and the food, which was in fact provided to them for free. That meant that every Sunday, after the visitors had left, each and every person on the wing, nearly two hundred people, unless you were part of the gang, had to pay $20 without fail. Those who didn’t or couldn’t pay would be locked in the space that led out to the exercise yard until they came up with something or had to call their families. I would often bail out friends who didn’t have money at that particular time as it was just so horrible the way they were treating their fellow inmates. If someone hadn’t paid for several weeks they would be taken into a cell and subjected to torture for hours on end.

  The next scheme they struck upon was that of charging everyone to ‘help’ them carry out improvements to the wing such as painting the walls – they got the paint free of charge but it would cost each of us a minimum of $20. Another was the replacing of the electrical cabling that ran the length of the wing on both sides. The most costly one was the purchase of a 50-inch plasma screen TV for the wing. Each person was expected to chip in $40 on top of the weekly $20. We got to watch the TV for less than a month before it mysteriously disappeared, only to materialise in Caiman’s, the boss’s, cell in the adjacent wing. He had knocked down the wall between two cells, forming one large one just for him. On the same wing he had also created a discotheque, by knocking down the wall between two more cells. It was complete with large speakers, a set of decks and a mixer, disco lights, a glitter ball revolving above a dance floor and a pole for pole dancers to perform on. Every weekend they would have raucous parties, drinking dozens of bottles of expensive whisky and consuming vast amounts of cocaine and marijuana. They would often bring in a group of girls with whom to party.

  In the exercise yard they had constructed a quite impressive cockfighting ring in which on visit days inmates would pit their prize birds against one another. I used to see large wads of money being bet on fights and recall Coyote pulling out a bundle of some eight thousand dollars from his pocket and betting a thousand dollars on a fight against anyone who could match him. There were easily 50 cockerels in the exercise yard that people would treat better than their children. They used to keep me awake at night cock-a-doodle-dooing every hour on the hour. First one would pipe up and I would bury my head in my pillow as all the rest joined in.

  They called these joint collections ‘collaborations’, and the next one they applied to all the wings. They decided to buy large paddling pools that were
a metre deep and you could easily fit 30 or more people in. Everyone was asked to pay $30. The pretence was that they were for the children who came in on visit days, so they could swim with their friends or parents. A lifeguard was appointed to keep watch over the children in case the parents wanted to spend some intimate time together in a cell. It did work well and proved to be very popular. The pools would be cleaned out and refilled before each visit day. On the intervening days the gang members would wallow in them while virtually everyone else, the ones who’d actually paid for the pools, were banned from using them.

  I must admit though, there were a few occasions when I got to relax in one of the pools and it was very good in the intense heat of the equatorial sun. Once or twice I spent time in them with a couple of beautiful girls in bikinis while drinking whisky and having a party. It almost felt like I wasn’t in prison for that brief time. I love being in water, especially with the sun warming my skin. Amazingly coloured dragonflies would buzz about overhead catching insects and sometimes land on my shoulder. We used to get swarms of them, into the thousands, flying around over the exercise yard, the most I have ever seen at one time. It was awesome to watch. It made me want to be one and fly away free.

  Then, one afternoon, I was napping in my cell when I heard screams from the exercise yard just outside my window. I jolted awake and carefully crept to the window, which had a screen covering it through which I could see but not be seen. The yard that I overlooked was that of the opposite wing and was the key stronghold for the gang. At this moment some of the gang members were busy trying to drown a couple of youngish-looking inmates who must have done something to annoy them. There were two guards standing there, watching, laughing and even helping. This carried on for about half an hour until the gang members finally got the information they were after out of one of the inmates and they were dragged off to who knows where.