They backed down and of course ran straight to the guard, who they told I had threatened them with a gun and that I should be taken off the wing. The guard came over and started giving me grief, but the caporal who was a friend of mine stepped in and got rid of the guard. From that day on I was pretty much enemies with most of the ex-police. They tried numerous times to create problems for me but never quite succeeded.
Their real aim was to take over the drugs trade in Atenuado Alto. It wasn’t long before a couple of them were getting their friends in the police force to bring them in cocaine and weed. By now Los Cubanos were so weakened by the loss of their members who had been transferred to other prisons that they were having a hard time maintaining control. They decided it would be easier to negotiate some kind of deal, rather than lose the wing altogether. The gang had a meeting and agreed that our wing would from now on be independent. This meant people could bring in their own drugs but we weren’t supposed to sell to people from the wings downstairs that were controlled by Los Cubanos. On the other hand, Los Cubanos still had the right to sell drugs and alcohol on our wing. Obviously, people from downstairs and other areas of the prison came to buy from us, but that was their choice. As long as we didn’t actively seek customers from the wings controlled by the gang it was OK. It was a kind of peace treaty. Things were changing in the prison as a whole new era was coming.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
DIVISION OF THE GANGS
THE GOVERNMENT HAD realised that Guayaquil prison was completely out of control and they were no longer able to keep a lid on it and stop the public from finding out. I didn’t tell my family much about what was going on to avoid worrying them. I never told my mother what I had been going through. I had hurt her enough already, so I painted a picture of a safe environment where the conditions were good.
The president himself, Rafael Correa, ordered the prison governor to regain control, split up the gangs, heighten security and restrict any goods whatsoever from coming into the prison in a bid to prevent contraband, and in particular firearms and ammunition, from coming in. This really didn’t make much difference as it was the guards themselves, and sometimes even the police, who would drop off a couple of handguns and boxes of bullets in order to make themselves a very healthy profit. I recall the bosses displaying their new toys to me, such as Glock 19s with enough bullets to kill half the wing.
Finally, after another gunfight in the prison left two people dead, the prison governor acted. One evening hundreds of police officers and some military descended on the prison. They had a list with the names of all the key gang members on each wing including the boss, the main drug dealer and the gang members directly assisting the boss. The police went from wing to wing and dragged out all those named on the list. These people were handcuffed and led to waiting buses, then driven to a secure holding centre near the airport. All of this was being filmed by the press, who had been invited along.
Caiman, the remaining Los Cubanos brother and boss of the gang in the Peni, was number one on the list and was taken with all the others. The authorities had chartered a military aircraft to transport everyone to Quito. They broadcast pictures on the news of all the gang members on the plane handcuffed, shackled to the floor with hoods over their heads and ear mufflers on so that they couldn’t speak to one another. There were a large number of military personnel on the plane, heavily armed. They flew them to Quito because they were absolutely certain that if they went by road the convoy would be attacked in a bid to set the gang free or possibly kill them. When they arrived in Quito they were transferred to the maximum-security wings of A and F in Garcia Moreno. Cubano, who was the overall head of Los Cubanos, was already on A wing, so they put his brother Caiman on F wing to keep them apart.
Around this time, a couple of people filmed a number of the guards receiving bribes and dealing drugs in conjunction with members of Los Cubanos. I saw them with a ‘handy cam’ in a cell on our wing. On the film, you can quite clearly see numerous guards walking up to a table where a gang member hands them various amounts of cash and one guard even hands a package of what is presumably drugs to an inmate. This recording was shown on the news in Ecuador and can still be found on YouTube. It resulted in the arrests of over 30 guards on corruption charges. Many more were questioned and several went on the run, fearing they were about to join the inmates on the wing but this time as prisoners.
This double whammy really rang the bell for Cubano’s gang. Not only was nearly everyone worried about getting transferred to another prison miles from home, but the guards were now reluctant to bring in drugs and guns, not knowing if they would be the next ones to be filmed. The governor saw that his actions were beginning to have an impact so tightened the noose a little more by heavily restricting the flow of goods into the prison, such as food shopping and soft drinks, along with virtually everything else. This was annoying as it meant Margarita couldn’t bring in shopping for me apart from on rare occasions.
The government had commissioned the building of a new super-high-security prison virtually next door to the penitentiary, intended to hold just 50 of the most dangerous prisoners in Ecuador. It was designed to be escape-proof and monitored everywhere by camera. It was quickly nicknamed ‘la Roca’ or ‘the Rock’, after Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay, which was supposedly unescapable.
I knew straight away that this was a recipe for disaster, having witnessed similar ideas put into practice in other countries. If you place the top 50 most influential and powerful criminals together in a tiny prison with guards who are notoriously corrupt, you will have fireworks eventually. Many of them were not only sworn enemies who loathed each other but also competitors in the drugs and firearms trades. The most notable arrivals were members of Los Choneros, including JL. There were 20-plus of them, so they occupied nearly half the entire place. Then you had two of the Los Cubanos brothers, Cubano and Caiman, along with perhaps 15 to 20 of their gang. Oscar Caranqui, who I knew from Quito and who had tried to escape dressed as a police officer, was transferred there as well.
This did have the desired effect on the gangs, who were very much weakened by the loss of their leaders. It also served as a strong deterrent to anyone else who decided to pick up the reins where the others had left off. There were several articles in the country’s press and bulletins on the news denouncing the poor level of human rights and basic standards in the Rock. They spent 23 hours a day locked up in the cells with just one hour of exercise in an internal covered courtyard with no natural light. There were no payphones and pretty much nothing was allowed in the cells. However, before long, the scent of dirty money wafting down the landings proved all too alluring for the guards’ senses. Within six months of opening there had been several gunfights in this tiny toy prison. Cubano and Caiman were hit by bullets but survived. Oscar Caranqui was killed by an assassin with a gun. Both of these events made headline news throughout the country.
One evening I was in Simon’s cell when a shock wave blew in the wooden shutters on the window, followed shortly afterwards by the noise of the explosion. Word quickly spread through the prison that someone had just launched an attack on La Roca in a bid to break out some of the inmates. There was a buzz of excitement as we heard the police sirens and the helicopter circling overhead. Everyone was rooting for whoever had managed to get out, hoping they got away. Unfortunately the huge explosion had only blown a hole in the exterior wall, not the interior one, so no one got out. We saw the news the next day with pictures of a gaping hole in La Roca’s wall and rubble strewn about all over the place. They had used either an RPG, as I had proposed in Quito, or plastic explosives.
A couple of brothers on the wing by the name of Martinez were big players in cocaine trafficking and had serious connections to FARC in Colombia. The deputy minister for defence, who was called Chauvin, was arrested in connection to their case but later cleared of all charges. He did however spend a good six months on the wing with us. The brothers Martinez were also in f
avour of making our wing completely independent. The final break from the control of Los Cubanos gang came with the arrival of a Colombian by the name of Esteban. He was alleged to have been involved in the supply and shipment of tons of cocaine to the Sinaloa cartel of Mexico, headed by Joaquin ‘Chapo’ Guzmán.
I had spotted an article in the reputable broadsheet newspaper El Universo. The article covered an entire page and explained in great detail how this Esteban was an informant working for the United States DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency), and was responsible for bringing about the arrests of several hundred people in villages in Peru involved in the growing and production of the coca paste that is then refined to make cocaine. This paste is transported by the ton up the jungle corridor that runs through Peru all the way up the edge of Ecuador on the eastern side to Colombia. It terminates in the Amazon jungle in Colombia, deep in FARC territory. In these lawless borderlands, the cocaine is refined in large laboratories hidden by the dense jungle canopy. From here it is transported to seaports in neighbouring countries such as Ecuador and Venezuela for onward shipment to nearly every country in the world where there is a market.
Esteban, as you can well imagine, was somewhat paranoid that his life might be cut short at the behest of his employers in the Sinaloa cartel before he caused any more damage with his loose lips. He undertook works to beef up the security of the wing using some of the money he had stashed away before his arrest. He had rolls of razor wire installed along the top of the wall that ran between our exercise yard and that of the wing downstairs. The gang now had to go past the guard on the gate to come into the wing and Esteban began paying them to not let anyone in who didn’t live there. He also blocked all the spaces around the top of the wing with metal grids so no one could drop hand grenades or shoot at him from the roof. He was very careful when going outside the wing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
TB
‘ VACUNAS, VACUNAS!’
Vaccinations. They would occasionally do mass vaccinations in prison. A team of healthcare workers from the Ministerio de Salud – like the UK’s National Health Service, except nowhere near as good and hardly ever for free – would arrive and just inject everybody. It wasn’t obligatory but there was a lot of pressure put on you to have these injections. I was extremely wary of these ‘vaccinations’ because you didn’t really know what they were injecting you with, whether it would work or if you even needed it.
Many of the South Americans would be queuing up as they thought that anything for free was worth having, and many of them had never had vaccinations or inoculations against anything. I would normally refuse to have the injections, which would quite often result in heated arguments with other inmates of the wing, who viewed my refusal as a risk to them. They believed that if I didn’t have the injection, whatever it may have been for, I would become ill and infect them. Of course I never did, until the one time I gave in and agreed to having an injection against tuberculosis, under threat of being expelled from the wing. This would have meant losing my cell and probably my possessions.
I was sure that coming from a European country I would have been vaccinated in childhood against such diseases as this. I tried to explain this to the caporal and others who were complaining about my refusal but they were having none of it.
‘You either have the injection or face ejection!’
‘Oh fuck it, go on then.’
I still intensely regret those words. In fact, I will do so for the rest of my life, which has undoubtedly been cut short as a result of having that one injection.
The healthcare staff asked if I was in good health and I said I was. At the time, I was fit and well built, weighing around 90kg. I couldn’t remember the last time I had had a cough, let alone been seriously ill. The injection left a lot of people feeling a bit sick for a few days afterwards, which is probably normal. I thought nothing more of it and carried on with the daily fight for survival in the war zone that was the Peni.
About three months later I developed a cough, which I thought might have been the result of my occasional smoking of drugs (I have never been a cigarette smoker) so I immediately cut that out, but the cough intensified and I began to produce phlegm that wasn’t the usual consistency. You know your own body and you know when something is wrong and something was definitely wrong this time. I bribed my way over to the healthcare centre and paid to see the doctor. Yeah, I know. Paid. Nothing was free in this place.
The doctor said, ‘Oh, no need to panic. You have a throat infection. Nothing to worry about.’
He wrote me a prescription, which Margarita took to a pharmacy outside. In the meantime, the cough proceeded to worsen and the phlegm I was now struggling to cough up was strand-like with small balls in it and very hard. It smelled disgusting. This is a sign of serious infection. I was really starting to panic now as my famously large appetite was well below par and I was rapidly losing weight. I was also having terrible fevers or night sweats where I would wake up drenched after every sleep, be it daytime or nighttime. These fevers were unlike any I had had before.
In the next six months, I probably lost 20kg. By now I was finding it difficult to walk upstairs without getting breathless. It was a nightmare. When I was young, I had been in the top five cross-country runners in my year at school, captain of the cricket team, hooker in the rugby team and a keen cyclist. Since then I’d kept up my fitness with years of gym training. I had been in good condition, and to now struggle up a set of stairs was destroying me. There was no way I could run even two steps. What the fuck was wrong?
Not only was my breathing now chronically bad, but my leg had also begun to swell up massively, from the ankle up, and also my foot. At first I thought it was an insect bite, as only one leg swelled, breaking veins in the process, but then the other leg started to do the same. I didn’t have a clue what was happening to me and it seemed nor did anyone else. Surely after all these years of prison I wasn’t going to die of a disease now?
The doctors didn’t seem to be interested so my family, and the angelic Margarita who had seen the state I was in, put pressure on the embassy to act. After their repeated interventions I was finally diagnosed with chronic and highly contagious TB. Had this happened in a British prison, I would have been placed in isolation immediately. Not in Ecuador. I was packed off back to my cell after being placed on an ever-growing list of prisoners infected post-injection. The healthcare centre informed me that I was lucky as the government had just started making the expensive TB medication free to all those infected. On one of my trips to the clinic I saw box upon box of medication piled high, so there must have been a large number of cases.
Just getting to the clinic was a real effort now as I could hardly walk because my breathing was so bad, added to which was the complication of both my legs being swollen to the size of an elephant’s. I was refused a medical visit in my cell so it was an agonising battle to make my way there, choking and wheezing all the way, with someone supporting me.
The guards could see I was having problems getting about, so they would just count me in my cell from the doorway to save me from coming out. My friends undoubtedly saved my life on one occasion, when my fever ran out of control and I became incoherent and was hallucinating for three or four days. They kept me cooled down with ice packs and damp clothes. If they hadn’t done that I would surely have died.
At the lowest point my weight dipped to just under 50kg, 40kg less than I had weighed previously. I didn’t know where to turn or what to do. I felt trapped in my own personal hell within the living hell of the prison. I didn’t want to talk to my family as I didn’t want to worry them. I tried to make light of the situation, but I knew I was close to death. I was so certain my days were numbered that I wrote letters to my family and friends saying goodbye and apologising for all the trouble and anguish I had caused. I addressed them and gave them to the embassy to send in the event of my death.
My breathing deteriorated to such a point that I would wake up suff
ocating. I had to have a constant supply of inhalers and a loaded syringe of dexamethasone by my side at all times to open up my airways so I could breathe. I had taken to sleeping sitting upright to avoid choking, as every time I tried to sleep horizontally I would literally wake up dying because my bronchia were completely clogged with TB. I would be sitting on my bed in my cell alone, suffocating from the phlegm blocking my airways, unable even to call out for help. I had to will myself not to panic, to control my breathing and not die. My bladder and bowels would release uncontrollably, much the same as when someone is about to be killed. My body shook, all my muscles taut and my face blue, sometimes for hours locked in this battle between life and death, while everyday prison life carried on the other side of the door. This was worse than being shot, tortured or beaten.
The medication they gave me finally began to have some effect, although it was sporadic at best. I was given the correct retroviral pills maybe only three days a week. Sometimes I didn’t receive them for weeks on end. This resulted in my developing a strain of TB that was multi-drug resistant. They increased the dosage from eight to 12 pills a day. These pills were some of the most disgusting I have ever taken and caused dizziness, aches, nausea and disorientation. During the worst period of my illness I didn’t leave my cell for a year – not once: 365 days in a cell.
My lungs are scarred for life, I have been left with a post-TB cough that I will probably never get rid of and there is always the chance that the TB may flare up again. Being continually that close to death for such a prolonged time has really made me appreciate being alive, being able to breathe, walk, eat, talk – things most people take for granted. I am very much aware of how precious and delicate our lives actually are.
El Infierno Page 19