Marching Powder

by Rusty Young

  ‘Quick. Press redial!’ said Liz.

  ‘Where’s redial? You do it!’ he shouted, thrusting the phone at her.

  ‘Here, have another line,’ I said. ‘It’ll make you chill down.’

  ‘I thought you said it makes you talk?’ Giles queried sarcastically.

  ‘It’s ringing!’ yelled Liz, and handed the phone back to Paul.

  Paul tried to explain to his mother what was happening. ‘Yeah, Mum. It’s me again … I’m fine … the phone just cut out … Yes, I’m in jail, but I’m not in any trouble. It’s not an ordinary jail …’

  Paul was now raising his voice because of the bad connection, ‘Mum … listen to me! No, I haven’t been taking drugs …’ As Paul tried to calm his mother, Giles offered him the CD case, where a line of cocaine was set up. Paul shook his head and waved it away angrily. ‘I’m telling the truth, Mum …I’m not making it up … yes, I know that cocaine is evil, Mum … I know you’re not stupid, Mum …I’ve never touched it …’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Mum, why won’t you just listen to me?’

  At that point he changed his mind and motioned to Giles for the CD case. Holding the telephone between his ear and his shoulder, he rolled up a Bolivian banknote, covered the mouthpiece and quietly sniffed a little line. He had a lot of explaining to do. And cocaine really helps you to explain things. You can explain a lot on cocaine.

  28

  THOMAS THE SHOPKEEPER

  The tours didn’t run every day but overall, things were going really well. Business tended to come in waves – some months there would be a mad rush, while other months were completely flat, owing to the transport strikes and road blocks that interrupted tourism. After one of these slumps, it would take a while for the word to spread around the backpacker hostels again. Sometimes, the guards got tough and wouldn’t let anyone in. There might be a high-ranking official or politician hanging around, or there may have been a report in the media about corruption in the prison. Or they just might have wanted to remind me who was in charge – I might have been the one running the tours and taking the money, but they held the keys to the gate.

  However, even with these interruptions, I could rely on a certain income every month and managed to save up some money. I didn’t want to leave the cash just sitting there in my room, so I decided to invest it: I bought another prison cell. Prices were low during that period and I was counting on the value going up by the time I got out so that I would have some money to live on for a while on the outside. Unfortunately, as Ricardo pointed out, when prices are low it’s because there’s not much demand; so, no one wanted to rent it from me. In the meantime, I had a better idea: I would start my own shop. Aside from the extra income it would generate, it would give me something to do during the quiet times. When things got too busy, there were plenty of people who would work in the shop for a few coins.

  Running my own tienda was a lot of fun. The business side of things was simple enough to handle. I had to remember to put my supply orders in before anything ran out and be careful not to buy too much of products that went off, such as milk and cheese. I also learned some basic bookkeeping skills, writing down every transaction and counting my stock and cash each morning to make sure I hadn’t made any mistakes and that nothing had been stolen by my employees. So that part, at least, wasn’t too difficult.

  The main skill you needed was in dealing with the customers. Owning a shop in prison wasn’t like owning one on the outside. In the outside world, provided your prices are fair, a customer will come to your grocery store for two main reasons – if it has an adequate selection and is close to wherever the customer is. In the prison, however, all the shops had the same suppliers and the same prices, and every shop was close by, so the one thing that made a difference was how you treated people.

  Bolivians are strange in the way they do business. I’d found that out very early on when Ricardo used to send me to the shops. I was still learning to speak the language back then. A lot of words are similar in Spanish and English, so I learned quickly, but I often had trouble with pronunciation. Many times I came back empty-handed or with the wrong item. Ricardo would always laugh and give me a lecture.

  ‘Chilli is ají. I repeated it to you twice,’ he said one time, pointing to the floor, meaning that I should go back downstairs. He held out the joint he was smoking so that I could have a quick puff before I went back to the shop.

  ‘But that’s what I said – aji. He’s run out,’ I said, reaching for the joint. It was my third trip and I was sick of climbing the ladder.

  ‘No. No. No,’ said Ricardo, suddenly deciding not to give me the joint after all, because it would ruin my concentration. ‘Listen. Not aji – it’s ají. Ah-heeee. The accent is on the second syllable. If you get it wrong, they won’t understand you.’

  ‘Ají,’ I said, testing my pronunciation.

  ‘Correcto.’ Ricardo gave me a small round of applause, then handed me the joint as a reward.

  ‘This language is ridiculous.’ I inhaled the smoke deep into my lungs and held it there.

  ‘No, it’s not. Not to them, it’s not,’ he said, stamping his foot and laughing at me. ‘Now go! You’re ruining my cuisine.’

  My pronunciation improved, but I suspected that the shopkeepers sometimes deliberately chose not to understand me. One time I was absolutely certain of it: Ricardo had sent me to buy some meat – carne – from a guy called Simón all the way around in Cancha, and I had come back empty-handed. Three times.

  ‘Did you pronounce carne correctly?’ Ricardo asked impatiently, putting his hands on his hips when I came back shaking my head.

  ‘Of course, I pronounced it correctly. I’m not stupid, you know. Carne. Carne. Carne. See!’

  ‘Were you nice to him? I keep telling you that you have to be nice to these people.’ He had told me hundreds of times that learning the words and their pronunciation was only the first step. You also had to learn the culture and how to speak to the people.

  ‘Of course, I was nice to him!’ I yelled back. I was beginning to suspect that Ricardo was in on the joke too. ‘I’m always nice.’

  ‘ Tranquilo, inglés. Just tell me, what did you say exactly? Maybe you offended him in some way.’

  ‘I didn’t offend him. He doesn’t have any carne, that’s all.’

  ‘Of course, he’s got carne. He’s a butcher. I saw him today and he told me he’d just bought a new lot. That’s why I specifically told you to go to him.’

  ‘Well, he’s the best butcher in the world because he’s sold it all.’ There was no way I was going back to visit Simón a fourth time. If he didn’t have any, he didn’t have any. But Ricardo insisted.

  ‘I saw him less than an hour ago, Thomas. Now just tell me what you said.’

  Ricardo made me feel like a child sometimes. I sighed heavily and recounted my conversation with Simón the butcher.

  ‘OK. I went down there and I said, “Buenas noches, Simón. ¿Cómo está?’” ’ I pronounced his name right, then I asked him for two pounds of carne. I said por favor and I called him usted to be polite, just like you told me. But he still said he had nothing.’

  Ricardo made a clicking sound with his tongue like I had committed a glaring error.

  ‘Well, of course he wouldn’t sell you any.’

  ‘Why? What did I do wrong this time?’

  ‘You can’t just walk straight up to him and ask him for meat without talking to him first.’

  ‘I did talk to him.’

  ‘Not properly. You don’t know these people, Thomas. If you don’t talk to them first or if they don’t like you, they won’t sell you a single thing.’

  ‘So, you’re saying that even if he has meat, he won’t sell it to me?’ I said sarcastically.

  ‘That’s right,’ Ricardo replied, as though he was making a point that was very obvious.

  ‘That’s ridiculous! He’s running a business. If he has something and I want to buy it and I have the money, then why won’t he sel
l it to me? Who cares if he doesn’t like me, he can still take my money. Doesn’t he need money?’

  ‘Thomas, you’re not in Europe anymore. This is a different culture. Of course, he needs money, but you have to talk with the people. They are a proud people, especially the Aymarans.’

  ‘So what? They still need money. If they don’t want money, then they’re stupid.’

  ‘They are not stupid at all. Don’t ever call them stupid! They just think differently. You have to show them respect, and you have to make them laugh.’

  I tried to understand this, but it was illogical. Maybe the Bolivians weren’t stupid, but they were definitely a bit crazy.

  ‘So, what should I have said to him, then?’

  ‘You have to talk to him. You have to call him Simoncito. They like it when you put ‘ito’ on the end of every word. Momentito, bolivianito, pequeñito. Especially with their names. It’s not Carlos, Juan or Tomás. It’s Carlitos, Juanito and Tomacito. It shows you’re friends with someone.’

  ‘Then what after that?’

  ‘Just talk about whatever you feel like until they laugh. But remember, it’s not for the money. You are asking them a favour as a friend and they are giving you something as a present.’

  ‘But how can it be a present if I have to pay for it?’

  ‘You aren’t paying, Thomas. They give you a present, and you give them the money as a present in return.’

  By the time I had my own shop, I had mastered the art of dealing with Bolivians. But the only downside with having to be nice all the time was that everyone wanted credit. Allowing convicted criminals to run a tab at your corner shop is a very risky business at the best of times, but it’s even riskier when those convicted criminals are still in jail. No one in San Pedro would have qualified for a bank loan – there were many dishonest people who would take advantage whenever they could, and the honest ones weren’t much better. But it was hard to refuse people and stay on their good side as well. If I offended someone, they might ruin my reputation and never pay me back. And what could I do then? I couldn’t send my bodyguards around just because someone owed me for cigarettes and milk from a few months back. It would have been better if all the shopkeepers had joined together and not given credit to anyone, but that wasn’t how things were done. Besides, most of the inmates did pay eventually. And when they got money, they remembered who had looked after them and who had cut them off.

  However, that didn’t make it any easier at the time. I tried to stay well stocked because of the frequent worker strikes and protests in the country that made supplies unreliable, but on several occasions I had no cash because I was owed hundreds of bolivianos.

  ‘Mañana, mañana,’ they promised, even when I knew they had the money in their pockets. And in Bolivia, mañana never seemed to come.

  The period of time I spent working in my shop was when I really got to know the people well and became properly established and respected in San Pedro. When there were no tourists around, I didn’t have much to do and all day to do it in, so I would spend hours on end talking and laughing with the other inmates who came to my store. Often, people would visit me and we would talk for so long that they would forget what they had come for and leave empty-handed. Other times, they didn’t come to buy anything at all, just to talk.

  Apart from being nice to customers, you had to be careful running any business in prison. There weren’t any standover men demanding protection money from you, but there were certain powerful people who you knew you had to look after. The Velascos were two of them.

  Jose Luis Velasco and Jorge Velasco were father and son. On the outside, the Velasco family had had money. They had been into all sorts of illegal businesses until they got busted and sent to San Pedro prison, where they were also well connected. The father and son were now living together in the same cell, while the family worked on getting them out.

  Shortly after I started my tienda, the son got married in the prison to a woman named Angela. By coincidence, I already knew her; we had met several times in Sweden through our business connections. It was quite a shock to see someone in a Bolivian jail that I had met on the other side of the world in more glamorous surroundings, but it wasn’t really all that surprising given the circles we both moved in. The visitors who attended the wedding were very well dressed and they all brought presents. I was invited along and I donated ten cases of soft drink for the celebrations after the ceremony.

  The Velascos were also two of my most regular customers at the shop. They never liked to pay for things up front; they preferred to buy everything on credit and then settle their bill at the end of the month, like rich people on the outside did. They always paid, but very often they were late. I never said anything, however – these sort of people could be good friends if you kept them on side, but powerful enemies if you didn’t.

  I had one other regular customer who was even more powerful than the Velascos, although you wouldn’t have known it by the way he looked or acted. Barbachoca dressed casually and, apart from his distinctive red beard, he looked like a regular inmate. However, he wasn’t a regular inmate at all, he was big. Mr Big. Nobody saw him much, because he rarely left his apartment. But even the czars of the drug-dealing world have to eat sometime, which is the reason I eventually met him.

  Barbachoca had been caught attempting to transport a large quantity of cocaine from Bolivia to the United States in his own airplane. How much is a ‘large’ quantity? Four thousand one hundred and eighty kilograms. That’s almost 4.2 tonnes – 4.2 million grams – of pure cocaine, enough to get all the party people in the whole world high for one hell of a New Year’s Eve party. And if you sold it on the street at one hundred dollars a gram, that’s $420 million dollars worth of merchandise, even more when it was mixed.

  Barbachoca’s plane had been intercepted by the authorities in Peru, en route to Mexico. Normally, big fish like him are too well protected to get busted themselves, but this was an operation run by the uncorruptible DEA, so he couldn’t get out of it. In fact, it was the biggest drug bust in Bolivia’s history. Once the media got hold of the story and dubbed the case ‘narco avion’, there was so much publicity that not even the Bolivian judges could have saved him. They did their best, though. The judges gave him only thirteen years. That didn’t make sense. I knew people in San Pedro who had been given the maximum twenty-five years for less than a hundred grams. But there was a public outcry over the sentence and the prosecutor appealed. He eventually secured a longer sentence. So Barbachoca appealed against the appeal.

  In the meantime, the US government was trying to extradite him and send him to a proper jail for the rest of his life, but Barbachoca had no plans to move anywhere. In fact, he was quite determined to stay in San Pedro, where the conditions were a lot better than elsewhere in Bolivia. The only problem was that the cells in Alamos were too small. Luckily, he had enough money to call in some contract builders to put up an extension on top of his room. Once his two-storey apartment was fully furnished, he was content to live there quietly until he could find a way out of prison.

  Barbachoca kept to himself; he wanted to maintain a low profile in the hope that the publicity surrounding his case would eventually die off. And the other inmates respected that. They had to. That kind of wealth commanded respect, so people kept their distance. I had never talked to him myself, until he came to my shop to buy supplies.

  ‘Hi, Thomas. Do you have ketchup, please?’ was the first thing he ever said to me. He spoke perfect English with a strong American accent. When I handed him the bottle, my hands were shaking. I checked the label to make sure it didn’t have chilli in it and counted his change twice. You don’t want to make mistakes around people like that.

  There was no need to have worried. You might expect people who get to the very top of the drug-dealing world to be violent and ruthless mafia types, but Barbachoca wasn’t. He was smart. He was educated. He was polite. And as far as I knew, he had never threatened or said so m
uch as an angry word to anyone. Basically, he was a really friendly guy.

  Gradually, we became friends and he started to invite me up to his apartment whenever he had a small fiesta. I always liked to bring a bottle of something because I didn’t want him to think that I was trying to take advantage of his wealth. Besides, Barbachoca supposedly had no money. He told me the cops had confiscated everything. I never believed him, though; he must have had some stashed away somewhere. You can’t buy 4.2 tonnes of cocaine and be stupid enough to leave all your money lying under your mattress for the police to find it.

  When we used to drink together, Barbachoca was always relaxed, but I wasn’t. His parties were very civilised, so I tried not to get too drunk or to sniff too much coke. Barbachoca was extremely disciplined; he never lost control and he liked everyone to leave before midnight so that he could get a good night’s sleep. I tried to leave before that time so that he wouldn’t have to ask me to. He also had an ensuite on the second floor of his apartment, but I always went downstairs to the public toilets out of respect. I didn’t want to stink his bathroom out. What if the toilet hadn’t flushed properly? How would you explain that to a guy who owned his own aeroplane with four million grams of cocaine in it?

  29

  MIKE

  The tours and my new tienda continued to do well. When I got out of prison, I wanted to have some money saved up so that I wouldn’t have to go back to trafficking, but I knew if I had the cash in my hands, I would spend it on partying with the tourists. I decided that it would be safer to have everything tied up in assets, so I began to look around for other ways to invest my money. Eventually, I chose to buy another prison cell, on the ground floor in Alamos. Because of its four-star rating, the prices in Alamos rarely went down, so it was a good investment. However, rather than renting it out, I converted it into a restaurant.