The Cocaine Diaries: A Venezuelan Prison Nightmare (11 page)

Hours later I dozed off to the chorus of a fellow shouting, ‘
Pantry solo, todo bien
’ (‘Hallway clear, all good’). A few hours later a different prisoner started the same chant. They seemed to be taking turns on sentry duty at the wing door, peering out through bars into the corridor outside. What they were watching for I didn’t know. I soon would.

I WOKE UP TO THE ROARS OF THE WING HENCHMEN SHOUTING AT THE INMATES to wake them. I sat up. My body ached from a night on the hard floor on a thin cushion, but I was getting used to sleeping like this. Soft light poured in at the opposite end of the hallway, replacing the grey gloom that was there the night before. I was exhausted. It was like I’d only just put my head down. That’s because I barely had. It was only dawn. I stood up and stretched. All the other inmates were busying about rolling up their colchonetas and tying them up with string. The Colombian did the same with the one we had slept on. The ‘mattresses’ were then all stored on the high ledge in cell two.

I walked into the yard. Some inmates were queuing up for the toilet and washroom at the far wall on the right. Showers were the manual sort: two drums of water stood in the corner and a plastic bowl floated on top. You dipped the bowl into what was once an oil barrel, threw the water over your head and let it roll over your body. There were a good few in the queue, wearing shorts and flip-flops, carrying towels, T-shirts and whatever else to dry themselves with. I didn’t bother with the wait. I just walked over to a rusty tap sticking out of the wall, turned it on and splashed water on my face. There was no sign of a mirror so I had no idea what I looked like. I could feel the bristles on my face, though; I hadn’t shaved for a couple of days.

I saw Eddy in the yard, drying his hair with a T-shirt. ‘Sleep well?’ he smiled.

‘Like a baby, yeah,’ I laughed.

‘Don’t worry, you get used to the floor.’ It felt great again to have a native English speaker to talk to, and Eddy seemed like a good guy.

Soon after, there was a scramble for the wing door. I followed Silvio, Eddy and Ricardo out into the passageway. The blood splatters on the wall and the pool of blood from the night before were gone. In their place was the smell of disinfectant. We passed by the Number 7 wing door on the left. Arms hung out, dirty hands holding cups, rattling against bars. They were like monkeys in a zoo. For security reasons only one wing went to the rancho at a time. Just as well.

‘If we all went at the same time there’d be war,’ said Eddy. ‘A bloodbath.’

I kept my distance, standing well clear of their cell door. Two prison cops sat slumped in chairs, cigarettes dangling from their lips. A couple of the luceros from Maxima stood in the corridor, knife handles sticking out of their waistbands. They were our real protection, I could see, our hired muscle paid for with the causa money.

In the rancho, breakfast was being dished out by the kitchen workers – prisoners from other wings. I stood in the queue. An
arepa
, like a small pancake made from cornflour, was plonked onto one of the plastic trays and handed to me. Another worker was pouring coffee into cups he was placing on a tin counter, and I picked one up. Silvio and Ricardo and most of the others had their own cups and plates. They headed back to the wing with their food. I stood by a stone bench and peeped inside one of the arepas. It was filled with sardines, or at least I presumed that’s what it was – flat slivers of grey flesh that smelled of fish. It looked awful, but I was starving. I gobbled it down with gulps of milky, sweet coffee.

* * *

In the yard, I could see others weren’t bothered with the rancho. One prisoner was eating fried eggs.

‘That’s Roberto,’ said Silvio, seeing me looking at him dining in style.

‘Sí, Paul, my name Roberto,’ he said. Roberto had a trimmed moustache and eyebrows that grew together slightly in the middle. He was Italian, like Silvio. ‘I speaking English,’ he added. Everyone laughed.

‘He likes prison life in style,’ said Silvio. ‘Pays people to do his cooking.’ It seemed that if you had money you could live better here – even if you were still locked up.

* * *

The wing after breakfast was in spring-clean mode. Cups and plates were washed and stored away. Bottles of bleach were poured over the yard. Buckets were filled with water and whooshed over the area. Floors were swept and scrubbed. Rubbish was gathered up in the cells and tidied away. It was a big clean-up. The
tobos
, or buckets, the used paint tins where the inmates kept their possessions, were all picked up and stored down at a back wall in a corner next to the toilet; some were shoved under a stone ledge where there was a little two-hob stove with a jumble of electric wires trailing from the back of it. The whole sight reminded me of a painter’s yard.

The cleaning didn’t stop there. The lags were also giving themselves a good spruce-up. Shorts and vests were ditched in favour of jeans or slacks and long-sleeved shirts. I also watched one fella putting gel into his hair, using a broken piece of jagged glass as a mirror.

Silvio walked by carrying his tobo.

‘What’s the story here?’ I said.

‘Visit day. Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays.’

‘Who’s going to visit me here?’ I laughed.

‘Like me, nobody. Our place is over there.’ He nodded over to the corner. There was a guy taking down a plastic washing line that hung from one side of the yard to the other. There were clothes hanging on it yesterday – now it had another purpose. The guy lifted one side of the line down off a hook on the wall and started threading it through the hoops of a plastic curtain. He hung it back up and it stretched across a small area in the yard. A floral pattern in full bloom on a white background.

‘
Verde. Verde,
’ shouted a lookout man at the wing door, peeping through a spyhole into the passageway outside.

‘That’s the troops,’ said Eddy. ‘Time for the “
número
”.’ The
verde
(green) was the nickname they gave the National Guard soldiers in their olive-green uniforms. The prisoners then scurried about taking a seat around the entire perimeter of the yard wall, sitting down on any free tobo they could get. A little black and white dog was also scampering around, a mongrel of a sheepdog that seemed to belong to one of the inmates. By the time I copped on to what to do there weren’t any buckets left to sit on. I quickly walked over to Eddy and sat down on my hunkers next to him.

Five National Guard troops marched in through the wing door. They fanned out across the yard, cradling pump-action shotguns. The barrels pointed toward the ground but not so low that they couldn’t be lifted in an instant to blast out a few rounds.

I looked at the other inmates. Some were half sleeping, slouched over, dozing; a few looked like they’d topple over. It was only about 6 a.m. I looked over at the wing boss and his henchmen. There were none of the inmates’ guns in sight, probably hidden now.

But the troops were on guard, edgy. Eyes darted back and forth at us. Two of them faced the wall where myself and Eddy sat; the other two faced the other wall on the other side of the yard, keeping guard on the inmates there. All angles covered. I was starting to get the idea of who was afraid of who around here.

‘They’re going to call our numbers,’ Eddy said to me. ‘If you fuck up the number, they’ll fuck you up.’ I knew the score from Macuto and from the headcount the evening before but still couldn’t say my number.

‘I don’t speak Spanish.’

Eddy came to the rescue. ‘I’ll shout you. Piece of piss.’

‘What’ll I do?’

‘Nothing. As I said, keep quiet and leave it to me.’

A prison cop started the headcount. He didn’t waste a second, beginning at one end of the line of inmates, pointing his finger at the first prisoner.

‘
Uno,
’ said the first prisoner. A National Guard, an old guy, ticked off a sheet attached to a clipboard he held.

‘
Dos,
’ said the second inmate. And so on down the line. The cop was getting closer to me. I was getting edgy. ‘
Treinta-cinco,
’ (‘35’) said Eddy. He then put his hand on my head and said to the guard ‘
treinta-seis
’ (‘36’). It went around the yard till the last man. I didn’t understand the numbers, but it looked like there were easily more than a hundred inmates in the count. I wondered where they’d all come from. There hadn’t seemed to be more than about 50 the night before. The wing didn’t look like it could hold more than that.

With the headcount over the troops then pulled out, walking backwards nervously towards the wing door, shotgun barrels dangling in mid-air.

The door slammed. ‘
Luz, luz,
’ shouted one of the luceros, swinging around a knife tied to his wrist.

‘That means a “light”,’ said Silvio. ‘Stand still, face the back wall and don’t move. I’ll tell you about it all later.’

I stood there along with all the other inmates, staring down at the back wall of the yard. A door behind us leading into the cells slammed shut. Silence fell over the yard. A second ago it was full of life: people joking and laughing. Now everyone was still, like when you freeze-frame a video and see the characters stop moving. I could hear other sounds more clearly now: bongos being drummed in a wing above the yard, over our hallway area –
doom-da-da-doom
– along with a hypnotic chant the prisoners there were singing. It sounded like a prayer, followed by loud applause. I felt like I was in a gospel church in Harlem. The sounds from that wing were quickly drowned out. A stereo in our wing started up. Salsa music kicked off. Trumpets and other brass instruments tooting away. It was deafening. The whole thing was weird. I felt like I’d walked into the Copacabana in full swing, only to have a doorman walk up to me with a knife and tell me to ‘shut up and stand still’.

‘Normal,’ shouted a lucero after about 15 minutes, hollering over the din of the music. Everyone was at ease after playing statues. I turned around and the luceros stood there with knives. The highlites were the second in command to the boss and were standing alongside him, all tooled up for a small war. Revolvers. Shotguns. Automatic weapons. Pistols and DIY guns that looked like they were made out of pipes. They were all done up to the nines, too, in trousers, nice shirts and polished shoes.

Silvio must have read the puzzled look on my face. ‘The luz, it means light in Spanish. It means something has come to light, to the bosses’ attention. And that means we have to go to the yard, stand still or sit down and face the back wall.’

‘For what?’

‘So they can get their guns and ammo out of their hiding places. Holes in the ground, all over the place.’

Plastic chairs that had been stacked three or four high were then taken down and spread out across the yard area, a row each against the two longer walls in the rectangular yard; two rows were also set up in the middle. All in all there were enough chairs to seat about 40 or 50. I could now see why some of them called the yard the ‘patio’.

‘Let’s go, behind the curtain,’ said Silvio. ‘That’s our place for the day.’

I walked in and sat down on a paint bucket. Eddy and Silvio sat next to me, and Ricardo a couple of buckets down next to a few Venezuelans. Grown men forced to sit on paint buckets behind a flowery curtain. It was mad. ‘Nice day for a sit-in,’ I laughed.

‘Yes, and all day to do it, Paul,’ said Silvio.

‘How long does it last for?’

‘Seven, seven and a half hours. Till about 3.30.’

I guessed it was about 10 am. ‘How do we fill the time?’

‘Sit and stare into space,’ laughed Eddy. ‘If you’ve no visitors you’re not allowed out to the yard. Not unless someone with a visit invites you, and then you have to be dressed right. Jeans or trousers, no shorts, and a long-sleeved top.’

‘It’s the
familia
, Paul,’ said Silvio. ‘The family, it is sacred in Venezuela. It is held in the utmost respect. That’s why the prisoners dress up and clean up the wing.’

Ricardo was sitting on a paint tin, flexing his muscles. He seemed to keep to himself.

‘And don’t ever stare at anyone’s bird, mate. Don’t even make eye contact,’ said Eddy. ‘Do and you’re dead.’ He made a gun sign with two fingers pointed at his head.

‘What?’

‘It’s considered a lack of respect. Men have been shot for doing it.’ I made a mental note not to eye anyone’s bird. ‘At the very least you’ll get a luz. You’ll get called into the boss’s cell for a beating.’

I changed the subject. I was full of questions. Nothing here made sense to me. ‘The guns, I don’t get it. How do they have guns?’

‘Most are courtesy of the National Guard,’ said Silvio. ‘Most of the home-made ones are called pipe guns and made by Vampy, one of the prisoners. He’s a dab hand with a metal file and a solder.’ Los Teques was getting more bizarre by the moment.

‘Without them and their guns it’d be worse,’ said Eddy. ‘Other wings would storm in and shoot us up. Some of them hate gringos. Here in Maxima they don’t care what you are as long as you pay the causa. Queers. Paedos. Rapists. They’re all here, mate, take your pick.’

‘And the causa?’

‘The causa, cash so they can tool themselves up. They smuggle in coke and sell it to us at extortionate prices.’ He laughed. ‘They even use the money to buy paint and give the walls a makeover.’

Behind the curtain I could hear the shuffle of chairs and the smell of food wafting in, like chicken and what I thought was beef stew, that the visitors had brought in. I craved good food. I hadn’t eaten a proper bite since the boyos in Macuto had fed me well, hoping to win the lottery off me down a Western Union cable.

The music was still blaring. I wanted to know why. ‘That’s to drown out the wails of them all shagging in the cells,’ said Eddy.

‘You’re joking me?’

‘No. In the cells. They hang sheets up around the beds. Bit of privacy. You bring your girl in and wey-hey. They take turns with the beds. The
chicas
can scream away in orgasmic excitement. No one can hear.’ This place was getting more off the wall.