The Cocaine Diaries: A Venezuelan Prison Nightmare (20 page)

‘This is wrong, I tell you,’ said Silvio, raging, shaking his fist.

‘I know, I’m starving,’ I said. My blood was boiling. We were all pissed off. Our money paying for them to have a good time while we sat there miserable and hungry. We were getting merry on the rice wine I’d made, but we still wanted to eat.

At about 7 p.m. one of the lags walked in with ‘dinner’. It was some local Venezuelan dish, a large green plantain leaf with a filling inside, served on paper plates with a dollop of vegetables and a small piece of bread the size of a communion host. We looked at each other and back at the plates laden with portions suited for a kids’ party.

‘What the fuck is this?’ I said.

‘
Hallaca
,’ said Silvio. ‘It’s a Venezuelan dish they eat at Christmas. This one’s vegetarian.’

‘You mean we pay a 100,000 causa and don’t even get a piece of meat.’

‘No, nothing. It is disgraceful I tell you,’ he said. The inmates and their visitors had obviously eaten the best themselves. The rage was flaming up inside me. I wanted to go out from behind the curtain and murder the bastards. Merry Christmas me bollocks. The words of the Pogues’s ‘Fairytale of New York’ also came to mind: surrounded by scumbags and maggots, I prayed God it would be my last in Los Teques.

New Year’s Eve rolled around a few days later just as fast as Christmas had. After a couple of days of rest from the visitors they were back in for another five-day stay in Hotel Los Teques, and we were huddled up behind the curtain again. It was endless. All we could do all day was chat; other than that we watched DVDs on a little telly the boss brought in. Most were pirate movies dubbed in Spanish. Arnie in
The Terminator
: ‘I’ll be back,’ in Spanish with a Mexican accent. That drew a laugh from the gringos.

On the night of 31 December, Fidel popped his acne-scarred face in behind the curtain. He was handing out goody bags to his loyal coke customers, like a department-store manager saying thanks for your loyal business throughout the year. They were plastic bags with smaller pieces of plastic wrapped up inside into one-gram lines. The usual band of snorters got one each, Billy included; he’d been back on the stuff only a couple of weeks after coming down from the Church. So much for getting clean.

Billy started elbowing me. ‘Put your hand out, you’ll get a bag, go on.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘he won’t give me any – he knows I don’t take it.’

‘He will, go on.’ So I put out my hand for the fun, and lo and behold Fidel did drop me a lucky bag. He stepped out, and we ripped open our goodies and spent the next few hours snorting charlie, using coins to scoop it up to our noses. After a while I was buzzing, waffling away to beat the band, my tongue loosening. We all were. That was why the Venos called coke
perico
, or parrot, which endlessly twitter and chirp.

We heard the lags and their families start counting. ‘
Diez, nueve . . .
’ (‘Ten, nine . . .’)

‘Countdown,’ said Billy.

‘
Ocho, siete . . .
’ (‘Eight, seven
. . .
’)

A bigger chorus of voices now. ‘
Seis, cinco, cuatro
. . .’ (‘Six, five, four . . .’)

We got to our feet. The jefe pulled back the curtain and stood beside us, smiling. ‘
Gringos, vamos,
’ (‘Let’s go’) he said, pointing his gun in the air.

‘
Tres, dos, uno.
’ (‘Three, two, one.’)

‘Heyyyy,’ we all shouted along with the jefe, jumping up and down and hugging each other and shaking hands and laughing. The sky exploded into a cacophony of gunfire. The jefe let off his automatic weapon and shot into the air,
drrr-drrr-drrrrrr
, a flow of bullets pumping into the sky, cartridges spilling onto the ground. The whole prison was crackling with gunfire now. All the wing bosses were shooting off rounds. Carlos was getting into the action too, standing beside us, pulling the trigger of his Colt with a heavy
boom boom
. The sky was also erupting with fireworks, exploding into a kaleidoscope of pinks, purples, blues and reds.

‘Happy New Year,’ we shouted.

‘
Feliz año,
’ (‘Happy New Year’) shouted back the Venos.

It was a rare moment I actually didn’t hate the Venezuelans. I was even laughing and dancing with them, the coke and booze putting me on good form. For a few minutes Los Teques was bearable. I actually forgot where I was – but only for a moment. I started jumping up and down, but I knew that I was ringing in the New Year thousands of miles from home, locked up in a circus of monkeys with guns. My life on the line every day.

* * *

On a Sunday shortly after the New Year the visitors were back in. More endless days behind the curtain and nights sleeping on the ground in the yard. It seemed like the whole prison revolved around them. That so many came in and so often could only mean that life for most in the barrios wasn’t much different from in the jail. Guns and drugs.

One night sleeping out in the yard one of the lads was passing around a joint, marijuana sprinkled with crack cocaine. They called it a
ruso
, which meant Russian in Spanish. Supposedly it was smoked in Russian prisons all the time. While I might take the odd snort of coke, crack was another league, and I wanted to steer clear of it. But I was lying on the ground, cold and miserable, trying to sleep. ‘
Fumas, fumas,
’ (‘Smoke, smoke’) said a Veno, offering me the joint. I took it from him – anything to escape the drudgery. I sucked in a deep drag, filled my lungs and slowly exhaled. In minutes I was out of my wagon. I lay back and felt my legs curling up. I sat up with a fright and looked down at them. They were straight. It was weird. It was my first and last time taking crack. I could see what it did to the stoners. Turned them into zombies. I didn’t want to go down that road.

The next day, myself and the gringos were squashed up behind the curtain as usual with the other PWVs. A lucero stuck his head through the plastic curtain. He rattled off a torrent of Spanish.

‘It’s a
secuestro
,’ said Silvio, shaking his head. ‘The cycle goes on.’ He put his head in his hands and looked like he was going to cry.

‘A what? What’s that?’ I said.

‘Secuestro, a kidnapping,’ he said. ‘They’ve kidnapped the whole jail.’

‘How?’ This didn’t make sense.

‘They put a chain around the gates in the passageway outside. No one gets in or out of the wings. Everyone who’s here stays here till it’s over. All the families.’

‘So another sleepover?’

‘Yes, but we can’t even go to the canteen to eat. Nothing. Can’t leave the wing.’

‘This is bullshit. What the hell do they want?’

‘Usual thing, Paul. It’s about conditions, or getting court cases moving so people can get their hearings and get out or get a sentence. There are people in here for months who’ve only been charged.’

I couldn’t believe it. You were in danger of losing your life in this dump and you might even be innocent of whatever you’d been charged with. What made me even sicker was that the Venos were basically kidnapping their own families as ammunition to get what they wanted.

For eight days it went on. A bit of rice went around the odd time, which had been cooked up on the little stove in the wing. And some mornings coffee was made, which you had if you had a few bolos to pay for it. The families didn’t suffer, though. There was a fridge in the hallway in the wing full of frozen food. Meat, chicken, the whole lot. I’m sure the bosses ate well out of it too. There wasn’t much to do to pass the time, but I did start writing again with a vengeance: a crime book set in Dublin, as well as my diaries, in a copybook I’d bought from the shop in our cell block. All day we sat behind the curtain and all night we slept in the yard. I hated the visitors and I hated Venos even more now.

When it was finally over I couldn’t see anything was different in the jail. It was still crowded, the food was still muck and there didn’t seem to be any greater number of inmates getting out to the courts that I could see.

* * *

‘
Irlandés, visita.
’ It was a lucero, a skinny little guy with curly hair and a thin moustache. I waved him away. Nobody visited me, only Father Pat, and he never came when the prison was open to visitors; he only came outside general-public hours with a special chaplain permission. That way he didn’t have to queue up outside with the families and have to be patted down when he got through the gates. The lucero had to be mistaken.

‘
A mí no me visitan.
’ (‘Nobody comes to visit me.’) My Spanish was coming on. The lucero stepped out from behind the curtain back into the yard. It was Sunday, and visit day. I was sitting on my bucket behind the curtain, counting the cracks in the wall.

Canario, another lucero, walked in now. He was holding a black revolver.

‘
Visita,
’ he barked, ‘
llegate.
’ (‘Visit, get here now.’) He wasn’t asking. I shrugged and stood up. I followed him out to the hallway. In front of me stood a guy in his early 30s with blonde hair.

‘How ya doing?’ he said. ‘I’m a friend of Father Pat’s.’ A Dublin accent. A Paddy.

‘How are ya?’ I said, intrigued. So the luceros were right; I did have a visitor.

His name was Jeff Farrell, an Irish reporter working out of Caracas. He wanted to hear a bit of my experience for a story. We sat down on a bench and spoke. Farrell had two shopping bags of food. ‘Father Pat said I should bring you something.’

‘Fair play to you,’ I said, shaking his hand.

‘The National Guard took a carton of orange juice off me out of one of the bags.’

‘They’re like that. They say it’s the rules, but it’s probably just that they like orange juice and don’t want to pay for it.’ We both laughed.

He asked a lot of questions about life in the prison. I told him about the murders and beatings. His eyes seemed to light up. A reporter got his story.

We spoke a bit more. The scene in the hallway must have been comical for him. The little Christmas tree in the corner was flashing with lights. Latin music was blaring out of a stereo, and a lucero was dancing salsa with a pipe gun dangling from his side. It was great chatting with someone from home. ‘I better go,’ he said after a while.

‘OK, it was good talking. Billy, the other Irish lad, he’s off in the canteen. He’ll be sorry he missed you. I’ll tell him you were in.’ I walked Farrell to the wing door. When we got out into the corridor I told him to march behind me up the passageway. ‘That way they’ll think you’re a prisoner and won’t hassle you.’ I was afraid one of the animals would jump out of Wing 7 and knife him, but I didn’t tell him that.

Not long afterwards, he rang me in the wing. ‘Any chance you could get your family back home to give me a photo of you for a story for the papers?’

‘No way,’ I said. The last thing I wanted was my mug all over the papers in Ireland. My family were going through enough grief as it was, I imagined. Weeks later I got word that Farrell had done a story about me on Irish national radio, RTÉ. He just called me ‘Paul, from Coolock’ – where I live in Dublin. No surname. Fair enough.

TROUBLE WAS BREWING. VISITS WERE ON AND WORD WENT AROUND THERE’D be a blow-up between the wings after the families went home at 4 p.m. What the strife was about we weren’t sure. There’d been talk about a shoot-out between the cell blocks for months, so I didn’t think anything of it. The root of the row always seemed trivial to me. Often an inmate accused a prisoner from another cell block of checking out his girlfriend on a visit. The visit ‘code of conduct’ had been breached and
respeto
had to be upheld.

Unpaid drugs debts might also spark trouble between the cell blocks. If, for example, an inmate fled a wing over a bill he couldn’t pay for crack or coke and holed up in another cell block, the jefe there would have to force him to honour the debt to his former padrino. If he didn’t, this was another cause to take up
armas
. It was all about honour. Pride. Saving face. But the worst of all scenarios for the trouble in the air that day would be if one cell-block ‘army council’ plotted to take over a rival wing. This was grave. It would mean all-out war – a fight to the death. It was all about turf. If a jefe and his henchmen had, say, 150 inmates in their wing, they made cash from the causa and selling drugs to that number. If the bosses took over another wing with the same number of prisoners, the jefe and his sidekicks doubled their lolly. In the end, it was all down to the dinero.

But in that moment we were safe. A blow-up would never happen during visits. The familia was sacred in Venezuela. That was the rule in Los Teques, and in every prison in Venezuela. If it was broken, it meant death.

When the visitors finally cleared, we PWVs were allowed out from behind the curtain. I started walking around the yard to stretch my legs. I’d been cramped up on my bucket for about eight hours and they felt wobbly.

‘There’s a good chance there could be trouble, Paul,’ said Billy, his brow furrowed. He’d been locked up for a year and knew the telltale signs: the bosses were jittery and on the phone to the jefes in other wings.

I shrugged it off. ‘It’ll be grand, Billy, all huffing and puffing.’

I continued pacing up and down the yard. I then sat down and started writing my diary, which I was doing daily. I thought some day my tales from Los Teques could be turned into a book. ‘Who would believe this place, Paul?’ said Silvio. ‘Nobody. They will think you made it up.’ He was probably right, but I still kept it going.

Something suddenly whistled past my ear.
Zzzzziiiipppp
. I spun around and saw a large hole in the door frame next to me.
Zzzzziiiipppp
, again. Then it registered: oh shit, we were being fired upon. Automatic gunfire crackled.
Rat-ta-ta, rat-ta-ta
. Bullets pounded into the yard, slamming into the wall and sending up puffs of dust.

‘
Nos disparan,
’ shouted the Venos, ‘
nos disparan.
’ (‘They’re shooting at us.’)