📸 Photo

MARCHING POWDER

people whom I hadn’t met. It had always been my policy not to work with people I didn’t know, and I already knew that you could trust barely anyone in Bolivia — I had learned that the hard way with Colonel Lanza, who I still intended to kill when I got out — but it was even more obvious in prison where people were desperate and would betray you for only a few bolivianos.

First, there was a chance that someone might try to set you up with the police. More likely, though, they would just rip you off. That could be done easily enough — once you have hooked up the buyer and the seller and they have done the exchange, how can you make sure you’re going to get your cut? Your business partners could say that the deal didn’t go through or that they hadn’t received the money, or they could just disappear completely. And what are you going to do about it when you’re locked up in prison? We had telephones and we could send the merchandise directly from the prison, but once it left our hands, how could we solve any problems?

Fortunately, Juan Carlos Abregon was one person I could trust.