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LOS VIOLADORES

no one left in the section to explain it to me. They had all disappeared. It must have been a mass breakout, and I was about to miss out. In fact, I might already be too late!

I jumped into my trainers and grabbed all the money I could find. I would have liked to have taken more stuff, but there wasn't time to look for anything else. Besides, anything I had to carry would only slow me down. I hadn't even done up my shoelaces before I was running so fast towards the main courtyard that I almost tripped over. As I approached the section gateway, the noise became deafening and I could finally make out what they were shouting: ‘¡Tráiganlos! ¡Tráiganlos!’ I didn't understand what that meant either, and I still didn't know what was going on.

When I arrived at the courtyard I had to stop suddenly. There were so many people that you could hardly move. Apart from when we had to line up together and sing the Bolivian national anthem, I had never seen so many inmates in the one place. I stood there, out of breath, looking around wildly for a hole in the wall or an open gate, while the crowd surged around, shouting and yelling and punching their fists in the air.

‘¡Tráiganlos! ¡Tráiganlos!’ they chanted, but I couldn't see where they were escaping from.

A big roar then went up from the crowd and it surged towards the narrow corridor that led down to the inside sections. Ahead, I saw that a man had been lifted above the heads of the crowd and was being carried down the passageway. Most of the prisoners started heading that way, so I joined them and, being taller and stronger than most of them, managed to push my way through faster. I accidentally knocked a few people over in my haste. I didn't know exactly where we were going or what we were doing, but I wasn't going to miss out.

When we reached the main section of Cancha, everyone stopped running and I noticed that another man had been hoisted above the crowd. The pair were looking around worriedly, wanting to get down, but I assumed that was because they were afraid of being dropped.

Still the crowd was shouting, ‘¡Tráiganlos! ¡Tráiganlos!’ but now that we weren't moving, I concluded it wasn't a breakout. I didn't know what to think, really, but it was obvious that no one was escaping. Maybe they had won a football match, or it was some type of protest and these men were the leaders.