📸 Photo

MARCHING POWDER

Ricardo accompanied me to the main gates where I lined up with the other inmates on the transport list. The police marked our names off, and we then filed out into the street and onto the green police bus to be driven across town to the court.

‘Good luck, inglés!’ he called to me before they closed the doors.

There were about ten of us on the bus, with two guards. They didn’t bother handcuffing us. San Pedro was for minimum-security prisoners, and the only time we would be out in the open was when we were getting on and off the bus, when there were plenty of police around. (Later on, they did handcuff us, but that was only after an accomplice had handed one of the inmates a gun in the courthouse and he’d shot three policemen before escaping on foot.)

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When we arrived at the court building, I saw my lawyers waiting for me at the entrance. They welcomed me with smiles and handshakes and then introduced me to a female colleague, who kissed me on the cheek.

‘Hello, Thomas,’ she said. ‘How was your ride?’

The policeman assigned to guard me stood aside, waiting to take me to the holding cells.

‘Don’t worry, Thomas. Leave everything to us,’ my lawyers assured me. ‘We’ll see you in there.’

I had been in those same court holding cells on my way to the prison from the FELCN eleven months previously. I wasn’t in the same cell as then, but it was almost identical – plain walls, no furniture, one small window high up, and an observation hatch in the door for the guards to look through. It didn’t seem as horrible as I remembered. I had been through a lot since then.

To me, eleven months was a very long time to have to wait for my first court appearance. However, by Bolivian standards, it was considered speedy. My lawyers said this was a good sign: it meant the money we had sent to the judge was working. There were inmates who had been in San Pedro for six years without a trial, they said. But I didn’t know whether to believe my lawyers, since originally they had said that my case wouldn’t need to go to trial at all.

The courtroom was very simple, like an old-fashioned classroom. There was nothing modern, such as cameras or microphones. All the