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SENTENCING

for each of us instead. He handcuffed me to the chair. As I waited, I began to notice some very strange things about the way the court system worked in Bolivia. For a start, absolutely everyone in the building knew each other – the judges, the police, the prosecutors, the defence solicitors and the administration staff. And they all seemed to be friends. Inside the courtroom, they kept a straight face, but as soon as they were outside, they shook hands and made jokes with one another and visited each other's offices, which were all on the same floor. It didn't seem like a place where people's futures hung in the balance.

As it turned out, all my worrying about arriving at court on time was unnecessary. My trial was postponed until the following week because one of the prosecution's documents hadn't been officially stamped. This was the first of many, many delays and postponements in my trial.

'Are you still thirsty?' I asked my escort on the way back to prison, directing the taxi driver to pull over at a nice restaurant down on the Prado.
'Always.'
'Shall we stop and have a Paceña?'
'The beer or the woman?' he asked, then we said at exactly the same time, 'Both!' before bursting into laughter. If I ever needed to escape, Fernando was my man.

Towards the end of my trial, I sensed that things definitely weren't going my way. Colonel Lanza didn't testify himself, but the prosecutor called policeman after policeman to give evidence that they had seen me arrested at the airport. With the exception of one man, I didn't remember seeing them there. Besides, none of the questions was about whether the merchandise actually belonged to me, but the prosecutor used the same trick with each witness to make me look more and more guilty.

'And can you identify the man you saw that day?' he would ask them.
'Yes,' they would respond solemnly, pointing at me. 'That man there.'

The policeman I did recognise was one of the two who had searched through my possessions at the FELCN offices, putting aside all my