📸 Photo

MARCHING POWDER

terms the guards set, because without their cooperation there would have been nó prison tours in the first place.

Eventually we struck a deal that I would increase the tour price and they would receive half the takings. However, the real cost of bribing the police was much more than that. I paid the fifty per cent directly to the major on duty after the tours, but on top of that I had to keep the low-ranking guards happy by buying them food and soft drinks and handing out small propinas, as well as paying larger sums to any new officers who arrived at the prison.

For policemen, working at San Pedro could be one of the most profitable postings in the whole country. In fact, some of the officers actually paid to be transferred there and with so much money involved, a lot of power struggles and politics went on behind the scenes. As a result, the prison administration was constantly being reshuffled and, unfortunately for me, every change of personnel meant starting again from scratch with the bribes. Just when I had started to get a good relationship going with one of the majors or captains, he'd be replaced by a new man, who would pretend not to be corrupt in order to get bigger bribes. At any one time there was a governor, three majors, four captains and about five lieutenants. The staff turnover was so high that it was impossible to remember all of their names, so I took to calling each policeman by his rank. The privates I just called 'amigo'.

The cost of a tour was twenty-five bolivianos, about five US dollars, although gradually this price went up as police cracked down and made it tougher for foreigners to visit. Sometimes tourists would claim that they didn't have enough money to pay the full amount. Many of them were used to the Bolivians trying to rip them off and had the mentality that you were expected to bargain for everything. They assumed that I was no different, since I was a prisoner. But what they didn't understand was that I had to pay the police no matter what; the head taxista counted heads as each person came in and every single one of them had to be accounted for. If I ever claimed that a tourist hadn't paid, the police might think that I was trying to cheat them, which would make it harder for me to get the next group in.

The other big expense was keeping the inmates happy. When I first started running the tours, I was scared that something might happen to one of the tourists, so I stuck to the main courtyards and didn't stay