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THOMAS THE SHOPKEEPER

jail. No one in San Pedro would have qualified for a bank loan – there were many dishonest people who would take advantage whenever they could, and the honest ones weren't much better. But it was hard to refuse people and stay on their good side as well. If I offended someone, they might ruin my reputation and never pay me back. And what could I do then? I couldn't send my bodyguards around just because someone owed me for cigarettes and milk from a few months back. It would have been better if all the shopkeepers had joined together and not given credit to anyone, but that wasn't how things were done. Besides, most of the inmates did pay eventually. And when they got money, they remembered who had looked after them and who had cut them off.

However, that didn't make it any easier at the time. I tried to stay well stocked because of the frequent worker strikes and protests in the country that made supplies unreliable, but on several occasions I had no cash because I was owed hundreds of bolivianos.

'Mañana, mañana,' they promised, even when I knew they had the money in their pockets. And in Bolivia, mañana never seemed to come.

The period of time I spent working in my shop was when I really got to know the people well and became properly established and respected in San Pedro. When there were no tourists around, I didn't have much to do and all day to do it in, so I would spend hours on end talking and laughing with the other inmates who came to my store. Often, people would visit me and we would talk for so long that they would forget what they had come for and leave empty-handed. Other times, they didn't come to buy anything at all, just to talk.

Apart from being nice to customers, you had to be careful running any business in prison. There weren't any standover men demanding protection money from you, but there were certain powerful people who you knew you had to look after. The Velascos were two of them.

Jose Luis Velasco and Jorge Velasco were father and son. On the outside, the Velasco family had had money. They had been into all sorts of illegal businesses until they got busted and sent to San Pedro prison, where they were also well connected. The father and son were now living together in the same cell, while the family worked on getting them out.