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MARCHING POWDER

Shortly after I started my tienda, the son got married in the prison to a woman named Angela. By coincidence, I already knew her; we had met several times in Sweden through our business connections. It was quite a shock to see someone in a Bolivian jail that I had met on the other side of the world in more glamorous surroundings, but it wasn't really all that surprising given the circles we both moved in. The visitors who attended the wedding were very well dressed and they all brought presents. I was invited along and I donated ten cases of soft drink for the celebrations after the ceremony.

The Velascos were also two of my most regular customers at the shop. They never liked to pay for things up front; they preferred to buy everything on credit and then settle their bill at the end of the month, like rich people on the outside did. They always paid, but very often they were late. I never said anything, however — these sort of people could be good friends if you kept them on side, but powerful enemies if you didn't.

I had one other regular customer who was even more powerful than the Velascos, although you wouldn't have known it by the way he looked or acted. Barbachoca dressed casually and, apart from his distinctive red beard, he looked like a regular inmate. However, he wasn't a regular inmate at all, he was big. Mr Big. Nobody saw him much, because he rarely left his apartment. But even the czars of the drug-dealing world have to eat sometime, which is the reason I eventually met him.

Barbachoca had been caught attempting to transport a large quantity of cocaine from Bolivia to the United States in his own airplane. How much is a 'large' quantity? Four thousand one hundred and eighty kilograms. That's almost 4.2 tonnes — 4.2 million grams — of pure cocaine, enough to get all the party people in the whole world high for one hell of a New Year's Eve party. And if you sold it on the street at one hundred dollars a gram, that's $420 million dollars worth of merchandise, even more when it was mixed.

Barbachoca's plane had been intercepted by the authorities in Peru, en route to Mexico. Normally, big fish like him are too well protected to get busted themselves, but this was an operation run by the uncorruptible DEA, so he couldn't get out of it. In fact, it was the biggest drug bust in Bolivia's history. Once the media got hold of the story