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‘ONE OF THE WORLD’S MOST
BIZARRE TOURIST ATTRACTIONS’

Many of the tourists who visited San Pedro were so fascinated by the prison and my stories that they came back to see me several times. I estimated that every tourist who visited me told at least five other travellers, and at least that number of people again when they got home. Tourists started coming in larger and larger groups and many of them had to be turned away at the gates.

During my second and third years in San Pedro, it seemed that the prison cocaine parties would never end. I had quickly gained a reputation for showing people a good time, so when backpackers arrived saying they had heard about me and wanted to try some coke, I never felt that I could refuse them. The trouble for me was that one group would arrive and want to party hard for a whole night, but while they spent the next day recovering, I had to get up and run another tour and party all night again with the next group.

Luckily, not everyone wanted to try cocaine. Once the word had spread that the prison wasn’t dangerous for tourists, it was no longer only young backpackers who visited San Pedro. People of all ages and from all walks of life began to visit me and the tours became more respectable. So much so, that Lonely Planet listed the prison as one of the ‘things to do’ in the La Paz section of its South American guidebook, describing it as ‘one of the world’s most bizarre tourist attractions’.

With all the publicity, I sometimes worried that the tours might be getting too big and would cause me problems, but they never did. What went on inside San Pedro was no secret to the people of La Paz. The prison was like a sad joke that had been repeated to them over and over