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'ONE OF THE WORLD'S MOST BIZARRE TOURIST ATTRACTIONS'

again. They had been hearing about it for decades, and an endless stream of articles continued to pour out of newspapers and television about it. The drug police were filmed delivering suspicious-looking bags to the prison gates after midnight. Countless prisoners were said to have died under suspicious circumstances or from lack of medical attention. Wealthy inmates, who were supposed to be in their prison cells, were photographed at shopping malls with their girlfriends. The prisoners regularly organised hunger strikes to protest against court delays and judicial corruption; when the police accused the protesters of eating, many of them sewed up their mouths to prove that wasn't the case. A racket of bringing prostitutes into the prison was uncovered – there were even allegations of inmates prostituting their teenage daughters.

The corruption in the Bolivian prison system went all the way to the top. One of the friends I made in San Pedro knew more about the high-level corruption than most of us. He was a Brazilian inmate named Samir Mustafá Ali, and he was probably Bolivia's best car thief. Samir could break into a vehicle and hotwire the ignition in less than sixty seconds. He was a little crazy, but we immediately became friends. Samir had been in and out of jail since he was a boy. Every time he got drunk, he used to tell me stories about the time he was in prison in Santa Cruz and how several high-ranking officers used to take him out of his cell at night to steal cars. They did the same in San Pedro. They would have him back in his cell before morning lista and pay him a few hundred dollars each time to keep quiet.

The stories that came out about the maximum-security prison, Chonchocoro, were worse. During one surprise raid police found hundreds of litres of chicha (an alcohol the inmates manufactured themselves by fermenting corn), several kilos of cocaine, four handguns and two dead bodies. Inmates were regularly tortured to death by the police if they threatened to expose the police corruption. Among all this, the availability of drugs was barely an issue.

'San Pedro Prison: Cocaína for 3 bolivianos. Basé for 1.5 bolivianos,' read the headlines, and hardly anyone batted an eyelid.

Occasionally, these exposés caused a brief scandal. There were often crackdowns and promises by the politicians and police to fix up the prison system. However, one corrupt administration was always replaced by another, so nothing ever changed. And to the people of Bolivia, who had been living in poverty and political turmoil for