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WORD SPREADS

‘Our mission objective, if you like, although that is more a term that Hollywood invented rather than one we freedom fighters use, was the destruction of a few central locations in La Paz.’

‘Can I ask which ones?’

‘No, you can’t.’

‘I’m sorry. So sorry. We’ll move on . . . How long have you been in San Pedro?’ He was lapping it up now, apologising frequently so that he could get more information out of me.
‘I’ve been here ten years. Long time.’
‘You must have been young when you first arrived?’
‘Too young. And they tortured me . . . with spoons.’
‘With spoons? How?’
‘Yes, with spoons. What do you mean how? They hit me with spoons, all over my body.’

My story became more and more ridiculous as the interview progressed, but to stop myself from laughing I only had to look at Mark Johnson’s sober expression as he conscientiously transcribed every word I said.

I followed the newspapers for two weeks and finally his article appeared. It was an exposé on San Pedro, but unfortunately not all the details I had given him were included, and most unfortunately, there was nothing about the previously unheard-of Bolivian form of spoon torture. Nevertheless, it did say something about one inmate called Jamaican Tom being an ‘unscrupulous terrorist’, and when I showed it to Ricardo, neither of us could stop laughing.

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Apart from pushy journalists, I received a lot of other weird visitors from all over the world. There was the Dutch backpacker with blond dreadlocks who would set up his tent in parks and main plazas and wash in public fountains until the police told him to move on. It wasn’t that he didn’t have money, he just didn’t like hotels.
‘Why pay money to stay on a mattress with fleas when I have a very good air mattress?’ he asked me.

There was the couple that was travelling the entire South American continent on bicycles because they said cars and buses were unnatural and caused pollution. They were nice, but they were also against deodorant and smelled a bit. There was a Japanese guy who not only