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MARCHING POWDER

Ramero was in for punching a guard in the face. Chino spent most of his time in solitary for fighting. Characoto and Chapako were in there for stabbing an inmate to death with a screwdriver. Those two had nothing left to lose; they were already in prison for thirty years for another murder and they probably wouldn't live that long anyway. Besides, if they got a second conviction of thirty years for the stabbing, there was a loophole in the law that would allow them to serve it concurrently with the first sentence, so it made no difference to when they would get out. And Samir? I don't know what he was in for this time, but it was usually something to do with drugs or fighting. The only reason they didn't send him to Chonchocoro was because he was always threatening to expose the police involved in the car-theft ring.

During those four hours we could go to the toilet, have a cold shower, move around in the small exercise pen or eat some food, if there was any. The meal system in La Grulla was the same as in the rest of the prison – a bucket of watered-down soup was sent out from the prison kitchen twice a day to all the sections. That was all you got and if you didn't like it, you had to feed yourself. In La Grulla, there was a small kitchen area next to the bathrooms with running water and a cooker, but it was of no use to us since we couldn't get to the shops. Sometimes the guards forgot to send us our soup and we went hungry unless the inmates from the neighbouring section of Posta sent us their leftovers, which was never enough for six men to survive on anyway.

The conditions in solitary got to me quickly. I was constantly hungry and lost a lot of weight. After one week, I had diarrhoea and a chest infection. A few days later, I started pissing blood because I had a urinary tract infection. But there was something worse than the physical conditions and the sickness: the mental torture that went along with it.

The guards in La Grulla were bastards. Real bastards. And they wanted to make an example of us because we were the first group to go through, so that everyone would hear about it and be afraid of being sent there. They did a good job of it, too. They called us dogs. They hit us like dogs. And after a while, we started to believe that we were dogs.

The guards were our masters. We were dependent on them for everything: food, water, toilet breaks, even company. They made us