📸 Photo

DESPERATE MEASURES

me, but he still made excuses not to. He didn't believe me about being set up — until he got arrested himself and was told to leave the country. He almost ruined everything by being so stupid. I had to fix things with the governor to get him a new permission slip. Once I'd bribed the governor, Rusty was allowed back into San Pedro, but only on official visiting days and he could no longer stay the night. He was out of trouble, but I wasn't; there was now a misdemeanour report in the administration office that mentioned my name. I was worried that if the judges found out about it, it would affect my trial.

The whole universe seemed to turn against me that week. It now looked like I would be convicted for the two hundred grams; Rusty got me in trouble with the governor; and then news came that Samir had died in Chonchocoro. Julián told me that Samir had killed himself, but I knew he would never have done that. I would have believed that he'd been shot in a fight with the police or trying to escape, but I knew that Samir would never take his own life. It took a while to find out what had really happened.

Samir had been kept in the isolation block at Chonchocoro the whole time, so that he couldn't communicate with the outside world. He kept trying to blackmail the police he had stolen cars for, but they stopped responding to his threats once he was powerless. Samir somehow managed to have a pen and paper smuggled into his cell. He wrote a letter that named names, dates and places. The letter never made it out because the police got to him first.

Before they killed him, the police tortured him for several hours, just as they had done in La Grulla. When they were satisfied that he hadn't sent out any other letters, they strangled him and hung the body from a rafter inside his cell. The cleaner found him when he was doing his rounds. There were at least three witnesses in the isolation block who heard everything that happened. At first, they were too afraid to say anything, but they made a pact to speak out together. A group of them contacted the media and told the truth about what had happened. Samir's death was reported in the paper, but it was only one of three suspicious deaths in Chonchocoro in a thirty-hour period. I didn't cry. I just felt numb.

After Samir was murdered, Rusty started to really worry about

363