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THIRTEEN DAYS IN HELL

‘We will see,’ he said, placing Tito’s card back on top of the pile of fruit juice documents.

Eventually, the capitán gave up on me and began to weigh what was left of the cocaine. While he was busy balancing the scales, I leaned forward and retrieved Tito’s business card, which I then slipped into my underwear without anyone noticing. Later, in the cell, I tore it into tiny pieces and swallowed them. When the scales balanced, the capitán read the weight out to the other officer, who wrote down the figure, and then they both signed it. The capitán saw that I was listening.

‘Eight hundred and fifty grams,’ he repeated in English for my benefit, sealing up the merchandise in an official evidencia bag and handing it to the other officer to take away. ‘You had a lot of cocaine, no?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s not mine.’ What was I supposed to say – ‘No, there was actually five kilograms’? Anyway, I thought that being charged with a smaller amount would be to my advantage.

‘Yes. Of course it is not yours, Señor McFadden,’ the capitán said sarcastically. ‘I understand. The police planted it in your suitcase, yes?’ He nodded to the guards to take me down to the underground cell. And that cell was where I spent the next thirteen days.

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Those thirteen days were the toughest of my life. I honestly thought I was going to die. For that whole time the police fed me only a piece of bread each morning and a cup of unsweetened tea made with cold water. The bread was always stale. When I complained about being hungry, the guards just shook their heads because they were under strict instructions not to talk to prisoners.

By the third day, I was so hungry that I pounded my fists on the door all morning until the guard on duty got sick of the noise and came to quieten me down.

‘Food. I am hungry. Food,’ I begged him, as soon as his face appeared at the observation window in the door. He looked at me blankly, so I put my hand to my mouth and pretended to chew, then patted my stomach. He shook his head sadly and said something back to me in Spanish. When he realised that I didn’t understand him, he fetched another guard who spoke a little English. This second guard had a kind face, but he also looked at me sadly.