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MARCHING POWDER

‘My friend. We no have money to buy the food for you.’ He explained that prisoners under investigation were supposed to provide their own food.

‘But how can I eat, then?’ I asked. The other prisoners in the interrogation cells had families that could bribe the guards to give them food, but I didn’t know anyone in La Paz and the police had stolen my money. The guard shrugged his shoulders.

‘Sorry. No money. No eat.’

He did, however, go upstairs and find my carton of cigarettes for me. I didn’t even smoke before then – I’d bought the cigarettes at the airport just to take up some time and do a final check for specialists. When I lit the first cigarette and inhaled, I could feel the smoke ripping at my lungs. I started coughing, but I forced myself to keep going; it was the only way to stop feeling hungry.

The cigarettes suppressed my appetite, but they didn’t stop my body from slowly starving. I had to get food somehow. Every time I heard the guards change shifts, I banged on my cell door in the hope that one of them might feel sorry for me. The nicer ones sometimes brought me an extra piece of bread to keep me quiet. However, most of them wanted money.

‘Dólares, my friend,’ they said, rubbing their fingers together. I promised to pay them hundreds when I got out, but when they realised that I didn’t have anything on me, none of them would help.

‘Food,’ I begged repeatedly, making gestures so they would understand.

‘No hay,’ they said, while stretching one hand out in front, palm down, and rocking it from side to side, like people do in England when they’re telling a friend that a movie they have seen is only OK. I worked out very quickly what this meant in Bolivia: ‘There is none.’

The seventy grams of cocaine that I had swallowed came out a few days after I was arrested. The guards always waited outside the bathroom whenever I went in, so I had no choice but to wash the balls and reswallow them.

After several days with no food and smoking a lot of cigarettes, my stomach had shrunk and I felt only a tight pain in my abdomen. Then, I didn’t notice it so much. I only knew that I was weak. Besides, there was something worse than the hunger: the cold. It was colder than you could ever imagine in those FELCN cells. La Paz is the highest major

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