📸 Photo

MARCHING POWDER

extremely small. I also wondered if La Paz ever got warm enough to go swimming.

'But when do they use it?' I asked.

'Um. Occasionally they fill it up, but the water gets dirty very quickly, so most of the year it stays empty.'

'But what do they use it for? It's too narrow for swimming.'

'Mainly they use it for baptisms and celebrations. You know, when a new inmate gets given his sentence or when someone has a birthday, they get thrown in the water,' he explained hurriedly before changing the subject quickly. 'Do you wanna see where they make the leather jackets?'

There was something Ricardo wasn't telling me about la piscina. I later learned that it had a more sinister name – 'el pozo', which means 'the well'.

We went up some stairs and into another dark passageway. This was the section of San Martín and it was more like what I had imagined a third-world prison would be like. In some parts, there were long rows of tiny, identical concrete cells, with the same grey metal doors. Often, they had no windows and so, in some parts, there was a horrible smell that must have been there forever. These were the dirtiest areas of the prison, where the poorer prisoners and the base smokers lived, sometimes four or five crammed into a minuscule room.

'Life is cheap here,' explained Ricardo. 'People do whatever they can to survive.'

He pointed out that, unlike Pinos and Alamos, there were no gates between the various inside sections, so at night the inmates were free to wander from one section to another, making it more like a big neighbourhood in a city slum.

'And this is where all the stabbings occur,' he warned me as we came into one of the darker passages. When he saw my worried look, he reassured me. 'It's perfectly safe during the day. At night is when you have to look out.'

This didn't make me feel any better. Although it was the middle of the day, the part we were in was so dimly lit that it could just as easily have been midnight.

We came to a corner and went down some stairs and outside again. This was where Ricardo came to buy his marijuana once a week. He didn't want to talk about it at that moment – even in English – in case