📸 Photo

MARCHING POWDER

He started to explain supply and demand, which I already knew about from the drug market. Ricardo became so enthusiastic at this point that he decided to draw me some graphs. There was no time to waste in finding a pen and paper, so he picked up his kitchen knife and started carving lines into his wooden table. We started with the supply side, being the available accommodation. The prison was in a situation of what Ricardo called ‘limited’ or ‘capped’ supply. This was because there was no space left to build any more rooms. Apparently, the prison had been originally built for two hundred and fifty inmates, but at times the population could reach up to fifteen hundred prisoners, plus their families, all crammed into one city block. If they had wanted to, the government probably could have built more rooms on top of the existing ones, but there were no funds available to do so. Besides, who really cared about the conditions of a bunch of prisoners, when most of the country was living in poverty? The politicians kept the money for themselves.

Then Ricardo explained the demand side of things. The demand was determined by people who needed to buy cells and it was rising because the prison population was expanding every day, mainly with people accused of drug-trafficking offences under a law called la Ley Mil Ocho – Law 1008 – which was the law I was being charged under. According to Ricardo, the reason for all this overcrowding and for Law 1008 was the US government's ‘war on drugs’.

Ricardo was proud of having lived in the United States and of speaking English, because it made him feel superior to the Bolivians. However, at other times, he really hated the Americans. This was one of those times. Bolivia is one of the poorest Latin American countries and the US regularly made kind offers of humanitarian aid to help out the poor, the starving and the homeless. However, this was on the condition that Bolivia agreed to fumigate its coca plantations and go after the people who controlled the drug trade. Of course, the Bolivian politicians were always glad to accept all donations, most of which never made it to their intended destination. They jumped up and down, promising to destroy the crops and hunt down the evil people responsible for drug trafficking, but in reality their efforts were only minimal; coca was the most valuable industry Bolivia had and it was making a lot of people in power very rich.

‘They never actually go after the big fish,’ said Ricardo. ‘They're