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THOMAS THE SHOPKEEPER

and dubbed the case ‘narco avion’, there was so much publicity that not even the Bolivian judges could have saved him. They did their best, though. The judges gave him only thirteen years. That didn’t make sense. I knew people in San Pedro who had been given the maximum twenty-five years for less than a hundred grams. But there was a public outcry over the sentence and the prosecutor appealed. He eventually secured a longer sentence. So Barbachoca appealed against the appeal.

In the meantime, the US government was trying to extradite him and send him to a proper jail for the rest of his life, but Barbachoca had no plans to move anywhere. In fact, he was quite determined to stay in San Pedro, where the conditions were a lot better than elsewhere in Bolivia. The only problem was that the cells in Alamos were too small. Luckily, he had enough money to call in some contract builders to put up an extension on top of his room. Once his two-storey apartment was fully furnished, he was content to live there quietly until he could find a way out of prison.

Barbachoca kept to himself; he wanted to maintain a low profile in the hope that the publicity surrounding his case would eventually die off. And the other inmates respected that. They had to. That kind of wealth commanded respect, so people kept their distance. I had never talked to him myself, until he came to my shop to buy supplies.

‘Hi, Thomas. Do you have ketchup, please?’ was the first thing he ever said to me. He spoke perfect English with a strong American accent. When I handed him the bottle, my hands were shaking. I checked the label to make sure it didn’t have chilli in it and counted his change twice. You don’t want to make mistakes around people like that.

There was no need to have worried. You might expect people who get to the very top of the drug-dealing world to be violent and ruthless mafia types, but Barbachoca wasn’t. He was smart. He was educated. He was polite. And as far as I knew, he had never threatened or said so much as an angry word to anyone. Basically, he was a really friendly guy.

Gradually, we became friends and he started to invite me up to his apartment whenever he had a small fiesta. I always liked to bring a bottle of something because I didn’t want him to think that I was trying to take advantage of his wealth. Besides, Barbachoca supposedly had no money. He told me the cops had confiscated everything. I never