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EL ALTO AIRPORT

When I stepped through the automatic sliding doors into La Paz's El Alto Airport carrying five kilograms of pure cocaine concealed in my luggage, I got a shock. There were police everywhere. Some were ordinary policemen dressed in green, but many others wore the blue uniforms of Bolivia's main drug squad, the FELCN. As soon as I walked into the terminal, every single one of them looked up. It was as if they had been waiting for me.

Normally, whenever I walk into an airport anywhere in the world carrying merchandise, I treat everything as a game. I try to see the funny side of things. If you think too much about the risk you're taking, it makes you nervous and you make bad decisions. Of course, you're always going to be a bit nervous, but thinking of the whole thing as a game stops those nerves from showing on your face.

It took me a while to slip into game mode this time because there were so many police and because the terminal was so small. La Paz is the biggest city in Bolivia, so I had expected its airport to be truly international. But it wasn't. It was tiny. However, now that I was inside, it was too late to turn around.

I chased after my porter. He had slowed down a few metres inside the door, waiting for me to catch up and tell him which airline I was with. I pulled out my ticket and pretended to be flustered because I had arrived so late. We studied the ticket together and then searched for the correct counter. All the while I was looking around in order to make a more thorough assessment of the airport's security system. Because it was so small, I could have got all the necessary information in a single sweep, but I took my time and made all my observations very openly. That's the first mistake amateur traffickers make: they