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NIGHT SHIFT IN THE COCAINE LABORATORIES

It was also during my period as a shopkeeper and restaurateur that I made friends with the bigger dealers and finally got to see the cocaine laboratories. The first time I saw them operating, I was so fascinated that they offered me a job working there. It didn’t pay well, but I learned a lot and it kept me out of trouble at night.

I was amazed at how easy it was to make cocaine. Very few people were needed and the equipment used was nothing fancy or scientific: a few buckets, hoses, pieces of cloth, strainers, several lamps and some flat trays for drying the crystals. In fact, the hardest part seemed to be getting hold of the chemicals, which were expensive and hard to find since they had been made illegal as part of the United States’ ‘war on drugs’. But once you had those, the process was surprisingly simple.

The coke came into the prison in the form of pasta básica, a thick, off-white-coloured paste extracted from coca leaves by soaking them in kerosene or gasoline and then adding alcohol, followed by sodium bicarbonate. This process was always carried out where the coca was grown, mainly in Bolivia’s Chapare region. Most of the pasta was then sold and transported to the labs in Peru and Colombia, but a small amount managed to find its way into San Pedro prison. It was usually smuggled through the main gate by the inmates’ wives. Among the hundreds of boxes and sacks of food that arrived to supply the prisoners’ daily needs, it wasn’t difficult to hide a few kilos in bags of sugar or rice, or hollowed-out fruit. The liquid chemicals were more difficult to get in, but the searches were never thorough, especially if the guards had been bribed in advance. Besides, if anyone was caught, the penalty was simply a bigger bribe.