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MARCHING POWDER

brother. The seasons may have been reversed in the southern hemisphere, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t have a traditional white Christmas in Bolivia.

After the Christmas celebrations came the New Year’s Eve party. And on the following day, another special prisoner was transferred into La Grulla from the main prison. They moved Chapako into Chino’s cell to make space for him. No one saw who the new prisoner was or knew why he was there. We were all too hungover to pay any attention. He was gone the following day. Later we found out why: he had been transferred to Chonchocoro for his own safety.

While the whole prison population had been partying, one of the women hadn’t noticed that her six-year-old daughter was missing. When she sobered up the following morning and raised the alarm, everyone in the section went looking for the missing niña. They called and called. They looked in all the likely hiding places: under the stairwells, in the bathrooms, in the laundry, under clothes. They asked the other children. No one had seen her. The mother began to panic. They checked to make sure the niña hadn’t fallen into the empty swimming pool. And although it was unlikely, they climbed up on the roofs to look for her there.

As word spread to the other sections, the whole prison population stopped what it was doing. Hundreds of worried people joined in the search. San Pedro was filled with the hysterical screams of the little girl’s mother and the sounds of people calling her name as if she were a lost puppy. Still, they couldn’t find her. The guards came into the prison and demanded that each prisoner open his door. They searched every single room, one by one, with a growing crowd following them.

When they finally found the girl, it was too late. Her tiny body was discovered in one of the inmate’s cells. She had been raped, then strangled and left naked on the bed. The body was cold. The prison doctor sedated the mother and I finally understood properly about la piscina. The inmates began filling it with water and a mob went looking for the culprit, but he had already made it to the main gate and bribed the guards to be sent to La Grulla. That wasn’t the only bad thing that happened. A couple of weeks afterwards, I got more bad news.