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By now the San Pedro prison tours are surely Bolivia’s worst kept secret. It seems like every backpacker coming to La Paz has heard that it’s possible to bribe your way into the prison, and that once inside you’re welcome to take as much locally-made cocaine as you like (provided you don’t tell anyone about it – wink).
While the glamour and sleaze of the San Pedro tours will continue to echo up and down the gringo trail for a long time to come, the less thrilling recent developments at the prison will no doubt take a lot longer to find a willing audience. Of course when talking about something that never officially existed it’s hard to find or provide reliable information, but for now it’s a generally accepted fact that there will be no more tours at San Pedro, at least not for some time.
The tours have never been very reliable. They have started and stopped and started again over the last few years, always hovering somewhere in the middle ground between possible and impossible, existent and non-existent. At the start of the year though the tours were gaining in fame and popularity; word was spreading that they were safer and easier than ever. This was the beginning of their end though; as they gained a higher and higher profile it became harder and harder to disguise their existence.
In January a (very good) article appeared in Britain’s The Guardian, which provided prices for the tours, details of how to get into the prison, and even the names of who could organise tours. In February a video was posted on youtube.com showing both backpackers and cocaine inside the prison. When the Bolivian media got hold of this video the tours became just too undeniably existent to ignore. The director of the prison was fired and his replacement clamped down on not just the tours but also other liberties within the prison Whether this director is serious about cleaning up the prison, or whether he to will eventually turn a blind eye and a greased palm to the tours remains to be seen (prison reform has been discussed and promised before, but there have as yet been no substantial changes).
It seems unlikely that tourists will be entering San Pedro again any time soon, though. Even if this scandal quickly dies down, something bigger is looming on the horizon. Brad Pitt’s production company’s film adaptation of Marching Powder – the book that first popularised the prison tours – is set for release in 2010. Once this comes out and San Pedro becomes even more widely known the ensuing scrutiny will make it all but impossible to resume tours.
Even in the short months since the tours ceased at San Pedro, word is spreading that tours are running in other prisons. It was perhaps inevitable that where a demand existed a supply would be found. And this is the daft truth of the whole prison tour business; San Pedro was always whispered of and marketed as a truly unique jail, but in fact it is just one example of Bolivia’s rotten penal and justice systems. Walking by the prison in Sucre, which looks almost identical to the school on the adjacent block, I’ve seen couples kissing through the main gates, and an ice cream vendor selling to guards and inmates. School children come and go; grizzled, idle men sit in the concrete patio behind the gate. This prison may be smaller, but it is not so very different to San Pedro. I have heard similar things from volunteers who worked at the prisons in Cochabamba.
This, I would suggest, is a far more worthwhile and memorable way to visit a Bolivian prison; to volunteer to teach classes to inmates or to work with prison reform programs. Rather than perpetuating a corrupt and repressive system, volunteering actually ensures that some good comes of this silly gringo fascination.
My first blog about the San Pedro conundrum.
An outstanding article that sheds light on life within the prison and the reality behind prison tours: http://www.boliviabella.com/san-pedro-prison-tour.html
The Guardian article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2009/jan/17/prison-tour-la-paz-bolivia
More on Marching Powder: http://www.marchingpowder.com
Organisations working in Bolivian prisons:
Ayni Ruway (prison rehabilitation program), in partnership with Sustainable Bolivia: http://www.sustainablebolivia.org/AYNI%20RUWAY.html
Article by a prison volunteer: http://www.volunteerbolivia.org/brian.htm
Prison Fellowship International: http://www.pfi.org/national-ministries/americas/bolivia
I arrived in La Paz with half a kilo of trail mix and the forlorn hope that it would last me long enough to get my thirty day Bolivian visa extension, as well as a tourist visa for Paraguay. Before midday I had a Bolivian stamp, a Paraguayan visa, and an untouched bag of fruit and nuts. I was in shock. Where was the Byzantine bureaucracy? Where were the endless frustrations? I hadn’t even had time to be nervous in the immigration office. As always, La Paz was full of surprises.
I spent a night in La Paz on either side of my trip to Coroico. I had come for purely administrative reasons, but within minutes of stepping out onto the streets, my feet almost completely numb in the morning cold, I was remembering just how much I loved this city.
With all my business carried out so quickly, and having walked the gringo trail thoroughly enough on my first visit, I was left completely free to enjoy the city itself. I gorged myself on the vegetarian street food unavailable in the rest of the country. I ate at least once a day in a Lebanese restaurant. I found the best book exchange in South America. I made business contacts with tour operators and hotel staff. I peaked in at the free galleries in Sopocachi, the trendy, leafy neighbourhood full of students and ambassadors and transsexuals and punks. I ate trail mix in every plaza in the city. I salivated over the packed shelves of international supermarkets. I stared into the twisted, leering faces of traditional masks from all over the country at the magnificent Ethnographic Museum, where there are a hundred representations of the devil and only one of an angel. I priced and haggled over things I didn’t want in the witches’ market. At every twist and contortion of the city I felt overwhelmingly that I would love to live in the city.
At an elegant theatre of faded red velvet and private box seating I sat down to watch a part-traditional part-contemporary performance, and found that half of the crowd was attired in the same jacket and scarf as me. At a narrow bar behind an anonymous door I sat down to watch one of Bolivia’s more popular bands play, and found the audience a curious blend of all the tattoos and haircuts, all the subcultures and attitudes that are missing from Sucre.
I spend a sunny afternoon reading in plaza San Pedro, by the notorious prison. Groups of backpackers and a few rugged solitary gringos were skulking about, lingering briefly by the gate before retiring to a safer and less conspicuous distance. No touts offered them prison tours; these apparently are still unavailable, although I wonder how long before money wins out and tourists find their way inside again.
The sky cleared and cleared with every hour I spent in La Paz. By my last day there the high snowy peaks that surround the city were glowing in late afternoon sunlight. Before it dipped below the canyon walls the sun also gleamed off the many highrise that cluster around the main avenue running the length of the city. There are a great many tall buildings in La Paz, but none of them peak out of the steep canyon that are built into. The poorer, shabbier plain brick houses that cling to the canyon walls have better views.
When I hopped a bus back to Sucre I was hoping I would have another chance to come to La Paz during this stay in Bolivia. And I was hoping that I would have a chance to come back to Bolivia and to call this city home.
The bus left in darkness, the entire city reduced to twinkling gold and silver lights in the thick night. The gold lights denote streets, and the silver clusters are houses, but like everything else about La Paz this generalisation is broken a thousand times, the city defying expectation and imposition, and remaining full of surprises and enchantment.
The name on the lips of every backpacker passing through La Paz, and advertised on every tour agency’s signs and fliers, is San Pedro. La Paz’s lack of superlative tourist attractions has allowed San Pedro to become one of the hottest backpacker destinations in the city.
San Pedro prison, located in central La Paz and just a short hop from the main tourist burrow, was catapulted to fame in 2002 with the publication of Marching Powder, which tells the story of Thomas McFadden, an Englishmen caught moving cocaine through Bolivia and subsequently left to languish in San Pedro prison, awaiting trial. The destitution and corruption a the heart of the Bolivian judicial system had spawned this prison, where prisoners were forced to pay for their cells, if they could afford them, and where drug barons lived in penthouse cells with cable TV. The families of poorer inmates lived in the prison, coming and going through the main gate, to attend school or visit the markets before returning to sleep within the guarded walls.
The entrepreneurial McFadden started offering prison tours, whereby seriously hardcore backpackers could visit the tour, spend the night in a cell, and avail themselves of the ample quantities of cocaine – said to be the best and purest in Bolivia – produced in the guts of the prison.
McFadden was eventually released, as was the book, leading to disintegration of the prison tours. Thereafter they have persisted as rumours, resurrected from time to time by enterprising inmates, and causing a headache for guidebook authors; how to deal with one of La Paz’s most intriguing sites, given that it was potentially very dangerous (rumours echo about of tours gone wrong, of disappearing money, and of the occasional assault), and very far from being legal. The current Lonely Planet Bolivia volume offers general details about the prison, which are no different to those given in Marching Powder, but no clues as to how to actually arrange a tour.
By the time I arrived in Bolivia word was out that the tours were operating more successfully than ever. They had been cleaned up and were very safe. When I finally made it to La Paz I wandered around the walls of the prison, and in the space of about fifteen minutes, while sitting in the plaza outside the prison, I saw three tour groups enter. I was offered the chance to join one of these groups, but didn’t have the 250 bolivianos ($40-50ish) needed to get in. If I’d had the cash on me I almost certainly would have joined the tour, out of obligation if nothing else.
By the time I returned to La Paz less than a week later, the tours had been shut down. There was no one in the plaza offering tours, and no gringos passing through the gates and into the prison.
A new word was out; an article had appeared in The Guardian in the UK, explaining exactly how to join a tour – who to talk too, how much to pay, and what to expect once inside. This posed a very serious problem; the tours were only possible while they were unofficial. They depended on corruption and blind eyes being turned, and existed only because officially they didn’t exist. An industry built on bribes and feigned ignorance can only function for as long as there is no public scrutiny. As soon as the tours were publicised and official, something had to be done to stop them.
Officially the prison tours were shut down as part of an effort to combat the corruption about the prison. Unofficially, rumours got about that the official powers of the prison were unhappy with their cut of the now officially advertised prices.
And further in the distance lurked another fact; Brad Pitt has bought the rights to Marching Powder, and his production company is currently completing a film adaptation of the book. When this is released San Pedro will become very much public knowledge, and it will be next to impossible to deny the cocaine labs, the bribed guards and officially illegal prison tours that are all a daily reality of life in San Pedro.
And for me there is the ongoing conundrum; I feel obliged to visit San Pedro, to prove myself a consummate traveller by visiting the prison and writing about it. But on the other hand I have no desire to be one of these parasitic gringos who bribe guards, enter the prison, and so become a part of the whole problem of the corrupt Bolivian judicial and penal systems. Every Bolivian I have heard talk about San Pedro speaks about it with a kind if embarrassed bafflement; why would all these gringos on limited time and money, bother visiting one of the ugliest, most corrupt places in their country. Every gringo, on the other hand, talks about the prison as the ultimate exotic destination; a mixture of crime and violence and drugs and a world very different to the one back home.
For now I find myself siding with the Bolivians. Ten days ago I would have visited the prison, and almost did. Now it seems like just another over-exploited tourist trap, which does more harm than good to the people of Bolivia.
(Later I wrote an update on the San Pedro prison tours…)
