Cocaine Prison

From inside one of Bolivia's notorious prisons, a cocaine worker, a drug mule, and his little sister reveal the country's relationship with cocaine. Cocaine Prison puts into perspective the War on Drugs and the lives of the 'disposable' people and questions the effort to incarcerate cocaine workers while banks worldwide have unfettered potential to launder billions of cocaine dollars every year.

Filmed in Bolivia — including inside the notorious San Sebastian prison — over five years, Violeta Ayala's film provides a ground-level view of the international drug trade through the eyes of its foot soldiers: a drug mule, his sister, and a cocaine worker.

The first time I visited San Sebastian Prison, I was a teenager. I went there with a friend as part of a program to take the children who lived in the prison with their parents, to the park. I was so disturbed by the sadness of the kids that I never went back. The experience stayed with me and I always had this place in the back of my mind.
In 2010, I returned to Bolivia because I wanted to tell the story of the Drug War, from my experience and the perspective of the people at the lowest echelon of the international drug pyramid, the story of the drug workers.
For the past 50 years, the media -- from film to newspapers -- has created what I call the gun-toting narco myth in the collective mind of people. The idea that south of the border, immoral and heartless traffickers, organized in cartels, control the entire cocaine business, continues without question, but that’s not the reality for the majority of the people working in the international drug industry.
I didn’t know where to start, so I went back to San Sebastian Prison, the only place where I thought people would be open to tell me their stories. I wanted to see the children and I asked the inmates if we could teach English to the kids. They told me that it was themselves who wanted to learn English, so for the next four years we gave English classes to the prisoners every day. It was during the first weeks, that I met Hernan, the moment he arrived to the prison, he seemed scared trying to put on a brave face and we talked for a couple of hours each day after class. A few weeks later we met Hernan’s younger sister Deisy. She was only 17, she was upset and her only concern was to get her brother out of prison. Hernan brought Mario to the English class and soon after we had a full production team, we gave them cameras and the inmates themselves filmed a lot of material inside the prison, which is why the film is so personal. Cocaine Prison is a film made with the people.
One day a week we took a projector and showed movies to the class, the inmates really enjoyed to have a discussion after the films, San Sebastian Prison like any other prison is a claustrophobic, monotonous, noisy and violent. In prison I saw up close and the raw consequences of the drug war and its effect targeting the most vulnerable. Most of the drug prisoners were like Mario who couldn’t write their name or even read and teenagers like Hernan and Deisy.
In Bolivia like in any other country the drug war is a racist war.
The majority of people who end up in prison are indigenous Bolivians. We, the indigenous people of Bolivia, have had a relationship with the coca leaf for thousands of years. In 1859, a German chemist who found how to extract the cocaine alkaloid from the coca leaf, creating Cocaine.
What makes this an even more complex subject is that the production of cocaine and harvesting of the coca leaf has somehow brought hope to the indigenous people, as it has provided a way to escape 500 years of a deeply ingrained system of poverty for hundreds of thousands of people who are the coca growers, leaf pickers and gatherers, factory and laboratory workers, transporters, drug mules, micro-traffickers and drug dealers.
In Bolivia, one kilogram of cocaine is worth about $2,000; in Brazil or Argentina, its worth increases to $12,000; then in Europe and the US, its worth up to $120,000, and as much as $300,000 in Australia. It's a no-brainer to see who is making the money and who is risking everything here.
There’s an old African proverb that states;
"Until the lion tells the story, the hero will always be the hunter.”
Cocaine Prison is the story of the invisible people affected by the drug war, the cocaine workers from Bolivia. It is a poetic and gentle film, to counter the narrative created about the drug war.
Cocaine Prison is our story. 

A United Notions Film

Directed by Violeta Ayala

Produced by United Notions Film

Featuring Deisy Torrez, Hernan Torrez, and Mario Bernal

Premiere: Toronto International Film Festival 2017

Cinema release in France 2019/20

Broadcast on PBS 2020