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.
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.
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.
From inside Bolivia’s notorious San Sebastian jail, COCAINE PRISON tells the story of Mario a cocaine worker fighting for freedom, Hernan a drug mule who wants to be a boss and his younger sister Daysi who is trying to escape the lure of trafficking cocaine. Told in an intimate and honest way, Bolivia’s complex relationship with cocaine is revealed.
A twist of fate prevents 16-year-old Daisy from smuggling 2 kilograms of cocaine to Argentina. Her 18-year-old brother Hernan goes instead, and is caught crossing the border to Argentina. Hernan’s boss “Don Carlos” pressures him into falsely claiming full responsibility, and, unknowingly, renouncing his right to appeal his sentence. Hernan is sentenced to 8 years behind bars. In May 2010, he arrives at San Sebastian prison, an overcrowded citadel with an open economy operating within its walls.
“It’s my fault Hernan’s in jail," says Daisy. "I was meant to traffic the cocaine.” Hernan believes the only way he can make real money is by continuing to work in the cocaine business, but this time, he wants to be a “sit down manager” so he’s not tricked again. Daisy believes it’s unjust that her brother’s in jail while the boss is free on the outside hiring other teenagers to do the same job.
Meanwhile, Mario, a naïve indigenous man, comes to the city in search of a better life for his wife and four children. On his first day on the job in a cocaine factory, Mario was caught by “the leopards” (the anti-drug police, FELCN), accused of leading the five others in the cocaine operation, he’s sent to San Sebastian for three years without trial. The real boss, “Doña Vicky,” paid to get the others out of jail because of their valuable experience in the “business.” Because this was Mario’s first job in the cocaine industry, he was stuck.
Mario seeks help from the media in his fight for freedom. Katiuska, a local journalist, becomes interested in his struggle. She believes there are larger interests at stake and therefore everyone’s already been paid off. Mario’s story appears in the local newspaper. A lawyer offers to represent him for free. But it soon becomes clear to Mario that his new “pro-bono” lawyer has been hired by his boss to keep him silenced. Despite the risk of being killed, Mario decides to reveal Doña Vicky’s identity in court.
With a great deal of courage, Mario tells the truth in court in front of his boss. But his confession changes nothing. Mario is charged as a manufacturer and given a 5-year sentence. Walking out of court with his hands cuffed, Mario says, “telling the truth isn’t worth anything, it’s all about money.”
COCAINE PRISON also traces the relationship of the characters with the outside world. This is framed by Daisy’s dilemma, faced by Bolivian teenagers, of making money in cocaine versus going to university.
Daisy continues to feel responsible for Hernan’s incarceration. Inside jail, Hernan becomes depressed and doesn’t work or study and asks Daisy to stop visiting him.
She calls Hernan’s boss, Don Carlos, for help to free him. He offers Daisy her brother’s job. She tells him that she doesn’t want to end up in jail like Hernan. Don Carlos says that what happened to Hernan is rare. Daisy tries to bargain, saying she’ll tell everything to the police, but Don Carlos laughs, reminding her she doesn’t have any proof. Upset, she goes to talk to a lawyer who gives her another option: she can set up the boss by acting as a secret agent for the police to help them catch Don Carlos red-handed, which “would allow Hernan’s case to be re-opened,” says the lawyer.
At the main bus station in Cochabamba, Daisy looks sad and worried as she boards a bus to Argentina. When she returns from her trip, she enrolls for the entrance exam to study Agricultural Engineering. If she passes the four exams, she will be the first person from her community to attend university. Daisy also hires a lawyer that will be able to get Hernan out of prison after half of his sentence is served in April 2013.
The final narrative layer draws on the global implications of the cocaine industry as it relates to our story. Cocaine as an industry affects the entire world, but the relationship between Bolivia and the US is framed entirely around the War on Drugs. Told in the film through Hernanʼs TV, Marioʼs little radio and Katiuskaʼs newspaper, politicians, police officers and even UN officials get caught with cocaine everyday, deepening the conflict between the two governments. Bolivia removes the D.E.A. and the American Ambassador, and the U.S. decertifies Bolivia in the War on Drugs, withdrawing funding and support. Nevertheless, cocaine consumption and production only continues to increase.
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