Death Camp Sunrise: Cocaine trafficking in South America
South American prison story, well, more of a concentration camp. All they needed was the ovens.
Exporting cocaine for them, it's not worth a thing there, is helping the local economy because not enough western hippies are eating enough quinoa.
It's a challenge to write about a place whose main indicators are constant crushing boredom, desperation/total loss of hope, fear, impotency, high anxiety and a low throb, constant, almost audible, like a bad earth, of just around the corner sudden and extreme violence. Feel it in the air.
Keep your readers on their toes with the boredom and pointlessness. Then again, if you've read Solzhenitsyn or Dostoyevsky it is hardly a laugh a minute. The Russians almost never are.
Reality is just that, it's not a fast paced action, never sit down for a moment, fun fairground waltzer. There aren't Ex-Navy SEALS all over the shop. just how many Ex-Navy SEALS can there be? One seems to turn up on a street corner in every film/book/action packed escapade]
Hum drum, grey, dull, drab, the minutes drag, the hours drag, the days drag, nothing ever happens. It's not disaster movie stuff but it does hold the power of the banal, the real, the unadorned weight of endlessly passing time. The outside world carries on without you as you are slowly but inevitably forgotten. You're on jail-time which runs at a very different speed because there is no perceivable future, nothing changes, just an endlessly wearing down present. Outside, people you once knew get wed, move house, change jobs, make plans. Your constant day repeating present allows for no plans, no future.
There's a certain compulsion to slow, dragging days. Coincidences? The only coincidence here is that tomorrow will be exactly the same as today.
In order to kill this tedium a heavy diet of drugs, home brewed fire water, more drugs, sex and even more drugs is the only real way of beating the beast down.
There's nothing worse than whining about how addictive/dangerous/life threatening it is. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. OK, maybe a little too late for that one, you're not getting out of this kitchen any time soon, the heat's been turned up again and it's getting more difficult to breathe. Long term exposure to any of the various noxious substances we ingest does not have favourable predictive outcomes. Never any supply chain problems but a reckless attitude to, er, any quality control can lead to sudden spikes in the fatalities records.
And don't get ill, there are zero medical facilities in here. No doctors, nurses or anyone with any more than the rudimentary skills of stitching you up after a slight altercation. There was a cholera outbreak in Pab18 and that shit spreads like wild fire in confined spaces. They DID have to bring someone in on that one otherwise it would have cleaned out the whole jail. They don't really care about that, like turning a new page in an exercise book, but it doesn't look good in the press.
Mr. President, we have lost all our prisoners...due to, er...unforeseen circumstances.
WHAT ? All of them? Er....yes sir.
How many were there?
Well...it's, er, kind of hard to say sir.
We don't know how many convicts we were holding in the most secure penal establishment in the country?
Well, er, Mr, er, President. There were certain previously undiscovered, umm...irregularities...er....anomalies, if you will.
What on God's earth are you talking about? We don't know how many were there? Why not?
Aaaaah, Sir. So far the cause of these slight aberrations has....er...not been determined.
Life is cheap, death cheaper. It becomes the new normal. Your life has changed...forever. The odds are you're going to be here a long, long time, if you ever get out at all.
Read the book, play the song, soon be sunrise.
I don't want a holiday in the sun Sex Pistols...
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